Pressure Project II

For our second pressure project we were tasked with creating a project with a Single person experience and a interface. As I was already thinking about story for my final project I wanted integrate intimacy and ideas of story told by the audience. I wanted to create a space in which the viewer was prompted to tell a story and then be audience to other stories about the same topic. I also want to using unconventional tactile Interface.

In the end I create a system which read one of my shirts and looked at the color to determine if it was there or not.  if the shirt was present it would trigger a text on the screen, that instructed the viewer to tell a story. This then would be captured to the computer and would be played along with all the other stories after the party was done. In theory this would work but in practice it kind of failed.  I don’t give myself time and the space to calibrate the computers understanding of the shirt under new lighting conditions.  And I had not quite figured out how do use Isadora’s captured to disk actor.

There where ideas in it that I were very attracted and will continue to work on. I really like the idea of a tactile interface being an everyday object, especially when the object hold significance or comfort. I was also interested in the different stories that me emerge from someone simply talking into a computer.


Third Pressure Project

The final  pressure project had the least requirements yet. It simply had to involve dice and the computer had to interact with them directly. Immediately my mind drifted to my last pressure project in which I attempted to use the computer to read colors. I felt the dice might have enough difference between each number that the dots would create distinct cumulative colors. I work for a time on using the Eyes actor to track the position of the die and the color calculator to get an accumulative color of the dice. Sadly, even under good lighting conditions there were too many shadows and differences to make a robust system. But in this I realized that I could just use the eyes actor. By creating a patch that cordoned off six areas of the view of the camera and having the audience Rolling dice without telling them I was basically creating a die.

This whole process ran parallel to the content of the work. As you probably have guest I really like talking about my experiences in my work.  the die through me back to playing dice games on long train trips during our vacations as a child. As these train rides were up to three day journeys the potential for boredom and easy entertainment was high. The easiest entertainment was a game at me and my sister would play four hours at a time. We would go back and forth saying “woof” until one of us said “meow” and I would precede to laugh uncontrollably, and to this day still do. I want to share the riveting joy of the game dubbed “woof” with the world.  Thus I came up with the final work.

One out of the six designated areas in the cameras view would make the computer say meow while the other five would say woof. Once the meow was landed on it would appear in another place. It was that simple. The final element and what I think sold the project was my reaction to it. the reward for landing on the correct sector was not only a “meow” but it also my smiling face.

I think there’s something to be said about technologies ability to reconnect us with what we truly feel is important. By making a simple Isadora patch I was able to re-create and experience that is extremely fond to me.


Third and Last time Around with Tea

img_0838         For my final project I wanted to take the working elements of the two earlier projects and simplify them whilst creating in more complex work. The two earlier projects contained tea in them. During deeper expirations of my relationship with tea I realize that it’s a symbol that is tied to many facets of my identity. It is important part of almost all the cultures I was brought up in, Indian, American, Japanese, and Iranian. This brought me back to the key premise of this journey, the expiration of time in story. I am very much a product of the times and would not exist anytime before this. I was also interested in the way that we tell the story that got us here. And how as audience members we are able to imagine alternate pasts while giving facts. From these ponderings I came up with a new score.

img_0840         In the final performance I would make tea while explaining what I Believe to be true about tea. To get this material I free wrote a list of every fact that I know.  I then measured how long it took me to make tea and recorded me reading the list. This portion would be filmed in chunks and playback in eight tiles much like the last performance. During the brewing of the tea I talked about the Inspiration for the work. I did this into a microphone and made a patch that listened to the decibels I was producing and produced a light whatever they got loud enough. My meanderings on the microphone ended with me presenting the tiles and then I poured tea for people.

img_1044

I did not get a lot of feedback after the show, but I did get a lot while rehearsing it. For instance, during the performance I needed to assert my role during the making of the tea by looking at the audience. Also that I needed to put a little more attention into the composition of my set. These pieces of advice really help the final performance and I wish I had better used my lab time as the space for rehearsals incident of doing so much work at home.

My constant worry through the process of the three performances was that I was not keeping in the spirit of the class by making simple systems. during the final performance I realized that what I was working on was highly applicable to the class. I was creating systems where the user could express themselves and have complete control over the performance. I was designing a cockpit for a performance with a singular user, me. The designers, stage manager, and performer only had to be one person. The triggers for actions played into the narrative of the work. In the second performance cycle the cup of tea attached to the Makey Makey  integrated a prop into the system that controlled the performance. In the final performance I ditched the cup instead opting for a more covert controlling method. I placed to aluminum foil strips on the table and attached the Makey Makey so that I could covertly Control the system by simply touching booth strips. The other cue was controlled by a brightness calculator that was triggered by turning off the lamb after I made the tea.

This performance will not be a final product and I will continue to work on it for my senior project to be performed in March at MINT gallery, here in Columbus.  I plan on integrating the Kinect that I just bought to create motion triggers, so that even less hardware will be seen on stage. I believe that I’m going good direction with the technological aspect of the work and now need to focus on the content. This class allowed me to think about systems in theater and ways to give the performer more freedom in the performance. The entire theater proses could benefit from a holistic design proses, where even the means od truing on a light must be taken in to consideration.


