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Hi! I’m Suraj Barthy
This, this.
Has changed a lot in the last one year.
As I’ve been.
Identifying differently and understanding what it means.
It was so.
Art is from Chennai, Artis, from Bangalore, from India.
You know, create a based from India a lot of different things.
But this seems to.
This is more, a strategic.
Sentence when I’m applying for jobs here, because that’s how they look at. It’s New York based. They’re like, Okay.
Looking at them for any of these things.
It’s fine.
Site, and I was just looking at it.
Earlier to see what all I’ve done this year, and.
A bunch of it hasn’t been updated.
But I do.
Sorry for this.
I think something that.
I.
So I know most of the people.
I think on the call through different.
Ways and different places.
I know, Mathura, because we met at a conference, and she put me on this whole wheel of going to Idp and.
I’m good. I graduated last year and.
Continued as a resident.
And I know Joe from an Id and.
The feature of some handy.
And a lot of them from Creator voting.
Into India.
I’m sorry if I’m speaking in a more tone. I’m just.
Not awake yet.
So something that’s.
Very integral to my identity is my everyday project. I’ve been doing art every day for the last
And it’s mostly cinema.
But it fluctuates.
Sometimes, since in the last 2, 1 or 2 years.
Been working on a project that I do.
Work on it every day, and post something about that.
And.
It’s like a journal to me, and I see it. I know what’s happened in my life at that point.
To be.
Have being said, really, emotion.
And sometimes I do live stuff and.
That forms part of the.
End of that day.
And.
And I was completing my residency Atp. All of us have to do a resident show.
And this is.
This could be something related to what you have been doing the last one year related to something.
We did over the last 3 years, or something new.
And I usually try to.
Use all my chances to.
Make something new, so.
I think it came from an id.
At every project. We’ll try to make something new, and it won’t be polished. When we finished.
By the end of that semester, or that class.
But in the holidays we’ll just sit with it and make it better and make it portfolio.
And that process has helped me and.
My.
Everyday project has also helped me prototype faster and.
Think of it in that way.
Think of as a final outcome when I start doing something.
So at Itp. For every class, every small project would be new, that it’s good or not.
Machine, but.
I’ll try to.
Put the 1st single 1st brick towards
Building a new project, and then.
Build it into a portfolio piece. Later.
So for this show something that I’d.
Wanted to do for a long time was print out all my everyday years of work into one sheet of paper.
And.
We also have a big display.
In the gallery that we showed it.
So I took some of the videos. This is like.
And put them all into one large video and.
Put it on screen.
And my mom was visiting so.
She’s here, and.
The final rolled out piece was.
Was like this.
Maybe that’s a better.
So in this piece the this was a near the entrance. This was a display in which that videos.
Playing.
And then people walk in.
And they see this. This was the.
Render that I made the day before the show.
So this is all. 8 years.
And whatever is unrolled is actually 3 years worth of.
The rest is inside the soul.
And I had some of the videos playing on the screens here, too, and write up about this.
Yep.
Point of this.
For me was one.
To see my whole life in one physical artifact.
At least my last 8 years.
Living in one physical artifacts and.
Putting it like this. I’ve met different people and.
Had different experiences, but in different places, over the.
Last 8 years, and I could clearly see what happened when and.
I would look at the window, and I’ll know exactly what happened that day.
And the point of it.
Not being completely unrolled.
And some of it hidden, is also.
That there’s more than meet Ci and.
This.
Being in New York is only a part of my life, and.
I think it.
My New York experience started somewhere at this point in this.
Role.
And then, a little before that was a pandemic. This part of the role, and then.
Only people close to me can access. That is the idea.
And.
In this I could also see patterns of.
Things that are done.
Like, because it’s.
Been a really long project. Most of it has been trying to learn one technique or one button in the software and seeing how.
What it does, and.
Making that all into my process.
So at this point, that is, making a watch.
And then this is every year in tower, which is like a.
Sketching style. But my goal with October has always been using the same 3D software cinema. How can I.
Make us.
Sketch field that looks real, and when I put it like this I could see that it was.
Slightly successful when I look at it.
As a day by thing, and.
On the phone looking at it as your Instagram feed. It doesn’t really.
Convey what it is, and when looking at it as a physical.
It really gave a sense of improvement and progress.
And.
The whole process of this was, I have all my files.
Also, Gary, can you get? Give me a time check at some point.
Yes.
Yeah,
You’re good.
Perfect.
Oh, yeah.
I have all my files organized and tagged, and I use emojis every day in the caption, and I have an excel sheet for all that.
But I didn’t want to go through all that and look at all my sources and download. So I wrote a bunch of different scripts.
Want to download all the files. Then the other.
Oh!
Well, it’s good to hear.
I can’t find it now.
So I.
I don’t at all.
It’s a wonder if you find anything actually, how do you do your file management.
It’s actually pretty clear. But I just I’m.
For me, but I guess I’m not.
Awaken enough to find everything now.
This is all the things I apply to, and.
All the Residency stuff.
But so the idea was writing a script to download all the things.
And then.
When downloading from Instagram. It gives you all the file names in Utc.
And so it will give the file names, date, and the time. That will be the format.
But the problem was, I was in India some days, and I was in them.
New York some days. I was in transit some days.
So they’ll sometimes 2 or 3 posts will count as the same day.
Because they’re all in universal standard time.
And I had to go through and again write scripts to.
Figure out!
I didn’t write scripts. I I figured when I was in which place, and then I had to write scripts to convert all the Utc time to that specific.
Regional time.
And then backwards, number all of them from the last day to the 1st day.
And then I realized I had been.
Them at some point from some point.
And that actually gave me.
Better number.
And.
Since it’s like a journal that was just adding miscount.
Because I’d I’d left counting like 5 or 6 somewhere in between.
And so this is 30, 72.
And it was not in one.
Tell you what.
The one that you missed a few numbers. The word that was presented in your art said sleep just felt very.
Yeah, this isn’t a day of printing. It.
The reality is
Very fancy printers at Itp, and I had the design lab as part of my residency.
And the other reason I wanted to do this Atp was, if I were to do this printout outside. It cost me like 5 to 6 grand dollars.
And because I was heading this, I had the opportunity to do. Do it.
The actual print took like 30 min, but.
Set the file right, and to actually.
Make it print. It took 8 h all night.
Of no sleep, and printing it.
And.
Every day. The caption and the Emojis and things have a story, and.
Mike.
Closest childhood friend. He’s had his Whatsapp status the longest time. It says, in sleep no compromise.
So.
Hello! Zach!
Hey! Captain!
And
Yeah. So in this project I used, I wanted to use this project as a.
Base to talk about the other things I did.
And you can feel free to stop me at any time.
So for my thesis.
I come from a family of textile designs. I’m sorry to sign us.
And in Kanjiburam and the father I move away from home. The more I do projects related to it after I came here. I’ve done projects a lot of projects around.
A lot of projects around weaving and silk and.
Using kanjaramis and different.
Video sculptures.
And.
About having 2 identities.
One year and one.
In India.
And when I do things like this, though I.
Like.
Critic inside.
Always things. Well, am I just doing something?
That will.
Look novel in the Us. But it’s actually not a great project.
And I keep thinking about that, and.
So my.
Validation of these is usually, I go talk to my family in India.
And see if they like it, like the ones who are working with silk directly.
And it’s not just a.
Paulist.
Version of.
Something normal, in India.
It looks fancy in the Us.
Anyway, for this project
This was my thesis project.
And the longest feel as this. I was just looking at my presentation.
I keep thinking a lot about
What we leave behind, and.
What we are building off of.
And that’s something.
That’s common across a lot of things like our parents want us to be better than them, and we want our kids to be better than us. And that’s the cycle. That’s how evolution goes.
Since. I’ll just.
So when I came to the Us I saw Van Goes for the 1st time.
And.
I realized growing up.
I only I had only seen it on screens.
And
Seeing it in person really made me realize why it was.
So popular and white or special.
Because you can.
You are standing, related to the painting where Vano was standing when he painted it.
And you have.
You’d experience that sort of connection. And this is common.
And this is their.
When you go to the Egg Museum in Sierra, I was painting so.
Looks like that.
And then.
I keep thinking about time and leaving. Then I came across this poem by Walt Whitman, called Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.
Eddie talks about.
Going on a ferry, and in the Brooklyn.
I’d send over, and he says all the people who come before me on this theory, and all the people who come after me on this ferry.
All of them. See these pigeons. See the sky. See this?
Water, and they all share this with me.
But the waves are never the same.
And.
Something to that.
And this was one of the 1st pieces I did in my day project, and this.
Sort of.
I think, as I’m growing older, I I can see connections to all my projects that I’ve done before, and all the smaller things that I’ve done.
A 10 id.
When I was doing interaction design. Everything, like none of the projects, seemed to connect to each other.
But when applying to itp.
Look at my portfolio again and write a statement, and that really helped see the connection between all of them.
I was thinking about leaving Itp, and what the people there.
Make. And they talk about family, and they talk about.
My granddad was a.
Simpler to sign now, my grandma, and that’s me, and usually a baby picture in a presentation is.
Sure, fair way to wake the audience happen at least.
The presentation, scoring.
But it.
And then I talk about my granddad, and they talk about my grandmother and I talk about this.
And explain what this area.
And the process behind making a candy.
You guys catches my granddad.
And then they’re plotted onto graphs which are now digital.
And then they are printed onto punch cards, called Jacquard cards.
The reason I chose to do this project at Itp was also because.
I had grown up with these cards around me. I just play with them, and.
Growing up.
But then coming year.
I realized that.
That ties to computation, and punch cards being one of the 1st forms of computing and.
Itv being the right place. Talk about technology and evolution. And also.
What we are leaving behind.
And then the cards are.
At this part in the.
Hello!
And they change one position.
Whenever.
The foot pedal is pressed.
And I think a lot of analog versus digital.
Again, the analog graph process that better than in digital.
And this is one of the thing. One of the reasons was because.
An analog, even if you put a dot on the graph on the left top.
You’re still aware of the rest of the graph.
But in digital, we just zoom in and we focus on a smaller part. And we start doing things there. And when we zoom out.
The whole.
This.
Losing something.
Unless we are intentional about it.
So I try to put all these into questions, and the question was, What are the traces people leave across time?
And this is kind of.
The question that I’m.
Without realizing per student all my other projects.
And the point I, the feeling I was trying to was all connected. Everyone.
So I started doing experiments. I put a sensor.
On, the.
So this part is called the floor, the whole.
A 4th floor of the building is Itp, and it’s called the floor.
That put a sensor on the ceiling of the floor.
And.
It was recording noise and sound.
And it was right under a ping pong. It was right about ping pong table, so it would have peaks.
Continuously, and whenever I would walk by I would jump and clap twice.
And.
In the data. I could see when I entered when others entered, and I could see how people played and.
Things like that.
And then I made this piece.
For me and my mom.
Because.
Both of us never understood when the other person was here, and she was there. And you we don’t know when to call.
Each other, and we didn’t want to disturb it.
Sleep.
So I made 2 small IoT control devices, impurity.
One is with me.
And I. When I wake up I press a button on my side.
It opens. So this is supposed to be me, so when I wake up I press a button on my side.
And it opens its eyes.
On my mum’s head, and she knows I’m awake.
And when she wakes up she presses a button on her side, and.
She wakes up on my side, and I know it.
She’s awake.
And then
This was.
A project that ends.
Concepted when I was in an id like 2017 for art in transit. Bangalore.
And it never happened.
And I.
Came here, and one of the.
Things that I had in the back of my mind was, I need to finish this project at least.
And I made it for a show.
And it’s a staring contest.
Where there’s someone’s face on a display, and you go in.
And you.
Have a starting contest with them.
You look into their eyes, and the intention was to connect with them. But that didn’t really happen. Once I made it a game.
You look into their eyes and.
When you blink, your face goes on the display, and you leave a part of yourself to the next person.
And you’re taking something that someone else has left behind with it. And you’re leaving a part of yourself to the future.
That is the idea.
And our everydays, and how working on the thesis project.
Made me also do renders related to that.
Yeah.
And anyway, so the pieces started like this.
And this was the.
I usually try to make.
Storyboard.
And the cinema pretty quickly, because I’m used to it now, and it’s part of my process.
So in a real loom the weaver sits alone, and the jackal cards are on the top.
And I want to do something similar. So this is a structure.
As a participant, you.
Through the punch cards. You see.
A display.
And on the display.
Through each hole. You see all the people who have come to this.
Experience before you.
And then.
There’s a loom under, and your view on this loom.
And when you leave a line weaved on the Sloan you leave a physical trace of yourself.
And that trace.
Triggers a camera on the side of this.
And adds your face to this.
Whole, 2.
And then when you walk away, it rotates once.
And then.
Prototyping, prototyping.
Activity.
Constraints and thinking about it, and.
And this was a test image. But the idea was like this.
So as people come in, it gets triggered and it catches.
Face.
And so.
When you look through the.
Holes of the jack card. You’ll see one piece.
And I think, yeah, this is okay.
And in my views, presentation. This is actually my final presentation.
And that I added this
I think.
And I said, Now all of us are going to watch video cause we need some slowness in our life. And it’s okay. If I don’t talk. Stand off.
And this is the full pipeline.
Of our full journey.
So there’s a.
There’s a small photo cellular, a light sensor.
That has
This.
When you take it, it takes the state.
And you can weave. However you want.
The idea with this was people expected, but I wanted to see what people are doing.
They just prompted to leave.
And different people did different patterns.
And once.
They leave, and.
Put it back in it rotates once.
And the thing is just like in real life. We might remember 3 or 4 generations before us.
And it all.
Depends. It doesn’t. We don’t really have control over who we know we don’t know.
And each of the card is actually different. If you see the patterns here.
So based on the card, you might see some faces you might not see some faces. That’s also.
Randomness of chance.
And.
I like making a lot of time lapses. I just.
Especially in a product like this, it.
Immediately shows progress.
Again, like with the.
Ancestral legacy in.
All those things.
Even if one person makes a different kind of weave or like, there’s 1 person. If you’ll see this line.
Didn’t actually weave through everything. This went in the start and put it in the end.
That still counts as a weep.
But the person that came after that over like 5 or 6 people, it again went back to a normal traditional view pattern. So even if that’s.
A mistake done in.
History.
The others who are coming in the future are able to correct it.
And then so just.
Thank you, my family, for waking me up every day.
When no one woke me up.
On this.
And then and thenking everyone.
Yeah, I can keep going. But if you want me to stop, I can also stop.
And I think I think I couldn’t stop you seriously. This is so.
This is brilliant like you’ve.
You show us like how you can keep that every day as a personal diary like, and you know exactly what happened. I think.
And
That project where you have been.
You put earlier, I think, ancestral knowledge to.
Like display and.
It’s it’s brilliant. Yeah. I think everyone feels that way as well.
We are very grateful for you to wake up like this, and like, tell us.
No, I I’m happy to be.
Oh!
Because every time I keep missing it, and this time I just want to.
No this
Yeah, thank you so much for.
Give me time.
It’s it’s the wrong answer.
I mean I.
Thanks. I’m here for waking you also.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Hello!
Thank you.
Great any questions.
By anyone to sewage.
We can have like 5 min of question.
How exactly do you put like faces into the cards and do those
Into the jacket, cards.
Like the faces were like really small, right? So that you have, like.
Behind the cards, or how would they display.
There was a display.
Right.
Cancel over, can still see my screen.
I think, like there was an adjustment. I said.
I think.
Yeah.
See.
I wrote a sketch.
Feedback.
The motors run on Ardwido and.
Got it.
Yeah, and like a slider to adjust.
Right.
I’m not sure.
Did you have a slider to adjust, to align the faces to each phone.
No. I wrote a sketch on Pfi on.
If I, and then put it on glitch and.
Add to size them based on the holes, so I’m sure the size of the whole, and the distance between each.
And.
Made that.
The size of the square, of the image.
Nice.
Yeah.
And it’s all.
And how do we know?
Figure it.
Running this, running the sensor and talking serially to the.
Camera.
Yes.
I have a question like about this about your everyday.
Ahem!
It’s not, you say, 8 years right?
I’m I’m just. I was curious like, how are you? How long are you gonna do it?
I don’t. I don’t. I don’t know. I don’t have an end date in mind. I just.
I then started with the idea of doing it every day.
I I think I think most of like I went to an Id, and I realized at some point got me into an id.
I stopped doing that once I was inside.
And I was doing a lot of graphic design before an Id, and I just stopped doing it. And I met Manta. I met people that faculty there, and.
As like, okay, I need to.
Get back to things I like doing.
And I think I did, for like.
And even that wasn’t intentional, and people liked it, and I passed in.
Started again.
And.
Now that I did this print out as seen the printout, and remembering and.
It’s all because.
I’ve always had supportive people around me like when I was doing it, the intention to do it every day, but if I don’t do it, and.
Let’s say we are going to dinner. My friends will be like, have you today?
We can wait to just do it, and that’s how it sort of.
Snowballed into.
Oh, man!
Becoming an everyday thing.
So. You would. You’d not miss a day like what happens if you miss a day.
Good.
Haven’t missed a day so far.
Like yesterday was.
No.
You haven’t. That’s crazy!
Like this is.
No, I think as much as I. I’ve tried doing an everyday thing. If I.
One day, then, like I would feel.
This discouraged and like I wouldn’t continue, or something like that like.
Hmm.
So it’s really something to admire to see like you’ve done it for 8 years.
Thank you. Yeah. I think it’s there’s a lot like it last called 100 Days of making at Itp, and the whole class is about this. All the students choose one topic, and they have to.
Do 100 days of that, and post on Instagram for 100 days.
And the whole class is about different.
Theory is like perfectionism and procrastination, and.
Where you need to be. Okay with putting out bad stuff to like this was just crap. I did it like 1 min before.
Midnight.
Because I had to get something out before midnight.
Cause. I was busy the whole day with some other work, and.
I was installing an A/C. And.
I was like, okay, I know that if I have.
At least 2 min. I can do something.
And put it out, even if it.
I’ll beat myself up over it, but I’ll still put it out.
And I think that.
Really helped me.
So that you can just look at my feed, and you’ll know some days like this took a lot of work and.
And this you can compile the 2, and you’re like.
Thank you.
Great if anybody else have any questions.
Online.
Oh, Hi! I just wanted to ask, because so much of your work is archival.
Do you start off thinking that this is what I want to build? Or do you just.
Like with the phone calls and notes and things that you are making. Do you just chance upon.
Like? How does inspiration.
For projects. I think I have.
And I used to have one notebook and.
I’ll I’ll sketch with me all the time.
But then I started using a smaller pocket notebook for just for ideas.
And.
It’s actually.
Like not magical you. If you get any anything you just.
But a small sketch on the left side of a spread, and then, whenever you’re free, you can fill out the idea.
But whatever you get, you just note it down, and, like I have.
Like idea notes that I’ve compiled over the last. I don’t know. 5, 6 years.
On app notes, and I can look at them if I don’t have anything.
But I think.
Maybe going to school again was helpful, because you’re always surrounded by people, and you’re in that environment and.
Now.
You understand? Your own process of coming up with things like the everyday project has really helped me.
Identify inspiration. Like, if I talk about that, I usually say.
Oh, I look at this lamp, and I look at this
Aluminum material. And today my renders going to be something combining those 2. So I’ve so sort of.
Collect things over the course of the day, and at the end of the day, based on.
Man.
Thank you.
Nice
Thank you, suz. Thank you for sharing
This wonderful journey with us next up.
Thank you.
We got
Need it.
Yeah. Please introduce us a little bit and.
About yourself, and.
See.
You can share screen.
Understand.
Thank you. Yeah. You should be able to.
I’ll mute so you can.
Yes, sir, sorry is near talking yet.
I can hear you.
Yes, we can hear you now. Okay, we couldn’t hear anything before.
Can you hear me?
I can hear you now. Yes.
Can you guys hear me?
Yeah, yeah. Now, we can hear you.
So, yeah.
Bank.
I’m Niraj. I’m a product designer, but I also do.
A lot of creative coding.
It’s mostly experiments, but I also do.
Calligraphy, like growing letters.
And I’m computer science engineer and a designer.
Turned into a designer. But 2 interesting things happened when I was in engineering.
I started writing. I was interested writing codes. I was surrounded by writing code, right.
And I was also interested in writing.
Words beautifully like I used to write
My Dsn notes like in absolutely brilliant handwriting. And like, yeah, later on.
And I I got interested. And then when I went into Design college, I got interested and.
That’s when I learned about telephony how it sort of came in, and
Started wondering what made it popular.
Right. How did it.
Generates so many different styles and different
Areas right.
It turns out it was due to these people.
Scribes. So essentially, they look like this.
In, the.
Era maybe.
And
So before the printing press. I think these people were responsible for copying each
Religious Scriptures, like big book by hand, one by one.
And I’m sure it must not have been a good experience. But anyways I was
Experimenting with calligraphy as well. I was trying different tools. And then I realized.
How different tools are giving me different results. So that’s why I realized, you know.
Oh!
Why did this?
Different.
Variants of. I started making my own tools. I was picking up ordinary things like branches, or maybe popsicle.
Things, and that’s the thing that stops your furniture from moving.
Got really interested in drawing letters.
You know, 36 days of time.
Oh!
Palestinian, but what I.
I was also interested in writing code, right?
And while I was in college I sort of then thought, where does this fit into? Graphic generation? Because.
I was training as a graphic designer and a lot of graphics and a lot of tools that I was using where.
I felt were more of a interface between, you know, we’re hiding behind the interface like adobe tools and.
Things like that. And at the end it was generating graphics. So I started learning code. I started learning 5 days got really into it.
And.
Then sort of, then moved on into.
You know, just getting the basics right like.
This, the transformation operators is like translate, and what.
Scale can do.
And.
This was really interesting, because.
In design colleges. A lot of my colleagues were like very.
Of.
Skeptical about mathematics, and they used to run away when I used to. Yeah intimidating. But yeah, and I, I happen to find Matt. It’s really interesting, because it’s in a way I feel.
In a way mapping the real world in in some equations and forms right.
And really, what? Yeah, adding motions.
These sketches.
Another thing, interactivity was.
Really interesting to me. I could.
Like in real time. See how.
I could control the graphics itself that couldn’t have been possible in let’s say, adobe tools.
At the end of the day you have to render it, and then it becomes a static. You know.
Video file. But this was really interesting for me.
Then, the next step was to sort of add a text layer on top of it, so that it kind of resembles a poster or
You know, graphical in that sense.
Right really got interested into Luke’s making loops.
Is.
Highly addictive. And yeah, this is another version of it. I think the frame rates is dropping. I don’t know.
But yeah, this is again a very simple sketch.
Just rotating it.
Around central access.
But I was also doing this. Matlab in the sense.
I really had. I really wanted something that was physical, that was, you know, made by hand or.
No answer. It’s it’s not as perfect as a graphic. You know, image would.
So.
This is where the I would. I like to call it the modern scribe. It looks like.
This something like it’s it’s a body parts. So if a pen plotter.
Similar to a 3D. Printer that we have here, and paper labs.
The pen plotter works in a more or less in a 2 dimensional world.
It.
Roughly understands 3 things to do, when to.
Take the sort of lift up the plan from the surface, move around, and when do.
Put the.
Bent down, right.
All I had to do was sort of write the instructions of when and where to go.
The early experiments I was
Doing a lot of it.
Was experimenting with lines. Just these are called Moirkkins.
So it’s it’s formed by, you know, intersections of different lines.
Some of that.
And what what I also realized was the tool that I was putting into the plan product would also sort of.
Then define how the outcome would be.
And that was kind of very interesting for me. The same design can look so much different.
Yeah. Then, I started getting into complex stuff.
And very soon I realized that I had to.
Optimize my path because it was taking ours and ours to.
Sort of.
Write this.
Then I got into making this.
And like, I said, I’m really into loops. So I had to draw like 100 frames of it so manually, yeah, not a easy process. But yeah.
A lot of funds of.
These are some of the recent ones.
The next step eventually was for me. Then.
How somebody asked me, how is this different from any other printer? Right, you can just bring these top printer.
But then I realized what I could do was then.
Jump on top of them and sort of then.
Add my own. So these the one on the left, I think. Yeah, that’s a simple sketch. But then, with a watercolor brush, you could sort of move around with the ink, play around with the ink. I could lift ink from the surface.
You know, make in some shapes there.
Sorry middle middle one is just
Random. So so it actually was printed at 3 layers like, because each color layer I had to change the pen.
And so it’s a random rectangles.
So I had to come up with a fill algorithm.
Then I got into making these tools that could make this patrons for me, or sort of these interesting shapes for me then, which I could.
Then, yeah, give it to my daughter, and that could sort of.
Render it, and then.
So I think, yeah, that’s it from
The journey has been so far interesting. A lot of fun.
And what really interested me was.
Oh!
You know, combining these 2 very different concepts of hard logical rules of code, and then combining it with something which is made with hand.
Can give you really interesting and beautiful results.
Yeah, nice.
I’ve I’ve actually missed motor because she was
She was thinking of getting a Florida.
Thanks.
Last time I think we had someone come in for
Had a plotter and.
Get a mounted light.
And then, and did light painting on it.
Pretty cool.
Can you show us what you got? Like? Yeah, I have a few prints. And but yeah, for the people who are online. I’m so sorry.
Yeah. And yeah, I think in in person, they look really interesting.
Because each each paper and each pen will give out a very different texture in that sense.
Can someone.
Oh, it’s beautiful!
Yeah, this is the latest one.
Amazing.
Yeah, yeah.
Oh!
So these these imagined, I mean patterns I can anticipate before coding. Yeah, pink. And yeah.
Maybe.
This one, this.
Thanks. Joe.
Of.
Like.
Things like these would take a lot of time to print. So.
Earlier. I started with the drawing concentric circles, but I realized it was taking a lot of time. So I.
Wrote the customer.
Not a custom, but I started making it as viral, so that it doesn’t waste time in lifting the pen up and.
The maximum on the printer can print is.
Slightly shorter than a 3 grand.
So that’s him.
So I got it’s it’s not the accident. I think that’s the most popular one. But in India this. There’s some guy in Carla, I think, who makes these 3 different parts, and that you can just assemble at home here.
Pretty good.
Yes, I’ve I.
Have you thought of trying other like other thing, except like.
I don’t know like.
Yeah, yeah. So I think the next few things that I want to try is with paints. And
Another thing that I’m also interested is in
Ceramics. Maybe I could. You know. Etch on ceramic plates so these are.
I think that’s that’s something that’s very exciting for me is because the tool that I put into that would then.
Kind of give me very different results.
So that’s something that I’m still exploring.
Do you send any of these.
I don’t know if people are interested in.
Yeah.
Oh, I I yeah, I I saw the Instagram. I meant.
Like having.
The original lettering, and then converting it to Svd. And making it again with the plotter.
Yes.
And making them, putting them next to each other.
Would.
Yeah, that would be interesting.
Yeah, I’m I’m I was actually thinking of making custom font.
Like most of the phones, are outlined base.
But for Penter you would need a path.
Right. And so I was thinking of making a custom font for that as well.
Maybe mimic my handwriting.
It’s pretty.
Yeah, I think there’s that very famous.
We take holding persona that Lady Amy, or something.
She has been trying that with her own, like very regular thing.
Yeah. Amy, good child. Yeah.
You mean.
Yeah. The.
Yeah.
She, I think, started. That’s something.
Nice.
I’m actually very interested to see more of the animations that was really something.
Yeah.
Had this very like Kelly Anderson, kind of vibe to it.
Yeah.
Just that. It takes a lot of time to.
Yeah, of course.
We dropped them.
I.
I wonder if you can.
Yeah, I tried doing it.
Put 4 dots in the corner of the screen with your with the same plotter.
Labor, of love.
Yeah, I did. I.
Right.
And run a script to crop with crop the dots, or something.
Yeah, I didn’t write it.
Might save time.
Yeah, I did that. So I do. The points the corners as a part of the Svg path. And then I got the whole image into figma, and sort of then.
Move the image.
The equal size of the width of the.
Frame.
Hmm.
Maybe you can write a Photoshop action or something just to open the image from the center to the size and something.
Yeah, so we are.
Yeah.
Someone’s brain is now suddenly running after saying that he was asleep.
Add my chai.
You should actually.
Yeah.
If you’re yeah, I’m I’m I am interested, but I’m not sure how. What the best way to.
Any other questions. Anyone.
You do not show us.
I look.
We’ve got.
I was the.
I I believe you did some project with the.
How are you?
Abi, Manuan.
Bunch of.
But I I wanted to know more about that. I thought maybe you talk about it, but I don’t know if this is the right place on the line.
Like.
Of if we have time, and I think I can.
Yeah, I can just show you the
I just noticed here.
The plant.
Adults, advertisements.
Music.
I would like that like after the.
Printer is.
You can go in and change the.
