Lawson: PP2 Inspired by Chuck Csuri
Posted: October 24, 2023 Filed under: Nico Lawson, Pressure Project 2 | Tags: Chuck Csuri, Isadora, Pressure Project Leave a comment »My second pressure project is inspired by the two Chuck Csuri works below: Lines in Space (1996) and Sign Curve Man (1967). I love the way that each work takes the human form and abstract it, making it appear that the figures melt, warp, and fray into geometric shapes and rich, playful colors.
For my project, I wanted to allow the audience a chance to imitate Csuri’s digital, humanoid images in a real time self-portrait. I also wanted to build my project around the environmental factors of an art gallery – limited space in front of each art work, a mobile audience with split attention, and ambient noise. In addition to the patch responding to the movement of the audience, I wanted to introduce my interpretation of Chuck Csuri’s work in layers that progressively built into the final composite image. You can see a demonstration of the Isadora self-portrait below.
To draw the audience’s attention to the portrait, I built a webcam motion sensor that would trigger the first scene when a person’s movement was detected in the range of the camera. I built the motion sensor using a chain of a video-in watcher, the difference actor, a calculate brightness actor, the comparator to trigger a jump scene actor. If the brightness of the webcam was determined to be greater than 0.6, the jump scene actor was triggered. So that the jump actor would only be triggered once, I used a gate actor and trigger value actor to stop more than one trigger from reaching the jump actor.
Once the patch had detected a person in the range of the webcam, the remainder of the patch ran automatically using chains of enter scene triggers, trigger delays, and jump scene actors.
To imitate the colored banding of Csuri’s work, I filtered the image of the web came through a difference actor set to color mode. The difference actor was connected to a colorizer actor. In order to create the fluctuating colors of the banding, I connected a series of envelope generators to the colorizer that raised and lowered the saturation of hues on the camera over time.
In the next scene I introduced the sense of melting that I experienced in Csuri’s work by adding a motion blur actor to my chain. At the same time, I attached a soud level watcher to the threshold of the difference actor to manipulate it’s sensitivity to movement. This way the patch is now subtlely responsive to the noise level of the gallery setting. If the gallery is noisy, the image will appear brighter because it will require less movement to be visible. This visibility will then fluctuate with the noise levels in the gallery.
In the next scene I introduced the warping and manipulation I observe in Csuri’s work. I wanted to play with the ways that Csuri turns real forms into abstract representations. To do this, I introduced a kaleidoscope actor to my chain of logic.
My final play scene is a wild card. In this scene, I connected the sound level watcher to the facet element of the kaleidoscope actor. Instead of the clarity of the image being dependent on the noise level of the gallery, the abstraction or warping of the image would be determined by the noise levels. I consider this scene to be a wild card because it’s effectiveness is dependent on the audience realizing that their talking or silence impacts their experience.
The patch ends by showing the audience my inspiration images and then resetting.
In thinking about improving this patch for Pressure Project 3, I want to consider the balance of instructions and discoverability and how to draw in and hold an audience member’s attention. I am unsure as to whether my project is “obvious” enough for an audience member to figure out what is happening without instructions but inviting enough to convince the audience member to stay and try to figure it out. I also know that I need to calibrate the length of my black out scenes and inspiration image scenes to make sure that audience members are drawn to my installation, but also don’t stay so long that they discourage another audience member from participating in the experience.