Catherine McCurry

Phase Study is a series of videos and performances about a woman who attempts to separate herself in space. To occupy two places simultaneously. This was a semester long project culminating in a live performance in Williamsburg.

The woman takes measurements and writes in a notebook in dim light. She recites a brief text and sits in a chair in darkness. She breathes hard, blowing all of the air out of her lungs and takes a deep breath.

She practices and repeats this process again and again. Testing, perfecting. The whole performance consisted of 5 cycles.

I shot prepared video footage in the same room the performance took place in. I covered most of the walls with green material to be keyed out later.

The prepared videos were played back in Jitter and triggered wirelessly from the stage using a homemade bluetooth remote.

I experimented with projections on the mesh I got this week with my 3D sensing final (documentation below). It looks great, but I’m not sure that it dense enough to carry off the effect I’m looking for with the overlaid video. It will definitely be possible to map the room, though I wish I could just set up once and leave my things – such a bummer to have to totally rearrange the room every time I work there.

My expectation is that my final project this semester will be a workshop performance in the community room in my apartment building. It will be performed one time (realistically), and I’ll invite the class. The performance will be documented and I will present documentation from the evening in the final crit. Hopefully the documentation will be helpful in finding funding for it to live again in a performance venue. I may try to stage it more fully this summer, possibly with other performers.

I’ve become attached to the videos I’ve been working on as well, and I’m not sure entirely what shape they will take. I may create a parallel video piece.

I’ve been thinking about this project since last spring, and made a failed attempt last semester in ICM. When the Kinect came out, I knew it was a solution, which is why I’m in this class.

I worked on a production that adapted Samuel Delaney’s novel, Dhalgren, for the stage. One of my favorite images from the book was not realized in the play and it’s stuck with me as a design problem that I know there’s a solution to (see my final proposal from ICM last semester for more background).

In the book, members of the Scorpion gangs wear projector necklaces when they roam the streets at night. With the touch of a button, the necklaces produce a holographic animal that surrounds their body and identifies them – dragons, mammoths, unrecognizable blobs when they’re not working correctly.

I had previously envisioned a solid, neon colored animal shape for these shields, and thought of using skeleton tracking with OpenNI to animate a 3D character. I was nervous about the animated character, though, and pretty sure it would look dumb.

A simple, and I think effective, solution occurred to me late in the game. I reimagined the design of the holograms – they could be skinned as the creatures rather than shaped like them. I modified an example from class to remove the background, then map pixel information from existing images to the depth image from the Kinect. I projected this onto two layers of mesh that I stood behind, producing a faux 3D projection effect. I tried a couple images – two dinosaurs and a lizard.

Here’s a diagram of my setup:

This is a study for an effect to be used in a live performance.

source (this is also the code for the RGB experiments in the post above)

I did 4 iterations of this scenario (here are two), playing around with the idea of documenting a study. I made measurements and tried to figure out different ways to leave evidence of this ability to split myself. Talking with Jason and Jackson last week, I came up with the idea of tying this to split to my ability to hold my breath. I blow out as much air as possible and slowly rotate my head until it becomes too difficult. My faster self interacts with matter, tries to become more physically present through exertion, addresses the video camera, and in this edit, manages to turn on the light so that it stays on.

I made this piece for a play based on Philip K. Dick’s Martian Timeslip. There is a character in the book/play who experiences all time at once as destruction and decay – is totally traumatized and non functional. There was a monologue from this character (kind of in her head) about watching death eating birds pick apart decayed carcasses as the world rots and turns into “gubbish”. I made the bird melody from sample my brother gave me – he made it in Max but didn’t explain how. I pitch shifted it up and down and timed it. I used found sounds convolved with musical content to create the atmosphere – and Max as a noise generator (representing this gubbish)

10weeks 1

I made this piece using a sample of Nina Simone. I created a patch in Max that does granular synthesis – moves through the sound file selecting short “granules,” puts a nice envelope around them, and rearranges them (it maintains some of the structure of the sound – I’d say the patch stumbles through the file moving forwards and backwards but ultimately forwards…). I wanted to make something beautiful and transcendent in some way. Use headphones if you can.

lookaround 1

Daryl Bem’s paper “Feeling the Future” has been getting a lot of press this week – I guess someone told me about reading about it on Hacker News and what they told me intrigued me more than the actual paper. They said something like, this study showed that a person’s intention to learn something in the future impacted their ability to make accurate guesses about the topic. The press the paper has been getting is mostly related to the fact that Bem showed erotic images to his subjects – but this isn’t really super interesting, as much as I like porn. I read the paper, as a result of thinking about this  idea this week - http://dbem.ws/FeelingFuture.pdf – and a bunch of other papers on the topic. I like the idea of statistically significant numbers that seem unconvincing. Having worked in experimental laboratories testing questionably perceptible (questionably existing) phenomena, this paper brought me to the place of an expectant researcher. You get more and more convinced that you are sensing the phenomena (I worked with audio-tactile interaction – tactile stimulus helping people to hear audio signals that they couldn’t perceive alone). I worked with the setup so much, and in such isolation that my results were leagues beyond any of the anonymous test subjects. Researcher becomes obsessed, becomes prodigy subject, goes a little insane.

I’ve never really been interested in Psi phenomena, or believed in it in any way that would allow a person to take advantage of it. I studied physics as an undergrad, including a good amount of QM, so I’m pretty familiar with concepts that sound similar. There’s some sort of narrative developing in my mind related to this idea. I’m thinking about a person who develops a methodology for simultaneously slowing themselves down and speeding up. I did a brief choreographic sketch trying to think about what this could look like – could be done live in projection with one of the channels prerecorded. Connecting this mental act of disassociation to physical/choreographic acts. How do I separate, how do I reconnect – how difficult is it?

Too many random projects in reverse chronological order..

Get the Light Right  2009-2010 – lead singer/organist/guitarist in rock band. Grad school and regular band bullshit let to our extended hiatus/breakup

Get the Light Right – Fall Right

First Interpretive Technical Lecture on the engineering of the space elevator. I made this while on Fulbright in Berlin and performed it at the ZKM in Karlsruhe, and this time, at the Klang/Zeit/Ort Festival at the UdK Belin.

Sound design for Bellona: Destroyer of Cities (2009), and Untitled Mars (This Title May Change) (2008) with Jay Scheib.

Performance Media final project 2007, one act play BURNOUT based on Unter Eis by Falk Richter

Solo violin recital 2006, Debussy Sonata for Violin and Piano with David Deveau

Debussy Sonata, Catherine McCurry & David Deveau, 1. Allegro vivo