Yono is intended to be an inclusive collaborative art experience with a low barrier-to-entry. Yono is also a love letter to pixel-art. The unique branching structure of Yono invites exploration and provides an unusual perspective on how art pieces interact. It is intended as an adventure to explore, and an even more exciting adventure to contribute.
Why do this? For the love of shared creativity, and to see what unfolds.
Every piece in the Yono Uchu (cosmos) is a rectangular image made using a limited drawing area (e.g. 64 pixels by 64 pixels) using a limited color palette (e.g. 16 colors). Each new piece is created to extend a piece already in the project. This new piece is inserted between the halves of the "parent" piece, resulting in what can be thought of as an "image sandwich" or "exploding rectangle" -- with earlier images always "bookending" the later images.
As you may have figured out, once a piece is added to the project, it is available to be extended by future additions. Since each piece can be split in two ways, horizontally and vertically, this means each new image becomes a branch in the art flow. This quickly increases the number of potential attachment points for new images.
The resulting structure of this continually expanding collaboration will be viewable as an interactive art piece. Viewers will crawl around Yono, traversing by expanding and collapsing rectangles. Each rectangle can be spread apart to reveal hidden art inside it. The path through the art will differ depending on the direction of the extension.
At any point in the traversal, the shape of the artwork will describe the path taken -- a symmetrical Yonograph being a trail of expanded squares.
A structure that has been spread multiple times can be pinched back together, collapsing into the past, eventually arriving at the earliest, origin, piece.
While many artists will choose to use their own favorite software to create art for Yono, we'd like to set up an environment where no special software is required. Pieces for Yono may be created in web-based tool that will run inside most modern Web Browsers (e.g. Firefox, Safari, Chrome), with a specific effort made to support mobile touch-screen devices.
The drawing tool provides not only the expected selection of brushes, shape, and color palettes; but will also offer user-generated stamp sets. The drawing environment displays bordering Yono pieces for reference.
To encourage continuity between connected pieces, the color palette will be restricted somewhat. In one instance, a palette of 16 colors is provided for each contribution, and when a piece is added, the new piece must share at least 12 of the original piece's colors. This means the creator of the new piece may change up to four of the colors on the palette.
The web-based drawing tool is currently a "stretch" goal in our software development cycle. It all depends on funding and resources.
Viewing a Yono Uchu is the way most people will experience the project. So our focus will be to develop a responsive animated interface for spreading, pinching, scrolling, searching, tagging, flagging, commenting, liking, plussing, fussing, praising, and rating.
This interface is intended to be distinct to viewing device. Touch devices will offer pinch/spread controls, mouse/keyboard devices will incorporate hover and toggle interfaces, autoplayers will crawl the structure on their own -- and hands-free might mean we can finally dance to architecture.
The Yono Navigator Prototype is a good way to get an idea how the collapsing/expanding will work.
Our priority is to create a globally shared Yono structure, so this will be the focus of development. However, we've learned from past projects that artists are often excited about using our tools to create their own, non-collaborative, works. To support this, Yono is being built with "instancing" in mind. That is, users will be able to create their own "walled gardens", to which only they (and maybe friends) can contribute. These instances can have their own rules, such as "base piece size", "palette restrictions", "reservation times", and so on.
These Yono instances can be used for personal art projects, but we envision them as being particularly useful to teachers and art-group leaders. In the past, SITO projects have been used in art curricula and for one-off exhibitions. This is something we endorse, support, and encourage.
For the primary instance of the project, Yono features the following parameters:
- Articipants must be registered users of SITO. This insures correct attribution, primarily, but also helps avoid spamming and griefing.
- Each piece on Yono will be 64 pixels wide by 64 pixels tall.
- Pieces will be split into two equal halves when being added-to.
- Reservation times for each piece will be 16 hours, with in-progress saving permitted. Articipants may cancel their reservation at any time.
- Contributors may not add a piece directly "adjacent" to one of their own pieces.
- Color palettes will be limited to 16 colors.
- Color palettes may only change by 4 colors in adjacent pieces.
Most of these parameters are modifiable for specific instances of Yono, and may be subject to change over the lifespan of the project.
SITO has a history of self-perpetuating collaborative art projects, the most prolific examples are Gridcosm (1997 - present) and HyGrid (1995 - present).
One example of this folded-art topology from popular culture is
the Mad Fold-In, created by Al Jaffee. Of course, Yono isn't be limited to a single fold-in, a single artist, or a single direction!
The name Yono comes from the Japanese yon, meaning "four". Each piece in the project can be split in two ways, creating four separate pieces. Also, the pixel and color counts for each piece are always multiples of four. Coincidentally, the city of Yono, Japan existed between two other cities up until recently, when they all merged -- an analog for the structure of this project.