Pressure Project 3 – Ashley

My pressure project 3 uses the Makey Makey to create an interactive auditory experience from one of my favorite novels. Our task was to share a story that was important to us and culturally relevant, so I decided to include an excerpt from author Akwaeke Emezi’s “Freshwater”.  Emezi is a queer, Nigerian and Tamil writer whose practice is rooted deeply in the footing of Black radical feminism and Igbo folklore.

This novel is an inspiration and was foundational to my research and art practice when I first entered graduate school. For a little bit of background, the book is what Emezi describes as “autobiographical fiction” in which they pull from parts of their own experience and mix it with fiction to create these fantastic moments of storytelling and truth.

For the interactive element, I knew that I wanted to include my copy of the book because it’s so important to me. I returned to using the conductive paint, where I made my own fingerprints as triggers on the pages to activate the sound. The sound is an excerpt of the book, read by Emezi themself. I also wanted to be intentional about where I placed the fingerprint marks, so that they would resemble to act of holding the book as you would naturally.

My Isadora setup was fairly simple. I made a patch that connected the sound player to a keyboard watcher that would trigger it to play. I also had background music that would play when you entered the scene.

Here is documentation of the interaction:

Pressure Project 3 – Yujie

The pressure project 3 asks us to use audio to tell a story that is related to our cultural origin. This is a broad prompt. I’m a Chinese who live in the United States and I feel cultural differences in the daily bases. But when it comes to tell a significant story, I still feel like no way to start. So, I just spent a few days for brainstorming. Even though I didn’t do anything in the first few days, I became very sensitive to culture related elements. I was preparing my presentation for one of my research papers that studies a Chinese queer dancer. So, it just came to me that I can just tell a story based on my research. One of the dancer’s pieces has historical and contemporary references to a Chinese female legend, Yu Ji. Her story has been told in numerous cultural works of literature, film, opera, and performance. She would be a perfect example for telling the changing gender and sexual ideals and norms in Chinese history.

I decided to use visual clips along with the audio because I try combine four diverse sources from distinct historical period. The videos will help the audiences grasp a rather complicated story. I downloaded videos and sounds from the internet and record my own written script that tells a combined story. 

Here is the screen shots of my voice-recording:

Here is the final video-audio project:

Jenna Ko_Audio Assignment

Pressure Project 3

For this project, I decided to narrate my cultural background, specifically in terms of Korean politics. Although there are no politicians in my family, I can say I grew up in a politically active family. We have veterans buried in National Cemetery, and I grew up witnessing my parents and grandparents holding candlelight vigils in Gwanghwamun Square whenever the nation was in crisis. In fact, Koreans in general love to congregate whenever the nation is in crisis. I remember my parents volunteering with millions of other Koreans to clean the coast when we had a huge oil spill. With great passion and strong beliefs, we also have various kinds of social conflicts. With the presidential election coming up, I thought this is the perfect time to share my cultural experience.

The challenge that I encountered was that most of my audience did not speak Korean. Originally, I wanted to gather news clips in English, but there were limited resources. Therefore, I decided to narrate the content by myself with a representative folksong, Arirang, in the background. I imported appropriate images in Premiere with the audio files.

Pressure Project 3, Gabe Carpenter

My audio pressure project tells the history behind the Russian Nesting Doll or the Matryoshka. I recorded all of the original audio on my Samson C01U microphone and edited all of the audio in audacity. The script that was read during the presentation was created by myself but was based heavily on an article online, linked here. I chose this story because I was born in Vladivostok, Russia, and had a very similar version of the doll displayed in the video on my nightstand. Being adopted from Russia is a huge part of my life and my family’s life. The events currently unfolding between Russia and Ukraine in the year 2022 are very saddening, and I do not condone Russia’s actions in any way by this project.

I created the Isadora network using a sequential trigger, which paused and unpaused a premade rendering of the tape recorder combined with the audio.

The rendering for the project was done in Maya 2022, along with all of the texturing and modeling work.

The final interactive portion of the assignment comes from a system based on a breadboard. A button is placed in the center and bridges together two alligator clips connected to ground and the up arrow on a Makey-Makey. When the button is pressed, the circuit is completed and the trigger is sent to Isadora to play the next part of the video.

The following is the full unsliced video containing all of the audio.

Pressure Project 2 – Personality Test – Min Liu

This project asked us to real a mystery using Isadora and Makey Makey. I wished that the building steps to the secret could have strong connections to the final mystery itself, so I thought of the personality test. Different people may have different feelings about the same sound due to their characters, and their answers reveal the personality mystery. I set up three questions and four personality types. Each question has two answer options. Testers put the alligator of the corresponding color into the bottle to choose an option. This can be a fun interaction way than just pressing the keys.

