Pressure Project 2 – Escape Otherworld

Posted: February 8, 2024 | Author: Sebastian King | Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a comment »

I’ve been to Otherworld some years ago so I was excited to go back. It’s a really strange space, but that’s what’s interesting about it, especially when I was able to find patterns or “figure out” a room. There were a few rooms that drew my attention at first. One was the mush-room (really funny joke). What I found interesting in it was the cow room, which had a very Legend of Zelda puzzle in it. Basically, there are six colored levers attached to a machine that itself is attached to the cow’s utters, and there is an order in which you need to pull the levers in order to get some effect. It was interesting to see how people would solve this puzzle, if they did at all (and a lot didn’t, mostly because they didn’t stay in the room long enough to realize that anything was afoot), but there were two notable instances. Sometimes what would happen is someone would be pulling random levers and then they would pull the correct one and something different would happen. In a few cases, people just started pulling levers to see if anything would happen, which lead to finding out that if you pull the levers in a certain order they don’t make the cow angry. Through trial and error they figured out the combination and the cow did fun things.

An image of the cow doing fun things!

However, some people also noticed this panel on the back wall with lights of different colors that would come on in a certain pattern. Someone then put together that the color of the lights was the same as the color of the levers and from there they found out that the light pattern was the order of the levers, which is not something I noticed at all but was really neat.

The interesting hint light panel that I didn’t notice because I’m not a true gamer

The room I actually want to talk about though because I can’t stop thinking about it is one of the first ones that people encounter. It’s right in the beginning and it’s this plainly sci-fi looking room with a bunch of panels and buttons.

This is the panel room, I stole this image because I didn’t have any good photos of this room and I didn’t expect to be talking about it but here we are: https://www.citybeat.com/cincinnati/inside-columbus-otherworld-an-immersive-choose-your-own-adventure-sci-fi-art-installation/Slideshow/12234210

At first, I wasn’t really interested in this room. For starters, the first button I pressed made all the screens display a rick roll, and I almost cried. In general, most of the panels weren’t related from what I could tell. Some of them had small games, like one had a game where you have to time pressing a button to cause a system overload. Some had videos that showed a scientist talking about Otherworld itself, which are interesting from a lore perspective but weren’t super interesting from the experience side (most people just watched them, which isn’t very interesting to describe haha). There was one panel that I saw a kid playing with that had a camera view of another room, specifically the mouth cave room, and when the button was pressed a sound effect would play like a burp. That I thought was very interesting. I tried playing with the panel myself, apparently you can change the sound effect played by turning this knob. What I wanted to know is if those sounds were being played to people inside the mouth room. Anytime one of the sound effects was played I stared intently at the panel to see if anyone would react. Unfortunately, basically no one had any sort of interesting reaction, so I couldn’t really tell if the sounds were going through. I went to the mouth cave room myself to see if I could hear anything (I probably sat in that room for like 10 minutes too), but I didn’t hear any noises. I don’t know if this was because no one was playing sounds or because the sounds aren’t being projected, but I’m like 90% certain that the sounds matter. Even if it doesn’t, people that I saw using the panel had sort of a devious way of playing, like they were messing with others in the experience.

The original room, and a little about how it works. Not super complicated all things considered.

Regardless, I started to think about this room as a sort of control room, for the whole experience really. I didn’t see any other panels in this control room that linked to other rooms, but I started to think about what it would be like if this room was connected to all the other ones and in a reverse Five Nights at Freddy’s or regular Hunger Games sort of way, if you could make different things happen in other rooms. As I was just exploring on my own, I started to see places where the room could definitely have jump-scared me in a haunted house sort of way. As I was looking through drawers in this room, I felt like this guy could have jumped out and grabbed me.

Similarly, while I was in this gothic/lovecraftian spider room, I had a chilling moment where I thought I remembered this bloke being an animatronic that moves around, but it was still. Then, when I turned around to focus on a different part of the room, I heard it move, and just as a turned around I could just barely see it move before it stopped again and never moved the entire time I was there. What if people could mess with others in these really minute ways? It would be kind of horrible, but it would be fun

it looks like a Bloodborne boss ngl, this thing scared me

The devious room where you play nasty pranks on people

I also started thinking about some of the puzzles I saw and some of the ways I saw couples collaborating in these rooms, and then a different idea came into my head. It happened while I was trying to explain what Otherworld was and one of my friends said: “It’s like an escape room except the goal isn’t to escape.” What would Otherworld function like as an escape room of some sort? The person in the control room is almost like the game master. I also remembered this strange moment where in the aforementioned spider room, the antique phone started ringing, some random guy came in, answered it (as if he knew this phone would ring), and then left. Aside from the fact that it was weird, it could be interesting to have connections between the rooms; maybe the phone is connected to the room with the bats, and you have to speak into one of their ears to communicate with the spider room phone? What if Otherworld was this Toolmaker’s paradigm fever dream where each person was put in a different room, and they had to figure out how to communicate with each other? It would be interesting to see a place like Otherworld or Meow Wolf with this alien aesthetic, but the goal is the solve some greater puzzle instead of the puzzle being an optional thing or the room interactions being disconnected.

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Pressure Project 2

Posted: February 7, 2024 | Author: Orlando Hunter | Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a comment »

Other World was quite an experience, I was intrigued from the start, there was a fractal projection surface outside of the exhibit spaces that I didn’t notice until light hit the surface and revealed the perfectly projection mapped textures on each triangular piece. I knew I was in for a treat.

I was particularly interested in the spaces that felt like a portal and infinite almost like a forest. The room that caught my attention was what I would call the infinite light forest. There were mirrors on all of the walls in the room with poles of light that were about 8 to 10 feet tall and shifted colors. There was also an ambient space like musical track playing from hidden speakers, that sparked a sense of curiosity As I took a closer look there were individual wires above connected to each light for power and signaling the light change. When I first entered the room I thought touching the poles initiated some part of the experience, as I observed, I noticed other folx thought the same. This exhibit turned out to be an ongoing light show that could seemingly go on forever.

People moved in-between the lanes of light and around the light pole fixtures. There was no particular pattern or path for one to take within this experience. I enjoyed how you were able to journey at your own pace to take in the vastness of the moody space.

I started to think about how I would reimagine this space if it were my project. I would shift the space into a digital tree forest.

First, I would change all of the light fixtures to trees and keep the mirrors for the infinite effect and add an interactive touch element to the bark that you must stay connected to, to learn facts about native trees in the state. In constructing the space I would source the energy and wires from below like a root system verses above. Second, I would shift the sound in the space to wind blowing through trees and sounds of leaves crunching under your feet. For my last augmentation of the space I would add a motion sensor to active wind/a fan as people move through the space to feel as if they are in a surreal natural environment.

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Pressure Project 2

Posted: February 5, 2024 | Author: Kiki Williams | Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a comment »

For Pressure Project 2 the assignment was to go to Other World or some place where you could interact with something. I decided to go to Other World because i had never been and was intrigued with what I was going to experience. The instructions were:

– Choose one of those rooms and take notes/ pics

– Evaluate how the interaction is happening. How do I think it works? 

– Observe what people are doing and how they are interacting with it/ experiencing it 

– Suggest a an EVIL or GOOD option to it (tweak the system/ twist their design)

I chose one of the first rooms I walked into and that was a room full of colorful light poles with mirrors on each wall. There may have been 50 poles in the room, all the same size that gradually changed colors. The wall being a mirror made it look like there was an infinite amount of light poles in the room. I couldn’t quite figure out the interactivity of the light poles other than people walking through the space. At first I thought there was a correlation between walking past the light poles and the colors change, but it wasn’t obvious enough for me to believe in that theory. This is my drawing of the room.

As a suggestion for this room, I have a few things.

