Moo00oo

Present: Today was a day where the Vuo and Isadora patches communicated with the Kinect line-in. Alex suggested it would be helpful to record live movement in the space as a way of later manipulating the settings, but after a solid 30 minutes of turning luminescence up and down and trying to eliminate the noise of the floor’s center reflection, we made a time-based decision that the amount of time I hoped to save by having a recording off of which I could work outside of the Motion Lab would be less than the amount of time it would take to establish a workable video. I moved on.

Oded kindly spiked the floor to demarcate the space which the (center ceiling) Kinect captures. This space turns out to be oblong: deeper upstage than wider right to left. The depth data of “blobs” (“objects or people in space – whatever is present) is taken in through Isadora (first via Vuo as a way of mediating Syphon). I had Alex/Oded in space walk around so that I could examine how Isadora measures their height and width, and enlisted an Inside Range actor to set the output so that whenever the width data rises above a certain number, it triggers … a mooing sound.

Which means: when people are moving within the demarcated space, if/when they touch each other, a “Mooo” erupts. It turns out it’s pretty funny. This also happens when people spread their arms wide in the space, as my data output allows for that size.

Future:
Designing the initial user-experience responsive to the data output I can now control: how to form the audience entrance into the space, and to create a projected film that guides them to – do partner dancing? A barn-cowyboy theme? In other words, how do I get my participants to touch, and to separate while staying within the dimensions of the Kinect sensor, and they touch by connecting right-to-left in the space (rather than aligning themselves upstage-downstage). Integrating the sound output of a cow lowing, and having a narrow and long space is getting me thinking on line dancing …

Blocked at every turn

This was one of those days where all I started to feel I was running out of options:

UPDATE 11-30-15: Alex returned to run the patches from the MOLA preceding our before-class meeting. He had “good news and bad news:” both worked. We’re going to review these later this week to see where my troubleshooting could have brought me final success.

Dominoes

I am facing the design question of how to indicate to the audience the “rules” of “using” the “design” i.e. how to set up a system of experiencing the media, i.e. how to get them to do what I want them to do, i.e. how to create a setting in which my audience makes independent discoveries. Because I am interested in my audience creating audio as an input that generates an “interesting” (okay okay, I’m done with the quotation marks starting… “now”)  experience, I jotted down a brainstorm of methods of getting them to make sounds and to touch preceding my work this week.

We use “triggers” in our Isadora actors, which is a useful term for considering the audience: how do I trigger to the audience to do a certain action that consequently triggers my camera vision or audio capture to receive that information and trigger an output that thus triggers within the audience a certain response?

Voice “from above”

• instructions
• greeting
  • hello
• follow along – movement karoaoke
  • video of movement
    • → what trigger?
    • learn a popular movement dance?
      • dougie, electric slide, salsa
        • markings on floor?
• follow along touch someone in the room
  • switch to kinect – Lexi’s patch as basis to build if kinesphere is bigger then creates output
    • what?
    • every time people touch for sustained length is creates
      • audio? crash?
      • lights?
    • how does this affect how people touch each other
    • what needs to happen before they touch each other so that they do it
• follow along karaoke
  • sing without the background sound
    • Maybe with just the lead-in bars they will start singing even without music behind