PP1- randomness and dark humor

The day our Pressure Project 1 was assigned, I was immediately excited about the possibilities waiting for me in the process of the endeavor to achieve making someone laugh. We had 15 minutes of class left and I began working on the patch. My first thought was to create ‘a body’ through the shapes actors, and have something happen to that body that was absurd. As I was creating the shapes, I began changing the fill colors. The first color I tried was blue, and that made me think of making the body drink water, get full of water, and something with that water happens that creates some type of burst.

While I liked the idea at the moment, it wasn’t funny enough for me. After I sat down to work on it longer, I recreated my ‘body’ and stared at it for some time. I wanted to make it come alive by giving it thoughts and feelings beyond actions. I knew I had to have some randomness to what I was doing for the random actor to make sense to me.

So I turned inward. My MFA research is utilizing somatic sensations as a resource for creative expression through a queer lens. The inward-outward contrast, alignments and misalignments are exciting for me. I enjoy training my mind to look at things in non-normative ways, as both a queer and a neurodivergent artist. While I have a lot of coherent thoughts relative to the situations, I sometimes have hyperfixations or interest in random stuff many people might not think of thinking.

I wanted my Isadora ‘body’ to be hyperfixated on magic potions. I wanted it to be consumed by the thought of magic potions that led to some sort of absurd outcome, hence the randomness. I searched for magic potion images with .png extensions and found one that I would like to use. After adding that image, I needed a ‘hand’ to interact with the potion. So I searched for a .png image of a hand.

To help my ‘body’ convey its inner experiences, I decided to give it a voice through the text draw actor and included short captions to my scenes. The next part was giving my magic potion a storyline to have two characters in my story. I achieved that through showing how the magi potion affected the body beyond the body’s initiated actions. Carrying the magic potion from a passive role to an active role.

I connected a wave generator the magic potion’s width that created a spinning visual and connected another wave generator to the head’s intensity that created a sense of lightheadedness/dizziness or some type of feeling funny/not normal.

In the next scene, the head of my body disintegrates after consuming the magic potion. I achieved that with an explode actor.

To exeggarete the explosion and the effect of the magic potion on the person, I connected a random actor to the explode actor and connected a pulse generator to the random actor.

The last scene reveals the dark truth of the story, using humor. The body disappears and the only thing on the scene is the magic potion with its inner voice (through text draw) for the first time. I needed to give a facial expression to my magic potion so I searched for a .png image of a smiley face that I could layer on top of the previous image. After finding the image I liked, I looked at my scenes and found myself laughing alone in my room. That’s when I decided my work on this project has been satisfactory on my end and I stayed within the 5 hour limit we had to work on it.

In my presentation, everything went according to plan on my end. And the expected achievement of making someone laugh was achieved as I heard people making noises in reaction to the scenes, especially the final scene.

There was a feedback on the scale of images. I worked on it on my personal computer and presented on the big screen in the Motion Lab. Because I didn’t project this there before, the images were very big especially given the proximity of the audience to the screen. But I received the feedback that due to the texts not being long and readable both in attention span and timewise, it still worked.

I am quite content with how the process went and how the product ended up. Having used Isadora in previous classes, building on my skills is very exciting to me. I usually don’t use humor in my artistic works, but I had a craving for it. With the goal of making someone laugh, using Isadora as a canvas or a ‘stage’ for storytelling and connecting beyond the ‘cool’ capabilities of the software was the part I enjoyed the most in this process.

Bumping Alisha’s post

Reading Alisha Jihn’s Cycle 3: PALIMPSEST post and viewing the accompanying videos was insightful. It provided a clear example of how projections can be used in a concert dance context. I’ve encountered Alisha’s work before, both in movement and technology, and seeing her process, her iterations, questions, and curiosities resonated with me.

Her approach reminded me that stepping away from a piece and returning to it later can offer fresh eyes and new ideas. It also reinforced the idea that just because I can add more to a work doesn’t mean I should. Sometimes, subtraction can be more effective than addition.

Bumping Old Discussion

I found Peter’s pressure project utilizing an Arduino to be an interesting idea. Using the microcontroler as a means for creating unusual interfaces is a fantastic idea. He mentions that the hardware caused things to change “on screen”, which is particularly fascinating. I assume that the Arduino was providing input to some other application that processed the audio/video aspect of the project. I’m curious if in addition to what was described, can the Arduino also receive information from the A/V application while also serving as an input device? For example, could touching the fruit controllers also cause lights or motors to activate based on instructions form the computer controlling everything?

