#spaceimagesound

[claudias-game-blog]

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FREQUENCY ART INSTALLATION - COMPLETE

Top window is what will be displayed on the screen, the bottom window is the people counter(data collection).

[bambi-ct]

The Journey of the Narrator

This is a master post of my journey creating this project and also reference to past related projects:

1) Space, Image and Sound

2) Hypernarration > Unsteady

3) Hypernarration and IoT, An idea on a grander scale

4) Oh what a few days can change.

Here is also a link to the playtesting playlist:

Playtesting the Narrator 

And if you really want to go deep, Links to posts up to 2 years ago for projects that lead me to this Project:

Narrator Resources

[patriciadanielletan]

Space, Image & Sound: Week 11 - installation setup review

Our previous idea for our installation setup was to mount the boxes on their sides along a wall, in order to not block the ambient light needed for the printed image at the rear of the box to be visible. However we found that typical indoor lighting conditions didn’t illuminate the images as well as we’d hoped, so we tried holding the boxes up to outdoor-facing windows (during daytime of course) and found the images to be a lot clearer. This gave us a serendipitous stroke of inspiration: what if we actually mounted our installation up against a glass window? Doing so would give both optimal lighting and a representation of the idea that peering into the boxes distracts the viewer from their real world environs — a metaphor for the way that we increasingly live through our screens and neglect to acknowledge our fellow people and surroundings.

We then faced a major practical challenge: how could we physically mount our boxes against window glass (without damaging anything)? We considered several options, including:

suspending them from nylon cords attached to the ceiling

attaching suction cups to the backs of each box

Neither of those sounded like they’d be robust enough for our needs, so we sought out Clint for ideas on how to go about mounting the boxes. He suggested an elegantly simple solution we hadn’t considered: don’t mount the boxes, instead, invite the viewer to pick them up and hold them to the window themselves. What I like about this is the added element of participation, which I think links the concept of our work more closely to the viewer.

As always, we’ll need to consider how to prompt the audience to interact with the work. We’ll be setting up the final installation as shown below, with a plaque reading “FOR YOUR EYES ONLY” affixed to the plinth our boxes will be arranged on. This single line works as both the title of our piece, alluding to the concept of voyeurism, and a suitably open-ended prompt for the audience.

[kylieclarke-bct]

Space, Image, Sound - Anxiety Article:

I don’t usually read the articles like this that are woven through my Facebook news feed, but for some reason the title of this one really intrigued me and I wanted to find out more. 

Over the past week, I have been constructing my dance piece for my final submission, (which I will be filming in the next couple of days) but after reading this brief article, I realised how far away from anxiety and emotion I was getting. I was thinking and creating too much choreography that was perfect and intense - I have been overthinking the project entirely and focusing on getting the message across, too hard. 

This post was short, but the underlying message of it was about this particular couple, where she suffers from anxiety and how he deals with the downs in the relationship. I resonated strongly with the quote "Someone with anxiety is inclined to assume everyone is going to leave. The truth is they battle something they can’t control and there is a sense of insecurity within themselves when it comes to relationships." I agree with this 100%. 

I need to let go over the overthinking and trying too hard to create something amazing. I need to take a step back, breathe and find choreography through my emotions, not my head. I am excited to see where this new motivation is taking me.

[gmonro]

Space Image and Sound. Pitch and other plans

Proposal

Space, Image and Sound.

So far I am still struggling with a solid concept or an exact idea which I would like to follow through with. I have however seen a few things which have interested me very much. Those include the following links.

https://vimeo.com/190293037

The reason I enjoy this is due to the way the sound and the colour seem to be directly based on how they interchange and fade into the next colour/sound. I would be very interested into looking into something similar to this and exploring how I could use those colours with very distinct sounds which could seem to have little to no relation together, to possibly creating some form of soundscape and possibly a photo or picture when it is put together. https://vimeo.com/190645337

I really am really interested in the way this is is shot so that there always seems to be two separate stories going on next to each other, and with the narration over the top which seems to be able to relate to either of the films, I find that very interesting. I wouldn’t think I would like to base my project on this but I would be very interested in using aspects of this in my final product. However I would like to point out that I enjoy the idea of challenging an audience by using objects or sounds in a way they aren’t used for. I would prefer to create something which uses these elements however at the end completely makes the audience feel like challenging what they see and/or hear. Something similar to the wall of speakers and lights that blast you when you walk past them.

