Art Portfolio
Quickly made 3D interactive sketch/ composition, using A-frame, with sound. For best results, please view in Chrome browser.
I tried to capture the moment in this quick sketch. I enjoyed playing with depth here, using A-frame.
Though just a quick sketch I like the roughness or the rawness of the result.
https://boomar.github.io/eatout2helpout/
For best results, please view in Chrome browser.
This is an immersive VR political comic, telling a satirical story using WebVR software, and exploring the aesthetic and narrative possibilities of the medium.
It tells the news story of the UK government’s hugely popular ‘Eat Out to Help Out” scheme during the Covid pandemic (2020), where 100 million restaurant meals were consumed. The scheme arguably boosted Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s political popularity, but evidence shows the scheme likely contributed to the deadly second wave of the pandemic.
Artistic influences on this work include André Fougeron’s painting ‘Atlantic Civilisation’, a panorama of over 5.5m wide, telling a vast political narrative, in a comic style. Other influences were Cold War Steve’s vicious political photocollages and David Hockney’s wide immersive panoramas.
The work explores the aesthetics possibilities of WebVR, using the A- frame framework.
An A-frame scene is composed of multiple layers of drawings, separated by distance along the Z-axis, and overlapping. Authoring HTML in A-frame forces a layered approach, as a scene contains a list of entities. This aesthetic – the separation of successive 2D layers within a 3D space gives a feeling of space and depth, resulting in an effect like a traditional Diorama.
I was attracted by the fishbowl distortion of the drawings, when moving around the immersive 3D space, which felt like moving around inside a sphere, zooming in and out of the entities.
This is a panoramic story, told over time. A-frame seems to lend itself to a wide or panoramic storytelling.
Theme: Storytelling in Immersive Media
An experiment in AR aesthetic approaches, and narrative composition in political comics.
This “AR Vignette” is a tiny multimedia comment on the news. The AR effect is a 3D montage of overlapping flat planes, similar to old traditions, particularly Dioramas. These AR montages (through association, positioning and juxtaposition) tell stories in a particular aesthetic.
The technology used is AR.js and A-Frame. AR.js is a lightweight library for AR on the Web. A-Frame allows the creation of 3D Scenes and Virtual Reality experiences.
The subject for the work is the UK Care Homes during the Pandemic. The Government imposed strict rules, no visitors or physical contact. Daily on TV Health Secretary Matt Hancock announced rules from the podium – social distancing, no hugging. Yet at the same time, he was having an affair with his secretary, meeting in secret at Whitehall.
His response was “Well, I’m only human”
Composition analysis
The park alongside Parliament serves as the backdrop and Tracking Image. Scanning the Tracking Image opens up Hancock’s face – big with a transparent mask. We see through where he speaks, which is where we witness his betrayal, secretly embracing his mistress. In front of the mask, we see a care home with a family gathered outside, waving through the window. On the opposite side, Hancock stands at the podium. Hancock apologises throughout.
This experiment into narrative composition and the aesthetics of AR considers narrative possibilities of see-through shapes and over and around layered shapes and objects, exploring foregrounding, depth, layering, and what lies behind. It tells a story through layering and positioning, and transparency within drawings. It explores photocollage, digital drawings, mixed media, multimedia, and narrative composition.
Using your phone, scan the QR code:
Then point your camera at this picture:
This is an interactive story, which tries to work as a conversation and visual story combined. It deals with a controversial, topical and emotive local issue, concerning the development of Crystal Palace park (in London) after many years of neglect. Lots of plans and architectural designs were put forward, and local people consulted. But it occurred to me that one voice seriously missing from the consultation, was that of the master architect and planner Joseph Paxton, who conceived the original design for the park. I thought it would be interesting to imagine his point of view.
I’ve tried here to make this online interactive story unfold as a conversation, which is often considered the highest form of interactivity. The work is inspired by the ‘Eliza’ project, an interactive psuedo therapist/ counsellor which was built many years ago, and simulates a conversation (this has been expanded upon by Alexa etc):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA
My intentions are that the conversation presents an independent view of the situation, avoiding one side or the other, and local politics. The work tries to see above that. I hope the work is more questioning, acting on a deeper level.
In 2008, there was an ‘Occupy’ site at St Pauls in central London. There were lots of drawings and paintings sellotaped to the walls; the area became a sort of temporary public Art gallery. Works full of slogans and messages, full of passion.
It occurred to me that many people wanted to express their views in this way, and contribute their own art work to express their support and solidarity; but they couldn’t physically be there – at St Pauls.
I built an online cartoon tool to make it easy to collaboratively author your own political/satirical cartoons. Once a week I printed them, went to St Pauls and stuck them on the walls. Some well known artists contributed their work, building up a big stock of ‘ready-made’ fantastic drawings and cartoons – for everyone to remix into their own political cartoons.
The project was a collectively authored and networked satire, giving people a chance to participate/ support/ speak out/ in a creative way.
I am in the process of updating the project code to the latest version of PHP, as it doesnt work anymore. Once this is done I will post a link.
Newscomic (2008) recycles the news, re-mixes it, subverts and distorts it. It takes live news feeds, chops them up, reworks them and places the text into speech bubbles in a comic. The result is a disjointed reading experience, where the words and pictures don’t quite match but create their own meaning from the network.
Newscomic has been described as a generative satire, that takes RSS feeds from major newspapers, uses PHP and databases to chop them up and generate interesting strings, based on the feed content and user input, then puts the resultant text into speech bubbles in a 3-panel comic format.
The result is a disjointed comic, where the words and pictures don’t quite fit but instead make their own story, blurring fact and fiction. Sometimes the story makes sense, and readers/ users always found it fun to experiment with the stories. Possibly, this early experimental idea seems to be part of what is now referred to as “Conditional Text” in recent interactive story works (Ambient Literature).
Often the stories generated are quite surreal, and can even be revealing.
Please note: sadly newscomic isn’t working properly right now, as PHP has been updated and I need to re-work the code
This is an interactive work on the subject of ‘wreckers’. In 2007 a container ship was grounded off the coast of Devon, England, and locals looted it. My idea was to make ‘debate drawings’ – networked drawings generated by a debate on a specific topic. I wrote a script and database to combine web feeds and comments, and convert into shapes and lines.
This is what I call ‘Feed Art’ – mixing & mashing networked data into pictures to create an informed image – a ‘conflict picture’ or ‘debate drawing’. There are two sets of comments being pulled into the picture: a news feed on the subject of the wreckers, and the user comments from this site. They work to support or conflict with each other – there’s a debate going on within the picture.
This mix makes the work more connected to the subject, and gives rise to chance forms and connections to make interesting images & unintended meanings. The feed and user entries are converted into shapes, so all forms in the picture reflect the data itself.
Please note: sadly ‘The Wreckers’ isn’t working properly right now, as PHP has been updated and I need to re-work the code
Shirley Bassey Mixed Up (2006) is a generative art work – more accurately an experimental illustrated networked generative biography, covering the ups and downs of her life, successes and tragedies. The illustrations are network generated, built dynamically from Yahoo searches, and combined dynamically with my own drawings. Through specifying different searches and playing with the customisation options, readers can create a unique illustration for each page of the story, resulting in their own personalised version of the biography.
Pulling in data from the Internet and manipulating/ transforming it within a story, this work can be arguably be described as a networked narrative.
Unfortunately the project isn’t working properly right now, as PHP has been updated, and I will need to re-write the code.