1. I would add a reactive device to the poles that can detect body heat or movement. If someone walks past that pole the color of the pole drastically changes and/or changes to white when you’re near it.
2. It would be cool to add a fan to the light poles so that when you pass through a lane of poles, you feel a gust of air on your skin (I wold do this similarly with a light mist too!)
3. Lastly I would add a heat and/or touch reactor to the light poles, so if you touch the light pole it gradually changes color. However when you let go of the pole it goes back to its originally light.

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PP2 | Otherworld Luminous Mushroom Garden

Posted: February 5, 2024 | Author: Nick Romano | Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a comment »

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Pressure Project 1 | Neon Fragmentation

Posted: January 30, 2024 | Author: Nick Romano | Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a comment »

This piece was inspired by my personal interests in jazz, feedback systems, and media archeology. I’ve played saxophone for 10+ years and look highly upon jazz musicians as fearless explorers of sonic harmony, melody, and rhythm. Their artform requires a fine-tuned motor pathway system connecting the brain and fingers to enable quick musical decisions within an improvisatory ensemble of horns, drums, pianos, and strings. The interactions between musicians in an ensemble are unique and require a auditory feedback to create an artform bigger than any one contributor. In addition to jazz, I’ve worked with electronic feedback systems and learned to respect the impact their discovery has had on much of modern technology. These technological systems form an ecological relationship with human culture which too is receptive to feedback. The process of media archeology can help to scrutinize and analyze dominant narratives about technology and their relationship to culture.

For this project, a computational multimedia software called Isadora was used to devise an audiovisual feedback loop. This system inputs a video file undergoing several stages of video mixing and feature analysis to synchronize low and high frequency audio tone generation with video splitting. Computer vision plugins were used to detect relative motion and color within the inputted video frame. The intensity of motion detected was used to drive the quantity and frequency of video splitting in the XY directions. Additionally, the RGB color proportionality drove emission of audio tones where red produced frequencies between 30 – 400 Hz and green and blue produced frequencies between 1-2kHz.

This piece takes influence from early 1920s Montage film technique including Fernand Leger’s Ballet Mecanique. The affects of the industrial revolution are visualized through mechanical systems held at the same level of authorship as humans. Humans are depicted with cyclic motions such as a woman on a swing evoking the image of a pendulum. The rapid frame changes are also accompanied by a frenetic sound track which is synchronized to the rhythm of industry. The rapid montage clips remind me of jazz because of its quick delivery of stimulus transcending the traditional mental faculties of comprehension. It seems to me that Leger is playing around with visual Jazz in the form of semiotics. When passed through my generative media system, the quick color and shape changes lend themselves well when converted into high and low frequency tones. To the right set of ears, its difficult to tell the difference between abstract jazz and machine noises.

The assembly line style of interaction between humans and machines during and after WWII, is then expressed by a 1950s supermarket film. The women in the store is surrounded by an array of homogenous consumables which funnel smoothly down a conveyor belt, into her car, and then presumably into the home. There is an element of time ticking in the store from the machine noise pressing of keys on the cash-register to the conducting of cars via neon traffic light systems. This exchange of information and household goods all flows to the beat of machine inputs and outputs.

Human-machine stimulus and interaction is even more pronounced in the situation of the 1970s Las Vegas strip. Suburban tourists have gathered in neon wild west in search of cowboys and gold nuggets. Immersed in an ecosystem of electric light and casinos, tourists can at a safe distance engage in a symbolic exchange of money and neon. Grande advertising spectacles erected in the desert now being closer in association to sinful redlight districts than with their initial connotation of technological optimism.

I hope that this piece brings attention to interrelations of human and machines in the 20th century. The aesthetic of multivid splitting by computer vision and foreign sounds helps bring these media artifacts into the vantage of the modern algorithmic viewer. Just as machines influenced human perception and behavior, so too are algorithms.