The most difficult part of this project was deciding the mathematical logic behind the personality test and setting it in Isadora. For now, I didn’t know how to feed data from one scene to another. I set a different key to each answer option. And I built a separate scene to deal with the logic. Actually, it is interesting but kind of strange to calculate a personality. I also tried to interpret different sounds with abstract elements like lines and dots. I am going to learn more about video effect actors and tools for transmitting data in Isodora. This is the Isadora patch for calculating personalities:

I was a proud of the final outcome. But I also met some issues in the test in class. First, the first scene about game instructions is too easy to be triggered by movement… so many testers missed this scene. Second, in one test, two alligators twisted together and trigger a scene unexpectedly, which disrupted the experience. So, it’s important to sort out circuits. This is the test video at home:

Pressure Project @ – Patrick Park

Reveal your secret! What is a secret and how could I reveal it to the people (our classmates). I started by revisiting past week materials and recordings on what we have learnt on isadora. Flipping through the old recordings, my thoughts about “revealing a secret” changed from literal secret to “if a certain condition is achieved by the audience then certain action will happen”.

Once I was able to categorize my thought process as “whatever I make the audience do, that is the trigger. Now what do I want my trigger to do?” So naturally I started with the shape actor and started thinking about what could be manipulated in this actor. This thing that the audience is manipulating should be visually apparent enough that “oh! If I do this, this happens!” Since the easiest thing that one could recognize the change of is color I’ve decided that color would be what changes visually.

After I had decided that I was going to manipulate colors, it was a matter of setting up the system in isadora. To run the tests before connecting to the makey makey, I used the letter a, s, and d as a test trigger. The ‘a’ triggered the change in color of the inner square, ‘s’ triggered the outline of the square, and finally ‘d’ triggered the background color. I was able to achieve this by using a ‘sequential trigger’. Sequential trigger allows each trigger that this actor receives the output to be triggered sequentially (ei. Click ‘a’ and Output 1, output 2, output 3 is triggered with each press sequentially). From the sequential trigger I built a trigger value that plugged into a random actor. The random actor then goes into limit-scale value which will take any values that the random is giving and scale it to the numbers I have set. Each of these random values plugged into ‘red’, ‘green’, ‘blue’ of color maker RGBA. This process was copied and pasted as the main function of my patch.

Since I have achieved basic function for each trigger (each button changes color in a specific area), I wanted the triggers to do something when a condition is met and when triggers were activated together at the same time. I made the condition of the trigger to be pressed for 3 seconds. I achieved this by putting together a keyboard watcher into a timer actor. When a trigger is pressed it will start to run the time, this output is connected into float to integer actor so the actors involving integer input can understand the time information. Float to integer actor is connected to Inside range actor which sends a trigger when a number you’ve set is inputted into this actor. This was then connected to the gate actor, which controls if the trigger is going to push through at the end.

When you press ‘a’ for three seconds the line size will change line size making the inner square small and bigger. When you press ‘d’ for three seconds the background will start to change automatically. 

Finally I wanted the secret to be revealed when all three triggers were to trigger at the same time. Since the color was changing the most dramatic thing to do in my mind was to move the squares. So using the simultaneity actor, I’ve set it up so if all three triggers are triggered within 0.5 seconds, then it will activate the pulgeneraters which are connected to the wave generator. Finally the wave generators are plugged into the vertical, horizontal, and rotational section of the shape actor. 

Things that I’ve noticed as learned: My particular patch doesn’t give the motivation to find the secret without the context of this assignment which I thought was interesting. The question I got the most during my presentation was “is this the secret?” 🤐 🤫 maybe designing how to make people want to look for a secret? and having a clear indication of “you have achieved it and came to the next part of the thing” is something to think about for the future projects.

Pressure project 2 – Yujie

This pressure project asks us to use Isadora and Makey Makey to reveal a secret. I was struggling for a long time about how to define a secret that can be connected to physical forms that conduct electricity. First, I was thinking about the things that are serious, epic, or hidden in daily lives. But those things are really hard to connect with daily objects that could animate Makey Makey. However, it hits me in the last class where Alec said that the secret can also be something that is delightful and small. These comments then reminded me of something I find delightful myself. I couldn’t stop watching the funny and silly videos where people use various materials and ideas to make Bing Dwen Dwen, the mascot of the 2022 Beijing winter Olympics. Because of its surging popularity and unexpected shortage of supply, people can’t get the mascot even after waiting for long hours. So, they started to make all sorts of creative and personalized versions of Bing Dwen Dwen. I was so amazed by people’s creativity and exceptional skills. I think my class would be also fascinated by these grassroots creations. 

I first download and edit the news videos about how cute and popular Bing Dwen Dwen is to give some context for people who don’t really watch the Winter Olympics. Then I use text draw to give directions to the class that you can actually get one if you follow the process. By holding the “I” button with one hand and pressing one of the drawings with the other hand, the earth and output of the Makey Makey will be connected through the human body and the pencil graphite. Then different videos of Bing Dwen Dwen creation will be triggered to display. 

The four options are represented on a paper with pencil drawings. The four drawings have some elements related to the video so that they can trigger some imagination and lead people to reveal the secrets behind them. After one of them is revealed, the display will always go back to the selection scene for the next revelation. 

Here is the main Isadora scene of trigger connection between videos and drawings.

Picture of connection

Pressure Project 2: PLUR

For each of my pressure projects, one of my goals was to apply at least one of my three passions to the assignment: Theme Parks, EDM, and Marvel. This pressure project is the realization of a popular cultural trend at electronic festivals called PLUR. While the trend is not as proliferated these days, you will still see individuals at festivals passing off their “Candy” bracelets to one another in an act of Peace, Love, Unity, and Respect (PLUR).