Cycle Three: The Forgotten World of Juliette Warner

For my third cycle, I wanted to revisit my cycle one project based on the feedback I had received, which centered mostly on the audience’s relationship with the projections. One sticking point from that earlier cycle was that all three projectors featured the same projected surface. This choice was originally made as a preventative measure to keep Isadora’s load low. That being said, the first point of focus for my cycle three project was determining whether three separate projected video streams would be sustainable. Once I confirmed that they were, I began sourcing media for the entire script.

After gathering my media, I moved onto an element I’ve wanted to incorporate since cycle one but hadn’t felt fully ready to tackle, depth sensors. I used the Orbec sensor placed in the center of the room, facing down (bird’s-eye view), and defined a threshold that actors could enter or exit, which would then trigger cues. I accessed the depth sensor through a pre-built patch (thank you, Alex and Michael) in TouchDesigner, which I connected to Isadora via an OSC Listener actor. This setup allowed Isadora to receive values from TouchDesigner and use them to trigger events. With this in mind, I focused heavily on developing the first scene to ensure the sensor threshold was robust. I marked the boundary on the floor with spike tape so the performers had a clear spatial reference.

Outside of patch-building, I devoted significant time to rehearsing with three wonderful actors. We rehearsed for about three hours total. Because class projects sometimes fall through due to cancellations. as happened with my first cycle, I wanted to avoid that issue this time around. It was important to me that the actors understood how the technology would support their performances. To that end, I began our first rehearsal by sharing videos that illustrated how the tech would function in real time. After that, we read through the script and discussed it in our actor-y ways, and I explained how I envisioned the design unfolding across the show.

In our second rehearsal, we got on our feet. I defined entrances and exits based on where the curtains would part and placed mats to indicate where the bench would be in the Motion Lab. These choices helped define the shared “in-the-round” experience for both audience and performers.

Over the weekend, I worked extensively on my patch. The full script juxtaposes the Heroine’s Journey with the stages of Alzheimer’s, so I wanted the audience to know which stage they were in as the performance unfolded. Using a combination of enter-scene triggers, trigger delays, envelopes, and text-draw actors, I created a massive patch for each scene that displayed the corresponding stage. This was by far my biggest time investment.

When I was able to get into the lab space with my actors for a mini tech run, I realized that these title cards, which I had spent so much time on, were not serving the immersive experience and to be honest, they were ugly. The entire concept of the piece was to place the audience alongside Juliette on her journey, sharing her perspective via media. Having text over that media disrupted the illusion, so I cut the text patches and Isadora’s performance load improved as a result.

I spent another two hours between tech and performance fine-tuning the timing of scene transitions, something I had neglected earlier. This led to the addition of a few trigger delays for sound to improve flow.

When it came time to present the piece to a modest audience, I was surprisingly calm. I had come to terms with the idea that each person’s experience would be unique, shaped by their own memories and perspectives. I had my own experience watching from outside the curtains, observing it all unfold. There’s a moment in the show where Juliette’s partner Avery gives her a sponge bath, and we used the depth sensor to trigger sponge noises during this scene. I got emotional there for two reasons. First, the performer took his time, and it came across as such a selfless act of care, exactly as intended. Second, I was struck by the realization that this was my final project of grad school, an evolution of a script I wrote my first year at OSU. It made me appreciate just how much I’ve grown as an artist, not just in this class, but over the past three years.

The feedback I received was supportive and affirming. It was noted that the media was consistent and that a media language had been established. While not every detail was noticed, most of the media supported the immersive experience. I didn’t receive the same critiques I had heard during cycle one, which signaled a clear sense of improvement. One comment that stuck with me was that everyone had just experience theatre. I hadn’t considered how important that framing was. It made me reflect on how presenting something as theatre creates a kind of social contract, it’s generally not interactive or responsive until the end. That’s something I’m continuing to think about moving forward.

