The next cat out of the bag. Mortimer. A performance piece coming to Kiasma Theatre in September.
“Feather light or dead serious?
Ville Walo’s solo performance, Mortimer, is a contemporary circus theatre performance where juggling and electrical sensor technology come together. The focused, subtle performance juggles sound and video projections, brings small fluffy things to life and laughs at mortality. The performance’s soft hint of breath brushes the viewers’ skin.”
Can’t really say much about this yet. You will have to wait until September. All that I’m saying is that I built some custom toys for Ville. Including a real-time projection mapping system and some juggling birds embedded with wireless sensors. The dates and more info here: http://www.kiasma.fi/index.php?id=2639&L=1
I built a little robot for the Jättömaa festival that happened a couple of weeks ago in Kouvola.
It was hanging by its neck from a tree in the festival area. You could power it up by turning the handle on its chest. This would cause it to come back to life and then die again by hanging.
I wanted to play with the idea of life and death of artificial beings – especially when it was the festival crowd that gave the robot its life and then left it to hang to its death. The theme also suited the festival site as it was used as an execution site during the Finnish Civil War.
Jättömaa was a nice small festival with interesting bands and artists, including Joose Keskitalo, Jaakko Laitinen & Väärä Raha, Katja Tukianen, Sara Milazzo (the lovely lady appearing on the video above) and many others. I have some random video clips from the festival that I might edit together in the near future.
Animoitu liike (Animated Movement) is an animation/dance workshop that was organized during the Tanssin Aika festival in Jyväskylä, Finland on September 24th to 26th 2009.
The idea of the workshop/installation was that anyone could participate in the workshop by walking in, drawing their own character and then animating that character just by moving their own body.
This video shot by YLE for Keski-Suomen uutiset illustrates the process. (In Finnish)
The dances were streamed live to the internet. The first video (the last dance we did) has all of the characters on screen at the same time.
You can also browse all the videos over at the bambuser channel http://bambuser.com/channel/animoituliik. Unfortunately due to some technical problems, some of the dances were not recorded. Another issue is the sound. On some of the videos the sound is clipping very badly and on some of them there is no sound at all.
Almost 90 people came and drew their characters, 94 dances were recorded online and probably double that amount came just to see what was going on during the three days this project was running.
The movements of the participants were tracked by a custom built solution based on tBeta and Quartz Composer. The participants wore infrared “beacons” on their ankles and wrists that were being tracked by an infrared camera. The information was then sent over to Animata to animate the characters.
The infrared light can be seen weakly in normal photos as well:
Photo by: Sirja Moberg
Here are some photos from the workshop and behind the scenes. The first photos are from a little workshop that I taught covering the basics of Animata for some of our assistants.
A HUGE THANK YOU to Live Herring and all of the other people who made this possible.
Last week, I took part in the SenseStage workshop at the Hexagram BlackBox in Montreal. http://sensestage.hexagram.ca/workshop/introduction/. It was a workshop designed to bring together people from different disciplines (dance, theatre, sound, video, light) and cooperate in a collaborative environment with interactive technologies.
During the workshop, there were tons of sensors – light, floor pressure, accelerometers, humidity etc. – all connected to little microcontrollers which in turn were all wirelessly connected to a central computer that gathered all the data and sent it forward as OSC to any client conected to the network.
Basically, we had 5 days to complete an interactive performance sequence using the data gathered by the sensor nodes. This is what our group came up with.
We call it Treasure Islands and it’s a bit twisted interactive performance/game where a girl finds herself in a weird world where she is floating on a donut in the middle of the ocean with a mermaid talking in her head. She has to travel to all of the different Islands around her, and collect sounds from them in order to open a portal into this strange dream world for all her friends. Sounds like a good concept, doesn’t it? Check out the video and you’ll see that it actually makes sense.
There was a lot of sensor data available, but we ended up using just the pressure sensors on the floor and camera tracking. With a bit more time we could have evolved the world to be more responsive to the real world, but I’m pretty happy with the results we were able to achieve in such a short time. Our group worked really well together, which is not always the case in such collaborative projects.
Credits:
Sarah Albu – narrative, graphics, performance
Matt Waddell – sound, programming
Me – animation, programming
And I guess I need to include some more technical details for all the people who check my site for that kind of stuff (I know you’re out there).
We used camera tracking with tbeta to track Sarah and used that data to move the doughnut and to make the environment responsive to her movements. All of the real-time animation was done in Animata, which really is a perfect tool for something like this, because it allows me to animate things really fast without compromising in quality. Max was used as the middle man to convert the TUIO messages and the OSC from the sensor network into the kind of messages Animata needs to hear.
We sewed some IR LEDs on the hat to help with tracking in a dark space.
Each island is an instrument that you can play with. Stepping on a certain area would trigger loops, add effects to your voice etc. Matt could explain the sound part better than me, but the video should make it pretty clear. it doesn’t reproduce the effect of the quadraphonic sound system we used though. Some visual clues were also triggered in the animation based on her movements on the sensors.
That’s pretty much it. If you have any questions, leave a comment and I’ll try to get back to you as soon as possible.
The second installment of my Mixed Up series has now seen the light. Let me introduce you to the Mixmaster 1200.
The Mixmaster 1200 is a wireless scratching device for the turntablist who prefers to deliver his/her scratches like a 5 star chef. As you can see, the Mixmaster does not have any beaters attached to it. This is because it has small laser powered plasma emitter beaters that actually heat up the airwaves around the device itself producing the unique sounding aural explosions.
