Pressure Project #3

At first, I had no idea what I was going to do for pressure project #3. I wasn’t sure how to make a reactive system based on dice. This lead to me doing nothing but occasionally thinking about it from the day it was assigned until a few days before it was due. Once I sat down to work on it, I quickly realized that I was not going to be able to create a system in five hours that could recognize what people rolled with the dice. I began thinking about other characteristics of dice and decided that I should explore some other characteristics of dice. I made a system with two scenes using Isadora and Max/MSP. The player begins by rolling the dice and following directions on the computer screen. The webcam tracks the players’ hands moving, and after enough movement, it tells them to roll the dice, of which the loud sound of dice hitting the box triggers the next scene, where various images of previous rolls appear, with numbers 1-6 randomly appearing on the screen, and slowly increasing in rapidity while delayed and blurred images of the user(s) fade in, until it sends us back to the first scene, where we are once again greeted with a friendly “Hello.”

The reactions to this system surprised me. I thought that I had made a fairly simple system that would be easy to figure, but the mysterious nature of the second scene had people guessing all sorts of things about my project. At first, some people thought that I had actually captured images of the dice in the box in real time because the first images that appeared in the second scene were very similar to how the roll had turned out. In general, it seemed like the reaction was overall very positive, and people showed a genuine interest in it. I think that I would consider going back and expanding on this piece more and exploring the narrative a little more. I think that it could be interesting to develop the work into a full story.

Below are several images from a performance of  this work, along with screenshots of the Max patch and Isadora patch.