animation and code
I unfortunately had to leave town right before the show but thankfully Johnny Quinn Alston (my Dear Mr. Calatrava partner) and Ari Joseph (of Tapper fame) represented me at the show.
Here are some pictures of my projects, taken by David Steele Overholt. Check out the complete set for many more!
The Winslanirian is an instrument designed and built by Winsow Porter and myself. The original idea was to build a stringed addition to a drum set that could be hit to make the open-tuned strings resonate. This evolved into its current table-top form, which is based on prepared guitars, particularly Yuri Landman’s Moonlander.
If you’re in New York on the 17-18 of December, make sure to come to the ITP Winter Show. I will have three projects on display: Dear Mr. Calatrava, Louie’s Soul-Sucking Mirror and the Winslanirian.
ITP Winter Show 2008
Dec. 17th & 18th from 5pm to 9pm
@ 721 Broadway, 4th Fl
Forget-Me-Not is a system of small devices you can use to make sure you never leave anything of yours behind again.
Just attach one of the smaller units to an item you are prone to forgetting, like your keys or your umbrella, and keep the larger unit in an item you are likely not to forget, like your bag. If they ever get separated, your bag will scream out at you to remind you to go find your keys.
activityPixels is a site-specific installation for ITP that measures the amount of activity in the lounge and displays it as a set of two projections on the windows.
A camera captures a live feed of the student lounge and sends it to the computer, which performs a frame differencing algorithm to measure the amount of activity in the room. The resulting image is highly pixelized, and projected on one of the windows. The second projection is a pre-recorded video, also highly pixelized, which changes depending on the amount of activity. We see a person studying when there is hardly any movement, people walking and talking when there is little movement, and people dancing when the amount of movement is high.
By Elie Zananiri and Kim Thompson.
Special thanks go out to our actors Eddie, Amanda, John, Winslow, and Matt.
On top of the reflected image, the mirror also displays Louie’s trapped soul blended with an echo of what the camera sees. The camera only records when someone is in front of the mirror, so your soul stays trapped in the mirror until someone else looks at it and takes your place. The computer-generated image is warped using vector fields based on the activity captured by the camera. The code is written in C++/openFrameworks, and is based of the vector field examples given for the Making Things Move class at Parson’s.
The set-up is very simple. It’ just a framed acrylic see-through mirror mounted on an LCD screen. I originally used a projection and it worked quite well, but the problem was that the mirror would hang in the middle of the room. The trick with a projector is to use a short-throw model (like the LED projectors we have on the floor) and to cover the back of the mirror with a piece of vellum paper.
The idea behind this is very simple. The mirror will not be a real mirror, but either an LCD monitor or a back projection with a tiny concealed camera mounted on top of it. I would put a frame around it, and maybe add a piece of plexiglass in front of the screen to make it look like a mirror.
When a person passes in front of the camera, a vector field will be generated based on his/her motion, which will then be used to warp the image in the mirror. When the application starts, the image will be Louie freaking out inside the mirror, but as people pass in front of it, what the camera sees will gradually replace him on screen.
A mockup built in response to Santiago Calatrava’s proposed 80 South Street project.
http://www.vimeo.com/2083700
Continue reading ‘Dear Mr. Calatrava, In Light of the Recent Real Estate Crisis’
There once was a man named Louie who lived in Cobble Hill and worked at the ticket booth of the New York Transit Museum. He seemed like an ordinary Joe Six-Pack, but he was actually one of the most neurotic people out there. Louie always worried about people talking about him behind his back, and this would unfortunately lead to very embarrassing situations causing people to talk about him behind his back. For example, he would often sneak up on people quietly whispering to each other at the museum and try to spy on their conversations. Louie was obviously not trained in stealth operations and would always be discovered, at which point he would panic and scream obscenities at the museum’s patrons before running away and hiding under the desk of his ticket booth.
Continue reading ‘Louie’s Soul-Sucking Mirror’
We finished working on the Tapper gloves, and although there is still aesthetic work to be done, this version is complete functionality-wise.
Tapper now outputs a MIDI signal instead of the custom protocol we were previously using. This means that it won’t work anymore with the Processing sequencer we had built, but that it works with most audio production apps available, such as Live, GarageBand, or Reason. Tapper sends a NOTE ON signal when an FSR is pressed, an AFTERTOUCH as long as the FSR is still pressed, and a NOTE OFF when the FSR is released. This makes the response much more natural as we don’t get repeated notes when the FSR remains pressed and we can change the velocity of a note by pressing harder or softer.
http://www.vimeo.com/2033497
