#5 Anti-Surveillance Tool

Anti-Surveillance Tool

What inspired me to do this project is the art of shadow puppetry. Shadow puppetry(or shadow play) is a form of storytelling that goes back to to ancient times. The process is very simple as all one really neds to do is hold up any object, whether it be a body part or external item, and hold it up in front of a source of light and a shadow is projected onto a wall or surface. I was always fascinated by the creativity that can be injected into shadow play and tried to imitate a lot of the things I would come across on a day to day basis. My results were never good which is why I'm trying to redeem myself through code. When it comes to shadowp play, the recipient is anyone who can see the shadow.

Design Process

In order to successfully create a shadow puppet one has to make sure the shapes they're usign align with the object they are trying to portray. For my object I chose a duck made out of hands and arms. I'm not sure why I chose a duck exactly it just spoke to me for some reason. I used a series of vertexes and lines to draw the duck. This process took quite a while and made me wish there was a Microsoft Paint plugin for p5js but I doubt that will ever come to fruition. Since the drawing was pretty ugly I figured I had to make the background somewhat pleasing on the eye to balance things out. FOr this I decided to use an order of nested loops to create rings made out of lines. These lines also increase and decrease in length to give an animation effect that almost resembles a vortex. Finally, in order to reveal the shadow puppet effect I added a mouseDragged() funciton to pull up a "curtain" which is combined with a blendMode() effect to remove the color from the hamd/arms. And only show the "shadow" which resembles a duck!

Reflection

Storytelling is an essential part of being human and it doesn't matter if its wit words, auditory, or with images. I think methods like shadow puppetry and other visual forms of narration are fun and very effective. Despite my efforts I don't think my p5 skills can hold a candle to traditional shadow play.