Cycle 3: Xylophone Hero at Fort Izzy

This Cycle I decided to focus on the physical presentation of my project. My first task was to connect my xylophone to Isadora using the Makey Makey. I wrapped foil around each key of the xylophone, then made “wires” out of foil that connected to each foiled key. Then I remapped the back inputs of the Makey Makey to the numbers 1-8 and attached the breadboard wires to the Makey Makey. I attached the Makey Makey to the inside of a shoebox and fed the breadboard wires through to the outside of the box. From there, I connected the alligator clips and the breadboard wires. To ground the mallet, I tied one end of some conductive string to Earth on the Makey Makey and tied the other end around the handle of the mallet, taping the extra string to the mallet. I then covered the top of the mallet in foil.

Before my Cycle 3 presentation, I mapped the output of my Isadora patch onto the xylophone and I set up a “blanket fort” around my projection in the Motion Lab. I also went through my patch to make sure everything was working as expected, and I added a start screen, an end screen, and a restart. I staged the fort with stuffed animals, playing cards, and other items that might be found in a children’s bedroom.

I am extremely happy with how this project turned out and I am so proud of what I produced. If I were to do more cycles, I would paint the shoebox to look more like a toy box, secure the bottom sheet to the floor, and I would figure out a way to hold a high score or display a scoreboard. I could also figure out a way to introduce game difficulties.

Cycle 2: Keeping Score

In between Cycle 1 and Cycle 2, I decided that my input device would be a children’s xylophone, which I would make work using the Makey Makey.

During Cycle 2, I spent most of my time working in Isadora. I wanted to make sure I had my Isadora patch working the way I wanted before I started any of the physical presentation elements. To start, I turned my four arrow shapes into rectangles, then added four more to simulate a xylophone.

Next, I added in a way for the computer to tell the player which key to hit. To do this I started by duplicating the user actors I had made for the previous rectangles. Each user actor is almost identical to the blinking arrows in Cycle 1, but has input from a Get Global Values Actor inside the User Actor, and an Inside Range Actor outside of the User Actor. The outside mechanism uses an Enter Scene Trigger, Timed Trigger, Trigger Value, Pulse Generator, Activate and Deactivate Scene Actors, the Random Actor and the Float to Integer Actor, as well as an Inside Range Actor connected to each of the duplicated User Actors. Both patch snippets are pictured below.

I added in a goal for the game; To score as many points as possible in one minute. First I added a way for Isadora to track the player’s score using the Counter. Actor. Then I added in a game timer using the TimerTool Actor downloaded from the Add-Ons page of the TroikaTronics website.

I also tried to add in a scoreboard feature, but it turned out to be much more difficult than I had anticipated, so a scoreboard is likely a Cycle 4 type of addition.

In Cycle 3 I am going to spend more time focusing on the physical presentation of my project. My goals are to get the xylophone connected to my Isadora patch, figure out how I want to set up in the Motion Lab, and projection map my Stage onto the xylophone.

Cycle 3

After I studied connecting Isadora to Arduino and experimented its potentials in Cycle 1 and 2, I focused on considering what type of experience I could create with that technology in Cycle 3.
Feedbacks from everyone in Cycle 2, that just a tiny motion of small servo motors and its fuzzy structure could have its own quality, really inspired me.

I decided not to make such a “well designed” machine but just collected found objects and combined them with mechanics.
It was like installing an electric life in dead objects; how static objects get its another life as an interactive/kinetic machine.

Reactions from viewers (not only in our class but I also showed it to Art grad students and faculties) exceeded my expectations; the interactive motion which responds to viewers but still keeps a certain unpredictability made the sense of life (this object is living its own life) in each of viewers.
While its rule of interaction is very very very simple (just chasing and responding to a viewer in front of a webcam), viewers grows the sense and the meaning of that object in their own way…it was my discovery through this Cycle 3.
It could be a powerful potential of such an interactive project a creator doesn’t need fill out all the concept and meaning but viewers would find and grow it through the relationship with that object.

