Lawson: PP3 “Melting Point”
Posted: November 14, 2023 Filed under: Nico Lawson, Uncategorized | Tags: Interactive Media, Isadora, Pressure Project Leave a comment »For Pressure Project 3, we were tasked to improve upon our previous project inspired by the work of Chuck Csuri to make the project suitable to be exhibited in a “gallery setting” for the ACCAD Open House on November 3, 2023. I was really happy with the way that my first iteration played with the melting and whimsical qualities of Csuri’s work, so I wanted to turn my attention to the way that my patch could also act as it’s own “docent” to encourage viewer engagement with the patch.
First, rather than wait until the end of my patch to feature the two works that inspired my project, I decided to make my inspiration photos the “passive” state of the patch. Before approaching the web camera and triggering the start of the patch, my hope was that the audience would be curious and approach the screen. I improved the sensitivity of the motion sensor aspect of the patch so that as soon as a person began moving in front of the camera, the patch would begin running.
When the patch begins running, the first scene that the audience sees is this explanation. Because I am a dancer and the creator of the patch, I am intimately familiar with the types of actions that make the patch more interesting. However, audience members, especially those without movement experience, might not know how to move with the patch with only the effects on the screen. My hope was that including instructions for the type of movement that best interacted with the patch would increase the likelihood that a viewer would stay and engage with the patch for it’s full duration. For this reason, I also told the audience about the length of the patch so audience members would know what to expect. Additional improvements made to this patch were shortening the length of the scenes to keep viewers from getting bored.
Update upon further reflection:
I wish that I had removed or altered the final scene in which the facets of the kaleidoscope actor were controlled by the sound level watcher. After observing visitors to the open house and using the patch at home where I had control over my own sound levels, I found that it was difficult to get the volume to increase to such a level that the facets would change frequently enough for the actor to attract audience member’s attention by allowing them to intuit that their volume impacted what they saw on screen. For this reason, people would leave my project before the loop was complete seeiming to be confused or bored. For simplicity, I could have removed the scene. I also could have used an inside range level actor to lower the threshold for the facets to be increased and spark audience attention.