cycle three: something that tingles ~
Posted: May 1, 2024 Filed under: Final Project | Tags: Cycle 3 Leave a comment »In this iteration, i begin with an intention to :
– scale up the what I have in cycle 2 (eg: the number of sensors/motors, and imagery?)
– check out the depth camera (will it be more satisfying than webcam tracking?)
– another score for audience participation based on the feedback from cycle 2
– some touches on space design with more bubble wraps..
Here are how those goes…
/scale up/
I added in more servo motors, this goes pretty smoothly, and the effects are instant — the number of servo wiggling gives it more of sense of a little creature.
I also attempted to add more flex/force sensor, but the data communication become very stuck, at times, Arduino is telling me that my board is disconnected, and the data does not go into Isadora smoothly at all. What I decide is: keep the sensors, and it is okay that the function is not going to be stable, at least it serves as a tactile tentacle for touching no matter it activates the visual or not.
I also tried to add a couple more imagery to have multiple scenes other than the oceanic scene I have been working with since the first cycle. I did make another 3 different imagery, but I feel that it kinda of become too much information packed there, and I cannot decide their sequence and relationship, so I decide leave them out for now and stick with my oceanic scene for the final cycle.
/depth cam?/
What I notice with the depth cam at first is that it keeps crashing Isadora, which is a bit frustrating, which propels me to work with it “lightly”. my initial intention of working with it is to see if it may serve better for body position tracking than webcam to animate the rope in my scene. But I also note that accurate tracking seems not matter too much in this work, so I just wanna see what’s the potential of depth cam. I think it does give a more accurate tracking, but the downside is that you have to be at a certain distance, and with the feet in the frame, so that the cam will start tracking your skeleton position, in this case it becomes less flexible than the eye++ actor. But what I find interesting with depth camera, is the white body-ghosty imagery it gives, so I ended up layering that on the video. And it works especially well with the dark environment.
Here are the final Isadora patches:
/audience participation/
This time the score I decide to play with is: two people at a time, explore it. The rest are observers who can give to verbal cue to the people who are exploring — “pause” and “reverse”. Everyone can move around, in proximity or distance at any time.
/space design/
I wrapped and crocheted more bubble wrapper creatures in the space, tangling them through the wire, wall, charger, whatever happen to be in that corner that day. It’s like a mycelium growing on whatever environment there is, leaking out of the constructed space.
Feedback from folks and future iterations?
I really appreciate everyone’s engagement with this work and the discussions. Several people touches on the feeling of “jellyfish”, “little creature”, “fragile”, “desire to touch with care”, “a bit creepy?”. I am interested in all those visceral responses. At the beginning of cycle one, I was really interested in this modulation of touch, especially at a subtle scale, which I then find it hard to incite with certain technology mechanism, but it is so delightful to hear that the way the material composed actually evoke that kind of touch I am looking for. I am also interested in what Alex mentioned about it being like an “visual ASMR”, which I am gonna look into further. how to make visual/audio tactile is something really intrigues me. Also, I think I mentioned earlier that an idea I am working with in my MFA research is “feral fringe”, which is more of a sensation-imagery that comes to me, and through making works around this idea, it’s actually helping me to approach closer to what “feral fringe” actually refers to for me. I noticed that a lot of choice I made in this work are very intuitive (more “feel so” than “think so”) – eg: in the corner, the position of the curtain, and the layered imagery, the tilted projector, etc. Hearing people’s pointing out those help me to delve further into: what is a palpable sense of “feral fringe” ~