Relay of Joy film: proposal for Open Ear

test movie on youtube

Proposal for ‘A Relay of Joy” drawing. Tim Long, October 2007

Outline
A twenty minute live performance, creating a drawing of a figure on paper mounted onto a wall. The marks and motion of the stylus will generate sounds via midi triggers and a computer, played into a PA system.
The live action of the drawing is intended to be relayed via a video camera to a data projector.

Description of proposal
A relay of joy. Creating a drawing of a figure for the duration of the performance and a unique, graphically defined soundtrack determined by the position and intensity of the marks.

The live performance is intended to open a dialogue with the audience, through their engagement with the physical, aural, and graphic assembly of the work. The physical movement of the ‘artist’ will be aligned with the aural responses of the marks as they are made, eliding with the graphic properties of the marks themselves.

Further details
A new subject will be created within the performance, represented by the drawn figure, the duration of the work, and the shared experience of ‘artist’ and spectators. The network will be represented by the entire assembly: computer, drawing, sound, audience, duration.

The subject-image assembly will be relayed through the technology, physical movement, a development of graphic marks delineating a human form, referencing haptic sensations, and related physiological and psychological responses:
Haptic of or relating to the sense of touch, in particular relating to the perception and manipulation of objects using the senses of touch and proprioception.
Haecceity the property of being a unique and individual thing. The sound track uses recorded loops and samples of the human voice and other textures.

Equipment I can provide
Mac laptop, midi interface, trigger box, triggers, paper, drawing board

Equipment I would like to borrow for the performance
Amp and PA for sound
Video camera for relay to data projector and for recording the performance.

Other requirements
Lighting
It would be helpful to have local lights shining on the board, preferable from two sources, to eliminate heavy shadows.
I would need to position the equipment to the side of the work space, so there are no tables or obstructions between myself and the audience.

The paper will be pre-hung on a board I will provide, which may be mounted to the wall, or may be stabilised somehow so it does not move around. The triggers will be taped beneath it, so the bottom height of the paper would be about four feet from the ground, so that my body or shadow does not significantly obscure the work.

If the performance is filmed, I would like the video to be relayed live to a data projector. The audience with then see a duplicate of the live action drawing on screen.

ARToolkit

The ARToolKit is one software library you could use to build your own Augmented Reality projects / interfaces. Below are images of projects created with ARToolKit. Timo Arnall has an interesting write up of some experiments he did with this free for non-commercial use software library.

ARTag (image and videos below) is another system which uses tags (very similar to Data Matrix tags):

where virtual objects, games, and animations appear to enter the real world. 3D graphics is added in real time to video, similar to “view matching” in Hollywood, except that with Augmented Reality it is happening online. ARTag “Magic Lens” and “Magic Mirror” systems use arrays of the square ARTag markers added to objects or the environment allowing a computer vision algorithm to calculate the camera “pose” in real time, allowing the CG (computer graphics) virtual camera to be aligned. This gives the illusion of 3D animations or video games to appear to belong in the real world.

If you can’t see the embedded movie above see the videos page here.

Post partially inspired by this post at Turbulance and reblogged from this post at Network Research.