Yeah.
So with Abimru we, I’ll just show you the tool. Maybe.
So we we made a custom graphic tool, graphic asset creating tool for them
I wouldn’t get into the details of what the brief was, but the idea and the console, and Abi also.
Amazing architects. And they also like systems, thinking they’re very much into that. And.
That’s something even I am interested in. Even in my graphic design.
Practice. I you know.
I’ve realized I gravitated lot towards building these systems that can, you know, generate very interesting patterns or behaviors.
So the idea was,
You have a graphic.
Sort of canvas to work on.
And there are a few.
Things that you can sort of manipulate or.
Yeah. And it, it was a drawing tool, essentially and.
And the idea was to keep.
Keep it modular and.
To make it.
Against each other.
Right, so I could.
Another.
Bunch of tiles, and like. I said I was really into loops.
So.
That kind of help in then, sort of forming these interesting patterns.
But yeah, so
And what I could see was, if I could.
Just flip.
Few of them, you know, horizontally.
I could get a very different
Pattern or sort of motion.
Flip them vertically.
This is.
Great structure.
Yeah, this one. I could then add in some colors, background colors.
These were some rant from.
From the identity that we picked up.
Yeah. And like you said this was one of the module. Then the idea was to then explore different modules that could work.
So we came up with the.
Yeah, a lot of different motions that could.
On a bigger scale.
Work, ready.
Just flip this.
It would just lead to this.
You can see the system. Yeah. And then just building upon that trying different shapes that could easily dial with each other.
I also had a record button.
That so that I can export.
Grid. Yeah, so like, right now, you made it into a folder. So.
Yeah.
It can be. Yeah. So again, as this was a commercial project, so I had to at the end of the day render out images that could go on to their social media campaigns and stuff like that. So the tool had the function to.
Export png, or sort of record. The whole loop.
And then export it as Mp. 4 or a Png sequence. In that case, and I could. Yeah, like, I said, I could convert. I mean change the
I could add more rows, more columns. I could make the.
So you see that it, like some of them are, and some of them are large so again, the drawing tool itself is gone by mouse. So it’s I can make it as small as possible.
That was the basis of the grid.
It functions.
Yeah.
So I don’t have the actual presentation for the.
The scope. That was the project name.
Maybe I think.
Goodwood.
This is also really cool.
So.
No. And exactly so. This was then moved into their repository, so that.
It was actually handed over to the client so they could generate their own assets for the.
So it’s commercial. Yeah, yeah.
I need you guys to.
Of.
I have.
Any other question.
Have one question.
So I’m just wondering like, Did you have a design background education? And how did you.
What was your journey into code like? How did you start.
Yeah. So I I started, I went to engineering. So.
I studied computer science. That’s when I was introduced to coding.
But later on I did go to design school and studied graphic design.
And.
Then there, I realize that.
The graphics that were generated.
Eventually were coming from.
Some algorithm that was creating those shapes right?
Meant. I mean, I found a lot of people who are working on similar spaces.
Like.
Programmatically drawing the graphics.
And that’s that’s where I sort of.
Combine these 2 areas.
Focused.
Thank you.
There is a lot of stuff in the chat. Like.
A lot, so you should look at it later.
Hi
Then we can move on to last. Speaker.
Tell me, because.
We can’t hear you, but.
I think. Yeah, they’re just setting it up. Probably we can’t hear anybody right now.
Yeah.
Yeah. Suz, I think that you’re setting up, because maybe there’s some issue with the mic.
Like watching a silent film.
Okay.
And yeah.
Think they can hear us.
And they can hear us.
Joe is giving us.
It’s reminding me of your of your performance. When you put your head on you put your.
Peace.
Oh!
The face was there, and then another of your face was there.
I’ll try to get a scan of Joe’s face next time.
Yeah.
Hi.
Today.
Yeah.
So
Yeah, before I begin a little bit of like.
Introduction. I.
Like, every time you’re calling out adobe for doing like static stuff, I actually work with adobe as a product designer. And I was like, yeah, where do I hide? But but yeah, that’s kind of fun.
The other part is.
With.
Take different kinds of things, particularly like.
A lot of it.
Over the last.
I about the license costs, if not.
And there’s 1 like.
A project I wanted to share with the group today, which is which is called Untool.
It’s no more live, unfortunately, and I’ll continue talking word. But we kind of ran this for a few months last year. There’s 3 of us that.
Came together to kind of build this and it was born out of this kind of
Like, especially from early last year. There’s all this like buzz around, generated AI right? And.
There’s this whole like thinking that.
Has kind of democratized creation of images, and how everyone can create whatever they want and.
There’s a lot of obviously like Media Hype. And
It was. Yeah. The idea was kind of just.
Going viral right so.
Since like having.
Been working in the space of machine learning and art for some time.
I was kind of curious that okay, like, if it is so democratized like my.
It started off with, like my parents wanting to also make images right and.
Everyone’s parents are now pretty much generally active on Whatsapp. And there’s like all these kinds of images that are very much part of everyone’s whatsapp family groups, etc, right? And.
Yeah, I mean, I was also like, obviously subjected to all this. And I started thinking that these are generally like.
Forwards, that.
Somehow arrived like it’s quite magical, but they’re there like no one knows who created them. What the source of them was or is.
But they’re there, and everyone’s what’s happened.
To the extent that there have been a lot of these articles like.
Indians clog up the Internet in arms race of daily greetings. And this is actually happened like Whatsapp servers have been down like.
Multiple times because of how many like good morning messages I shared. And it’s.
Like, once I started digging into it. Really funny to discover the thing that’s actually going on but.
I mean, yeah, they are part of our lives, and we can’t help it. So I started thinking, but yeah, like, my parents don’t make these images right and with generate AI like, if it’s democratized creativity and making of images, they should be able.
Able to make this somehow right?
So then, with a couple of friends we started making this thing called Untool, which is
A whatsapp.
Like system where you.
Type in the message and Whatsapp and you.
