In Scolu one discovers a virtual and interactive aquarium – also a multi-tactile interface – inhabited by aquatic creatures created by Leïla Jaquet in collaboration with Stanislas Bernatt (HEAD–Geneva/Media Design). By placing their iPhone on the interface, visitors see the behaviour of the creatures alter: when one of these creatures enters an iPhone, the visitor can take it with them and then give or exchange it. The experience is therefore intended to continue and to spread beyond the walls of the exhibition.
Scolu begins as an interactive aquarium, populated by virtual creatures. As a gateway between digital life and physical life, the aquarium is the starting point of a journey that will eventually lead to the four corners of the planet. Moving from iPhone to iPhone, from pocket to pocket, the virtual creatures form a community that is both real and virtual, connecting human beings and virtual creatures through physical contact. The experience is thereby prolonged beyond the walls of the exhibition and seeks to spread itself well beyond its source.
update: I’m updating this post now because of a recently released video that I have yet to publish here.
Scolu prend naissance dans un aquarium virtuel et interactif, peuplé de créatures virtuelles. Passerelle entre vie numérique et vie physique, l’aquarium est le point départ d’un périple que ces créatures vont faire à travers la planète. Ces êtres se propageront à travers le monde, passant d’iphones en iphones, de poches en poches, formant ainsi une communauté à la fois réelle et virtuelle puisqu’elle réunie êtres humains et créatures virtuelles autour d’un contact physique.
Over the past year I have been working for Seconde Nature designing a public multi-touch platform via my Atelier Hypermédia in Aix-en-Provence. It’s a fairly ambitious project and involves many partners and most importantly, a whole bunch of students and researchers from five different schools/departments exploring interactivity from the perspectives of art, design, architecture or some combination therein. While I’ve been tooling away at the project in some form or another over the past 12 months, the production team was officially formed at the beginning of 2010 and still has about 6 months to go before completing the project with an exhibition planned for early 2011 in Aix-en-Provence and Marseille. In other words, we’re only at the half-way point and anything you see here should be considered highly work-in-progress, and purely experimental/speculative in nature.
That said, we have amassed enough material from the exploratory/workshop phase of the project to create the following document which can be considered a collection of ideas that we found interesting enough to record and group into this 20-minute demo reel. There were actually far more ideas explored than those you will see in this reel but they were unfortunately either lacking decent documentation or were simply too preliminary/unpolished. That said, many if not all of these ideas will need to be completely reworked during the production phase of the project. Only a few will be retained and most of those will be redesigned in collaboration with our content partners.
All of the projects were built within one of the four workshops, with each workshop lasting either 1 or 2 weeks. In total, this reel represents the accumulation of about 6 weeks of direct prototyping.
Quick post to link up to the Gamerz 05 video that just went live and where you’ll find a few seconds of my bitPong installation. I also shot my own video of the piece, in which I take advantage of this little known device called a tripod, but since I still haven’t had the time to edit it I shouldn’t complain. When I finally find the time to link up the gazillion things I’m working on right now, you’ll hopefully understand why the silent treatment. Until then, here’s the video, with some of that all-around-sloppy-soup that we have come to know as Jankenpopp:
I have finally found a venue to show a decent working version of bitPong, a piece I created some time ago when I was still working on the close relationship with phsyical implementations of data and their aesthetic consequences.
The idea is simple: a two-player game, based on the uber-referenced Pong, here played with 8-bit controllers. When we say « 8-bit controller », we mean literally 8-bit, i.e. 8 buttons, each representing 1-bit of data. Collected together, this byte represents a 256 value variable which is used to control a visual paddle representation within the game. To aid players in the conversion of 1-bit discrete switches into their collective base-two 8-bit value, each button has been labelled: 2^n, i.e. two to the power of zero, two to the power of one, two to the power of two, and so on. This is otherwise known to mere mortals as the values 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, and 128. To move your paddle, you must add each of these values together in order to position it somewhere between position 0 and position 255.
For those who know little about how the computer works internally, this is how the computer moves from the well-known binary 0 | 1 value, to complex values such as the letters you are reading right now: by associating a different value to each bit (the 1 values of « *0 1 0 1 0 1* » get converted to « *0+2+0+4+0+8+0+32* », otherwise known as the value *42*) the computer can use a physically limited scheme (0 or 1, on or off, yes or no, true or false) in order to represent a far greater sum of possibilities (here a number from 0 to 255). bitPong plays off of this configuration and brings its dynamics to the surface of the playing field. In order to take control of your paddle, you will have to quickly master binary encoding.
