This week was Art Week in Mexico City, so aside from wedding planning and working on my projects, I was checking out what professional artists are putting out in the world for inspiration. Some of those were: Sociedad Volcánica, Bright Moments (where I again saw Huemin’s Dream Machine that inspired a project last year), Feria Material, Casa Ideal, and Somos Luz at Maison Celeste. Honestly a few too many and by halfway through the week I was already fully saturated looking at things on walls. My take was that most of the art here was very safe and designed to be sold rather than to provoke.
On to the projects:
Wedding Rings
Building on my prototypes from last week, I played around with dimensions to make them taller (at P’s request) and experimented with a 90° and 270° twist:
I showed these to a few people and got good feedback, the most useful was from a friend who’s experienced in 3D modeling who said the way I was modeling it would result in angles and edges that don’t look as slick as eg Apple products. Here I learned about the concept of continuous tangency (or g1 continuity) which is necessary to achieve a Class A surface.
To achieve this I could use SubD modeling in Rhino, which is designed to rapidly prototype smooth, organic shapes.
Here’s a quick comparison in Rhino of how the two approaches look, clearly the right one (made with SubD) looks much more premium.
I still need to add in a twist, and perhaps an engraving on the inner band. Time is running out, my deadline is to have the model printed in wax in the next week so it can be cast the following week.
neoBRUTO
Huge progress this week, we improved the experience significantly and had the opportunity to showcase it at 2 events.
I figured out how to set up StreamDiffusion, largely through the amazing work of DotSimulate and his StreamDiffusionTD. I’ve swapped over my main interface to TouchDesigner from ComfyUI, it’s been around much longer and has thousands of interesting operators and tutorials, and is designed specifically for live interactive visuals.
This now lets me generate images in 2 steps with SDXL at 10-15 frames a second (up from 1 frame a second using my workflow from last week!). This solves the problem of losing people’s attention, and makes it feel fluid, dynamic, and interactive.
Here’s a version of the setup in Touchdesigner, the big chunk of nodes on the left are the prompts and associated MIDI buttons:
Here’s the first short video of me testing it out with a ‘cyborg alien’ prompt:
Rather than repeat the same experience as last week, we wanted to lean more into the ‘tactile tech’ part of our brand. We decided to focus the camera not on people (which is fun but often devolves into a self-absorbed TikTok-filter-esque experience) but instead on a hands-on and playful crafting experience.
We bought a bunch of corn and red beans, and laid them out on a table, and focused an overhead camera on it. We tested prompts that worked well with many tiny shapes and hands manipulating them.
I need to get better at filming our process, but here’s us testing it out for the first time:
And a vision to make it more vibey:
On Friday we set up at the Motion Design Mexico event in the city center and showed off our setup to a bunch of animators, many of whom loved the concept and gave us new ideas. Interestingly though, and we noticed this last week too, reactions are mixed: some people are mind blown and have a hundred questions, some people are intimidated or unsure, and others don’t care at all (or perhaps don’t realize what we’re doing). At one point we had a cat on our table and I turned it’s tail into spaghetti as it was swishing it around, sadly I messed up the screen recording so I didn’t save it.
A second big upgrade was hooking up a MIDI controller (a Novation Launch Control XL) so I could change parameters on the fly, which made it heaps of fun to mess around with in real time, and an easy way to explain to curious people what we were doing. The most fun was being able to cycle through 16 prompts on the fly, eg wait for a song to drop and at that moment change everyone into skeletons.
On Saturday we set up at on the rooftop at Haab for their art week party. After a rocky start with technical difficulties getting set up (I will never rely on wifi again) we found ourselves in a corner on the balcony and had dozens of people over several hours have fun with it. Due to a few logistic and space constraints we had to ditch the corn and beans and again just focus the camera on people.. giving the people what they want. David invited two friends to take photos of the whole thing, but I don’t have them yet, so will post in next week’s update, except this little snippet: