As reflected in last week’s conversations and the previous post, using Butoh’s approach and the Triad framework (Rock, Soil, and the Hole-y Spirit) provides a fertile ground for exploring animism, deep time, and materiality of technology. There are almost too many rich layers. Perhaps this contributed to why speaking to Craig yesterday (and later to a friend,) I could not succinctly explain how the installation will look and feel.

I’m behind in experiments/prototyping of interactions due to technical challenges. Since my goal is to create interactions with video, I started with sensors. I worked a bit with Touch Designer and the Circuit Playground Express sensors but switched gears when my soil sensor arrived. I followed the Physical Computing Lab (to the best of my ability). Ellen pointed me towards great resources, but it took nearly a week to solve a problem with values not showing up in my p5 serial monitor. Not knowing how/if this will work is frustrating… I ended up solving this issue, but I’m concerned if the approach will work. I reached out to Arnab (per Craig). Perhaps the data transfer from sensors, video playback, and the effects’ execution will not flow smoothly. Plus, I will need to move the sketches and sensors to a Raspberry Pi.

I do have Touch Designer for more senor-video tests, although others mentioned Isadora and Max/MSP/Jitter. In short, I am not confident about picking the right tech tools.