As a final thought and something which has interested me over the holidays, I got into a T.V. show which used a very unique way of narrating. It used the narration as part of the story due to the main protagonist being crazy, so you, as the audience are the protagonists imaginary friend. Everything they say to you is being heard by other voices in his head. Link can be found below. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytQFYBRIecY

So, with that being my pitch, I have been shown a bunch of different people who have done work similar or just had ideas which I can draw inspiration from. I would say that I am most excited looking into the image and how I could change how that would work together with the sound to create a more distorted overall piece, along with possibly changing what the audience could see based on how they interact with it. So far, I have thought about looking into the lighthouse on the waterfront when I get a chance, as well as looking at the light festival going on in the domain at the moment. So more on those hopefully a bit later. 

So from what Clint has given me so far, I am mostly interested in the “Zen for TV” and maybe putting sound into the video input of a CRT screen. Those both seem like very fun things. The former of the two being seen below (with added interest of magnets). 

I am also quiet interested in what I found while looking for this, which was a musical instrument which had video cameras looking at it and playing the recordings above it. Looking into how I could maybe use this with a mix of an instrument, the “zen for TV” and possibly some form of distorting sound. Might look more into this at some point.

Finally, I find Yasunao Tone’s glitch music extremely fun. Not because I would like to listen to it but because it is so distorting and harsh with no structure at all. I would like to look into this further as well, and investigate how I could use this, maybe with the image seen above, or maybe in another way, to create a distorting but immersive experience for people. I am unsure where this will lead at the moment, but the more I think about it, the more excited I get. So hopefully more updates soon. I leave you with the sweet melodies of Yasunao Tone.

[loganvanriel-blog]

SpaceImageSound - Setting up

Here is our sculpture after completing all of the metalwork and applying our final coat of metallic paint.We prototyped how it would hang from above in class with a plastic pipe.

We then moved our sculpture down to the performance labs where we would have enough space to set up our installation. We were able to get two supporting stands which held a metal beam 3 meters high. We clamped our wheel and UFO’s to the beam and then tweaked all of the hanging UFO’s so that they would hang from the right individual heights.

We then did final touches on  our sculpture by setting up the lighting which consisted of LED’s and a UV light. We used our UV paint to then paint rings on each of the smaller UFO’s and a design on the Mothership UFO. I was very happy with how they looked in the dark!

[claudias-game-blog]

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ART INSTALLATION INPUT AND AI

PROCESS

So these past 2 weeks I have been working on the input for our art installation ‘Frequency’. The purpose of this input is to collect data about the amount of Bluetooth frequencies in the area around the installation piece. We first tried to use an Arduino and a Bluetooth module to gather a device list so that we could turn this into a visualization. However, the model we bought wouldn't allow me to take this data as is was a newer Bluetooth version with little documentation available online. I was going to purchase an older version of this module that could have worked, but the group didn’t want to risk buying another module in case it didn’t work. After talking to James he suggested counting people using webcam images and detecting for changes using processing. I thought about this and decided against it as I wanted to use unity for our installation as it provides better functionality and tools.

OUTCOME

I decided to use a Kinect V2 sensor to track peoples body skellingtons and count them. The Kinect sensor only allows a maximum of 6 people to be tracked at once so this will be our max data take in. This data will then correlate to a flock of 10 Wisps (possible 20-30 in future). For example, two people tracked equals two flocks on screen.

FLOCKS?

When I reference a flock I mean a group of Wisps that interact as a flock of birds would(video above), this is a type of AI behavior. I have coded them to have a goal location that they travel to on spawn. This can be randomly turned off and on. They also have a willful state which controls if they have the will to wander from the flock group in a random direction. The last behavior is obedience, this controls if they obey commands or just float around by themselves via game physics.

