Week 5: Clock Assignment - kalibirdsall/Creative-Coding-Class-Wiki GitHub Wiki

Clock assignment, titled "Throwing Shade" https://editor.p5js.org/kalibirdsall/full/vK0rB4eeX

NOTE: YOU HAVE TO ZOOM OUT ON YOUR BROWSER TO SEE THE FULL CLOCK.

My clock is a sundial that uses the shadow of a super tall luxury residential tower to indicate the time of day. This obscenely tall building effectively throws shade on extensive areas of the surrounding neighborhoods (including homes, parks, gardens, schools, etc.) from sunrise to sunset, as do all of the super tall luxury buildings that have been built recently in New York. I question why such buildings are allowed to be built when they so clearly diminish the neighborhood for everyone except the real estate developers who build them, and the building's wealthy inhabitants. I hope this clock project draws attention to the problematic nature of these towers, and leads to a reevaluation of how the city is developed.

The Brooklyn Tower was recently built in Downtown Brooklyn, near where I live and near NYU. At 1,067 feet tall (74 stories), it's by far the tallest building in Brooklyn. The building is thin, extremely tall, has jagged pointy bits along it's roof, and is ominously black in color. My family and I refer to it as "Darth Vader's Castle", which is strongly resembles. The building's height and overall design is completely out of character for the neighborhood and its height far exceeds what is appropriate, in my opinion.

To figure out how to make my clock, I had to learn about sundials. I decided to try making a real sundial using a miniature 3D mock of the tower that I made to use as the gnomon (shadow caster). I placed my mini tower gnomon on a large piece of paper laying flat in a sunny spot outside and traced the tower mockup's shadow every hour. I ran into a number of problems: clouds, wind, and ironically, SHADOWS FROM OTHER BUILDINGS. Then a friend pointed me to a website that allows photographer's to research how the natural lighting will be at a particular location. This site shows you a 3d map of your location, and the shadows you can expect throughout the day as the sun moves across the sky. As a planning tool, I used this website's visuals to draw shadows on top of the Google Earth map I used for my clock's background. This visual planning informed the positioning in p5.js of the shadows on my clock, as they move from hour to hour, throughout the day.