An overview of the journey:
3 weeks ago I decided I wanted to project the output of a sketch. This was controlled with potentiometers.
Then I connected it to my heart instead of a potentiometer.
Then it became one version of a performance, which I piloted on Monday.
What we wanted to experiment with was using two sensors rather than just one, as well as tracking the body.
Leia wrote this sketch that takes input from two sensors, and alternates between drawing and moving a shape when the second sensor (placed on my bicep here) hits a certain threshold.
Bruce then integrated this sketch of Leia’s with a Kinect’s camera. The camera can track up to 6 bodies, and it is surprisingly responsive. What it’s doing here is moving the position of two ellipses based on my hands. When my hands are together, both ellipses are black. They turn white the further my hands are apart.
We played.
It has many different effects.
It can be kind of comedic:
It can be kind of an act of drawing / erasing / revealing / hiding:
It can be kind of galaxial / reminiscent of curtain opening / or a monochrome James Turrell:
And each of them come with their own ‘choreographies’.
The overall style of movement seems to be determined in part by my own movement training, propensities combined with my sense of proprioception from sensor placement and wires too (as in how they feel on the body).
Right now it’s just a projector behind the Kinect, so the position of my hands in space and the projected circles are not calibrated. And the projected sketch is mirrored.
All of this is set up up in room 468. For sense of scale:
Circuit diagram:
(Link to vimeo videos in case the above doesn’t load)
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Feedback:
- To go wireless, look into Arduino Nano 33 BLE. In developing the performance, I would do this to allow for more freedom of movement, or all the way with being tethered to a room/space.
- There is something special about being in the small room with only a few other people: the projection takes up 80% of attention. Not like being on stage, where there is some remove, and the projection will become more visual than visceral/spatial. I want to know if I can do this in a bigger space but still achieve the same level of viscerality + intimacy + hold of attention.
- ITP is a program that tends to produce interactive/participatory art more than performances, so a lot of the projects here tend to focus on creating interactions for laypeople rather than for performances with specific skills. In the former case, there’s more need for specific mapping/making explicit the relationship between actions and outcomes. In the latter, it really depends on choice and dramaturgy.
- Make note of the forks in the road we encountered but didn’t take...
- Not mirroring, mapping ellipses to hands
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