In this Victor Vasarely inspired version of bitPong, hexagons populate the playing field and create an added diversion. Therefore, bitPong has now turned into something like a two-player bitBreakout. I was actually inspired by the following sign which is posted on the wall just next to my installation, indicating the escape routes out of the museum.
bigPong est un jeu pour deux joueurs, basé sur le célèbre jeu de Pong. Les controlleurs du jeu sont des controlleurs 8-bit, compris dans le sens littéral du terme : 8 boutons, chacun contrôlant une donnée binaire. Prises ensemble, les 8 boutons représentent un octet qui représente 256 valeurs.
I’ll be travelling tomorrow to Poitiers for what looks like a very rich roster of speakers discussing… oh yes… the subject of interactivity. Cough.
Oh, and apparently Ségolène Royal will be giving an opening pep-talk (oui, oui, that Ségolène Royal), which probably has something to do with the fact that she is currently the president of Poitou-Charentes where the conference is being held. You might also have noticed that she is currently making a bid to for the leadership of the French Socialist Party, so I don’t know how much to bet on her appearance.
I haven’t completely finished my talk yet, but from what I have so far, it looks like I’ll be sticking with this resumé that I sent a few weeks ago to the organizers:
L’image du monstre
Il y a trois ans, lors d’un précédent colloque à l’ÉESI sur le cinéma et l’interactivité, j’ai argumenté pour une approche “hydraulique” de l’image en mouvement : une approche dynamique autour d’une image fluctuante qui prendrait en compte notamment la fluidification que les machines algorithmiques apportaient à l’image. C’était une hypothèse intéressante, mais qui n’osait pas aller jusqu’au bout. L’épine du problème était une insistance à maintenir notre relation nostalgique avec la trace photographique à l’intérieur de l’image, face à l’horizontalité des nouvelles formes de stockage comme les bases de données qui ont tendance à brouiller les figures qui s’y trouvent.
Depuis, mon optique s’est totalement transformée. L’objet n’est plus pour moi un simple jeu de re-juxtaposition permanente, il est devenu un jeu de mutation, avec des images-croissance qui poussent à partir de n’importe quelle extrémité de la « Chose ». Il se peut qu’il y ait encore des traces anciennes dans cette image, mais ces traces jouent un tout autre rôle, et nourrissent la bête tout autrement. Je vois désormais dans cette image nouvelle une forme de « monstruosité » qui pousse à l’intérieur des images, et descend jusque dans les entrailles du GPU lui-même, ne remontant à la surface de l’écran pixelisé que le temps d’un court affichage.
Accepter le monstre dans l’image, transforme notre approche de celle-ci, et transforme aussi ce qu’on entend par figure, mimesis, et enfin narration. Cela change également les champs d’exploration qui permettent de saisir plus fermement les phénomènes que je considère comme les plus pertinents pour ces transformations, à commencer par les jeux vidéo.
Here is the symposium’s valiant attempt at an English translation, which makes absolutely no sense to me, and I wrote the damn thing. The words are right, it’s just that the meaning got lost in there somewhere. Apparently, my French is hard to translate, or perhaps just plain hard to understand:
Three years ago, during a previous conference on cine-film and interactivity at the ÉESI, I put forward the outline for a “hydraulic” approach to image in motion: a dynamic approach hinged on the fluctuating image ,which, notably, could factorise the fluidising import that algorithmic engines have brought to the image. It was an interesting hypothesis, which was just not bold enough to go all the way. The bane of the problem being insistence on maintaining our nostalgic affinity with the photographic trace within the image, at the hands of the horizontality of the new storing configurations, like those involving data bases, which tend to scramble the figures present.
Since then my assessment has been turned around. I no longer view the object as just a game of constant re-juxtaposition; it has become play on mutation, with image-growth sprouting from just about any appendage of the “Thing”. It is just possible that old traces still linger in that image, now however, they play a completely different role and feed the beast with different fodder. In this novel image, from now on, I can see a form of “monstrousness” germinating within the image, and getting right down to the entrails of the GPU itself, coming up to the pixelized surface of the screen for only a brief moment of display.
