Andrew's ITP blog

Interactive Projections for Teen Girl Scientist Monthly

ICM Final proposal:

In mid-December I am going to design a CD Release loft party for the band Teen Girl Scientist Monthly.

There are a five elements I have been playing with, (or in some cases struggling with,) while creating the programming side of this project.

1.  Playing with a WiiMote attached to the 2nd singer’s mic.

I have been trying to work with motion tracking via infrared.  Which has proven to be a little difficult.

However, recently I started messing with a few of the Nintento Wii libraries.  And I’m really interested in drawings and particles appearing in response to the singer moving her mic around during a few of the songs.

2.  Automated waves responding to the music:

I downloaded the ESSr 2 library, and have been poking around with it.  I have found some interesting stuff by importing MP3’s and having sketches play.

What I haven’t been able to do yet is have Processing respond to sounds coming in through my computer’s mic.

That’s something I’d like to figure out if I can.

3.  A HUGE challenge for me is going to be finding a way to work around the file-limit size within Processing.

Right now I have different images that I’m using as alpha maps to go over the live-feed in my design.

I am also interested in using After Effects to make a few particle emitter based PNG sequences that I can drop in during the performance.

The thing is, importing those into Processing takes up a lot of the program’s memory.  I think that’s because it stores each imported image into the program itself.

I am sure there has got to be a javascript that can tell my program to locate the files in my directory—which should free up more memory within my program.  I just haven’t found it yet.  Any advice there would be really helpful.

4.  I’m also interested in seeing if I can import two camera feeds at the same time.  Have one on my screen as my reference, and have the other at hand to use as life-feed projection material of the performance.

5.  Last but not least, I have been poking around with OSC.  I haven’t made much headway here because I am trying to stay within Processing.  However, here is a program, Isadora, that I am familiar with. It is made for live-performance video manipulation.

If I cannot work around the memory issues within processing, I think I’ll use OSC to let processing send data to Isadora.

Here is a sample of their music:

Can’t Sleep – Teen Girl Scientist Monthly

Safari – Teen Girl Scientist Monthly

Kate, Ariel and I made some really strong progress this week.

I feel like we zeroed in on our concept.  Essentially we are looking at creating a moment that most of our users can identify one.  One that creates a sense of nostalgia for time spent with family, or loved ones would have happened outside of New York City.

To do that we decided to create an outdoor setting.  Unsers will climb into a tent.  The tent will have physical designs inside that point to different moments one might have outside with someone else–literally different seasons.  In the middle will be the set-up for a campfire.

Each “season” will be represented by physical objects that are linked to different sensors, based on how we expect users to interact with them.  This will cause two things three things to happen.  1. An interactive narrative will take place over a voice over.  2. A soundscape related to those sounds will play.  And 3. Different scents, stemming from that moment, will begin to fill the tent.

When the campfire is triggered, we obviously cannot start a fire inside the tent. Instead we are aiming to infuse the space with the smell of marshmallows.  Also, we are hoping to wire small LED’s into the ceiling of the tent which will turn on to make stars.

I am incredibly excited about where this piece is headed.  Beyond just prototyping and testing our coding/electronics, I would also like to demo how users can interact with hit.  And also, to test our conceptual model several times.

The goal for me is not just to make the interaction intuitive.  It is mainly to create moments that give the users’ senses enough to respond to, yet remain open enough for them to experience their own associations.

Below is a quick mock-up of the current design for the tent.

(Note: for some reason, the thumbnail stretches and cuts off the image.  When you click on it, it should show in the original scale.)

Recently I was brought on a by a musician to do various designs for her band Blue Kid.  Eventually the designs will include: Projections for live performances, their CD cover, linter notes, music videos, and eventually collaborating on interactive installations.

The singer/songwriter, Lydia, and I talked about making an animation to go along with their “Dismemberment Song.” Luckily this timed out with our animation assignment in Comm Lab;  I was eager to take  the opportunity to bring some outside work into ITP.

The song can most simply be defined as a “violent breakup song,” but the style is meant to make that more complex.  Talking with Lydia, it is actually about taking back control of your life.  We decided that it would be redundant, and actually reductive, to have the video just depict  the actions of the lyrics.  And even might be counter-productive to even include images of “the ex.”

Instead we decided to make the video a metaphysical journey of controlling your body and surroundings.  I wanted to include some of Lydia’s features in the protagonist, hence the red hair and tattoo.  However, we also felt it was import to obscure most of her features as to let viewers’ imaginations fill in some of the details.  That choice really helped me find the main visual style for the animation.

This week I worked with Matt Tennie and Will Jennings.  They added a lot of ideas for the sequences, and really helped string the narrative together.  In particular, Will  suggested a few sequences such as the cogs as the central mechanism.  Matt gave ideas for new sequences too. He also  really helped push the pleasure of what was already there.  They both really helped this go from a few ideas around a core, to a cohesive video that can really come together.

Below you’ll see our storyboards for the first verse and chorus, as well as an m4a of the song.

The Dismemberment Song, by Blue Kid

This is our group’s Comm Lab project, a two part letter called “Most Are Bad.”

This video was created along with Cyrus von Hochstette, Eszter Ozsvald, and Matthew Tennie,