We’re having a big open house event June 9 from 3-9pm! Lots going on and lots to see!

Special Performances; Visual Arts, Literary, Dance, Music, Voice, and Installations

Above is a quick clip of where I had progressed to by the day before the show. The triggering had seemed fairly cacophonous when we got to the space, so I was trying to make the zones have rankings. 1st zone is the yellow outside zone, 2nd zone is the two orange strips, and the 3rd zone is the red strip in the center. The audio corresponding with each zone gets more harsh, and starts to get a bit cacophonous as all three tracks might be playing at once. As you can see, this pretty much ruined the interaction, and I didn’t have enough time left to fix it so that it was maybe “weighted” instead of having “priority”. It’s kind of funny though, it’s doing exactly what I was trying to have happen in this video, it just didn’t turn out to do what I thought it would do.

A large part of this is, because you can see the projections in this version of the project, you can see exactly what is being triggered and when.

What I ended up having to do was to revert back a few days to what I had on Monday and adding in all of the small fixes and tweaks I had done over the week at the same time as I was working on the zone priority.

You can see from this test clip that it looks far more interactive, just from waving my hand in front of the camera on my laptop.

Now that I had a working file at 1am the night before the opening, I just had to get it back onto the machine in the morning. No problem. Easy peasy. File on the laptop, and backed up into my Dropbox account.

(Gratuitous NY Street Shot, you can still see the fences set up from the half marathon)

The next morning I got a slow start, plus there was a half marathon right next to us that closed off the most likely roads for the cab. Got to the space in good time, and bam! My laptop wouldn’t boot. And the Dropbox copy didn’t help, as there was no internet I could get a hold of (although I realized afterwards I could have figured something out in the area). The hard drive must have been bumped or otherwise had some error after I put it to sleep the night before, or maybe when it went back into my bag. Thankfully, it was a problem that was not too bad for the operating system to deal with, and it finally booted up and let me transfer the file within five minutes of the opening.

Next up, conclusion and some footage of the piece in the space with people interacting.

Once we got to the space, it seemed that the piece wasn’t really understood, and we were kind of talking in loops. I set the projector up so that we could see exactly how much space the projection would be taking up on the floor.

This helped, but ended up with us moving the pile of stuff over to a somewhat enclosed area between two spaces. Good, because we could control the lighting and audio in the space pretty well, but potentially not great because there might not be enough people going through the space. It also wasn’t an exact fit for the shape we were planning on, so we were going for it, but thinking that the shapes projected on the floor would be changed out. By the end of the 1st day of setup we had the projector set up and mounted in the ceiling. Ready to finish the physical setup with the mirror bouncing the projector’s light in the morning, and to get going on tweaking the software to fit the space.

When I got back the next morning, everything was on the floor. At first I misunderstood, and thought that James, the person next to us, had just taken everything down because he liked the space for his projection. Thankfully, that was not the case, it was Kate still wanting a better space, along with James needing a space for his projection, and (I believe) the people volunteering at BWAC trying to help us find a space that would work. The end result was that we didn’t get much more than the physical setup done on the 2nd day, but that at least included finding a mirror in the cavernous nearby IKEA.

We were going in fairly blind as to what kind of space we would be installing Mother May I into. From photos of the BWAC space it looked like a bunch of beams, columns, and walls in a fairly well lit space. The first version of MMI used a paint outline on the floor to designate the area of interaction, but we didn’t think we were going to have that option, so we decided to go with a projector. Along with being able to outline a space with light, this gave us a bit of “feature creep” as we were now enabled to change the lighting through the use of the projector. Add the motion detection that triggers the audio into the mix, and the idea now became: when movement gets detected in a zone, that zone on the floor will get lit up.

One main problem with this is that anything that happens in sight of the camera within the designated area gets seen as a difference between the frames being compared. In other words, letting people see that motion has been detected, and not just hear it, caused the projector to light up an area, which caused the motion of changing the lighting to be detected. Not so good.