By accepting the monster in the image our approach to it becomes transformed, thus transforming that which we understand as figure, mimesis and finally narration. It also changes fields of inquiry which sanction and capture phenomena more securely and which I consider as being the most relevant for these transformations, starting with video games.
OpenCV For Processing is an open-source library for integrating basic computer vision analysis and tracking within the Processing environment. It simplifies access to the powerful OpenCV library and offers a Java/JNI wrapper for artists, designers and multimedia developers looking to integrate OpenCV into their project.
OpenCV Pour Processing est une librairie open-source permettant de l’analyse et de la reconnaissance basique à l’intérieur de l’environment de création, Processing. La bibliothèque simplifie l’intégration d’une librairie puissante pour la reconnaissance optique, OpenCV.
is an open-source library for integrating basic computer vision analysis and tracking within the Processing environment. It simplifies access to the powerful OpenCV library and offers a Java/JNI wrapper for artists, designers and multimedia developers looking to integrate OpenCV into their project.
Stéphane Cousot and I are announcing today the public availability of our OpenCV Library for Processing. Although the library has been ready (in various states of undress) for a few months now, we have been using the intervening time to learn more in-depth how OpenCV works, debug, simplify method calls, test the library in real-world situations, add various features, plan out features for future releases, and — most importantly — write coherent documentation for those Processing users discovering OpenCV for the first time. It might seem like a light start, given the limited number of functions we’ve made available from the impressive Intel library, but we wanted to make sure each component worked as promised. Also, we wanted to make working with it as painless as possible for Processing users, and follow the Processing logic of getting complex things done with a limited number of simple methods. And finally, we wanted to make sure it was stable enough in a real-world installation context.
For the features, you have internal (via OpenCV) and external (via Processing) capture, basic image treatment (threshold, comparison, extraction, etc), contour tracking, face & body tracking, and a few other little goodies thrown in here and there. So, as it stands, you can (for example), recognize someone’s face, grab the outline of that face, and go into the image data of that person’s face to extract the face data. Or, you could use infrared filters with lights pointed at or placed on your body (see below), a multi-touch surface, or some other artificial lighting condition to grab light blobs for finger or body-part tracking and use that data somehow in Processing. There are obviously many possibilities.
Some of the things you cannot yet do, and which we plan to add to the library: motion history images and optical flow (pixel tracking), kalman predictions, color tracking, histograms, and obviously the list could go on and on. A lot of these functions I already have working in OpenFrameworks for an installation (soon to be announced) which will be exhibited later this summer. So consider the current release a starting point, with what we believe is a fairly clean start, but we could be wrong on that. The code is open, so go in and dig around — perhaps you can give us some good advice or add to the code yourself.
Special note: this library will also work for pure Java work, and yes, there is Java documentation.
So, why did it take so long? Well… when I say that we’ve been busy testing it in laboratory and real-world instances, I mean it. I’ve gotten some mail on this recently, so I should make things a little clearer: if you ever wondered why I don’t post as much as I (or apparently some of you) would like, it’s because I’m busy elsewhere working on so many @#&*$% projects. I do not just work on my own projects and I am definitely not a full-time blogger : I teach, run an atelier, collaborate with other artists, do research, write, write code, consult, curate, and somewhere in there, I’m a dad for two lovely and brilliant young (or youngish) women. Since I don’t have a secretary, nor a double, that means some creative Douglas-time-sharing. So when I’m quiet here, it most certainly means that I’m busy doing one of these other things. And over the past few months, that has worked out to about 50% of my creative work involving OpenCV in Processing and OpenFrameworks.
And on Stéphane’s side, he’s been just as busy working over the past six months on a gazillion projects for various artists, art students, and researchers; and only a part of that work involved this OpenCV library.
So, what have we been doing with it? The library has already been used in numerous projects at the Atelier Hypermédia, in external workshops at schools such as the Institut d’Arts Visuels in Orléans, as a research tool at the DRII laboratory (Dispositifs relationnels : Installations Interactives) at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts Décoratifs in Paris, and in two public works, one an installation for Gamerz 0.2 and the other as a component of a haptic dance performance-dispositif by Wolf Ka and his studio. Finally, we used the library to prototype an urban-design project by Lei Zhao for the Studio Lentigo, Marseille although this project was eventually finished in OpenFrameworks due to the high video performance demands of the installation. So all in all, about a dozen different projects over the past few months.
Here are a few images/videos with links for more information on the author(s)/works:
Lei Zhao, Node City (follow link for more videos).
Fabien Artal, Diplôme DNSEP (avec les félicitations du jury), L’école supérieure d’Aix-en-Provence. There is a video, but you’ll have to jump to 23:15 for Fabien’s installation.
Students of the Institut d’Arts Visuels, Workshop Légerté + Nuit des musées, Orléans (follow this link for — very poor quality — video).
I’ll leave off with these images from an installation Stefan Schwabe created with his collaborator Sebastian Neitsch in a public pool in Halle. As swimmers wade about, their movements are tracked by a camera and modify an image built out of 4 overlapping projectors, projecting onto the dome of the rotunda. It should be mentioned that, like Lei Zhao’s Node City, this piece used Processing only during the prototyping phase (the final work was created in vvvv). Nevertheless, Stefan & Sebastian’s project was an important one in our year-long experimentation with various forms of video surveillance in art and design installations. (See Stefan‘s website for video of this installation).
Update: I used the wrong terminology. Oops. We decided to call this version v01, precisely to suggest that there is still much progress to be made. Previously I called it v1.0, which is a very different idea!
The abstractmachine is setup in San Jose, there is a breakcore Rubik’s Cube® kicking out the jams, a programmable video mosaic recorder is open for public abuse, and the Hypertable is unleashing a non-linear interactive documentary containing a telepathic virus. We’re setup in the main exhibition hall for the festival, South Hall.
Oh, I should also mention something after having watched a few visitors this afternoon: um, hello, people out there, yes, you can actually pick up the Rubik’s Cube® and play with it. And that interactive table, yes, you can put your hands on it. Most of you reading this are probably in the know, and would find it laughable that people would fear interacting with an installation during a festival dedicated to digital art. But hey, that’s apparently America. It’s my first show in my home country (yes, that’s right) and I guess the public is just like that. I always figured that the dopey Americans who looked confused were just like that because they were tourists lost in Europe. But who knows, maybe there are just a lot of tourists showing up today.
So with that out of the way, here’s the official statement.
Through various experiments, installations, and online software, the abstractmachine project asks the question of how we as artists and users can create, manipulate, and ultimately enact digital algorithms. If the specificity of the computer comes not only from it’s digital aspect, but even more so from it’s algorithmic aspect, how does this hyperprogrammable nature transform the media we manipulate — i.e. the images and sounds we design using these machines? Amongst the many machines available within the abstractmachine project, two creation platforms will be presented to illustrate our response to these questions: one dedicated to the creation and manipulation of algorithmic cinema, the other designed around algorithmic musical composition.
« 3 », a.k.a. « ^3 », a.k.a. « cubed » is a musical sequencer integrated into a Rubik’s Cube®. By manipulating the colors on the cube, users generate different sound algorithms within the sequencer. Using specially-designed soundfonts from Jankenpopp (cf. http://jankenpopp.com), math geeks can finally become the speedcubing breakcore supernerds they always feared were lurking underneath. With ^3 we are working against the idea that a musician has to create music with audio software where building the musical algorithm and manipulating the digital algorithm are two different processes. Often, making digital music looks a lot like someone working on their spreadsheet. In ^3, all of the notes of the musical process are visible and intrinsically intertwined. Using a universally known interface, a series of simple gestures cascade into a complex multitude of musical possibilities.
Concrescence is a platform for creating and manipulating moving images outside of the traditional linear time-code. Images grow in spatialized mosaics, allowing for infinite recomposition while avoiding purely random associations. This specialized software is then projected onto the Abstractmachine Hypertable: a multipurpose interactive table which allows multiple users to interact with the non-linear narratives by simply placing their hands on the surface. For the San Jose festival, two uses of the Concrescence platform will be presented: a fully developed algorithmic narrative entitled “The Signal”, accompanied by a simplified version of the Concrescence authoring software where the public can record their own audiovisual clips and create collective non-linear patchworks.
