Playtime

This project, like most of my work, is about order and disorder.

The grid, the archetype of order, is used to arrange a set of rectangles. These rectangles are then extruded to become blocks/boxes. Here the perspective is created by means of a formula of projection of points on an isometric plane. Depth of field only exists because a sequence of instructions erases the background as the composition is built.

Order is also present in the succession of each of these steps.
And disorder? It is very subtle, insidious, but nevertheless it exists in certain details within these blocks. These are details that do not follow the general shape of the box, residual, forgotten parts of blocks that have been erased.

NOTE ON THE TITLE

The title Playtime refers to the film (1967) by Jacques Tati, the cubes generated here evoke the settings of the film (the exteriors of this modern city and certain interior settings such as the open spaces). The analogy is made in the perception of these spaces, thanks to the use of the depth of field of the glass and the reflections.

A link is also made through the film's few dialogues. The characters do not really understand each other, they speak several languages (French, English, German and some are not subtitled). The misunderstanding arose during the writing of this programme in the form of a bug, an error in the way of erasing certain parts of the composition in the background. Once the error was corrected, the composition offered little interest because the volumes described were perfectly solid, eliminating any perception of depth. This misunderstanding of the way my programme works gave place to a singular perception of space and depth.

FEATURES & OPTIONS

Grid size: indicates the number of rows the iso grid will contain (between 14 and 22)

Zoom: the magnification factor of the composition (between 0.7 and 1.74).

Block height: between 0.15 and 0.50, determines the general height of the blocks and the vertical position of the grid

Height variation: how the height of each block is decided, three chances out of five, to have a totally random arrangement otherwise the height decreases from left to right or from right to left.

Iso angle: between 1.85 and 2.1, the smaller this parameter is, the more the grid is seen in bird's eye view (projection = [x-y, (x+y) / {angle}]).

Crop mode: This parameter depends on the zoom feature, from a certain threshold (>1.11), the blocks will be cut cleanly according to the margins (hard), otherwise they will simply be deleted (soft) if they go out of the frame (in whole or in part).

Palette: The three colours used respectively for the background, the texture (not included in the SVG) and the lines. 90% chance of getting a black line on a white background.

Format: portrait (A3) or square, 50% chance of getting one or the other.

Options & exports available in live mode (fxhash.xyz) or at IPFS artifact url (objkt.com) by clicking on the canvas, a window will open allowing you to export the drawing (PNG and SVG) as well as different formats.

RESOURCE & LICENSE

Developed in Typescript (with 2D Canvas) with the Greiner-Hormann polygon clipping package (NPM: greiner-hormann), Playtime is a plottable NFT, it is part of the Hybrid Series (for more information click on the canvas on live mode).
This project is licensed under the MIT license.

Nicolas Lebrun / @nclslbrn / nicolas-lebrun.fr