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SIS: Project summary

SOMA is an interactive art installation exploring an idea of control of people in a society, what its main causes are and in what form said control is manifested. Generally, control can be viewed as self-inflicted as well as imposed by an outside party but here they're explored as if society is an extension of our individuality, mind, and body (A. Watts), therefore, there's no separation between the types of control.

The final concept has been reached through iteration cycles consisting of discussion, prototyping, and criticism and the conceptual journey this project embarked on has been remarkable due to a wide range of ideas and mediums of presentation explored. Each idea has been enquired into under two lenses: meaning and technological means of conveying an idea. That approach allowed us to probe into drastically different mediums so that we would have a solid understanding of various art forms and how they can be applied to a concept our group is fully satisfied with.

The final piece is a combination of ideas about societal control from a novel Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and a simple yet engaging technological demo from eelslap.com allowing an audience to control an animation by moving their mouse cursor along the screen. Huxley's novel showed his characters being controlled through a drug Soma, endorsed by the government, that they willingly take whenever they feel unnerved. The drug is available only in the civilised part of the society, the uncivilised territory reserves to pain and self-harm as a control method. We decided to use a video, later turned into a GIF, projected onto a wall as the medium and have represented control and submission by submerging young kids, brother, and sister, underwater. An audience has to decide who of them is sinking by operating a lever that in return controls a GIF, there's no middle ground, both kids can't be under or out of the water at the same time, that way the audience is presented with a decision they inevitably have to make.

by Trak Gray, Matvey Tarchutkin and Tobias Heeringa

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This is the final footage we’re going with (out of 12 in total, can be viewed here, was initially shot in 720p 120fps), the middle of the video depicts both kids half submerged in water and gives a neat effect as the lever, which is weighted to its center, pendulums back and forth as it comes to a rest.

The final processing sketch works perfectly well, all we have left to do is make a few changes to a lever system to make it as presentable as possible.

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Space Image and Sound - Workin

16.05.17

The lever is coming together. I prepared all the metal components, and did some tests with axle at different heights to see how it swings. Having the axle only slightly off centre means it pendulums back and forth very slowly and for a much longer time, meaning it should look dynamic in the final installation. Everything is ready to weld as soon as I get a chance to do so.

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SIS: Dunking kids into a pool

On 14.05 Sunday we have filmed all the footage we needed for our project, the main difference from a test footage we've done a few weeks prior was us lowering young talents into a pool horizontally and not upside down. There were a few reasons for this change:

Uncomfortable and awkward holding positions for people lowering and a person being lowered into a pool

Multiple takes would take a long time to shoot as being lowered underwater upside down is really stressful for actors

Stability, it was rather difficult to stabilise the body/head of an actor

We came up with a more eloquent solution which Trak built: a rig allowing us to position a person horizontally to capture the water rushing in or out of their face as they're being lowered into a pool with a GoPro strapped above their head. It also has a space behind actors' heads for sliding in a piece of plastic that acts as a background for easier post-editing.

Toby and Trak were in charge of submerging our actors while I was doing camera work — a task I was happy with as I didn't feel enthusiastic about jumping in and out of cold water for a few hours. The time before filming was somewhat tense for the team as we had to do multiple trips around the city to get everything we needed (GoPro, SD card, kids), but that unnerving state has quickly disappeared when we met our actors: Luca and Elissa, 9 and 14 respectively, extremely energetic kids who were doing flips on a trampoline between the takes. It seemed as if they're never tired and the whole experience of working with them has most definitely brightened up my day, that means a lot to me as usually I'm lost and awkward around kids. You just can't help but get infected with their joyous playful attitude.

Now that the filming was done, our next step was to build a final version of a lever system. Up to that point, the only material we've considered was wood, something we're familiar and confident with working, but after visiting 3D labs for design advice we saw an enormous amount of metal scraps that would fit our needs perfectly and we've ultimately decided it would be better if we welded it. It would make our device not only stronger and more stable but the flexible nature of the material allows us to experiment with a design more. Moreover, I've never done welding before and it's something I'd be interested learning, what a perfect opportunity.