Concrescence was developed in France with assistance from the following institutions: ARCADI, DICREAM, SCAM, and was produced by the CIREN. All sounds for The Signal were designed by Julien Hô Kim, with a narration by Keith Evans. The Jankenpopp666 soundfont can be downloaded at http://jankenpopp.free.fr/666/
Ok, so 8=8 has returned back from Nantes. Ooops! That was a mistake! Scopitone is one of those amateurist multimedia festivals I have been complaining about recently. Actually, the festival is broken into two, with the whimpy multimedia selection during the day coupled with a brilliant and adventerous musical lineup at night. So it’s basically one of the best French festivals for electronic music with one of the crappiest non-selections of multimedia art. I don’t know what went wrong, but after five years you either have it or you don’t. If this year is any indication, they definitely have it all wrong and need a serious reboot. In typical fashion, yet again all the multimedia artists got squashed in the planning by by the disproportionate focus on (big name) musical acts. And of course, in spite of the fact that 8=8 is a musical performance guess where we were stuck performing? Sigh
Despite extremely poor conditions, we actually rocked the house. Don’t just take my word for it. Yeasterday, Marie Lechner wrote on 8=8’s performance in Libération and seemed quite happy with us. You can read the original article here: Nantes bombardé d’électro. Here is an excerpt of the part about us:
“Mécaniques infernales. On aurait aimé voir dans le [Scopitone Soir] 8 = 8, un dispositif où sons et images sont générés simultanément par simple déplacement des mains au-dessus d’une table basse. Pour découvrir l’instrument audiovisuel imaginé par Douglas Edric Stanley, il fallait se rendre aux Ateliers et Chantiers de Nantes qui accueillent le Scopitone «jour» et son lot d’ateliers et d’installations interactives. Assis autour de cette hypertable, avec trois autres performeurs (TM, Nao, JankenPopp), ils activent des univers punkoïdes, entre Donkey-Kong distordu, match de foot abstrait, arc-en-ciel déviant et mécaniques infernales.”
As Marie mentions in her article, we would have been better served as simply one of the opening acts for the nighttime concerts (more on that later). 8=8 was designed for a concert setting, although off the main stage. It was not designed as an installation, we already know how to do that, thank you very much. Despite our protests, the festival director begged us to present 8=8 as a daytime installation + performance, claiming that there wasn’t really anywhere for 8=8 to perform in the evening setting. But once we actually got on-site we realized how much we had been screwed, as there were several places/times we would have fit in fine. A truly shameful lie, especially considering he was with me in Marseille when I — sucessfully, albeit with much difficulty — fought against the tendencies a previous music festival had of treating multimedia performances as nothing more than an entertaining sideshow.
To further add insult to injury, the sound system sucked — really sucked — as did the acoustics, whereas at the night setting the sound was f§@#&?! brilliant.
Want the real story? In reality — according to a local — there wasn’t enough peanut gallery material to amuse the public and justify public funding, so 8=8 got sacrificed as a pleasant curiosity for your afternoon stroll. It’s true, 8=8 is fun for the public, but if we wanted to design it as an installation we would have designed it very differently. Ho hum there we are yet again distracting the public with amusing gadgets you can fiddle with. We really have to stop this dangerous cycle, it’s making us look like idiots…
If I could make a public plea to Scopitone: do what you do best — music — and just drop the multimedia part all together. That, or be more honest with your artists. Slapping together a couple minor installations with little to no means, and even worse no curatorial vision, just gives digital arts a bad name. The scary part is that they are currently renovating a former warehouse to make room for a permanent cultural center dedicated to multimedia art. Yikes! They better get a serious artistic director, and quick. It would be even better if they found someone who has travelled beyond the infamous invisible wall that protected France from Chernobyl.
That said, the public was very enthusiastic, and 8=8 actually started feeling more and more like a real group. I think we could actually do something with this ragtag band. I had fun spending time with my fellow performers, but I know it’s a pleasant illusion, and that I’ll always be the old professor who will eventually have to be carted back into his study. In the end, we knew that we would have a good response, hence our willingness to bore the weight of shitty conditions: ultimately we do enjoy meeting cool people and playing our programs for/with them. And for that, at least, the trip was a success — cheers to all the enthusiastic people we met, by the way…
Here are some photos of that “Punkoid universe, between distorted Donkey Kong, abstract football, deviant rainbows and infernal machines,” Marie described so well. All the photos were taken by Thomas or else by some intoxicated stranger ressembling one of the members of 8=8.