Body as Reservoir of Secrets, DEMS Cycle 3

In cycle 3, the three things I focused on were:

1. Refined the composition of the graphics generated. Included more gaussian blur effects to reduce the number of hard-edges present in the work. The reduction of hard edges was intentional to reduce the “digital” nature of the graphics.
   
2. I continued to develop the costume. I drew, painted and stitched in the costume, to create a more shamanistic leaning for the costume, hoping to steer away from an immediate aviation or space travel reference.
   
3. I managed to program a Hot Folder in my computer, so that syncs up with the stage to image actor on isadora, and whatever Isadora exports to the Capture folder is automatically printed.

Decisions made:

1. I decided to include an additional web-cam to do a live-capture of the pile of printed matter that was generated. The pile would then appear in some print outs.
   
2. I moved the pulse sensing contact mic to my wrist due to the headache I experienced after the cycle 2 presentation.
   
3. The score of the piece was supposed to be live-painting/collaging. There was not enough space/time for that to happen at ACCAD and the dec 8th critique. So I devised a score that was about folding each sheet of paper 8 times, and being unable to fold it the 9th time as a parallel to the irretrievable nature of ancestry.

Challenges/Feedback:

1. My patch got very complicated and towards the end I was having some difficulty figuring how everything was wired, even though I did make an effort to be organized.
   
2. Isadora crashed from time to time. I will look into buying a high capacity windows laptop next year.
   
3. I needed some troubleshooting with the Hot Folder and took awhile to figure out why I was generating so many prints. Turned out that I had an earlier version isadora file running in the background which was feeding the hot folder a bunch of images.
   
4. The prints generated had a general purple hue to them. It seems like I needed to vary the colors more in the graphics generated, so that this purple hue is counteracted/balanced.

Observations/ Ongoing curiosities:

1. The printer working generated an unexpected mechanical soundscape to the piece. The rhythmic and hasty machine sound creates a sense of urgent-ness to the work, I find myself feeling some anxiousness and felt pressure to work at that rhythm/pace. I felt “chased” by the printer.
   
2. A classmate posed me a question about generative art, and how generative art tend not to have any material cost to it. She asked me how I felt about the paper and ink expended for this performance. I actually welcome the creation of these materials because as an artist working in collage, I hardly throw away anything because I save everything in flat files. These materials will eventually find its way into another piece of work in the future.
   
3. I intend to stage a cycle 4 in the Sherman Studio Arts Center after the semester quietens down. Cycle 4 will have the live-painting aspect and I will be exploring using what I have created in this class, as means to create a video work. I am also curious about how feature extraction can influence sound and be used for composing.
   

Body as Reservoir of Secrets, DEMS Cycle 2

For cycle 2, the idea started to take shape in a more concrete manner. I started to develop the costume using coveralls bought on amazon which I tailored myself for a better fit.

The following feature extraction functionalities were in the costume-

1. On the coveralls I stitched on some patches with dark pieces of digitally printed fabric. This increases the overall contrast of the figure, which helps the eyes++ actor and webcam track object movements better.
2. A contact microphone was housed in the chest pocket running up to my neck. An additional elastic band was devised to apply pressure and hold the contact microphone in place.
3. Two iphone Gyroscopes were housed within blue/purple pockets with elastic openings on the arm and calf of the custom.
4. A microphone was blown into whenever a scene change was desired, as a means of activating breath.

Challenges/Feedback

• Composition looked too busy given that more than 10 variables were being fed into isadora.
• My computer’s graphics card seems to be struggling and isadora crashes easily.
• A classmate mentioned that the costume appeared like an astronaut, which is not what I intended.
• I had a headache after wearing the neck piece with the contact mic for 20 minutes because it was restricting bloodflow.

Observations/On-going curiosities

• The class seems to be very interested to map/figure out which visual element was coupled with the various sensors.
• The class seems to be interested view the live generated graphics as a video piece, when I had intended the graphics primarily to be viewed as prints. I am open to the possibility of the video being screened alongside the painting performance.