Pressure Project #1: (Mostly) Bad News

Pressure Project #1

My concept for this first Pressure Project emerged from research I am currently engaged in concerning structures of representation. The tarot is an on-the-nose example of just such a structure, with its Derridean ordering of signs and signifiers.

I began by sketching out a few goals:

The experience must evoke a sense of mystery punctuated by a sense of relief through humor or the macabre.

The experience must be narrative in that the user can move through without external instructions.

The experience must provide an embodied experience consistent with a tarot reading.

I began by creating a scene that suggests the beginning of a tarot reading. I found images of tarot cards and built a “Card Spinner” user actor that I could call. Using wave generators, the rotating cards moved along the x and y axes, and the z axis was simulated by zooming the cards in and out.

Next I built the second scene that suggest the laying of specific cards on the table. Originally I planned that the cards displayed would be random, but due to the time required to create an individual scene for each card I opted to simply display the three same cards.

Finally, I worked to construct a scene for each card that signified the physical (well, virtual) card that the user chose. Here I deliberately moved away from the actual process of tarot in order to evoke a felt sensation in the user.

I wrote a short, rhyming fortune for each card:

The Queen of Swords Card – Happiness/Laughter

The Queen of Swords
with magic wards
doth cast a special spell:
“May all your moments
be filled with donuts
and honeyed milk, as well.”

The scene for The Queen of Swords card obviously needed to incorporate donuts, so I found a GLSL shader of animated donuts. It ran very slowly, and after looking at the code I determined that the way the sprinkles were animated was extremely inefficient, so I removed that function. Pharrell’s upbeat “Happy” worked perfectly as the soundtrack, and I carefully timed the fade in of the fortune using trigger delays.

Judgment Card – Shame

I judge you shamed
now bear the blame
for deeds so foul and rotten!
Whence comes the bell
you’ll rot in hell
forlorn and fast forgotten!

The Judgement card scene is fairly straightforward, consisting of a background video of fire, an audio track of bells tolling over ominous music, and a timed fade in of the fortune.

Wheel of Fortune – Macabre

With spiny spikes
a crown of thorns
doth lie atop your head.
Weep tears of grief
in sad motif
‘cuz now your dog is dead.

The Wheel of Fortune card scene was more complicated. At first I wanted upside-down puppies to randomly drop down from the top of the screen, collecting on the bottom and eventually filling the entire screen. I could not figure out how to do this without having a large number of Picture Player actors sitting out of site above the stage, which seemed inelegant, so I opted instead to simply have puppies drop down from the stop of the stage and off the bottom randomly. Is there a way to instantiate actors programmatically? It seems like there should be a way to do this.

Now that I had the basics of each scene working, I turned to the logics of the user interaction. I did this in two phases:

In phase one I used keyboard watchers to move from one scene to the next or go back to the beginning. The numbers 1, 2, and 3, were hooked up on the selector scene to choose a card. Using the keyboard as the main interface was a simple way to fine-tune the transitions between scenes, and to ensure that the overall logic of the game made sense.

The biggest challenge I ran into during this phase was in the Wheel of Fortune scene. I created a Puppy Dropper user actor that was activated by pressing the “d” key. When activated, a puppy would drop from the top of the screen at a random horizontal point. However, I ran into a few problems:

1. I had to use a couple of calculators between the envelope generator and the projector in order to get the vertical position scaling correct such that the puppy would fall from the top to the bottom
2. Because the sound the puppy made when falling was a movie, I had to use a comparator to reset the movie after each puppy drop. My solution for this is convoluted, and I now see that using the “loop end” trigger on the movie player would have been more efficient.

Phase two replaced the keyboard controls with the Leap controller. Using the Leap controller provides a more embodied experience—waving your hands in a mystical way versus pressing a button.

Setting up the Leap was simple. For whatever reason I could not get ManosOSC to talk with Isadora. I didn’t want to waste too much time, so I switched to Geco and was up and running in just a few minutes.

I then went through each scene and replaced the keyboard watchers with OSC listeners. I ran into several challenges here:

1. The somewhat scattershot triggering of the OSC listeners sometimes confused Isadora. To solve this I inserted a few trigger delays, which slowed Isadora’s response time down enough so that errant triggers didn’t interfere with the system. I think that with more precise calibration of the LEAP and more closely defined listeners in Isadora I could eliminate this issue.
2. Geco does not allow for recognition of individual fingers (the reason I wanted to use ManosOSC). Therefore, I had to leave the selector scene set up with keyboard watchers.

The last step in the process was to add user instructions in each scene so that it was clear how to progress through the experience. For example, “Thy right hand begins thy journey . . .”

My main takeaway from this project is that building individual scenes first and then connecting them after saves a lot of time. Had I tried to build the interactivity between scenes up front, I would have had to do a lot of reworking as the scenes themselves evolved. In a sense, the individual scenes in this project are resources in and of themselves, ready to be employed experientially however I want. I could easily go back and redo only the parameters of interactions between scenes and create an entirely new experience. Additionally, there is a lot of room in this experience for additional cues in order to help users move through the scenes, and for an aspect of randomness such that each user has a more individual experience.

Click to download the Isadora patch, Geco configuration, and supporting resource files:
http://bit.ly/2xHZHTO