Overall, this project had a very interesting concept development road and at first glance, it's difficult to connect our initial idea with what we have now. We started out with wanting to make a difference in NZ's society by trying to tackle one of the myriads of problems but essentially ended up with an art installation after realising that bringing awareness is something we can realistically hope to achieve. I, however, believe that the final idea wouldn't be as strong if we didn't go through so many concept iterations and am very happy with how it turned out.

[matveycolab]

Today was short on discussions but rather long on making and testing things. It all started with Toby showing the prototype he built with Arduino and Processing that was able to scrub through the video with a potentiometer, the problem was that the scrubbing wasn't smooth at all and the whole thing lagged quite a bit.

At this point, we changed the format to GIF in hopes to ease things for Processing and sure enough, it worked well after Stefan helping us out with mapping potentiometer values to GIF frames, lags were gone and the GIF played smoothly. In a matter of ~2 hours, we had a fully functioning prototype with only one problem: high-resolution GIFs that are ~100mb in size don't play, so that puts a constraint on video quality, surely we can think of a workaround. Toby and I decided to move on to construction a physical prototype representing a lever attached to a potentiometer that a GIF is controlled with as we wanted to get an idea of what it'll feel like before building the final iteration.

Before finalising on an idea of using a pull lever we've considered a wheel, a chair that a person sits on and spins around in, a pulley, a button, a slider and a bunch of others. We've ended up with a pull lever as it's not only the easiest one to build, but also makes the most sense in the context of the project. I personally associate levers with something bad/sinister as they remind me of Frankenstein or all those cartoon villains leading heroes into traps and that's what we wanted to do with the project, partly make people feel responsible for their actions as well as feel conflicted about whether they actually did something wrong (thus characters in the video being tranquil underwater yet disturbed when out on the surface and not the other way around).

The prototype we made today uses a pendulum action with a potentiometer attached at the axes, the weight at the bottom is meant to add resistance to the lever. When let go, the lever swings back and forth eventually stopping in the middle, therefore, looping a GIF in a dynamic way. This prototype helped us identify a few weaknesses:

1. Lever resistance is not enough and it doesn't actually feel like you need to make much of an effort to move it. We're also considering of moving the axis down on the lever to see if it's a better approach. 2. The rigidity of the construction, we need to make it durable enough in case people will want to swing the lever with full force (according to our assumptions and feedback they actually will).

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SIS: Satire in drugging yourself to death

With every team discussion, a new approach is being adopted and today is no exception, we have moved away from artefacts from the future to something different while keeping the word "dystopian" in our project description and continuing with a satirical theme. We're basing, but not limiting, our installation on Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. We're particularly interested in the wonder drug "SOMA" and with what intention it was used. While Huxley discusses such interesting aspects of the dystopian society as psychological manipulation, separating society into classes from birth as well as utter disgust for family values, it's important for us to keep a satirical outlook and we thought that SOMA fits our needs the best.

SOMA is the perfect drug in every way, it's "euphoric, narcotic, pleasantly hallucinant" but without any side effects. There's only one aspect to it - it's being used as a distraction by the government and makes people content/happy with the way their world works. It's possible to compare SOMA to the real world drugs - opioid mixed with anti-depressants and hallucinogens (yet somehow without adverse effects), however, it's not what's important, but the idea that people numb themselves every day in order not to feel or rather feel "happy" is a reality in our society. I believe it's a perfect opportunity for a piercing social commentary - it's a very clear, relevant concept that is easily overlooked as it's in people's nature to strive for contentment and happiness, only it's difficult not to fall into their deceiving counterparts.

The purpose of this whole project from its very beginning was to give said piercing social commentary, we've tried it in many ways but we weren't happy about spoon-feeding the audience; we started off looking into extremes and then somehow ended up in the middle ground which failed to do the very thing we wanted - provoke.

We started discussing our current approach, which we're finally sticking with, by focusing on 2 extremes. Novel's main character John is taking SOMA like any other citizen of the World State, he also uses a switch/whip to beat himself into feeling the "right feelings". We ended up not combining those 2 things but rather focused only on SOMA due to the whip not adding much substance to the project's message but adding quite a bit to its complexity. Besides, we simply felt it's juicier to tease out one thing to the extreme rather that 2.

