Final Performance

After a final dress rehearsal with the dancers and wiring up of andrew, we had the final performance for my presentation at the Pole Fitness Studio. It was a great way to finish a fantastic paper and mega thank yous to those that helped me get it all together on the day.

Before the Final Presentation

Have been playing around with the projector etc to see how I can establish a mode of displacement through the actual projection of the media also.
I've decided to project onto several pieces of vellum paper that will suspend infront of a mirror wall.
Vellum is a great paper to project onto because you can see the projection either side of the paper and with a mirror behind this paper, will mean the projection is being shown several times to a different scale.

The dancers will also have bare arms and legs so that when they perform infront of the projected image, the dream media is distorted and shown on their limbs.


setting up a large projection

















playing with distortion of image over curtaining

















Projection through vellum and onto a mirror

tidying up

While I haven't been able to discern why the arduino patch is indecisive I have resolved my phaser patch. What I had to begin with was (basically) a four channel alpha phaser however, the main cycle clip, at some points would have such a low alpha reading (because the other channels were reading so high from the IRs) that effectively it couldn't be seen.

However, I want the cycle ride to read the whole time so I've remade the patch so that the cycle patch has an alpha reading of .5 all the time and the three remaining channels equate to .5

erratic arduino

so my arduino is all wired up and my max is patched up, but getting the two to communicate is proving somewhat 'temperamental'- having run tests on the arduino, the hardware itself is fine, and will communicate with my patch when he's in the mood to (after discussions we think it is a core script in the patch that gets arduino communicating with max that may be the problem)...I'm working on making the situation a little more predictable.

however- the IR range finders seem to wire in well and work accordingly- I'm yet to test them with the dancers however. We had a meeting tonight, and will tighten up choreography tomorrow.

Content Development

Whilst I've still been unable to upload the video samples, I have been reconsidering the content of my dreaming media. While I began creating Quartz animations of a clothesline coming out from the streets, into the cyclist's vision with household objects pinned to them. I have been thinking on this however and have decided to restructure this as it is not conducive with my theory of displacement because it then became the clothesline that was the framework of connection for the displaced objects and experiences rather than the dream itself. So it is back to the drawing board on the animations.

I am still going to keep the household objects as they are representative of displacement (objects belonging to the house, that have left the house to crowd the dream as the cyclist drives through the suburb).

Brandon LaBelle: Social Music

Today I had the opportunity, alongside Ben and Stephanie, to attend Brandon LaBelle's workshop on social music- a way of exploring how social contexts and public situation can create or have an effect (real time) on the way we create sound.
Something refreshing (to a student of architecture) that was discussed amongst the group was the ability that sound has to free someone of the burden of meaning: that sound is a reference to meaning with which people connect without superfluous articulation of what that meaning may be. Embodied meaning and the communication of such is an element that is considered in almost every architectural move: particularly in the academic world (perhaps not as much in the applied industry of architecture). In this freedom, the musician (or digital artist) has the ability to address the audience but there is a point [HT LaBelle] "at which you don't have to be so accommodating" to the aesthetic desire of the audience. For me I find this is true in the way in which I am exploring dreaming in my current project: whilst the consideration is that there will be an audience and my piece will be interpreted, I am not considering how the aesthetic of my work may or may not suffice the audience's desire- it is more about the exploration of displacement through dream.


















The Workshop: consisted of a presentation of Brandon's work across Berlin, Bergen, Malmo, Copenhagen and London. Followed by two hands-on exercises:
1. We were to listen to the sounds of Cuba and return them to their site by way of communication via chalk. I began to listen to the dialogue of Cuba as one conversation rather than individual occurrences, recordning the snippets I could hear as a story on the pavement.
2. Walking from Mighty Mighty to Civic Sq. and back, we explored how specific frameworks of information can be used to create sound: each of us had a whistle which we sounded upon finding an informatino we were looking for- I sounded my whistle every time I saw somebody using their hands/arms to communicate. This facilitated an interesting discussion on how ambiguous language can communicate the presence of meaning (where the precedent for the sound is unknown) versus the communication of the meaning itself (where the content is known and being reinterpreted and therefore, newly understood).

work experiments

audio
the audio track I'm using is written by a Norwegian songwriter, Kate Havnevik. The song I'm using, Sleepless is not on her homepage but it's a good reference point for her musical style.

animations
I've been working in quartz on animating some household objects to animate the screen, and looking into Chromakey patching in max/msp to enable certain colours as transparent, creating a better video montage in the performance.

Some quick and rough examples of quartz work-
having trouble with the browser and uploading videos- will come back to do this.



things to consider with the animations- I need to find a way to make them less two-dimensional (this may be in the drawing style?) and I want to experiment with colour (animating the colour- perhaps similar style to Waking Life?


max/msp
This week's experiment has been setting up something similar to a 4 channel mixer for my media samples, each connecting to an IR rangefinder- at the moment they change the opacity of each media sample. Will play around with them also changing the framerate of the media and saturation.