The Whiskey Sea

Big Screens Show
“I/O”
December 3rd, 6:30pm – 8:30P
@ The IAC Building

I was super excited when Mike Cohen mentioned the Trapcode plug-in that can be used in After Effects. I started playing with the particle systems, coding it to match sound and other drawn movements I’d worked on already. Chris Kairalla and I agreed that these types of plug-ins (like with special effects in Psd and Illustrator) usually feel generic and unprofessional, but I think I was able to tailor it enough to my piece that it actually works ok. So far I’m pretty happy that nearly every still shot I’ve taken from the animated piece has yielded a pleasing result.

1) Scribble



2) Turbulence

I wanted to start playing with the edges of the Big Screens frame itself, drawing it in and playing with scale, nesting, repetition, and rotations. I think this rectangularity could represent the digital digestion of natural breaths represented by the circle language already developed so that both the circles and rectangles duel/duet in framing each other. In some ways, I’m exploring how the Big Screens frame can be shrunk down into pixel size and then explode outward again into a pixel frame, thereby toying with the fact that content is shown through pixels and framed within the screen.

Frames within frames:

Rotating the frames into a circle:

All these demonstrate tiling and repetition: as if the Big Screens frame were taking snapshots of itself, sometimes rotating the snapshots on a z-axis, shrinking them and then taking more snapshots, ad infinitum.

Combining the frame aesthetic with the circles

Intro (Example 1.a):

Abstract visuals of waves (Example 3):

Questions:
1) What is the best way to do audio?
2) If live, is it better to do processing, OF?

Neil’s latest sketches in Processing:
http://itp.nyu.edu/~nh724/bigscreens/img/

I: STARTING POINT

Once upon a time there was silence.

-Aiwen

II: B/W AESTHETICS (with a touch of red)








III: A FEW STORYBOARD IDEAS

An old idea I had for an interactive animation using two half spheres (diameter ~ 4/5 feet) w/ pico projectors projecting animation onto each half, along with accelerometers, and xbees. Ideally, the animation will change w/ the orientation of each half-sphere as well the spheres’ orientation to each other. I’ve also considered the possibility of latching the two halves together to build another type of controller. Considering the physical, conceptual, and logistical constraints we’re working with, this idea will not happen for the big screens space, but I’m still keeping this on the back burner.

Last Friday our class had our first opportunity to visit the IAC Big Screens space!  It was amazing to see the space completely empty and we were able to throw up some test images onto the screens.  Since Neil and I have been talking about working in mostly black and white, I opted for these Chinese characters I designed a few years ago (based on the seal script style of Chinese calligraphy), which gave us an idea of how positive and negative space could work. A loose translation from Confucius’ Analects, the words say “The Master said: A mensch is not a tool”:

Dan mentioned that no one has really tried to do a piece solely in black and white, mainly because it’s too tempting to want to work in color here. It will be interesting to work with this sort of aesthetic boundary and we think that the simplicity will actually afford us more flexibility in making a processing sketch and interactive component to our piece. Here is a walk down the length of the screen:

Here’s an example of the ratio of person-height to screen-height, as well as a map image that Morgan provided for us which offered a great example of how richly detailed we could get:

We also had a chance to see the inner workings behind the screen.  There are 18 projectors ($50k each) with 44 mirrors to create distance between the projectors and screen.  Each glass panel for the screen weighs around 400lbs and is 1 inch thick…. any bigger and the glass would shatter from its own weight:

Using Spyder, WatchOut, and an obscene amount of energy, the entire Big Screens design cost $5million to build and about $0.5/year to maintain.  We will be running the screens off of our three little ITP computers:

Dan also mentioned that we could also submit a piece for the interstitials between each performance. Last year, they displayed falling snowflakes, which I think showed off the size of the screen. It’d be a nice opportunity to create something for Living Systems, or even to expose the inner mechanics of the Big Screens operating system.

IDEA 2: Living Systems

I really like the idea of doing a data visualization piece involving energy consumption, life cycles, and/or various living systems in New York City.  The fact that the IAC’s big screens actually uses up so much energy, and was made for the purposes of advertising, provides a nice context for this topic.

