Nothing is juicier than an open-ended brief for a generative art moment centered on color. Just thinking about it calls to mind a million ideas, aesthetics, methods, references, and techniques.
Deeplocal worked with Google on a hero exhibit for their Chelsea store, starting with a deck of juicy, candy-colored, bubbly, translucent, squiggly, squishy reference, and a focus on personalization. Just enough agreement on style to narrow the field, and just enough variety to leave it wide open.
From a previous installation, Google already had a wraparound three-screen display, extended by a low-resolution array of LEDs nestled in a floor-to-ceiling cove of frosted glass tubes. The refresh, timed to coincide with the launch of the latest Pixel phone, was to use the Pixel as both a camera and as a controller for a generative art moment.
The phone was to capture an image of the user, extract the dominant colors from the image, and begin generating a one-of-a-kind art piece with a palette derived from the picture. At the end, an onscreen QR code offered wallpaper-formatted captures of the unique artwork for the user to take away. (Try scanning the QR on this page!)
For the project, we explored a handful of camera-based interactions for a variety of colorful, abstract, mirrored, dichroic, chromey, confetti, bouncy, squishy visual directions (a few rejected ideas pictured at the bottom of the gallery), eventually landing on a worm / tube / squiggle Google named the ‘Woogle’.
Our front end system consumed a palette and state change commands from the phone and middleware layers, using those elements to drive a high resolution, smooth-as-silk Woogle experience for hundreds of customers a day for a run that continued, by popular demand, long beyond its initially-scheduled window.
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GOOGLE: WOOGLE MAKER
Client: Google
XD, Software, Systems - Design & Implementation: Deeplocal
Generative Art Moment / Snek: Noah Norman / Hard Work Party