Get like an image back right? And
Potentially make like.
Slightly, more.
Good looking. Good morning messages, I mean, yeah. So these are made with untoward, but like not to comment on the aesthetics. There is obviously like a room for all kinds of like imagery. But what we were getting at was also.
Like.
This is so, my dad runs this like.
Green initiative in the apartment in the building that they live in in Bombay.
And he.
On 15th August was doing this like tree plantation drive, and he wanted to make an image, to invite everyone to say that. Okay.
We are going to do this like preplantation thing or something, and
He wanted to combine like greenery with independence somehow, so he could make this image directly on Whatsapp now, right? So there was some level of like that democratization that was.
Being promised and instead of like having to go, let’s say, on some.
Mid journey, or whatever, and try their hand at that, like within the tool that they use for forwarding these images. There was a potential of doing something like this.
And it was nice and.
Like.
That’s to like this.
Very like strongly worded message like this, I propose to send us message on. It’s okay, like, you don’t have to be so formal on Whatsapp, but whatever, and then like
I shared it with my family members first, st and my.
Moczyg could make like this.
Greeting for her grandson.
He loves cars, and he’s turning 4 or 5, I think, and so making like this cake with.
Car imagery so kind of like at least.
Making something personal, and then being able to write that message at the bottom. And so the interface or the ux of it kind of looks like this like you sent a message.
And you got the image back with like these.
Like generated text, messages but you could like change the heading and.
The bottom text or regenerate the image if you wanted. And we picked up.
Their Whatsapp name, and added that to like the message automatically. But they could change it by changing the bottom text right? And you had like these.
Different kinds of creations that could be done.
And then we earlier this year, kind of tried a different version. Whatsapp came up with this.
Scrolling, carousal thing horizontal, so we could give more options, etc.
But they then kind of pulled that out. So we were obviously dependent on like this Giant Whatsapp machine to.
If they have introduced some new like ux patterns, we could adapt to that otherwise.
We kind of stick to what they gave
But anyway, what when it all really started to get interesting was this for me? Like, so, yeah, yeah, so I mean.
It’s a very interesting pattern, like my mom sends these greetings out every day like and obviously like, Forward it right. And
So.
Then I told my mom, now you can create your own thing and maybe have slightly personalized messages. And she created, this 1st thing is my mom’s name.
And she wrote this thing, but she was horrified with the image that was generated.
And I actually was quite surprised, like I was just using off the shelf like stability models and whatnot. And I was like, this is quite reasonably good, right? Like
But she was like, you have to stop doing all this. I don’t know what you’re up to like. All this is not like right.
The thing was like this doesn’t represent, like the actual imagery that.
She has in mind of.
This date, right or of.
God!
And it was like she was like.
She got onto things like the leg is a bit or fingers are a bit odd, and all of that, and.
I was like, Yeah, but this is like AI, and like, Are you kidding like what? I don’t care if this is AI or not right like this, cannot. You can’t do this like even, for, like this imagery of the center image of RAM, like she’s like.
This is really disrespectful. And I was like, Okay, I get your point. So.
Then we kind of what we did.
As a tweak in the backend is.
Collected like a bunch of images.
That.
I’m sort of more realistic representations of gods and based on the prompt we received like kind of classified. If that.
Prom belong to a certain religious figure, and would just serve up images of that rather than generating with AI.
But this, like this particular experience, really.
Made me start thinking.
More like I obviously knew about like.
Cultural biases and whatnot in AI. But like this was.
Very close to home, literally to kind of think more deeply about it.
And now I think earlier this year, like couple of months back, met up their own like AI within Whatsapp, right? So.
As as playing around with it to see if it can do what.
My mom would wanted to do in a certain way like, Can it generate this.
Image, but.
Currently it says that. Okay, I can’t generate that image. I can help you with something else. And if I say just like a message. Then it gives me a message which is.
Which has religious inclination, but not an image, and if I just remove the God word, then it gives me this very like.
Obviously like non-indian Western kind of generic image. And
So there is obviously that gap between what that whole.
Promise, of.
Democratizing with.
AI was, and what.
Was expected for my parents in terms of the democratization.
But yeah, so it I mean, there’s we’ve kind of stopped like the tool. Now. It’s not no more on.
Whatsapp because.
This is what the structure basically looked like. We were using these.
Open air was used for, like basically checking God or not, and then, like kind of generating the text on top and bottom, and generating a prompt for stability.
Which would generate the image. And then, yeah, using Whatsapp for communication and.
Double cycle just continues, but this was obviously costing us like.
A good.
Sent it out.
Publicly to a bunch of people on Whatsapp groups and all that, and.
Lot of people started using it. So we had to like start to manage like load costs, etc, on the server, and all of that became like just too much like.
Financially to continue so.
For now this is stopped. And also, like, yeah, has introduced that thing online. But it obviously there is sort of that gap between.
Expectation and output. But it really started making me like kind of think a little bit more about the material aspects of AI. And if.
Constitutes like data sets and algorithms, and each of them have their own, like.
Consequences. Right and
In a certain way, even if there is that promise of everyone can participate in this geni kind of journey. But.
It.
Probably is not true, and especially for, like my parents, like, it doesn’t matter for them if.
Generated by AI or not right like they need to have the right.
Respectful image of that particular religious figure that they want, and.
Period like it doesn’t matter if.
It’s 80% there. And.
Interesting as a project, and I thought, I’ll just share that.
That’s it. Yeah, nice.
Like. So you had.
You had a.
Yeah, yeah. So it was just I mean the. It was quite an obvious thing for Whatsapp to do. But yeah, it was.
I think intentionally, it was very different from.
They have currently at least.
Any like. I don’t think any how know where those.
It’s very interesting. So I have a friend who works with canva.
And he kind of.
Confirm that every morning India time that they receive a spike.
And.
Download of bad looking templates, and they trace that back to like good morning. So someone like there is there are people who are at it like. But I don’t know the entire story, for sure.
