09/04/24 – 16/04/24
The first Unit 2 brief tasked us with iterating on a ‘snippet’ of one of our previous projects from Unit 1 with the intention of discovering our position as a designer through this process. I faced some difficulty in selecting a starting point as I viewed all my projects from Unit 1 as standalone pieces of work that while had scope for further development did not possess the potential for reinvention into a new project. However, I knew that my position as a designer has always been influenced by science background therefore, I needed to choose a snipped from a project that best reflected this.
The snippet chosen for this project is taken from my Unit 1 Translating project, Genetic Hex Code. The 64 different shades of colour generated in that project acts as the visual material to be used for further iteration. These colours were generated from converting the genetic code consisting of triplet combinations of nucleotides (U, C, A, G) , of which there are 64 combinations into hex code values which also consists of a triplet combination. With the snippet being so broad it presented a greater potential for multiple iterations.
p5 was used to create a generator which produces colours based on a random assortment of codons. RGB values and hex codes are interchangeable so for the purpose of this project RGB values are used. The nucleotide variables (u, a, c, g) are described alongside their values. Squares are then randomly filled with a triplet combination of u, a, c, g, each representing a codon.
Different methods were used to present the colours generated. Here, ‘strands’ of RNA are produced.
I settled on the idea of a gradient generator. Here, I decided to manpiulate the size of the ellipses created, increasing over ever iteration resulting on the emergence of the codon colours on a macro scale. The variables of u, a, c, g, which determines the RGB colours remained random.