The prompt of this pressure project was that a secret is revealed. This started me off on a brainstorming session in which I was trying to figure out a way to include electronic music as a revelation. My first train of thought was making a sort of puzzle that had to be solved in order to reveal a specific song. The thought of the acronym of PLUR popped into my mind as a discussion of the popular the game Wordle was occurring, prompting me to devise a system that required the user to get the configuration of the letters of PLUR in the correct order.

Another criteria of the project was that it included the use of the Makey-Makey. I went to my CAD of choice, SolidWorks, and began sketching a prototype housing and letter tiles.

My vision for the system was that each tile had its own unique spacing, so that it could only fit on one spot on the housing. Each tile would complete the circuit for one of the arrow keys on the Makey-Makey, helping to trigger a specific action within an Isadora patch.

The Isadora patch is arranged such that each tile correctly placed triggers an icon onto the stage. Once all 4 icons are triggered, then the secret is revealed. I chose to use a clip from Tomorrowlands After Movie, found at this link here

The point of the project is to introduce the idea of PLUR to others and also show off how incredible the European Music Festival scene is.

If given more time with project I would go back and fix the following items:

• Larger clearances for the tiles spacing. Although I factored in the accuracy of a printed part, I did not give the model enough clearance and was left to sand down some of the tiles.
• More room in the housing to fit my hand into to make secure the alligator clip connections. This got frustrating.
• Less of a focus on small details and more of a focus on functionality. I put extra effort into dimensioning the Makey-Makey to have it sit nicely within the housing, but due to the inaccuracies with printing, it ultimately just had to be haphazardly contained within the model.
• Have the patch play the main reveal on a second stage to the output monitor so that manual intervention is not necessary to hide the icons after reveal starts.

Pressure Project #2- Orlando Hunter

Pressure project #2

For pressure project two I thought about how to incorporate my artistic practice using a dance film created in an urban garden with my dance collective Brother(hood) Dance! In order to create a revealing element within the film I wanted to use photography to illustrate urban growers in the community. To provide sensory awareness to the earth I engage participants by placing their left hand in moist soil to literally ground them in the moment. While lifting the leaf of a plant to reveal photos on the screen and picking up an apple to remove the photo all while the film plays as background, lift the leaf, surprise! Another photo. You only get the surprise if you stay grounded.  

Keep your left hand on the soil.

Pick up the apple for nutrition. 

lift the leaf for relief. 

Always leave on a high note.

Using the Makey Makey I curated the moist soil to connect to the literal earth on the device which serves as an electronical grounding for the full experience. The apple as the down arrow symbolizing the digestive process which is a downward process to revealing the picture on the screen to illustrate those who grow the nutrition in my neighborhood and the up arrow indicating how house plants give you an upward boost in your wellness from mental to spiritual health. 

On the front end I have a movie player playing the dance film.  To keep the back end hidden I used a user actor. In the user actor I conducted the change of pictures circuit by using a keyboard watcher to indicate up and down. Then I needed to trigger these functions which in this case up equals plant leaf and down equals apple, soil equals. I had to shift the value for the down arrow so that Isadora knows to signal the photos onto the screen. I also created a trigger delay so that the up arrow would know to switch out photos a specified time within the picture player.                           

Pressure Project 2 – Ashley Browne

My pressure project 2 uses conductive paint and the MakeyMakey to make a pseudo video synthesizer using Isadora. 

On the MakeyMakey, the connection inputs are using the ‘W’ ‘A’ and ‘D’ keys that each trigger a unique video effect in Isadora. The effects are able to be combined simultaneously, and the user is able to mix and match. With the conductive paint, I did a little research about how to work with it before I started. I learned that each unique signal or ‘key’ could not overlap with the other, meaning I had to be very deliberate about where I painted each section. Also, I made sure to work with separate brushes and cups of water so that there was no contamination or mixing between the acrylic paint and the conductive paint. 

I’ve labeled the 3 effects as:

• Glitch
• Split Screen
• Surprise (Video Portal)

For the glitch effect, I used a GLSL Shader from the shadertoy website that produces a glitch overlay on top of the video feed. This is triggered by tapping anywhere along the black line of paint on the canvas. Here is the link to the code I used and my patch in Isadora:

https://www.shadertoy.com/view/XtK3W3

I used a gate and toggle switch to turn the GLSL Shader on and off when triggered.

The split screen was fairly simple, I just split up the video feed into two projectors that were similarly triggered on and off using the toggle actor.

Lastly was the Video Portal patch, which was one of the more complex ones. This was ultimately my surprise or secret reveal. It reveals the 2nd video underneath, which plays through the shape of a circle or portal. I learned how to do this by searching through the Isadora forum page, and messed around with the Alpha Channel to get different results. It basically connects the second video into an Alpha Channel that projects on to the specific shape actor. The Get Stage Size ensures that the video proportions are the same.

I put each effect into its own User Actor for better organization and had a movie player and projector set up independently. Here is final documentation of the project: