Body as Reservoir of Secrets, DEMS Cycle 1
Posted: October 31, 2023 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »I see the body as a reservoir of ancestral secrets. I have been coaxing out /imaging these secrets as an abstract painter, through gestures and paint. However, gesture is only one vector in this exploration. The body generates streams of data in addition to gesture that can be harnessed and imaged- such as breath, heartbeat, voice.
I am devising a system that extracts these features and maps them accordingly to the movement/color/scale of visual elements, triggering video or image files. These visual elements come together in compositions that will then have video and print outputs, via the capture stage to image and video actors.
In Cycle 1, I mostly concentrated on figuring out isadora-OSC/gyroscope communications and tuning hardware like webcams and lavalier microphones for feature extraction. The outcome was somewhat successful, but I have generated too many input data streams and are lacking variables to plug these inputs. Feature extraction for hearbeat is not very effective using a lavalier microphone.
For Cycle 2, I intend to:
- Focus on creating more variables to plug the generated inputs into.
- Develop greater flexibility in the visuals generated, so that there is more variance in the composition- composition can range from very simple and very complex.
- Include a contact microphone for heartbeat extraction
- Start to integrate costume into mix.
For Cycle 3, I intend to:
- Develop a clarified live performance dimension to the work
- Figure out how to feed the captured jpegs to a printer