And this is what we're actually doing. The current idea for an installation: video on a screen and a pulley/lever. A video will present a person with their head underwater, they look content and trouble-less akin to when people take SOMA to escape reality; water is a symbol of calmness and tranquility. When someone pulls a lever, a person on the screen will be pulled out of the water and will start screaming and flailing, representing discontent with what's around them. The trick is that the video is upside down.

To produce the video we'll use a GoPro with a harness construction attached to the body and Trak and I will be lowering Toby into a pool, later we will most likely improve the method, but it's good enough for testing purposes.

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SIS: Your very own portable house

...in the dystopian New Zealand. One of the artifacts that my team has brought from the future.

Our ever-evolving approach/idea has been changing and taking 180 turns, those changes might seem completely random to some, but to me, there’s a perfectly clear line of thinking and one ever-present aspect - satire. Actually, the idea isn’t changing as much anymore, it’s the approach that becoming wackier each time.

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SIS: New Zealand’s satirically dystopian future

A group task for the last week has been to come up with a few satirical posters poking fun at NZ's issues, I've done 4:

1. Now even you can afford to live in the city centre 2. On the verge of poverty? Get more domestic workers 3. My ad campaign is FIRE 4. Water shortages? Shower with your girlfriend (empty image on purpose)

Our initial take on the issues was a bit more grounded / timely, however Tobias' idea of turning excessive methane emissions into a commercial product set off a huge discussion on how these current issues might be presented in the future. The discussion was mainly focusing on extremely consumerist dystopian New Zealand set sometime in 2050. The date was later pushed another 100 years forward since it granted us more freedom to be wacky with ideas and approaches.

Moving away again from a chosen presentation medium, posters, we realised that most of the issues we poked fun at could be presented as physical artefacts, namely satirical objects from the dystopian New Zealand of tomorrow. An idea for the installation theme sprang naturally, the premise for it would be that our group somehow traveled into the future and was able to bring a few artefacts back to our time, which includes, but not limited to:

1. A radio playing ads, news, and infomercials of the future 2. A jar of methane that's sold as a commercial product 3. A cardboard box representing an accessible option for a place to live, a "house of tomorrow"

The same day we tried prototyping a few quick ads for the radio by pretending to be a show guest, a street passerby and a host on a radio show, we discussed 3 things mentioned above. I quickly realised that scripting the dialog will go a long way as I was not experienced in improvising lines and using satire are especially challenging.

Sometime throughout the discussion, a movie Demolition Man (1993) starring Sylvester Stallone and Wesley Snipes was mentioned. The movie screams 90s but the plot relates to our idea of an exaggerated future: The future is so bright that police officers need only to look after occasional graffiti and people crossing streets on red lights, in a case of a more serious issue they would hardly be able to do anything. A prisoner from the past wakes up from cryogenic sleep, so a cop from the past has to be woken up as well to deal with the problem. The plot provides a reference point and a similar direction to our exploration of NZ's satirically dystopian future.

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Using satire for the sake of satire, how fun is that! We played around with the idea of how we can portray it, initial idea was that we represent one issue, but with different levels of satire, from slight to extreme. Then we ended up with 2 possible approaches:

Multiple commentaries/issues explored in one satirical format

One issue represented in different mediums (video, poster, poem...)

We picked the former for testing purposes because it will be much easier to get into the mood and develop prototypes of the same medium, posters.

There was another important decision: focus on issues either specific or directly affecting NZ, since people will be able to relate to them more. It came from our assumption about people not caring enough about a recent Russian legislation that decriminalises domestic abuse; while horrible, it's happening on the other side of the world and doesn't affect people in NZ. It's more of a philosophical debate really, as to should we do something (and whether we can actually make an impact) about things not directly affecting our immediate lives.

