I seek to increase social connections and self-expression in the public space through body movement and dance. A public video projection has music and visuals that are determined by your own defined content and controlled by your body's movements.

A successful recreational public space is a result of allowing the individual an involvement in that space. A place to find comfort and expression. According to the renowned urban planner William H. Whyte\'s(1) meticulous analysis of New York City public recreation spaces, sitting area\'s are the most important characteristic in making a space popular. Other important characteristics include, varied and effect pedestrian flow, moveable chairs & tables, location and view of the \'urban theatre\'. People desire for a place that allows them to move chairs around and sit in a configuration of their choosing. Anyone that has ever visited Union Square in New York City will see the vast diversity of public expression. The park is famous for it\'s social and political activism and public activities since its conception, notably the Labor Day celebration of 1882. People gather in numerous groups forming circles of people, others flow through the pathways of the park and some prefer to sit on it\'s different surfaces. I observed some people sit on a grassy ledge with their arms on the handrail as some kind of armrest, others engaged in a hacky sack circle. Dance circles of all kinds are always common. One teenager whizzed by on his skateboard bumping down a flight of wide steps. On other occasions I have witnessed heated political debates and protests. This is a park that flourishes on diversity and the active and spontaneous expressions of novel ideas in a central location within architecture that encourages freedom of expression. Societies flourish when good ideas are abundant. This creates what Henri Lefebvre(2) refers to as the \'differential space\' or the space that celebrates socio-spatial differences through personal expression.
Skateboarding and the Parkour(3) movement are pushing this notion in even more powerful directions. Ian Borden(4) talks about this differential space and how skateboarding introduces a powerful idea that is often ignored in today\'s public space. That is the idea of re-adaptation to the city by the people that traverse through it. \"In such a city, creation of creations, everyday life would become a creation of which each citizen and each community would be capable\"(5) This opens up the possibility that all space in a city can be somehow recreational, that all spaces can partake in inspiring us with a participatory pleasure of some kind. It is a place that values activity and conversation over passivity and complacence. Too much architecture today is in the realm of \'zero-degree\' architecture(6), or architecture that is generally created for political, commercial, or purely functional purposes. It reduces everythign to functionality, instruction, commodity and instant convenience. This \'zero-point\' where things are over-designed in the sense that they fall within a perfect grid that leaves nothing left for the imagination thereby leaving nothing left to communicate. \"Resistance to zero degree architecture takes place outside of the buildings themselves, in the streets, as some counter the everyday, routinized phenomena of privatized urban space and the commodification and pacification of urban experience by enacting a different space and time for the city.\"(7)
Unleashing Rhythm Flow in a public environment using a projection system creates and open and interpretable space, a space that gives some agency to the user. It will create visual and audiotry rhythm within a space and create a stark differential space that multiple users can indulge in simultaneously. Unlike Parkour and skateboarding, this system has a lower barrier of entry on a physical level. But it\'s music and visuals can be customized and extended by individuals allowing the co-option of the system into new and differing ways. The piece will create a rhythm in a space, encouraging a differential space to form and become traversable to the public.


The intended audience for this is anyone looking to break out of their everyday restraints and excited about moving their body. If you’re open to the idea of ‘detourning’ from a normal routine and interested in moving your body spontaneously then this project will interest you. Mostly people interested in dancing and people open to the idea of freestyling with their body’s will find this project exciting. It blends visual and spatial kinesthetic creativity into one. Assumedly mostly younger generations of people, ages 16-40 will be interested in JointFlow, since these are the ages of individuals usually involved in street style dancing.

You walk home with your head down thinking about today\'s business and begin thinking of what notes to prepare for tomorrow morning\'s meeting. Going down the usual route home your body moves on auto pilot while your mind ponders the future. Passing a dark alley close to your place you notice a strange flicker of light in your peripheral vision along with a subtle hum of fleeting noise. You gaze down the alley interrupted from thought and quickly stare at the area where you think the light came from. Again a flash of light dances across the surface of the ground coaxing you to come closer. Curiosity overcomes you and you venture closer to see what in the world this light might be. Looking on the ground you see another gelatinous blob of light appear to be swimming below the surface of the concrete below you. Moving over the surface causes a sudden swarm of light to surround your body, as if seeping up from the cracks of the ground underneath you. To your surprise the more you move the more the light grows and gets excited around you, as if urging you to move even more. The more you move a rhythmic tribal drumming begins to surround you as if coming from an unknown distance. The more you move the more the rhythm increases in volume while simultaneously causing the light to dance around you more vigorously. Feeding the lights and sounds around you your body continues dancing. The longer you dance the more the visuals evolve to newer levels as the drumming continues. Finally your body stops moving from exhaustion causing the lights to disperse back under ground as the drumming fades away into the distance. You return back to your walk home wondering whether what just happened was real or a figment of your imagination.


RhythmFlow is a computer vision based system created using Processing designed for street dancing and body experimentation in a public space. The design is framed around public dance recreation culture. Dance typically exists in an open space, unconstrained by walls, therefore the design of the system adapts to this constraint. The video projector is mounted from above and will be projected downwards onto a dance circle at night. IR lights will be projected downward in the same direction as the video projection. This light will be reflected back to the IR sensitive camera allowing blob detection of the user\'s shadow to be made. The IR light helps provides a clean, noise free, brightness tracking environment. With the camera tracking the different dancer\'s shadow\'s they are able to move about the space unconstrained. As the user moves about the dance cirlce their movements leave a trail behind them. A history of painted pixels is projected on their surrounding area corresponding to wherever they recently moved. Faster movements correlate to thinner drawn lines, while remainingg still paints a thicker blotch remnant of a pen being held on paper. As lines cross paths they react by changing color and cause the pixels to become more energized or agitated. Overtime the dancer\'s drawings fade away, allowing for new dance paintings to be drawn. The style of visuals can be altered based on which system the user selects. The focus remains on the dancers, but with a layer of virtual content and expressiveness on top of them and their surrounding dance territory.

Discovering the proper equipment was a difficult task. The webcam I initially used did not a have a sensitive enough lux level and was therefore not allowing enough of the IR light into the lens. I ended up getting a great Lee IR filter from B & H Video. I ended up just using a basic consumer DV camcorder that had a built in IR filter. I still ended up putting my own filter on top of the lens since it did not block all of the visible light coming in. For the lights I just went with 60 - 80w iridescent bulbs and applied red, green and blue gels to block out their visible light emissions. Only 2 of them seemed to create enough brightness for a solid track. Ensuring the ground was white did increase the camera\'s sensitivity to blobs.
The trickiest part in the programming was in trying to differentiate the different blobs and keep track of them individually. I initially tried this in Processing but was unsuccessful; I ended up going with Jitter and used maxlink as a bridge to Processing.