Digital Mist / Return to Mist
You can find a more in depth look at the project here!
Digital Mist is a series of photographs ranging from portraits to landscapes as well as candid shots. I wrote an algorithm that parses through each individual photograph and randomly relocates a chosen pixel.
I wanted to implement photography in my programming work with a big inspiration being glitch art.
A question that sparked this project was how computers could independently create art. Here, the computer is not breaking the original photo, but rather rearranging it. Allowing for the pixels to be randomly reassigned made me feel like the finished image would be outside my control. Thus, running the algorithm on the same photo will almost never give the same output. Ultimately questions of authorship, originality, and individuality were key to this project.
I decided to revisit this project in 2020 as a submission to Two Feet Studio's art kick. I wanted to explore a more optimized way of scrambling these pictures. For that, I turned to shaders, allowing for this continuous and wave like distortion of the image.
Both of these projects were created in Unity using C#. I was the sole developer.
Key Learnings:
Manipulated the pixels of an image within unity
Optimized the length of time it would take to scramble the pictures
Reworked the algorithm based on the visual look of the final image
Understood shaders and how they can manipulate an object's visuals
Saved and loaded data on a computer so that the image stays the same