IDEA 1: B/W

Last week Amy, Neil, and I started talking about collaborating together for a performative, interactive animation.  This piece would take up the full 6min and the structure of it could be thought of in three parts:

• Prologue, or narrative entry
• Interactive dynamic that increases the tempo of the piece from slow to hectic
• Short ending dream animation

The aesthetics and meaning/context of this piece is inspired by a short dialogue about relationships, and we’d like to develop a dynamic between positive and negative space using particle systems that would create spatial constellations, as well as a Powers of Ten effect.  We’ve toyed with the potential of making it interactive by using two gigantic black and white balls.  The idea of minimalist black and white aesthetics appeals to us and we’ve also enjoyed playing with the idea of constellations made from b/w particles and moving continually eroding particle systems/constellations that would give way to new systems/constellations.

Here’s a sample to throw up for positive-negative space (these are actually Chinese characters, roughly translating: “The Master said, a mensch is tools himself not.”):

I also just saw Ryoji Ikeda’s “Datamatics” piece last Saturday and LOVE some of the aesthetics there which also utilizes b/w space in amazing ways:

Mutek (2007); Between 0 and 1

It’d be interesting to perform with some live coding (saw an amazing ixi lang piece in Copenhagen) and have a battle of sorts occur with two performance programmers!

(The following are my notes from last semester):

Challenges/unique characteristics

• width and lack of viewing depth means partial view of screen at any given time (really meant to be seen from the street)
• columns block view
• no rehearsal time at night
• kinda crazy time deadline
• camera tracking super difficult
• sound quality? don’t remembering it being that great

What I remember from last year’s 2009 performances:

• ladder successful insofar as everyone in the audience could see the physical controller
• repetition was a way of dealing with width (i.e. splitting into 3 separate screens), but it undercut the uniqueness of the big screen itself
• big screen used as a way of directing the audience to do things.  not terribly interesting to me, appeals more to the fact of having a huge crowd rather than using the uniqueness of screen&space

Talk w Shiffman:

• don’t do camera tracking; almost impossible and asking for trouble
• foot switches and similar simple physical controllers are the way to go
• don’t know why people haven’t partnered up beyond pairs
• disadvantage of physical performance devices (like we saw last year) is that it’s small, limited to one person, and not everyone can see it
• classes meet on-site

Some Ideas

• Chinese Scroll narrative (calligraphy): take advantage of the width, which can either be traversed physically via people’s physical walking or digitally via what’s displayed
• controlled by floor switches?
• created by a group of “writing instruments”
• Sound Wave principle: have the aesthetic be based on movement across the screen; the width be traversed digitally
• Use the columns: braille graffiti controllers? mirrors?
• Spacial sensitivity: use the space around it, contextualize or extend the big screen (maybe beauty of little screens (such as on the iPhone) lies partially in its context of a phone in your hand; other examples, outdoor movie screens framed thru car window
• “Play”: what if we gave a production as a group instead of individual shorts?  much more of a headache perhaps (or different sorts of headaches) and people would have to compromise individual moments of stardom, altho that might not be necessarily true. maybe a production of the space itself as a platform for individual shorts?
• Zoetrope variation: mix of sound and visuals, using fragmented mirrors to reflect motion on screen and audio to direct where audience looks (those plastic speakers?  how reflective can they be?)
• Body Xrays
• Labyrinth: mix of big screens and projections on the transparent mesh that would take an animation of the 2D into 3D
• Lamp light switches all over, pull and turns on spotlight on-screen: a combo of individual vignettes and overall mood; relationship between micro and macro
• Cartography: a physical and on-screen mapping system

Questions:

• How many columns are there? 3
• What are the dimensions of the screen and the space? 120 x 12ft
• Can we hang things from the ceiling? from column to column? NO
• Can we build an indoor bridge? NO
• Can we have bubbles? NO
• Can we adhere things to the columns? drilling allowed? NO
• If we have projectors, how can we place them?
• Can the screen be touched? NO
• If big collaboration/production can we get funding from the department for materials?
• Can we have access to building other than Friday classes? ha, yeah right.
• What were the technical glitches from last year?

http://itp.nyu.edu/bigscreens2009/