Media artifacts:

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Pressure Project 1: Circles

Posted: January 30, 2024 | Author: Afure Adah | Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a comment »

I approached this assignment without a specific goal in mind, focusing on actors that had caught my interest during our initial exposure to the software, such as the Movie Player, Shimmer, and Wave Generator. My aim was to experiment with these actors and explore the various variables I could manipulate. That served as my starting point.

Additionally, I considered actors recommended for experimentation, like the Shape actor and Video In Watcher. Before delving into the patch, I sought visual inspiration by looking at how designers and artists utilized patterns in their work and how they went about animating them. The images I explored influenced my creative process.

After gathering inspiration, I experimented with the Shapes tool and the Wave Generator to create and animate patterns in Isadora. Upon completing my first scene, I searched for a video to use with the Movie Player actor, choosing one supplied by a classmate featuring water and bubbles. To maintain engagement, I aimed for playing with the different perceptions of circles—moving from repetitive motion to free-flowing, organic visuals, and interactive movement.

While interactivity wasn’t a requirement, I implemented the Mouse In Watcher to grant users control over variables like shape dimensions, sound volume, and Shimmer effects intensity. The Movie In Watcher, paired with the Dots effect, facilitated circle movement using light, shadows, and colors captured from the camera input.

See screen recording below (does not include sound 🙁 ).

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/mevo9ujn65p2rza3fvvph/Screen-Recording-2024-01-30-at-12.47.53-PM.mov?rlkey=z3srm6p7x2o0rc86h735zdclu&dl=0

One aspect I wanted to incorporate was computer vision, intending for movement captured by the Video In Watcher to influence the music volume. Although I couldn’t achieve this before the presentation, I learned how to make it work afterward.

I’m pleased that viewers stayed engaged with the patch, and achieving interesting transitions was a success. A classmate even mentioned enjoying the evolution of circles from spacious and mobile to tight and grid-like in the final scene, a detail I hadn’t initially considered but found satisfying upon reflection.

While I don’t regret adding interactivity, my future goal is to master using actors to autonomously manipulate variables for a more self-generated patch, aligning with the requirements of the assignment.

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Pressure Project 1 – Generative Dark Patterns

Posted: January 30, 2024 | Author: Sebastian King | Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a comment »

I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do for this project at first. We were tasked with creating something self-generating and almost unpredictable, which was daunting to me in a new software. I figured the best way to create something was to just begin though.

HOUR 1

Within my first hour I started playing around with some of the different actors in Isadora. I wanted to see what would happen if I plugged the wave generator into various parts of the shapes actor. I noticed that when I put a sine wave into both the horizontal and vertical positions my default square kind of bounced around the screen, but not in a way that I felt was interesting. When I changed the wave type to a triangle though I noticed that the square started to bounce in a very familiar way, almost like an old screensaver (I was specifically reminded of the screensaver on my old family Gateway computer, both the bouncing logo and the pipes). Moreover, if I added multiple shapes on top of each other and messed with the phase there was a nice additive effect when shapes crossed that I liked.

HOUR 2

I wanted to randomize the different shapes going around my space. After looking through a few tutorials and posts I happened across this post talking about using a counter being used to select different timecodes: https://community.troikatronix.com/topic/6399/answered-using-a-list-of-timecodes-to-trigger-events-in-this-case-lights-through-midi. This was interesting to me, and I figured I could do something similar to create a loop that would activate different shapes at once. After trying for a little bit, I couldn’t get my loop to work, however I got very close. My logic kept short-circuiting.

I figured I would give up on this and just manually make my randomized entrances. I still had no clue what I wanted to do though, and I was getting a bit worried. Had I squandered all this time? Was I going in the right direction?

EPIPHONY

I started musing on the part of this project about grabbing people’s attention. What was it about Conway’s Game of Life or bouncing screen savers that had people staring at them for hours? For Game of Life surely there are emerging patterns and self-generating complexity, something obviously compelling to me, but why was a bouncing logo just as enthralling? I remembered that I used to try and predict when that logo would get caught perfectly in a corner of the screen. It never would, but it got so close so many times, and that’s why I kept watching. There’s something about being so close to perfection that is strangely alluring.

While we were discussing the second reading by Hari and Thanassis, I had a thought. We got on the topic of dark patterns, specifically within games like Candy Crush, and I was reminded of those horrible mobile ads that I would get occasionally. The idea is that they would set up what looked like really easy gameplay but whoever was playing would purposefully play badly and fail to get you to download the game. It’s a very sneaky tactic that acts as a gateway into games with even more dark patterns. I was also reminded of several trends a year ago on TikTok and YouTube where content creators started putting gameplay from popular games into the bottom or corner of their videos (Subway Surfers particularly became a huge meme). The idea was that to keep people from scrolling off of an otherwise dull video, more lively footage was added to retain peoples’ attention, which would in turn increase revenue since watch time was inflating.

These emerging patterns intrigued me, as they were real evolving trends built on the foundation of retaining attention. They were just as unpredictable to me as Conway’s Game of Life, just as captivating, and just like one of those tiles, the trend disappeared, as do many. I wanted to make something that was a commentary on this, tying it all together with the earliest and simplest attention grabber I remembered, that being the bouncing screen saver.

HOUR 3

I spent the next hour collating and integrating several different clips of gameplay from various titles I saw used in the trends I talked about earlier, and I will link those sources below:

• Mobile ads: Mobile game ads (youtube.com)
• Subway Surfers Gameplay: Subway Surfers Gameplay (PC UHD) [4K60FPS] (youtube.com)
• Minecraft Parkour: 11 Minutes Minecraft Parkour Gameplay [Free to Use] [Download] (youtube.com)
• Temple Run Gameplay: Temple Run 2 (2023) – Gameplay (PC UHD) [4K60FPS] (youtube.com)
• Fortnite Gameplay: Fortnite Gameplay 4K (No Commentary) (youtube.com)

I took each video and trimmed them down to 1 minute in Adobe Premiere (for the footage of different mobile game ads, I selected a few ads that I felt were most emblematic of my own experiences). After that I created separate scenes for each clip that I would load in below my screen saver squares using Activate Scene and Deactivate Scene.

I also figured out that you have to multiply any randomized values by 1000 before inserting them into time-based inputs because of the way Isadora treats seconds versus normal floats.

HOUR 4

I created a user actor for each of my little bouncing shapes and for the instantiation of those shapes, as well as adding more randomized elements like the phase (which would affect where the shapes bounced), the color, and the timing at which they appeared.

HOUR 5

In the final hour I took time to polish and organize. I created some quick logic that would look at the vertical and horizontal positions of several shapes, compare them, and load/unload gameplay footage based on those values. I also took the time to add a piece of music that I felt captured the feel of my experience. The piece is called Cascades by Disasterpiece and it’s from one of my favorite games, Hyper Light Drifter: https://youtu.be/bKkl9iRB9-c?si=jy81Xwh1ZtegPbJJ.

SHOWTIME

People reacted differently from what I expected but I’m really glad they did. Everyone caught onto the fact that the experience was probably some critique or was representative of some trend, which I thought was great. Nathan immediately recognized the DVD screensaver-like bouncing of the shapes which I also appreciated, and Orlando said that the footage has YouTube tutorial vibes, which wasn’t a connection I drew at first but is incredibly apt. Nick made a comment about a moment where it appeared that the shapes filled in this black section of the screen and footage came up all around, which I thought was cool and pretty close to getting at how the footage is activated. There was a lot of talk about how the piece reflects on me as an artist which was great and people noted that music seemed like it wasn’t looping, which helped build anticipation because it made the cut harder to distinguish. There was also a question as to whether the music was diegetic or not, which is not something I considered at all, but I can’t stop thinking about it now.

Overall, I’m glad to have heard people’s reactions and what meanings they drew, as well as emotions. I’m also happy with what I got done in the amount of time I had. I was worried at first but once I figured out some intent behind what I wanted to do things went smoothly.

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