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SIS: Focusing on satire, not the issues

There has been a reoccurring topic in our discussions that we, as a team, couldn't quite agree on: satire normalises the issues that are being poked fun at. This podcast discusses Tina Fey's satirical representation of Sarah Palin and how awesome it was at first and then how Saturday Night Live pushed it too far by inviting Sarah Palin herself alongside Tina Fey. That turned Palin into a joke and only a joke, people started overlooking how dangerous she was as a politician.

Another problem with the project, or rather just Tobias' preconception was that satire isn't strong as a medium, because he wanted not to simply poke fun at a problem, but provide some sort of a solution. We essentially came to a conclusion that providing solutions to problems within art projects could be somewhat detrimental – people don't want to be told that there's a problem and they're not doing anything to make the situation better. Bringing awareness, providing facts and hoping for people to understand the issue further is the only thing we can realistically hope for. I'm not saying providing solutions alongside the problem doesn't work, it's just that satire is such a powerful medium that is thought provoking and people who have an ability to understand the crux of the issue will probably take action, however, if the person is looking only to have fun, that's the only thing they will find.

So we shifted our focus again. Tobias decided to go along with Trak and I since he felt like he's shutting down ideas for no particular reasons. 

Now the focus is - exploring satire for the sake of satire, using the issues that are represented by it only as means of exploring the power of satire itself.

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SIS: Idea iteration, prototyping

Our focus has changed again due to the team not being quite satisfied with the previous concept of 3 pretentious student documenting their creative process and talking a lot. Didn't feel right so we talked and talked until we decided to go pick at a recent change in Russian laws, namely the decriminalisation of domestic abuse. We felt that this issue can't be left without a response and it was also a perfect opportunity for us to explore and test how satire works.

We came with the most satirical manifestation of our thoughts about said law in a form of a "self-harm machine" with a punchline: "your man forgot to beat you today? Now you can give yourself a badge of honour without his help!". One of the deputies referred to bruises as "a badge of honour that women should wear proudly".

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Global problems: Ideation, discussions, never ending idea iteration (Part 2)

The second brainstorming session revolved around the idea of challenging people’s assumptions of the value of animals as "ends-in-themselves, rather than means to an end" (according to Kantian ethics). It's an idea that animals shouldn't be seen as things the sole purpose of which is serving people in one way or another, such as food or clothing, but rather that their life is intrinsically valuable in itself, that they can exist without any purpose, just like humans.

This neatly ties into Speciesism - a prejudice or bias in favour of the interests of members of one's own species and against those of members of other species.

We started brainstorming by thinking what is an extrinsic value of animals in our society and specifically looked into the most popular New Zealand's uses of animals, the biggest of which is agriculture (being the 2nd biggest export after tourism).

That led us to an idea that bringing awareness to the issue of using animals isn't enough. People can be aware, but have no idea as to how they're supposed to act. Same thing with an economy - an alternative needs to be proposed. An important point to consider is that animal agriculture is a big part of NZ's identity and tradition and stripping it away, especially without providing a worthy alternative isn't possible.

We decided to still stick with agriculture, just eliminating animals from the equation. Growing only crops is more sustainable than growing crops and feeding them to animals because 36 percent of the calories produced by the world’s crops are being used for animal feed, while only 12 percent are consumed by humans (Cassidy, 2013).

Because we, as students, can't make an impact on country's agriculture, we decided to tackle this issue on a local, university level scale - AUT Community garden.

This garden, as envisioned, would provide AUT with enough produce to feed the university, at least partially; food grown in a garden can supply local cafes or potentially, a fully vegan cafe can be opened.

However, after further research, we found that a traditional garden will be required too much space in order to provide enough food and therefore alternative methods need to be explored, such as vertical aeroponic or hydrophobic growing. But in that case, that wouldn't be exactly of a community garden, because the majority of the people wouldn't know hot to look after one and one of our unspoken goals is to create a university symbol of sorts, that can connect people, which a community garden could embody. Therefore, both ideas should be explored: a community garden for fostering connections and a vertical farm for actually growing food.

References: Cassidy, E. S., West, P. C., Gerber, J. S., & Foley, J. A. (2013). Redefining agricultural yields: from tonnes to people nourished per hectare. Environmental Research Letters, 8(3), 034015.

