Pressure Project @ – Patrick Park
Posted: February 22, 2022 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »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.