Mollie Wolf Cycle 2: The WILDS – Dancing w/ Cody

For Cycle 2, I began experimenting with another digital ecosystem for my thesis installation project. I began with a shot I have of one of my collaborators, Cody Brunelle-Potter dancing, gesturing, casting spells on the edge of a log over looking a mountain side. As they do so, I (holding the camera) am slowing walking toward them along the log. I was rewatching this footage recently with the idea of using a depth camera to play the footage forward or backward   as you walk – allowing your body to mimic the perspective of the camera – moving toward Cody or away from them. 

I wasn’t exactly sure how to make this happen, but the first idea I came up with was to make an Isadora patch that recorded how far someone was from an Xbox Kinect at moments in time regularly, and was always comparing the their current location to where they were a moment ago. Then, whether the difference between those two numbers was positive or negative would tell the video whether to play forward or backward.

I explained this idea to Alex; he agreed it was a decent one and helped me figure out which actors to use to do such a thing. We began with the OpenNI Tracker, which has many potential ways to track data using the Kinect. We turned many of the trackers off, because I wasn’t interested in creating any rules in regards to what the people were doing, just where they were in space. The Kinect sends data by bouncing a laser of objects, depending on how bright the is when it bounces back tells the camera whether the object is close (bright), or far (dim). So the video data that comes from the Kinect is grey scale, based on this brightness (closer is to white, as far is to black). To get a number from this data, we used a Calc Brightness actor, which tracks a steadily changing value corresponding to the brightness of the video. Then we used Pulse Generator and Trigger Value actors to frequently record this number. Finally, we used two Comparator actors: one that checked if the number from the Pulse Generator was less than the current brightness from the Calc Brightness actor, and one that did the opposite, if it was greater than. These Comparators each triggered Tigger Value actors that would trigger the speed of the Movie Player playing the footage of Cody to be -1 or 1 (meaning that it would play forward at normal speed or backwards at normal speed).

Once this basic structure was set up, quite a bit of fine tuning was needed. Many of the other actors you see in these photos were used to experiment with fine tuning. Some of them are connect and some of them are not. Some of them are even connected but not currently doing anything to manipulate the data (the Calculator, for example). At the moment, I cam using the Float to Integer actor to make whole numbers out of the brightness number (as opposed to one with 4 decimal points). This makes the system less sensitive (which was a goal because initially the video would jump between forward and backward when a person what just standing still, breathing). Additionally I am using a Smoother in two locations, one before the data reaches the Trigger Value and Comparator actors, and one before the data reaches the Movie Player. In both cases, the Smoother creates a gradual increase or decrease of value between numbers rather than jumping between them. The first helps the sensed brightness data change steadily (or smoothly, if you will); and the second helps the video slow to a stop and then speed up to a reverse, rather than jumping to reverse, which felt glitchy originally. As I move this into Urban Arts Space, where I will ultimately be presenting this installation, I will need to fine tune quite a bit more, hence why I have left the other actors around as additional things to try.

Once things were fine tuned and functioning relatively well, I had some play time with it. I noticed that I almost instantly had the impulse to dance with Cody, mimicking their movements. I also knew that depth was what the camera was registering, so I played a lot with moving forward and backward at varying times and speeds. After reflecting over my physical experimentation, I realized I was learning how to interact with the system. I noticed that I intuitively changed my speed and length of step to be one that the system more readily registered, so that I could more fluidly feel a responsiveness between myself and the footage. I wondered whether my experience would be common, or if I as a dancer have particular practice noticing how other bodies are responding to my movement and subtly adapting what I’m doing in response to them…

When I shared the system with my classmates, I rolled out a rectangular piece of astro turf in the center of the Kinect’s focus (and almost like a carpet runway pointing toward the projected footage of Cody). I asked them to remove their shoes and to take turns, one at a time. I noticed that collectively over time they also began to learn/adapt to the system. For them, it wasn’t just their individual learning, but their collective learning because they were watching each other. Some of them tried to game-ify it, almost as thought it was a puzzle with an objective (often thinking it was more complicated than it was). Others (mostly the dancers) had the inclination to dance with Cody, as I had. Even though I watched their bodies learned the system, none of them ever quite felt like they ‘figured it out.’ Some seemed unsettled by this and others not so much. My goal is for people to experience a sense of play and responsiveness between them and their surroundings, less that it’s a game with rules to figure out.

Almost everyone said that they enjoyed standing on the astro turf—that the sensation brought them into their bodies, and that there was some pleasure in the feeling of stepping/walking on the surface. Along these lines, Katie suggested a diffuser with pine oil to further extend the embodied experience (something I am planning to do in multiple of the digital ecosystems through out the installation). I’m hoping that prompting people into their sensorial experience will help them enter the space with a sense of play, rather than needing to ‘figure it out.’

I am picturing this specific digital ecosystem happening in a small hallway or corner in Urban Arts Space, because I would rather this feel like an intimate experience with the digital ecosystem as opposed to a public performance with others watching. As an experiment with this hallway idea, I experimented with the zoom of the projector, making the image smaller or larger as my classmates played with the system. Right away, my classmates and I noticed that we much preferred the full, size of the projector (which is MUCH wider than a hallway). So now I have my next predicament – how to have the image large enough to feel immersive in a narrow hallway (meaning it will need to wrap on multiple walls).