Any questions.
We can stagnate, and I think we have, like 20.
We’ll have to.
I have a question.
So.
Out, of.
Great.
Add the.
There was like a cyber.
Now we can’t hear you guys at all.
Okay.
Is, is the audio, for that’s going.
You can hear us now.
Yes.
Yeah.
Yeah, so I just wanted to.
Yeah. So I have 2 things we can try out. One is like a tool. I built that we can.
Hold on, can’t hear nothing at all.
Sorry, and the other is just a tool that anyone can play with. So which one would you folks record based on how many people are comfortable.
Was this only just one thing?
Dual, dual.
Hands up or react for the tool guys.
Send that link to you.
It’s very.
The Vietnam is 3 month record.
No it’s like we can play around.
From the laptops.
Yeah.
And we do want to go through the tool once and.
And I just.
The water.
Okay.
Okay. So I built this as a, it’s a very old project.
Of.
But it’s also really fun to play around with.
Yeah, so they can’t see. Actually.
Well, because.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Is gonna everyone on call. See?
We can see. Yes, you’re sharing.
The.
My, my.
We can.
This is some complicated sharing. Yes. Now, okay, can we? Can we put that.
Okay. Cool.
Yeah.
Okay? So yeah, I’d made this as a way to play around with systems. So, systems are like.
Think of it as a way to make practice.
In some sense, but not exactly that. I’m just trying to simplify it.
And what you do here is you.
Start off by defining an alphabet or a language per se, which usually has a couple of letters.
And you’re going to use this language to draw something on the screen.
So.
The language that we’ve defined F means forward.
We just move straight. Alright. So imagine a person standing at the bottom.
Center of your canvas.
So this is where a facing upwards.
This is where you’re going to start out.
So if you see here, my axiom is F.
My axiom means my, so my starting thing. So like say the starting, usually for a sentence. It’s the word the and then you add stuff with it right.
So. Sf, so that’s what’s drawn here first, st which is F and F.
So it’s just moving forward.
Right.
Now I’m going to define some rules. So what happens in a fractal something over and over and over again. So something like that you can have multiple iterations of the same thing over and over again.
It will get larger and more complex as you add more iterations to it. So.
Say my accent was something a little more complicated.
Or let’s start off with the most basic. It’s ff, and my rule says F is equal to F.
Very simple like, no matter how much I take it, I’m going to keep getting the same thing.
Does that make sense? Because I’m not adding anything to it?
Now I’m going to add a couple more things that I can do.
Plus 10 minus.
Plus means, I turn to the right.
And minus means. I turn to the left.
You can change the angle of turn. So here I’ve done 60. You can make it 30, 25, whatever you want it to be.
Length. I’m saying 300 is just like the size of one F.
Right
Or like the starting you can play around with these numbers. Thickness is just the thickness of the line that you’re drawing.
So say so. F means straight whichever direction you’re facing.
Plus means turn to the right.
Minus means turn to the left, so say my axiom was just this, but my rule was.
F.
Plus.
My.
Right.
And let me.
Yeah.
Let me see. Let me see what happens.
Okay.
But is this making sense to you.
So it went f plus f.
Yeah.
And so that when I did, when I went to the second iteration, we became f plus f. This F also became f plus f.
So I got f plus f plus f.
Right. That was the final sentence. You can call it.
So this is what I got.
No. So I think F and plus and minus are clear.
We also have brackets. Now what brackets will do.
Is kind of store your current location because your F is going to take your direction as well. Right? What if you want to come back to a previous direction. So if I’m doing F, and then I want to draw a branch, come back here and then do something else. How do I do that? So.
Let’s look at.
Some very, a very basic thing.
Alright this is a little more complicated.
Why did I not do anything easy? Okay. There we go.
Okay, so.
This is my initial starting right. My axi is just F saying, Hey, draw this! What is my F. My F is.
You go forward.
You’re still facing up. I’m storing this location and then I’m doing minus F.
And then I’m popping out. So I’m coming back here.
The close bracket.
Then I do enough. F. Again I stole that location. I do a plus f come back here.
And then, if again.
Right? Yeah, brackets are essentially.
So if I.
Keep itrating. I get something like this.
Yeah. So the last 4 here. I’ve kind of written already.
So you can play around with.
Whichever you like. However you like. This tool will also let you add in another variable X.
And X, you can make us, you know, more complicated versions of.
If so, for example, if you wanted.
To make this branch a little more complicated, right?
You could define that as X, and just put that X here, instead of making it like a really long thing. So you can just add more complexity, using that second variable.
But yeah, this is the tool. I put the thing in.
This is the link.
So yeah, feel free to try it out. These colors will let you change the.
Color that it moves into. So the starting color to the final kind of like a.
Gradient in some sense. And this is just to change your background color. Yeah, these 4 will help you with this.
These are a little more complex. Someone go into too much detail.
But yeah, feel free to play around with it. Keep like increasing iterations to see what you get.
And you can kind of see what the rules look like as well. So yeah, so think of it this way, like.
As. And when I iterate my same, it started off the text right? And then it’s going to become this. And it’s going to become this, it just becomes a very long string. So as I’m like passing through that string to draw, and this thing where it is in part of that string like, is it in the 1st half, second half, and then kind of taking that gradient from those 2 that way?
So the site has a function that lets you take a color in between. So say 0 to one. What range are you at?
So it’s just the fraction of where you’re add on in that whole sentence. So.
Yeah.
Yeah, that’s okay. It’s do this as.
Within these years. Do you have any doubts? Let me know. Yeah.
Pretty cool. This this tool is very exciting, I hope. Like.
People at home can also open it. Everyone can open it right.
It’s there! I will.
We’ll take.
Hey? No, this is my! This is not all sorry.
Topic of.
Okay, so let’s take 15 min. And like, we can come back and see what we have done like, we can show around what kind of trees we have.
Tell me will be here.
Yeah.
Do you wanna share.
I believe.