As previously mentioned, the performance schedule was ”to be announced”. It turns out we will be performing at 11h30 and at 17h for the two days of the festival.
We will performing the 8=8=Lesjoueursde_cartes again, this time at the Scopitone festival in Nantes, France (don’t mind the horrid website design, they are actually really nice people). Unfortunately we will be performing in the afternoon (*update: performances at 11h30 and 17h on both days), rather than in the evening with the truly hep cats such as Coldcut, Matmos, or Birdy Nam Nam. I guess we’re still not sexy enough to play in the big sandbox.
// 8=8=Thomas Michalak=Naoyuki Tanaka=Pierre-Erick Lefebvre=Douglas Edric Stanley
// 8=8=Concert=Performance=Demo
8=8 is a group of 4 programmers = 4 composers = 4 VJs = 4 musicians = 4 artists. All four bring their own programming, visual and musical sensibilities to a collective instrument, the Abstract Machine Hypertable. By moving one’s hands over the surface of the Hypertable, images and sounds are generated, creating a unique opportunity for musical improvisation. 8=8 uses the Hypertable to perform singular programs/instruments in a concert=performance=demo context.
// 8=8=Program
All programs are generated by the members of 8=8. There is no distinction between performer = musician = artist = programmer. All members have been exploring computer programming as an artistic medium for several years, notably through collaborative research at the Atelier Hypermedia.
// 8=8=Instrument
Although the Hypertable was originally designed as an interface for algorithmic cinema, 8=8 quickly discovered its musical potential as an instrument. Each program is essentially an entire visual and musical software/instrument in and of itself. Some of the programs allow for direct manipulation of pre-recorded samples, other instruments generate sounds on-the-fly, while still others combine these two notions with the idea of composition taking place in real-time, on the surface of the table, and in front of the public. Some compositions=programs=instruments are visually baroque, others on the contary are minimalist. All work off the principle that image+interaction pilots the sound generation.
// 8=8=Big_Daddy
While the performers are free to improvise within each of the programs, there is also a Central Processing Unit, known in 8=8 speak as Big Daddy. Big Daddy’s role is to organize the flow of the concert itself. It switches the table from its public installation mode (see below) into its concert/performance mode, and controls the sequence of programs. There are over 10 programs currently installed in the 8=8 arsenal, and as more programs can be added before each concert, Big Daddy’s role is equally to keep things organised and working smoothly. Big Daddy is, in effect, 8=8′s stage manager.
// 8=8=Rock+Roll
Nothing could be less exciting than watching a solemn performer sitting on an empty stage behind a laptop. Although interesting attempts have been made recently to jazz up the experience — we’re thinking of recent performances by Golan Levin & Zachary Lieberman, or the excellent TopLap — ultimately 8=8 has found that the entire configuration of Raised Stage + Subservient Public has to be thrown out in order to create a more intimate and engaging relationship with the public. The public actually sits around the table, with the performers, or stands up looking down on the table (the table is only 30 cm high for this reason). Interesting configurations can also be envisioned, for example in situations where the public can look down from a balcony, depending of course on the local architecture.
// 8=8=Public
Before the concert, Big_Daddy informs the public of the time remaining before the concert with a countdown timer displayed on the surface of the table. All concerts start on-time, accurate down to the second. A small interactive program runs on the surface of the table as well, allowing visitors to explore — in a minimal/limited fashion — the technology that will run the concert. Although the original intent of this program was primarily pedagogical (= this is how the system works), as it turns out the public really takes to this little program. Consequently, two modes can be imagined for the Abstract Machine Hypertable: A) as reactive installation, B) as a concert platform. As such, several performances can be organized, with the interactive/public mode converting over to concert/performance mode at a pre-determined time. These decisions are of course dependent on local opportunities and the variable temperament of the 8=8 group.
This is just a quick post to thank the indefatigable Régine Débatty for giving me a chance to rant against the French and exploitive media art festivals over at we-make-money-not-art. I probably said a few things that will come back to haunt me, but what the hell. At least I was able to discuss a little where I’m going with my current research, and to make yet another plug for Processing and explain why it is good for art schools (as if you haven’t heard by now).