To get around this, I decided to just ignore it. Or to be more precise, the way my motion detection works, it’s only looking at a grayscale version of what the camera sees. In order to make the camera not see any changes, we had to pick colors that were all of similar tone or darkness. Once they were the same overall tone, the detection couldn’t see that anything had changed within it’s vision. We see colors, and so does the camera, but the motion detection was blind to those changes. Color blind, as it were.

Image Showing the Color Blindness of the Motion Detection

I’ve been working in NYC this last week on an interactive piece for Kate Vrijmoet called “Mother May I”. The opening is today (Mar 18, 2012) and will be open the next couple weekends as well.

BWAC.org is at 499 Van Brunt in Red Hook, Brooklyn, NY, NY. Kind of hard to find the actual space, it’s not the very end building, but the far end of the building right next to that. Last door on the left before you leave Van Brunt.

The video I’m linking is a test video shot last night of the interactivity of the piece. The square on the bottom left will be projected onto the floor, and the people in the gallery will be either accidentally or intentionally interacting with the art by walking through the space that is lit.

Playing With The Word Wall

Word Wall At The Compound Café Closeup

Auggie Playing With The Word Wall

Ian Talking With Ralph

Playing With The Word Wall

The Compound Café Ian Explaining The Wall

Luara at The Compound Café

Compound Café Guests

Word Wall at Compound Café

Word Wall at Compound Café – Talking To Eli

The Compound Café

Auggie Playing With Toy Laptop In Front Of The Word Wall

Ian In Front Of The Word Wall

fish

(The subtitle of this post is “Look, I Do Exist Outside Of The Internet!”, but of course, since you’re seeing this on the internet, no proof has really been garnered.)

Top Half Angled

Top Half Close Up Straight On

Top Half Wired

Top Half Closer Angled

Button Assembly Close Up

Top Half Wiring In Hall

Top Half Wiring

Word Wall Finished Front Panel and Buttons (green)

Just wanted to let you all know about an art brunch coming up on Sunday (I had this in my mind as Saturday, but that’s not the case). It’s a brunch at a group of Seattle artists’ property on Beacon, and some of them wanted to do a series of non-standard art fundraiser events. I put my name in the hat, and this third brunch date August 14th from 11am-3pm honors/supports me and will be helping me to offset part of the costs for my Word Wall.

Word Wall Finished Back Panel and Buttons

I’ve been working hard on this project for the last long while and it’s finally getting to the point that the lights will be lit up! I’ll bring the wall in its’ current state. Hopefully it will be interactive, but I think that it will at least be flashing words at random by that time.

Word Wall Finished Front Panel and Buttons (spring hill)

If you are interested, email TheCompoundCafe@gmail.com to reserve a spot, and most importantly, make sure there will be enough food for you when you arrive! I’m not posting the original email about the event as I don’t want to share the address to anyone and everyone on the internet. You can get more information from myself or from TheCompoundCafe@gmail.com.

Word Wall Last Bit ‘O Electronics –> mosfets

I went to the previous one, had some great food, got to listen to some of Cristina Orbé’s music, as well as got to talk with a variety of people who make and/or love art. Feel free to let your art-loving and your technology loving friends know about this!

Thanks, and hope to see you there! Ian

Word Wall Finished Front Panel and Buttons (spring, clothes, hill, blanket, hawk, far, chaos)

Sun Through Words “am too”

Testing LED Strips (Current as of August 2nd)

Sun Through Letters “m to”

Ian Eating a Banana (Had to take a break at some point)

Sun On Edges of “e”

Word Raiser

Upper Box Buttons Fitted, Front View

Ben Marking Words

Upper Box Buttons Fitted, Rear View

With Bolts and Most Acrylic

Upper Box Buttons Fitted, Rear Angle View

Drilling & tapping the waterjet cut front panels, cutting and drilling the buttons (which will lie beneath the cut letters), and initial LED light testing on a piece of art I’m doing called the Word Wall.

Music:
The Fall of Humanity (With He Can Jog)
by Deceptikon
on the album Mythology Of The Metropolis

Thanks:
Breona Gutschmidt – Word play
Ben Flaster – LED & confabulation
Clay Roach – “Hinge” button scheme
Nils Christian – Shop space & box building
Ignition Northwest – Partial grant & deadline