Have you ever wondered what a banana mixed with a strawberry sounds like? Or how about kiwi-watermelon puree? Watch this video and you will find out.
I found this old blender from a flea market and noticed that the names of the different blending modes are very similar to the terminology used in DJing. So I decided to turn this kitchen appliance into a DJ mixer.
The audio tracks are triggered by inserting different fruits into the blender. The buttons on the front panel control the mixing modes and you also have two different types of transformer switches for cutting the sound in and out.
Not many people know this, but Concordia University in Montréal also has a toon department deep inside the maze that is known as the EV building. The university officials would prefer to keep this knowledge as a secret, since the brutal self torture that goes on inside the faculty would shock many people. In the same way that the Average Joe or Jane does not want to know where the meat inside his/her burger comes from, no-one really wants to know the shocking truth about the stories behind your Saturday morning dose of laughter.
When watching cartoons, people rarely think about the amount of time and dedication the cartoon characters spend on perfecting their sketches and routines. Unfortunately, consumers love to see toons getting hurt. There is just something special about dropping heavy anvils on the heads of unsuspecting cartoon characters that appeals to the majority of viewers.
Like in all fields of entertainment, the competition in the cartoon business is also very harsh. You are only as good as your last fall from a huge cliff. That´s why all the aspiring cartoon students at tooniversities across the world practice new and inventive ways of getting themselves hurt.
A group of activists from PETT (People for the Ethical Treatment of Toons) have been able to sneak a spy camera inside the Tooniversity facilities at Concordia University. Because of their brave action, all the dirty secrets inside the Tooniversity will be exposed. Please go to http://tooniversity.originalhamsters.com to find more information and sign a petition to stop this madness.
Here is a quick solution on how to get the analog inputs from an Arduino into Quartz Composer. For now, this only supports the analog values. Reading the digital input pins is not hard to implement, but I still haven´t decided what is the best way to do that.
Sending serial data from QC to Arduino is a little bit trickier, but I will definitely try to work on that also.
What do you need for this to work?
The Kineme Serial patch for Quartz Composer. Available here: http://kineme.net/SerialIOPatch20080326beta (You will need to register and check the “I would like to beta test new and updated patches.” box in your user profile.)
I´m really interested in stereoscopy, which you might have guessed, if you´ve ever seen me running around with my View-Master camera. In my opinion, View-Master is still a superior method for viewing stereoscopic images, but it´s only still images. That´s why I wanted to see if I could improve the design and make an interactive View-Master for animations.
This little hybrid between Mickey Mouse and Steve Mann enables you to control and view stereoscopic animations that are animated in real-time.
It´s an old View-Master viewer modified to have ChromaDepth lenses, some custom buttons, accelerometer, bluetooth radio and an Arduino to control it all. I thought about hiding the electronics with bigger ears, but decided not to, because I like the ghetto-cyborg look he´s got going on there.
So how does it work? You look through the viewer to the screen where you will see some 3-layer Månsteri-action in all of its stereoscopic glory. The great thing about ChromaDepth stereoscopy is that it works with basic colors. You dont need two channels for the video to achieve a 3D-effect. On a dark background, everything that is blue will appear to be in the background and everything that is red will appear to be in the foreground. Colors in the spectrum between blue and red will appear to be somewhere in the middle. If you didn´t understand my explanation, look it up on the interwebs.
The accelerometer detects your motion and will move the character on the middle layer, giving the illusion that the character is trying to mimic your movement. You can control the content of the layers with the three buttons on the side of the viewer. Button three controls the background, button two the middle layer and button one controls the foreground. Check out the video and you´ll understand what I mean. If you have ChromaDepth glasses, put them on to see the 3d effect.
The Arduino sends the sensor data and the button states wirelessly via bluetooth to my computer. The information is parsed in Max/MSP, which in turn sends the data as OSC packets to Animata (my favourite software at the moment). Animata then animates everything in real-time and handles the hiding/revealing of different layers.
If you are interested, I have uploaded the Arduino and Max 5 source codes and also the Animata scene. It´s all very specific to my setup, but someone might find it useful. Download the source.
Gather around children, the multitouch adventures continue. Today we will hear the story of The Acrylic Screen and 112 Little LEDs.
I decided to go for a 4:3 format for my screen and bought a 10 x 820 x 620 mm acrylic screen from Foiltek. Acrylic that size cost me around 60 euros. Couldn’t find any place cheaper here in Finland. The edges of the acrylic weren’t clear so I sanded them with sandpaper. I started with 180 grit paper and worked my way up to 1000 grit paper. Then I finished the edges with some metal polish. They should be clear enough now. Here’s my screen.
In order for the FTIR tracking to work, you need a lot of LEDs that shine the IR light inside the acrylic screen. So basically you need too make LED strips that will be placed on the edges of the acrylic. Here’s a handy calculator for helping you design your LED array.
I decided to save a lot of time, by ordering the circuit boards for the LEDs from dshop.ch. Each of the boards will hold 2 x 7 LEDs and 2 x 15 ohm resistors I got a bunch of the boards with resistors already mounted, but not the LEDs. I ordered my LEDs from eBay. 120 for $48.
I’m using 4 of these boards on each of the longer sides of the acrylic. That’s 112 LEDs in total. This might be a little overkill, but. We’ll see once I get a power source for the strips and I can test it properly.
Next time: How to hack a webcam to see only IR light.