[bambi-ct]

Oh what a few days can change.

User testing is really freakin’ helpful by the way. Do it as soon as you can, learn from my mistakes.

Bligh and Matthew have already made some pretty decent blogs about this testing so I'm gonna try not to make too many of the same points since there's a chance you already know about it. However, there are some points I’d like to address in terms of future improvements since they on my mind and relevant to studio work. 

Solo vs Cooperative experience: 

In the times I've talked about the Hypernarration Project the thoughts have always stemmed from a solo, personally customised experience. (e.g. You would open the door of your fridge and it plays a custom tune, something funny or over the top) The Narrator was something you’d tailor to yourself and honesty, I can still see that being entirely viable. 

However, a new branch has opened. Cooperative operation is an avenue I was kinda ignorant to not consider, It’s literally one of the few membership services I have. I pay for the privilege to be cooperative online with my PlayStation. Of course, turning your friends into a drumkit would be fun. Duh.

I'm not trying to be overcritical of my past choices I had my reasons and they still hold. If I follow the path to rework this project and make it more cooperative I will run into a few problems:

Firstly and most importantly, what happens to the Adaptive Audio?

Adaptive audio in the context of The Narrator branches into two areas: sound effects (drumkits), and the adaptive music (overarching theme tune)

Having the adaptive audio tracks pushed into a less important role to allow more playful interactions with the drumkits means the original ambition of “bringing adaptive audio out of videogames and into the real world” also loses focus somewhat. The interconnection won’t be as strong as I first hoped.

Secondly, how do we treat personalisation?

Giving the project to two people at the same time would make the outcoming sound more general than I first expected, is that a good thing? 

Lastly, the playfulness changes the outer appearance and interaction of the project. 

It makes less sense to have an interactive object that is more fiddly and shaped to subvert expectation (e.g. a tree) when the focus becomes the sound purely and not the relation to the object. In our playtests the users would even connect themselves to the objects so they themselves become the interaction, shown here:

There’s a lot of reflection to be had here. I really gotta work on what's to come from all of this. I may be coming across as overly critical and upset with the outcome, I just want to say thats not the case. The fact that so many people were having fun with our project is a huge relief and I’m overjoyed with the outcomes. I just do feel a need to be critical of the implications of these results and what comes next. 

[patriciadanielletan]

Space, Image & Sound: Week 5 - installation as a social experiment?

This week Karen and I wanted to see how we could further evolve our installation concept from last week’s “peep box” prototype to be more participatory and involve the audience in a more direct and provocative way. We came across a performance art installation called “The Artist Is Kinda Present” by An Xiao (2010) pictured below, where visitors were invited to physically sit down with the artist yet only engage with her through either text message or tweet:

The purpose of the piece was to examine “the nature of contemporary social relationships, which are frequently mediated by digital devices such as cell phones and social media”. We thought there was something particularly compelling about how it asked the visitor to become part of the artwork in a very individual way, by inviting the visitor to use their own device to facilitate their own conversation with the artist. This seemed to highlight the personal relevance of the artwork’s commentary on digital mediation for the visitor taking part.

Inspired by this, after we did a bit more digging into our ideas around online voyeurism we came up with an installation concept that combines the viewing box element of our early prototype with a greater degree of audience participation, so it becomes almost a space-bound social experiment of sorts. Below are some on-the-fly notes and sketches from our discussions, which I’ll attempt to summarise in a hopefully more coherent form after the jump.

The installation itself will be set up in an open space where lots of people are present, such as the BCT studio, and consists of two parts: 

- a “private” viewing box/booth set up in one area, containing a smartphone open on a social media app (either Instagram or Twitter) - a large screen or wall projection set up in another area of the space visible to everyone, displaying a live mirrored screencast of whatever is being viewed on the smartphone. (Video showing how this can be done)

The installation will invite those in the space to participate in a social experiment in which volunteer participants provide their Instagram username or Twitter handle by writing it down on a sheet of paper provided next to the viewing booth. Anyone is invited to sit at the booth, choose one of the profiles and freely browse through it on the smartphone. Simultaneously, the smartphone display is mirrored on the screen/projection wall visible to everyone in the space, including the person whose online profile it is being viewed.

