in EM1/Mirror

Interactive II: Mirrors

Our first attempt for Max was to recreate an artwork done by artist, Christian Moeller. The mechanics of his work was a mirror that fogs up as the individual approaches the mirror, and eventually blocks out his/her reflection.

It was tough for me to catch up in class (I am just a slower learner), so I appreciated that we had time to explore the software. Jiaman and I paired up and started to deconstruct the final work that was posted, as both of us are very unsure of how the software is to work. So the first thing we did was to create a video.

Next was understanding Patches, which was something I did not understand until experimenting and using it on my own. Similar to the patch created in the final folder for p faces, we clicked “Command E” to lock the Ain file, and double clicked on it to create our own patch. This was when I realised that whenever we created a patch, we need to have an input and output to connect the patch onto the main piece.

The we had our first question: What does the resize @size function alter?

After trying but failing to understand the help function on max, we carried on and realise that we can change the colour of the boxes, text and lines. Besides improving our aesthetics, I think it will help with organising our work.

But we understood that it splits the output and goes into area2brightness, which patch helps with changing the colour to black as the user approaches. Then we broke down split and scale for our understanding.

Then we were stuck at this place for awhile, and then we realised that the values did not go through because we did not add the”,”, which is a a decimal place for the scale.

Another area we were stuck at We then “Command I” to alter the value to the slider.