Once the upload is finished, I will include it below:

Cycle 3: Grand Finale

For the final project, I decided to do some polishing on my Cycle 2 project and then try to add to it to create a more complete experience. During feedback for Cycle 2, a few people felt the project could be part of a longer set, so I decided to try to figure out where that set might go. This allowed me to keep playing with some of the actors I had been using before, but also to try to see how I could alter the experience in various ways to keep it interesting. I, again, spent less time than I did in the beginning of the semester looking for assets. I think I knew what I was looking for more quickly than I did in the beginning, and I knew the vibe I wanted to maintain from the last cycle. While I, for the second cycle in a row, neglected to actually track my time, a decent portion of it was spent trying to explore some of the effects and actors I hadn’t used before that could alter the visuals of what I was doing in smaller ways, by swapping out one actor for another. As always, a great deal of time was spent adjusting and fine-tuning various aspects of the experience. Unlike in the past, far, far too much time was spent trying to recover from system crashes, waiting for my computer to unfreeze, and generally crossing my fingers that my computer will make it through a single run of the project without freezing up. Chances seem slim.    

Cleaned Up and Refined Embers

Flame Set-up

I again worked with the Luminance Key, Calc Brightness, Inside Range, and Sequential Triggers actors. Sequential Triggers, in particular, are a favorite because I like tying “cues” together and then being able to reset the experience without anyone needing to touch a button. Throughout the class, I’ve been interested in making experiences that cycle and don’t have an end, things that can be entered at any time, really, and can be abandoned at any point. To me, this most closely mimics the way I’ve encountered experiences in the wild. Think of any museum video, for instance. They run on a never-ending loop, and it’s up to the viewer to decide to wait until the beginning or just watch through until they return to where they entered the film. For me, I want something that people can come back to and that isn’t strictly tied to a start and stop. I want people to be able to play at will, wait for a sequence they particularly enjoyed to come back around, leave after a few cycles, etc. I am still using TouchDesigner and a depth sensor to explore these ideas. This time around, I also the TT Edge Effect, Colorizer, and Sound Level Watcher ++ to the mix. I was conservative with the Sound Level Watcher because my system was already getting overloaded, at that point, and while I wanted to incorporate it more, I wanted to err on the side of actually being able to run my show.

“Neuron” Visuals

“Neuron” Stage Set-up

The main challenge I faced this time was that my computer is starting to protest, greatly, and Isadora decided she had had enough. I ran into errors a number of times, and while I didn’t lose a significant amount of work, I did lose some, and the time I lost to the program crashing, restarting my computer in hopes it would help, and various other troubleshooting attempts was not insignificant. In retrospect, I should have found ways to scale back my project so my computer could run it smoothly, but it everything was going fine until it very much wasn’t. I removed a few visual touches and pieces to try to get the last scene, in particular, to work, and I’m hoping that will be enough.

Initial Set-up of Final Scene

Final Scene Visuals before Edits

For this project, I mostly was focusing on expanding on my Cycle 2 project to make a longer experience. I don’t know that the additional scenes ended up being as developed as the first, but I think they still added to the experience as a whole. I worked hard to incorporate music to make a more holistic experience, as well. As stated above, I couldn’t do so to the level I would have liked, but I hope the impulse toward that is recognized and appreciated, such as it is. I also wanted to address some of the visual notes I received in the last cycle, which I was able to do with relative ease. I tried to find new ways for people to interact with the project in the added scenes, but I feel they are a little lacking in the interactive department. Ultimately, it was a combination of struggling with Isadora logic, still, and a lack of ideas. I still feel my creativity in these projects is somewhat stymied by my beginner status with media. I can’t quite get to the really creative exploration, still, because I’m working on figuring out how to make things work and look somewhat finished. I’m satisfied with what I’ve been able to put together, I just wish I were able to create at a higher level (it’s an unrealistic wish, but a wish, nonetheless).

If I were to continue to work on this project, I would work to increase the interactivity in each scene and make things more sound reactive. I would continue to look for different ways people could play with the scenes. I think there’s a world where something like this is maybe 5 or 6 scenes long, and it runs 20-30 minutes. I think this one runs maybe 15 minutes with three scenes, which maybe would work well with more interactivity woven in. Regardless, I’m happy with what I managed to put together and all I managed to cram into my noggin in one semester.

ADDENDUM: I ended up cutting the third scene of the experience before I presented it. By the time I removed enough of the effects to get it to run smoothly, it felt too derivative, and I decided to stick with the two scenes that were working and “complete.” If I had more time, I would work on the getting the third scene to a simpler patch that was still engaging.