The idea rose out of the notion that online voyeurism has made us comfortable with our ability to look into others’ personal lives through the one-way window of our screens, without the repercussions of being called out on or judged for our prying gaze. Our installation concept aims to subvert this by removing the one-way aspect from our social media browsing behaviours, in co-locating the voyeur and the subject in the same physical space. We’re interested in seeing what kind of social tensions occur for both the person doing the viewing and the person whose online profile is being viewed when both have visibility of each others’ behaviours. Hopefully those tensions will open some thought around the normalisation of voyeurism as part of how we perceive and are perceived online.

As with any participatory art, we’ll have to carefully consider how we go about engaging the audience - the subject of our next round of discussions.

[kylieclarke-bct]

Space, Image, Sound - Lead up to final presentation:

Now the final two weeks have arrived for this project, I am starting to feel the stress. The deadline has crept up on myself, as well as my fellow lecture buddies and we are all starting to feel the stress to completing this project the best we can. 

Formative assessment was fantastic. I managed to get a good grade and feedback out of it, knowing what direction I was going in for the following weeks. Fast forward to this last week been, and I can say I haven’t been as productive as I had wished I had been. So the last 5 days or so have been filled up with creating the entire sound element + planning for filming and presenting.

Sound Component:

As a refresher, the main message behind this project was based around anxiety and representing what kind of thoughts and feelings are felt from my own personal experience through a form of visual such as a performance. 

The soundtrack I have created through Audacity are recordings of general everyday objects that we all interact with (printer, cups, coffee machine, paper, eating toast etc). The soundtrack is random, noisy and there is no direction to the piece, much like the performance itself. There is no build up in the song. It starts raw, and finishes raw just as someones mind is during an anxiety episode, or even a highly stressed and over thinker such as myself. Often there is no structure in my mind. My thoughts and moods jump around causing me to feel confused and exhausted. 

I also wanted to create this soundtrack with sounds we all hear everyday to create relatable symbolism for people who have not experienced anxiety or over thinking to the level of many people in the world. Distorting the sounds by adding echoes, reverbs and pitch/tempo changes was an interesting twist to the piece that I hadn’t planned on doing. I had initially planned to have all the sounds raw and not edited, though the change in speed and deepness of the sounds BUT keeping in the recognisable ones such as the printer, changed the feel of the soundtrack and added a deeper element to the final piece. 

Below is the Soundcloud link to this soundtrack. Performance crafting and reflection to come. 

https://soundcloud.com/kylie-clarke-17238829/space-image-sound-soundtrack 

[erfanalavi]

Space Image and Sound - WHINING... project summary

WHINING... is a visual art installation that aims to get its audience in a drunk head space to convey a plain a straight forward message. The visuals of this project go hand in hand with the audio being played to irritate the viewer until the end title screen pops up exposing the message,and the pun intended in the name. This is so the audience understand what type of head space people are in when willing risk their lives driving home.

This idea sparked into interest after seeing how popular and effective the New Zealand’s drink driving campaigns have been in the past. I decided to give an idea for a commercial the creative technologist makeover to see how effective an installation inspired commercial could be. The purpose was not to have it very interactive physically, but mentally through the use of its sound and images to make you feel sick and not want to drive home even when your sober.

The nature of the video represents different moment in life where you been drinking and would of been thinking about wanting to drive rather than walking to your destination. Though each time she had a different amount to drink, the girl reminisces about her most drunkest walk and continues to a scene of her smiling in the passenger side of a car without ever seeing where the girl ended up walking to. This was to give the audience the illusion of forgetfulness while drunk and realize the important thing is she not in the driver’s seat and she can still smile because shes safe, ultimately giving the audience a recollection of there own drunken memories to think about.

