Nostalgia
Posted: December 14, 2018 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »For the longest time I didn’t know what to do. I knew I just wanted people to enter in on the world of my own sensory associations but I wanted them to feel things. I thought initially about putting colored light from the ceiling, and then have a sensor watch when people sit and certain music would come forth. I was actually really struggling with what the interface would look like.
It really wasn’t until a few weeks before the due date when a classmate told me, okay, you really gotta start planning the nuts and bolts. hahah. So i made a list of what objects I wanted in the room. I decided I would have a series of objects that had personal significance, and then when they touched the objects, it would trigger a projected reaction. At the same time, I wanted it to be multisensory, so I wanted smell and sound to be in there as well. Eventually, I decided that I would have nine objects laid out: books, blue light, purple light, yellow light, red light, some handcrafted smells from Candle Lab to evoke the smell of coconut and lime, iranian tea, and firewood, and then finally an Indian necklace family friends had given me. I would explore with the colors some of the imagery and feelings that were evoked for me. I would do the same with smell: coconut and lime were smells i thought of my mom doing my hair, and lime cooking in the kitchen with my aunts.
As far as the programming, I used Isadora. It has been a great program for me to use considering I have never used tech stuff before. It helped me to feel more confident because the first couple weeks in the class felt so difficult. So by the end I felt amazing.
ISADORA
I had about 27 scenes! I had a base scene, and I decided that i would have a keyboard watcher with 9 triggers total for each object.
- because i wanted to connect it to a makey makey so audience members could select each object themselves and watch the images and sound that came after, I decided it would be easiest if I told audience members to trigger one at a time. (even though initially i had imagined that several people trigger the buttons and I just make it a smooth transition). That felt too complicated for the amount of time I had, and I kind of liked the idea of audience members watching together.
- So I set up 9 triggers, each jumping to the scene I wanted from the base page. Each scene would play 60 sec before jumping back to the main page.
- because i had three projectors for each object (and each slide was in a different scene, i chose to “activate scene” in the first scene triggered so the other two for that object would go off as well.
- so I had: jump to scene 1 from base scene,
- on scene one: enter scene trigger – activate scene 2 and 3
- on scene one at the same time: enter scene trigger – trigger delay for 60sec – deactivate scene 2 and 3
- on scene one at the same time: enter scene trigger, trigger delay for 60sec – jump to base
- repeat for each new object
There are other ways I could have done it so i didn’t need to use activate scene, like putting all three projections per object on one scene. But it felt like it would be messy for me to follow allllll of those logics on one scene. so for visual purposes I didnt do that.
The other part was since I had several videos playing at the same time, I had to edit the sound so it didn’t overlap in ways that didn’t sound nice. I was really working up to the final show, so it ended up being a little stressful–i had people who wanted to come and see my installation while I was still setting up! All in all, it helped me though. I got over the fear that somehow it needed to be realllly perfect in order for people/myself to enjoy it. And i got awesome reactions! I never thought people would be looking at me as some kind of tech expert after the show. hahah
All in all, it was super meaningful.
When setting up the room, I tried to think of how I could make it as dreamy as possible. I hooked some sheer fabric to the ceiling, played with how I wanted my images to overlap on the projections, and folded the fabric in different ways to create a layered image effect. In order to watch “the color blue” i believe you have to download the file below.
If you want to see more, I plan to post them on my IG: _parisa_rose
Thanks!
Parisa