The Organism

For the organism project we had to make an application which would represent a living organism ( virus, etc..). The first idea we had was “music track destruction”. The principle of that was that when user runs the software it asks him for any music track and then destroys it by changing the frequency, pitch, etc.. and then saves distorted track over the original one. We started to look for the solution how to realize this idea. The first we wanted to use Automator and Audacity programs for that, but finally we found out that AppleScript does not support Audacity. But also the biggest problem was that we couldn’t find the way of getting into the music file, that is why we had to think about somethig else.

The other idea was Adam’s, he came up with the idea of making a “nuclear blob”, which would has to be fed by user with some random objects. The blob would react to the different objects in a different way and might become a mental , so the user would have to find out what stuff would make it smaller and not to spread around. This idea was not successful because our project’s tutor did not really like it. So we had to go back and change our first idea.

We decided to replace a “music destruction” by an “image dectruction” and to use AppleScript and Photoshop CS3 for that. We got a book from the library about AppleScript basics and started making an application. Basically we have created a family of monsters where each of them does some specific function. The main monster was called “PeeDes” and when it runs it asks the user to choose an image and then it applies a few Photoshop filters to the image and makes it looks complitely distorted and unrecognizable. Then it asks to save the image and transfers user to other monsters with names such PeePirate, PeeRes and PeeFib. They start to interact with a user and finally they make a cycle which catches user into a mental trap. I think that this is could be a good idea for a virus. But unfortunately our final version of the organism application still has a few errors which we could not solve because of the limited time and an insufficient knowlege of AppleScript, which basically we had to learn from scratch.

This is an example of how the icons of our application look.