With the goal to get you thinking about what mind set wine can get you in before your in it, I believe this video is successful in its efforts to get people to confirm to themselves they will not drive drunk, before and while they are getting intoxicated.

[loganvanriel-blog]

SpaceImageSound - UFO Baby Mobile - Working with Metal

Above is a photo of EJ bending our long metal rod into the S shape which we has intended. This took us a few tries to get the S shape but we got there in the end. Below shows our bike wheel which will be the main source of movement for our structure. We got a piece of metal welded to the hub of the bike wheel so that it could connect to a clamp which would allow the wheel to hang from above. this photo also shows our S shaped metal rod which will be used to hang our UFO models from.

[bambi-ct]

Hypernarration and IoT, An idea on a grander scale.

Video games attach sound to a suite of events, places, interactions and occurrences. 

Hypernarration is the act of enhancing real-life interactions with a network of digital reactions.

Put two and two together and I believe there is conceivably unending potential for personal audio customisation at home, work and beyond. By harnessing the new power of IoT devices. Compare it to Hue BulbsTM, To set up the bulbs a “Bridge” is needed. This Bridge acts as a hub for all light connections and each bulb can be changed via a phone app thru the hub. 

Now imagine instead of lightbulbs, there are various sensors with customisable audio cues. You open the fridge and it sounds like a chest from the legend of Zelda, you turn on the shower and it sounds like a calm waterfall, you can tell when one of your roommates specifically is arriving home because the imperial march plays. The possibilities are entertaining, engaging and humorous. 

[patriciadanielletan]

Space, Image & Sound: Week 4 - early prototype generation & crits

For this week’s crit session @karendanegee and I brought in the above early paper-and-cardboard prototypes as a talking point to discuss our conceptual ideas around online voyeurism. The prototypes drew from one of the initial sketches we created last week, where we visualised an installation comprised of a series of mysterious black boxes with small peep holes that invite the audience to peer into them, upon which they find themselves looking at glimpses of a person’s life as drawn from their social media profile:

We took inspiration from examples of participatory art installations. The idea is that the physical act of peeping into the box(es) becomes a tangible metaphor for voyeurism: the viewer is implicated as a literal Peeping Tom through their voluntary gazing into a concealed place. This contrasts with what they actually see: publicly shared social media posts, the likes of which we’ve grown used to perusing at will. There’s also something discomfiting about the tunnel-like view you get peering down the length of the box at the image – it seems to emphasise the one-way, objectifying nature of your gaze, which is what we want to call the audience’s attention to. Is online voyeurism leading to our objectification of others’ lives as entertainment to consume when we’re bored? What does this mean for us? Something to think about.

During the crit we received positive feedback from Charles and Finley in that they liked the simplicity of our prototype and the directness with which it alludes to our concept of voyeurism. Our discussion also touched on the Netflix series Black Mirror and how it explores similar themes of the dark side of our digital behaviours, provoking thought by presenting disturbing visions of a resulting dystopic society. This could potentially be a way to weave an interesting narrative around our work.

[kylieclarke-bct]

Space, Image and Sound - Reflection:

I thoroughly enjoyed this paper when it got to the creating stage, though I did find myself struggling at the start of the paper about what direction I should go in, which is apparent in my earlier blog posts. In terms of time management, I think I didn’t do too badly. I stayed on my time schedule rather well, so leading up to this final week, I wasn’t as stressed as I thought I would be, especially with two of my papers due today. 

I managed to get my message across in dance which is brilliant. Dance has always been an expressive and interesting form of art that I have wanted to delve into a little deeper in my later years. I have realised though, that dance doesn’t have to be perfect and ‘pretty’ to be a good dance piece / piece of art. Something that has depth and meaning should shine through the dance and make it interesting to watch which was my main goal and one I think I achieved.

I am reasonably proud with what I made. If I had a bit more time and resources, I reckon I would have been able to take this idea above what I had. I reckon it would have been interesting to take this project to the public and have it showed in front of people and made them interact with me while I watched myself dance, which is a weird and strange concept but maybe one I might think about next semester.