I’ve often pointed out to people that credit me for my Hypertable that in fact there have been many other attempts at interactive tabletops.
Although I’m particularly happy with my configuration (very collective, intuitive, no need for gadgets, etc) there have been many others. My little list of influences went as follows:
Over at Pasta and Vinegar they came up with a different list of Interactive tables. Their list is a lot larger, but far from complete. There are even industrial interfaces of this sort for sale, such as the system by Hitatchi that was exhibited at the ZKM exhibit on democracy. Hypertables (interactive or not) are a common fantasme. I’m sure that we’ll be seeing more from them.
One of the stranger things I noticed talking to people using my installation back at the Pompidou Center last year, was that they did not in fact think of the image as projected from above: they often described it as a table lumineuse, in other words the image was emanating from the table itself. Obviously the image was still for them an image, that it acted like objects without being objects was part of the charm. But the familiar nature of the Hypertable surface (perhaps its Unheimlich nature if I got lucky) and its horizontal configuration evoked centuries of table-top culture and just couldn’t be shaken. People like to touch things in front of them, as opposed to the cinematic apparatus which is a pretty frightening apparatus when you get down to it. A lot of my algorithmic cinema work has actually tried to deal with these issues, and I’ve even just finished an article (a few days ago) that will explain some of my positions on these issues. I’ll post more when it is published.
This is a recording of my presentation during the Symposium Audio/Espaces/Réseaux organized by Locus Sonus. In the accompagnying pdf file (destanley.pdf) you will find links to all of the films and interactive animations described during the talk. This talk is in French (why the hell am I writing this in English? I have no idea)
Everything went great. Better than I had imagined. The images are for real : all the interactions take place directly with the images and all of the sounds are being generated by movements within the image programs. We let the programs run after the concert, which led to some interresting discussions. The public was very enthusiastic. One couple stayed for several hours, as they realised that each program was set after the concert to last about 45 minutes : they didn’t want to miss the next one. Someone else we spoke to took some time to accept the idea that in fact the interactions were generating the sounds (odd, it seemed pretty obvious to me).
We came up with an idea that we knew would be f#!&#& brilliant, but that we didn’t know if it would work in practice. It goes back to our hatred for boring stage shows and the formulaic nature of rock n’ roll which becomes even more boring when you stick someone behind a turntable and (gasp) comotose when they’re sitting behind a laptop. So since we were going to change all that, we also had to change the “announcement” of the concert (also because we were competing with noisy DJs in the other room).
Basically we created two modes : public interactive mode and live performance mode. To move from one to the other we created the “Big Daddy”, a program that would move us back and forth as well as choose the different programs. But to give the audience a bit of a feeling of all this, and create some anticipation, we created a sort of demo mode with a clock ticking down to the performance (time of the performance 22:30, with the T-minus clock opposite). Around the clock was a little interactive dribble-program that the public loved (personally I found it a bit limited : put your hand in, sounds go bling, and images smear about, but the “public” tends to like this sort of thing). People kept pouring in for the dribble, and the count-down kept ticking down. Then, ten minutes before the concert, the whole thing went black (except the clock) and all interactions stopped, giving us some time to spread out some room, get installed, and wait for Big Daddy to dish us the first bite.
That clock thing is totally brilliant. It really should be used by other musical groups. It creates a nice tension. Automating the stage is actually pretty cool : when your time is up, your time is up. You have to keep up. It’s pretty stressful = I like it.
I just finished a successful 4-day workshop at the Haute Ecole d’Arts Appliqués in Geneva. It’s the second workshop I’ve held there, and my third visit. As always, it was a great pleasure, and I love Geneva. We also got dragged to a few interresting spots in the evening.
The original proposal was to take bits of a research proposal (Objets orientés-objet) I had defended at the Aix-en-Provence School of Art that failed to get adequate funding. Finally, we decided to (suprise) build a hypertable. This allowed us to teach the students programming the first day, and then to experiment directly onto the hypertable the following three days, as all the development has previously been done and merely requires plugging into the system (it’s as easy as pie, actually easier given that I can’t cook). Actually we reserved the last day for finalisation and filming all the successful projects.
