Body as Reservoir of Secrets, DEMS Cycle 3

Posted: December 12, 2023 | Author: Ivan Ng | Filed under: Uncategorized |Leave a comment »

In cycle 3, the three things I focused on were:

1. Refined the composition of the graphics generated. Included more gaussian blur effects to reduce the number of hard-edges present in the work. The reduction of hard edges was intentional to reduce the “digital” nature of the graphics.
   
2. I continued to develop the costume. I drew, painted and stitched in the costume, to create a more shamanistic leaning for the costume, hoping to steer away from an immediate aviation or space travel reference.
   
3. I managed to program a Hot Folder in my computer, so that syncs up with the stage to image actor on isadora, and whatever Isadora exports to the Capture folder is automatically printed.

Decisions made:

1. I decided to include an additional web-cam to do a live-capture of the pile of printed matter that was generated. The pile would then appear in some print outs.
   
2. I moved the pulse sensing contact mic to my wrist due to the headache I experienced after the cycle 2 presentation.
   
3. The score of the piece was supposed to be live-painting/collaging. There was not enough space/time for that to happen at ACCAD and the dec 8th critique. So I devised a score that was about folding each sheet of paper 8 times, and being unable to fold it the 9th time as a parallel to the irretrievable nature of ancestry.

Challenges/Feedback:

1. My patch got very complicated and towards the end I was having some difficulty figuring how everything was wired, even though I did make an effort to be organized.
   
2. Isadora crashed from time to time. I will look into buying a high capacity windows laptop next year.
   
3. I needed some troubleshooting with the Hot Folder and took awhile to figure out why I was generating so many prints. Turned out that I had an earlier version isadora file running in the background which was feeding the hot folder a bunch of images.
   
4. The prints generated had a general purple hue to them. It seems like I needed to vary the colors more in the graphics generated, so that this purple hue is counteracted/balanced.

Observations/ Ongoing curiosities:

1. The printer working generated an unexpected mechanical soundscape to the piece. The rhythmic and hasty machine sound creates a sense of urgent-ness to the work, I find myself feeling some anxiousness and felt pressure to work at that rhythm/pace. I felt “chased” by the printer.
   
2. A classmate posed me a question about generative art, and how generative art tend not to have any material cost to it. She asked me how I felt about the paper and ink expended for this performance. I actually welcome the creation of these materials because as an artist working in collage, I hardly throw away anything because I save everything in flat files. These materials will eventually find its way into another piece of work in the future.
   
3. I intend to stage a cycle 4 in the Sherman Studio Arts Center after the semester quietens down. Cycle 4 will have the live-painting aspect and I will be exploring using what I have created in this class, as means to create a video work. I am also curious about how feature extraction can influence sound and be used for composing.
   

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