king.jas

Destroy Draw Build Score

With Assistance

From 1-100, choose how much you want to destroy.

Choose a graffiti pattern.

Chose whether to paint the old or the new.

Behold.

Without Assistance (i.e. with an administrator that knows how blender works and how the score is played)

Open the Blender file.

Enter Edit Mode, Go to Select->Select Random.

Choose how much you want to destroy.

Right click-> Delete.

Pick a graffiti pattern from your available textures.

Choose whether you want to apply this pattern to the remnants of what you destroyed or what is going to fill in the gaps.

Unhide the original model.

Destroy Draw Build Reflection

Destroy Draw build is of course inspired by Dada, but also inspired by the cartoon network show Destroy Build Destroy and the episode of Friends where Ross gets married. The goal of the piece was to allow players to experience the process of creation and destruction and ponder how they’re intrinsically linked together. Thus, the dichotomy of creation = good destruction = bad isn’t true, as new things cannot be created without old things being destroyed, and even without creation, destruction in of itself can lead to and be beautiful.

Many of our readings talk about the political underpinnings of movements like Fluxus and Dada in addition to how they challenge what art is, especially the commercialization of art. This greatly inspired when designing this game. I can’t for the life of me remember the artist, but in class one of the slides went over this machine that broke and set on fire when operated, and thus could only be operated once before needing rebuilding/repair, and that was a great source of inspiration as well. I wanted to create a score where the process was as much the art as the literal artifact leftover at the end of said process, and I also wanted destruction to be part of that art and process. Socially, I want this score to recontextualize the meaning of destruction and thus art. I’m not sure how widely held this belief is right now, but I know some people think of graffiti just as defacement (in a way a form of destruction in of itself) and of course the art medium isn’t simply that. By pairing graffiti with literal destruction and then tying that to beauty, I want people to realize that many things can be art that you wouldn’t first expect. Hopefully, this would be a step for people to wonder why art has to be so commercialized, as graffiti can be beautiful and yet isn’t traditionally “commissioned” most of the time.

Playtesting was fun, I primarily did it with my roommate and my girlfriend, and it was interesting to see the different approaches applied. Some playtesters took more of a “screw it” approach when it came to the actual destruction, almost like they were just curious to see what happened. On the flipside, some where much more cautious. I find these different approaches telling, and would love to present this game to more people to see where most people default to. I also wonder what insight about people could be gained from such a choice, and how that choice could affect the score if I chose to game-ify it more.

Technically, this project presented some annoying difficulties but nothing too crazy. I was unfamiliar with blender so I had to relearn some elements like how to properly apply modifiers and texture mapping, some of which took some time.

Overall, I am happy with how the score turned out. My favorite artifact would have to be the church paired with a graffiti pattern that had a lot of softer pastel colors, as shown below. I thought it ended up looking both very nice, and very nice in a way a church traditionally doesn’t (as the color scheme is anything but traditional). If I had to improve anything going forward, I would likely try to automate the process so that the user only had to input a few numbers, but that was beyond the scope of this project. Additionally, some technical issues remain, as I’m unable to render any high res images of my final product due to using in the rendering pipeline (everything is becoming tinted pink when I try to render it). While this could be a cool addition if I expanded this (pick a tint to tint the image or nothing at all) I would like the user to intentionally have that choice and not have it be forced on them because of a bug.