Keep it Today
As part of a 2 week Open Elective Course at college ( National Insitute of Design, Bangalore), our objective was to reimagine and contemporise traditional craft-forms of Gujarat to the current times.
The idea was to depict the traditional craft forms in current times. How could traditional art forms be practised today, with the aid of relevant tool and technologies ?
Background
The region of Kutch its home to some of the most beautiful art forms of Gujarat.
- Lippan artwork , done using mirrors and clay is an intricate art-form. It is usually done for the decoration of walls in village homes.
- Ajrakh on the other hand is a traditional block and resist printing technique done using vegetable dyes on cloth. While, Ajrakh comes from ‘Azrakʼ- the Arabic word for Indigo, a naturally occurring blue paint; the popular story amongst painters is that 'Ajrakh' means ‘keep it todayʼ.
Idea
Ajrakh (Textile Block Printing ) and Lippan (Glass-Mudwork) two of the oldest art forms practised in Gujarat.
The idea was to depict a version of these traditional craft forms, fit with the contemporary times; employing modern digital techniques. The installation also seeks to depict the changing perception of the people and resulting impact on the traditional crafts today.
- Projecting Lippan patterns to a surface from a distorted arrangement of mirrors in its base form.
- Visualising live sound input to depict the changing perception of people on the craft.
Process
- The live sound visualisation part was done in Processing using its inbuilt sound libraries.
- The art glyphs were made in Illustrator, from the existing Ajrakh print motifs.
Algorithm
- Import sound library in the code sketch ( is an inbuilt library).
- Import the glyphs based on ajrakh motifs in the sketch.
- Setup the variables for calculating input sound amplitude
- In order to use the amplitude at an observable level, i scaled it upto 1000. Map a variable ‘Si’ to be used as the stroke width from amplitude level.s
- Set the motifs to rotate about their individual centres.
- A certain threshold is kept considering the background white noise, as the input sound level crosses this, the motif rotation and color would be changed to certain set conditions.
- The final block sets the grid of 5 motifs to rotate in unison.
Final Setup
Test Video
To Do
- Mapping sound frequencies - to show diversity / nature of incoming sounds
- Generate the pattern generatively using rose curves.
References
- Processing (processing.sound) - Used the specific library to detect incoming live sound and derive its attributes (amplitude). You can find it here.
- Kudos to my teammates -