“NaNaNaNa” is a generative videoclip by Eftihis Efthimiou, created for the same title song by the greek artist “Γιαν Βαν” (Jan Van), featuring Pavlos Pavlides.
The video has been entirely created in Grasshopper 3d. For the most part it is generated and rendered in real time, based on values that are extracted from the analysis of various music stems taken from the song. The values that are used are the peaks of the waveform, that are smoothed out temporally, with a series of techniques. The way these values are then utilized is threefold. The fluctuation of the values is used to animate elements in a parametric model, the values are iteratively added to create an ever-increasing value or the values are connected to a boolean operator that alters a state whenever a specific thresshold value is exceeded.
Since proper texture mapping is rather difficult to achieve via this workflow, the shading has been made possible by using mesh vertex coloring. This directs the distinctive “naif” aesthetics of the video, allows for some beautifull gradient colours and generates a vapourwave vibe that is justified by necessity more than style.
Whenever computational designers stride away from basic parametric logic, they usually find themselves inside the ever too familiar areas of emergence, chaos, complexity theory and the such. Wildly alluring though they may be, these themes tend to entrap the user inside their abstract mathematic beauty and impose certain niche aesthetics. This leads to the paradox of a both formal and conceptually vastly dynamic discipline, yet with a rather static expressive vocabulary, that more than often appears agnostic to things like cultural connotations or the human scale.
This video is part of a series of experiments on figurative computational design, in an effort to enrich the aesthetic language of the medium, without taking distance from its main problematic.