Cycle 2 | Mysterious Melodies

For my cycle 2 project, I wanted to expand upon my original idea and add a few resources based on the evaluation I received from the initial performance. I wanted to lean away from the piano-ness of my original design and instead abstract the experience into a soundscape that was a bit more mysterious. I also wanted to create an environment that was less visually overwhelming and played more with the sense of light in space. I have long been an admirer of the work of James Turrell, an installation artist that uses light, color and space as his main medium. Since my background is primarily in lighting and lighting design, I decided to remove all of the video and projection elements and focus only on light and sound.  

ACCAD and the Motion Lab recently acquired a case of Astera Titan Tubes. They are battery powered LED tubes that resemble the classic fluorescent tube, but have full color capabilities and the ability to be separated into 16 “pixels” each. They also have the ability to receive wireless data from a lighting console and be controlled and manipulated in real time. I started by trying to figure out an arrangement that made sense with the eight tubes that I had available to me. I thought about making a box with the tubes at the corners, I also thought about arranging them in a circular formation. I decided against the circular arrangement because, arranged end to end, the 8 tubes would have made an octagon, and spread out, they were a bit linear and created more of a “border”. Instead, I arranged them into 8 “rays”. Lines that all originated from the center and fanned out from a central point. This arrangement felt a bit more inviting, however it did create distinct “zones” in-between the various sections. The tubes also have stands that allow them to be placed vertically. I considered this as well, but I ended up just setting them flat on the ground.  

In order to program the lights, I opted to go directly from the lighting console. This was the most straightforward approach, since they were already patched and working with the ETC ion in the Motion Lab. I started by putting them into a solid color that would be the “walk in” state. I wanted to animate the pixels inside the tubes and started by experimenting with the lighting console’s built in effects engine. I have used this console many times before, but I have found the effects to be a bit lacking on usability and struggled to manipulate the parameters to get the look I was going for. I was able to get a rainbow chase and a pixel “static” look. This was okay, but I knew I wanted something a bit more robust. I decided to revisit the pixel mapping and virtual media server functions that are built into the console. These capabilities allow the programmer to create looks that are similar to traditional effects, but also create looks that would otherwise be incredibly time consuming if not completely impossible using the traditional methods. It took me a bit to remember how these functions worked since I have not experimented with them since my time working on “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night”, programming the lighting on the set that had pixel tape integrated into a scenic grid. I finally got the pixel mapping to work, but ran out of time before I could fully implement the link to triggers already being used in Touch Designer. I manually operated the lighting for this cycle, and intend to focus more on this in the next cycle.  

For the audio portion, I decided to use “Skydust” a spatial synthesizer that Professor Jean-Yves Munch recommended. This allowed me to use the same basic midi integration as the last cycle, but expand the various notes into spatial sound without the need for an extra program to take care of the panning. Similar to the last cycle, I spent a lot of time listening to the various presets and the wide variety of sounds and experiences they produced. Everything from soft and southing to harsh and scary. I ended up going with the softer side and finding a preset called “waves pad” which produced something a bit ethereal but not too “far out”. I also decided to change up the notes a bit. Instead of using the basic C chord, I decided to use the harmonic series. I had a brief discussion with Professor Marc Ainger and this was recommended as a possible arrangement that went beyond the traditional chord structure.  

For the patch, I kept the same overall structure but moved the trigger boxes around into a more circular shape to fill the space. Additionally, I discovered that I could replace the box with other shapes. Since the overall range of the depth sensor is a circle, I decided to try out the “tube” or cylinder shape in touch designer. When adding boxes and shapes into the detector, I also noticed that there is a limit of 8 shapes per detector. This helped a bit to keep things simplified and I ended up with 2 detectors, one that had boxes in a circular formation, and another with tubes of various sizes, one that was low and covered the entire area, with another that was only activated in the center, and a third tube that was only triggered if your reached up in the center of the space. 

The showing of this project was very informative since only one other person had experienced the installation previously. I decided to pull the black scrim in front of the white screen in motion lab to darken the light reflections, while also allowing the spatial sound to pass through. I also pulled a few black curtains in front of the control booth to hide the screens and lights inside. I was pleasantly surprised by how long people wanted to explore the installation. There was a definite sense of people wanting to solve or decode a mystery or riddle, even though there was no real secret. The upper center trigger was the one thing I hoped people would discover and they eventually found it (possibly because I had shown some people before). For my next cycle I plan to continue with this basic idea but flesh out the lighting and sonic components a bit more. I would like to trigger the lighting directly from touch designer. I am still searching for the appropriate sound scape and am debating between using pre recorded samples to form a song or continuing with the midi notes and instruments. Maybe a combination of both?