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Global problems: Ideation, discussions, never ending idea iteration (Part 1)

It's week 3 since the project started and it's the first time I'm writing something about it. The reason for this is quite simple: all the ideas our group has discussed have been quite vague up until this point. But now that we have something concrete and worthy of telling people about I feel it's necessary to write out all of the previous ideas we went through.

Ever since last year my projects have been lacking one thing – purpose, it was art just for the sake of being art. That is why I feel they didn't turn out to be anything remarkable, I wasn't really happy with them. It was difficult for me to find things I was passionate or really concerned about because I was afraid of speaking about one that was truly on my mind all the time – veganism. Still not quite being socially accepted I felt out of place and concerned about being met with a backlash. Now that I have the support of friends who think in similar ways I feel that I can express my thoughts freely on the subject. I can talk about the philosophy of veganism forever, but I feel that it's a time to make a project revolving around it.

The project started with frustration about the state of the world people ignore a significant amount of problems that can be solved with one simple solution - an adoption of a plant-based diet, and further – stopping the use of all animal derived products. Our team has talked about it for 1.5 weeks, throwing ideas out on a table, discussing our interests in a given topic and trying to come up with a creative way of solving problems stemming from animal agriculture, which was the main focus of our discourse.

The outcome of those talks were the following ideas:

Ad-campaign

Children's book/application

Documentary

Ethical vegan business practice guidelines

Vegan breakfast/lunches at schools

Competition to develop export alternatives to NZ’s dependence on animal agriculture and...

Vegan camera film

That last idea caught more attention, as expected, due to being "out there" and relating to creative technologies more than any other. Despite being rad, research has shown that it's almost impossible for us to produce our own film, as special equipment is required and there are only so many companies in the world that make it. How in the world do you make a vegan film you may ask? Well, the regular film surprisingly contains gelatine, which is an animal-derived product, we proposed to substitute it with human gelatine. One of the points of veganism is that animals are being used without their consent, but humans can give consent, therefore if, for example, a person gives consent to be used for gelatine after their death, using said gelatine would be vegan. But even that wouldn't be necessary because human gelatine can be grown in yeast (Duan, 2011). You can also buy it here. We have also explored various ways of printing, including dry and wet plates, where the latter requires gelatine. Unfortunately, simply producing a print with human gelatine loses an important aspect of the project - bringing awareness to the fact that such trivial everyday products have animal products in them, as we have also planned on marketing the product.

After failing to realise the vegan film idea we needed to brainstorm one more time.

References: Duan, H., Umar, S., Xiong, R., & Chen, J. (2011). New Strategy for Expression of Recombinant Hydroxylated Human-Derived Gelatin in Pichia pastorisKM71. Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, 59(13), 7127��7134. http://doi.org/10.1021/jf200778r

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SIS: Approach changes

After some thinking and discussion, we made 2 distinct changes from our initial idea: the reintroduction of the use of technology and use of humour instead of confrontation.

Firstly, the idea of not using any sort of digital technology has been discarded due to it not clearly relating to other ideas we wanted to explore (feminism, veganism...), e.g., discarding technology and accepting veganism / feminism have only one certain thing in common - that initial feeling of confrontation and rejection of those concepts.

Secondly, when people are being confronted, their defensive mechanisms come into play, therefore it would be quite difficult to get them on board with whatever idea is being presented, especially if they feel that their world view and morals are being challenged, which they can interpret as a personal attack (which is usually not the case). How else can we make people emphasise or even accept other points of view? We as a group thought that humour can be a good one. After talking through this mess of an idea we ended up with something that all of us are quite excited about.

We're making a documentary / sitcom-like film about us developing a project for Space, Image and Sound paper. The idea is that we will be able to chip away at social issues in a satirical way, while still getting our views across. The plot, so far, goes like that: 3 pretentious artists, that are caricatures of ourselves (Trak, Tobias and I), are working on a university assignment / art project, being up our asses about it and bringing in different aspects of social issues while discussing said project.

The film will be exploring our group dynamics and our view on privileges and a variety of social issues since all of us have first-hand experience with them.