Second Time Around with Tea

Playing off the ideas of my last creation I decided to make my work capture me as I performed. In this way the subject of the peace shifted from the story I was trying to tell to a story that was being created by performing. However this thought process took a bit of time to end up with the product.

For a bit I tried to the idea of focusing on the presentation of the information considered giving the audience carte blanche on how they absorbed the media. I would film from different viewpoints and then connect it to a stylist that would allow the audience to view the temporality of the information on a spatial level. This would continue the thread of the relationship to time but would massively change the project. I put this idea in a box for another day and started with another solution.

I decided that the story itself was an event that could be told. This time I created a patch in Isadora that would video me for a certain length of time. It would store these videos away until I chose to play them all at once on nine tiles. These tiles would be projected onto me as the video camera again would capture my actions and projector image and then play this back.

During this time I also became obsessed with the idea of the magical mundane. In my performance I wanted to equally show my flaws as well as my strengths. To do this I credit improve  score. While the video camera recorded me the first time I would do a free write. For the performers that was shown I wrote about the audiences expectations of my work or at least how I felt about the audience expectations. As I did this I drink tea to add a little bit of action into the tile frames. Once the video was done recording I read the free write which was captured buy another recording. Finally this recording was playback also as tiles in Cannon but not split up, in other words each video was delayed a little bit from the last.

I finally felt like this was an interactive piece, in the vain of the rest of the class. To make it even more interactive I involved a Makey Makey that, with the help of some tinfoil, would turn my tea cup into a switch that would trigger the start of the first recording and that the switch from the second recording to the showing of the second recording. This was highly successful in that it changed the way the queues were read, in that my face do not have to be in the computer and I was allowed to perform more freely.

For my final iteration I wanted to try to further the ideas in this one and make it more exciting to watch and take it a bit out of draft state. The feedback that I got included consideration of detail. With the final iteration coming up so soon I’m not sure about how much Will change.


Fist Time Round with Tea

I had a very difficult time getting started with my project. I had a fairly clear ideas for what I wanted but did not how to express them in an interactive format. At the base of my project I was trying to explore storytelling as an act of time travel. We experience the world in linear mode, but categorize it fairly non-sequentially, skipping from detail the detail and making associations with other times. In this way our bodies experienced time in a different way then our minds do and the way did we interpret the world. I have been dwelling on these thoughts for a little bit now. There is an idea in the theater that the show starts at the first pamphlet and never really ends. As performers we can control what the audience sees but everything that is not the performance ultimately has mass effect on the nature of the work.

From these fairly heady notions I wanted to create a format for telling stories without my control and manipulation of time. I wanted the viewer to experience it as a thought, disconnected from a temporal state. My first project was more about achieving this shuffled time state then the interactions with the audience. I filmed short three second clips of me making tea and the images that I saw while making tea. I’ve then made an Isadora patch that would play these images at random either forward or backward.

At the stage in the process the choice of tea was fairly arbitrary. I chose it because of its sequential nature and because it was a process that was familiar to me and to the viewer. I was committed to it being a performative work and thus read a script while the videos occurred. The script run counter to the objective view presented by the camera. It’s featured nuggets of information that I knew about tea and interlaced them with instructions for making tea with the steps reversed.

During my lab time I toyed with projection mapping in to corners. I was interested in the effects that would have on immersing the audience into the work. I think this Will be a rabbit hole I jump down in the future, but did not serve my work in an intentional way.

After the performance I got feedback which allowed me to focus more on the content. For my next cycle I wanted to try to make the world more interactive, and not necessarily interactive with the audience but interactive in that content would be generated during the performance.


The Fly

This is Fly

Make sure your camera is on.

Try clapping at it.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/rx077164kz1ikai/fly.izz?dl=0

I had no clue what I was going with this, to the point that I was frustrated, and then I realized that this frustration could be one of my resources. One of the more frustrating things in this world are flies.  Inspired by these creatures and the need to use the Eyes ++ actor I created a Digital fly the moves when you move and then rest on the last thing that moved, presumably you.  I am not a computer programmer and the logic to make this work took most of my time. They need to use The jump actor forced me consider how to progress the story. As flies of the most annoying thing in the world (maybe slight hyperbole) the most satisfying thing (again hyperbole) is to get them.  I integrated a system whereby the scene would jump when movement is detected around the fly and a sound is as loud as a clap is heard. To capture to frustration created by a fly I made it so that ones you killed  it more would show up.  Well doing this I made a scene in which  a fly would just fly around.  The previous scene jumps to at one time and I decided it was fly heaven and get back to it you have to apologize.  I worked up kinks and counter actors as well as made it one more pretty and here is Fly.

Once I finish this assignment I wondered if it was generative. I came to the conclusion is not completely generative. They are fairly basic set outcomes however how you get there is different. The user has a score but what they do can differ. Also, the aspects of the fly are completely randomized including movement and color.