Along for the ride was the always brilliant Pierre-Erick Lefebvre who helped run the workshop. Ever since he has been my assistant in preparation for the exhibition Créer du sens à l’ère numérique we have been talking about finding other uses for the Hypertable. I wanted to give him the opportunity to finally experiment with it without me imposing anything on hum. I was secretly hoping he would do something musical with it, which he thankfully did. We improvised late into the evening on one particular proposition, very funky, very fun. We’ve now got an idea for a concert. More to come from our collaboration, then…
The following participants finished work on the Hypertable : Jana Korcjomkina, Baptiste Coulon, Pierre Rossel and Pierre-Erick Lefvbre. Here are a few photos that Anne-Laure Schneider (of collectif_fact) took on the last day. I also filmed all the projects, and we made a DVD-Video from my footage.
The Signal was a very popular installation. I’ve had some interesting reactions. Before it was too late, I made a little document of the installation which you can watch in mp4 format.
Here is a link to an installation that Alexis Amen and I finished for the “Salon du livre et de la presse de jeunesse” in the Paris neighborhood of Montreuil. At Alexis’ request, the Hypertable was turned into an interactive story illustrating different renditions of Little Red Riding Hood. It was a youth-oriented installation, which was interresting for me because I had been trying to find some more design-oriented uses for the Hypertable while still maintaining a certain artistic integrity. Working with children gives you some unique design constraints. I’m not 100% thrilled by the result, but it was a worthy exercise. Hopefully, Alexis and I can find another collaboration in the future where we can explore some of the design ideas we ultimately had to throw out.
Inside of Opixido, Alexis works on Piloti, which helps other artists code their works. Obviously I didn’t need to give him any pointers, at least not any pointers than those to my incoming data (bad programming joke).
“The Signal” is a unique audiovisual narrative, designed specifically for the Abstract Machine Hypertable. It maps the mysterious chain of infections that led to a poorly documented telepathic virus that spread throughout the United States of America in a historical period not so far removed from our own. Traces of this virus have been found in the strangest of milieu : in communications technologies, via teenager rituals, in mass media and advertising, through irrigation systems, in sound recordings, in political propaganda and urban myth paranoia, in sociological experiments, etc. “The Signal” charts the virus’ growth across the map of the United States, allowing the Hypertable to transform itself into a sort of war map, overlooking the spread of the contagion.
From a purely technological point of view, The Signal is a unique algorithmic cinema experiment. Over 10,000 video shots were culled from public archives, treated and injected into the [Concrescence](http://www.abstractmachine.net/blog/?p=21) development software. A narration was added to each image, giving its context in relation to the story. Each image contains its own diegetic sound track, but is accompagnied by narration whenever possible (the program avoids cacaphony by singling out only related narrative information, and tries to give pause between each utterance). One all this data had been entered into the database, the software was then used to literally “teach” the computer the non-linear narrative relationships between the images. This allows the computer to make intelligent choices within the narrative material, in such a way that it can smoothly acompany the unpredictable movements of the public. As each image knows its relationship with other images in the database, it can easily modulate the arrival of new images to match narrative paths coherent with its own. This “concrescence” process is what gave the software platform its name, by the way. “The Signal” was created, therefore, to be one of the first proofs-of-concept of the feasability of the [Concrescence](http://www.abstractmachine.net/blog/?p=21) platform.
I will be showing The Signal at the Pompidou Center, as part of the exhibition Ecoute on sound as an artistic material. I wrote the story and designed the images starting from material from the Internet Archive. Sound design by Julien Hô Kim. Keith Evans of Silt fame (yes, that’s his back) spoke the narration.
The Signal was co-produced by the CIREN, with the assistance of Arcadi, the DICREAM, and the SCAM.
“Le Signal” est une installation interactive de Douglas Edric Stanley présentée lors de l’exposition “Ecoute” au Centre Pompidou en Sptembre 2004. A partir d’un logiciel-auteur, une base de données d’images sonorisées en mouvement est proposé comme potentiel non-linéaire de lecture. L’ensemble est projeté sur l’hypertable où l’utilisateur re-compose le récit avec ses mains. A l’image frontale du cinéma ou de la télévision se substitue une image horizontale et manipulable. Réflexion sur les limites du cinéma traditionnel face aux possibilités offertes par l’art algorithmique.