We have started doing research into filming and storytelling styles we would like to play around with and currently thinking of doing something similar to "This is Spinal Tap" or "Parks and Recreations".

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SIS: Privileges.

People in the majority of the western world don't realise how many of those they have. Being able to get a good education, good food... ultimately it comes down to being able to choose. It's also hard acknowledging our privileges and some people experience quite an uncomfortable feeling when confronted about them. I had to experience that feeling myself when I was confronted with an idea of veganism, it made complete sense and all the facts were right in front of me, but I still felt uncomfortable, my beliefs were challenged and I felt as if my personal morals were attacked. I've experienced it once again when Trak offered to give up digital technology for this project and only use analog means of documentation and project development (paper notes, polaroids...). The whole team felt incredibly uncomfortable about the idea and each one of us was hoping the others would discard it as stupid. However, we shortly realised what was going on since each one of us had to experience that involuntary response before - our privilege of using technology and the idea of not using it felt like an atrocity.

It was an "eureka!" moment and we felt we were onto something big. That almost automatic negative response interested me greatly and we as a team decided to explore it further. Immediately deciding not to use any technology for this paper, we wrote our project proposal on a piece of paper, gave it to a lecturer in person (who had to scan it so we could refer to the original later) and started discussing this idea further.

Initial proposal:

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Flattie, discussing concepts

Flattie has been a rollercoaster of a project, mainly because of the constant scope change throughout the whole development cycle, even when the due date was only 3 weeks away. That fact, however, did not in any way deter us from reaching our initial goal, which is to inform students of the current housing situation in Auckland and show them where they can find a place to live. What I imply by inform is to educate them on the current renting prices and what their reasonable expectations should be. In order to achieve that goal our team had to meet a few criteria: reach out to as many people as possible and have access to certain datasets and APIs. The first criteria was met by choosing a platform - the Web since it is a platform agnostic medium. As for the available data, that was a challenge on its own. Albeit the vast availability of different datasets, picking the right one was crucial, since it would affect every step of the project development, as we have learned. We had to consult with Figure.NZ and after significant consideration, we settled with MBIE Rental bond data (mbie.govt.nz, 2016) and TradeMe API (developer.trademe.co.nz, 2013). An issue arose straight away, which we realised was universal for almost all governmental datasets - their data requires plenty of prior manipulation in order to become usable, that almost feels as if the concept of open and accessible data is completely defeated.

The project development cycle was set up and structured during the idea development stage with goals to be met at the end of each week, initially we have even implemented a Scrum Agile methodology, yet we quickly came to realise that a set structure is not going to work out due to a different class timetable for each team member as well as us being relatively inexperienced in Agile.  We ended up following a more relaxed approach, assigning an area to work on for each member and then discussing the progress during our weekly meetings. That worked well in the beginning of a project, during a stage where we had to learn certain software, JS libraries, and APIs. However, that mellow approach did not do us any favours with the deadline date drawing nearer, as we did not know how to take our learned material and put it into something practical. That is when we came up with an idea of 48-hour weekend hackfests and just within two weekends we were able to produce an MVP. I have personally come to a realisation that when something needs to get done in a short period of time, a hackfest is the answer, it simply puts a person in the right mindset.

The ever changing scope was the result of us being uninformed to an extent, in other words, we did not realise what we were getting ourselves into and the complexity of technologies we were about to use. I am mainly referring to React JS, a framework which requires a significant amount of prior knowledge and practice we simply did not have. It also became clear that a complex approach is not always the best, as were managed to achieve roughly the same result with vanilla JavaScript.

All things considered, the final application ticks almost all the points of our initial goal, I feel the only area in which we could have done better is informing the users of the current Auckland housing crisis, that could have been done by spending more time adapting available datasets and implementing more of them in the final app.

References:

[1] Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment. (2016, October 7). Rental bond data. Retrieved October 31, 2016, from http://www.mbie.govt.nz/info-services/housing-property/sector-information-and-statistics/rental-bond-data

[2] Developer API Reference. (2013). Retrieved October 31, 2016, from http://developer.trademe.co.nz/