Drawing Studies No. 1
Custom Processing and OpenGL software
The conventional notion of perspective, dating from the Renaissance, privileges the viewer as the person for whose benefit the depiction of the world unfolds and whose gaze completes the image; the stability of his or her position is mirrored by the fixed vanishing point. In these drawing studies the Waterdrop-perspective that I'm exploring, remniscient to Tamas Waliczky's studies with Garden, is a quite different principle which structures every object from the vantage point of the drawing itself (in Tamas case it was the child who also inhabits the screen). The self referencial drawing process that occurs further suggests a disengagement betweeen viewer and performer in the very act of drawing. This experiment is also an attempt to discover new dynamic processes of line and shape formation and most importantly their relationship with the environment they inhabit. I'm interested in the synesthesia produced by these experiments in the process of creation as well as in the process of spectatorship: influence one type of control has over the other, bearing in mind that the aesthetic judgement is affected both by space and time. The invisibility of the sphere occasionally draws us back to a 2-dimensional state and the physical nature of the screen, but once we trace and rotate, we don’t necessarily leap straight into a 3-dimensional appearance. This seems to be controlled and limited only to a certain extent, letting us stay longer in the space in between dimensions.
Technical discussion:
By subtracting the previous and current mouse position vectors to the vector of the centre of the sphere, I created a new vector that was fundamental for all manipulations. It is on this vector that the viewer can create points to the surface. This is done by making the magnitude of this vector the same as the radius of the invisible sphere. One of the most challenging aspects of this project was in the creation and management of an ArrayList that creates a new set of points that draw a line each time the mouse has been moved. This allowed me to trace a line to the surface without the previous points that were traced being directly affected by the mouse position. I had never worked with ArrayList before, I feel it has added a lot to my programming skills. The hardest challenge of all was to unrotate the coordinates of the centreToMouse vector so that the trace continues to be drawn throughout the whole surface of the sphere. There is no in-built function for rotating individual coordinates on any axis, so I had to apply line-by-line standard rotation equasions that required different types of priority. It took a long time to get the priorities right. There are still some minor corrections to be made such as a smoother vertical rotation around the sphere and a more continuous trace rather than a fragmented one.
Below are some stills from the first and second versions (third version is nearly complete):
