I’ve been working with the Wiimote to build another free gesture controller, this time based on led finger tracking. You can check a small post of development here
Again the N.I.P. crew was together at STEIM (Amsterdam). This time around we concentrated essentially on theoretical thinking about performing with new media. A very good exercise was to build some mind maps and find out about the different issues that each one of us is concerned about.
One word that sticked to my mind was “fragility”. Is fragility what makes us interested in performance per se? Knowing that the performer is expressing his own thoughts and ideas into an improvisational scenario and that it can all just go wrong.
Of course it is easy to point that it could simply go wrong (or be bad) because the performer is not good enough, but we must also consider that the digital system itself is prone to misbehavior. The digital media should, in theoretical terms, be immune to error or failure, since machines should always behave the same, with certainty to them. Thus it should be controllable by definition, which doesn’t really happen.
I think it doesn’t happen because we’ve connected two worlds: digital and biological. The variability of the biological environment is automatically mapped onto the digital system and thus it becomes much more evident to us, performers, that we live in an environment full of chaotic functions, very distant from the digital precision. This is very visible if you simply take any analog sensor and connect it to some kind of digitizing device. Any sensor has noise to it. The digital values jump up and down. Our biological environment does so too.
Regarding the performer side, this indeterminacy adds up to the fact that we are makers and performers. By building our own instruments we must then learn how to use them. This is already a big step. An even bigger step is learning something that doesn’t always behave equally. And that makes it interesting! If we ever got to the totally deterministic response, maybe even us, performers, would loose some interest into exploring this media’s “experimental possibilities”.
But that leads to other issues, namely one that really strikes me as very important: Who is restricting who? (if the word “restriction” is applicable). Are we controlling machines and making them the instruments of our precise vocabulary or are they just restricting our creativity, blurring our expression?
Are we adapting to the machine’s behavior or is it adapted and designed around our own purposes?
These are very basic questions which I’m sure many of the researchers of this field have already addressed, but it is very good to see some of this discussion emerge in our own group.
We’ll keep commenting on these. Soon Teresa will have our mindmaps freshly distributed. I need to take another look at those! 
Some food for thought:
My dear Nippers,
sorry to disappear again, but I can’t manage to travel so much and to be loyal to my NIP friends
Just back from eARTS Festival in Shanghai, it was great!
www.shearts.org/earts/english/node59/node62/index.html
www.aec.at/shanghai_earts07/en/index.asp
As it was great in Lisbon! working with all of you … (love to see some pictures of what we did over there
As I’m not going to be with you for our meeting in Amsterdam in December 
I’m writing down my upcoming exhibitions’ schedule for 2007. Maybe some of you is around:
16-18 November: CYNETart_07encounter, TMA Trans-Media Akademie Hellerau, Dresden (Germany) http://body-bytes.de
22-25 November: STRP Festival, Klokgebouw, Eindhoven (the Netherlands) www.strp.nl
1-9 December: Florence Biennale, Fortezza da Basso, Florence (Italy) www.florencebiennale.org/indexeng.html
14-22 December: La scène dans tout ses états. [ars]numerica, Montbéliard (France) www.ars-numerica.net
In the meanwhile, working on my Gynoid (from Greek gyne - woman; artificial female), and its historical categorizations…
Pygmalion and Galatea, Jean-Leon Gerome (1890)
Pygmalion, Giulio Bargellini (1896)
Pygmalion (in Ovid’s Metamorphoses) is a sculptor who falls in love with a statue he has made. A clay statue coming to life …
Beautiful!
I’ll keep in touch mostly by emails for organization issues …
a big kiss
Sonia
This is a self sufficient Arduino board, which is powered by harnessing solar power and using a 9V rechargeable battery. It is perfect for anyone who is interested in doing Arduino projects that do not require a computer or any power supply. You can take this to the most remote places for any project.
http://www.instructables.com/id/Self-Sufficient-Arduino-Board/
Cheers
Ivan
The Arduino team in Italy has just launched a blog for thoughts, news, and discussion with the Arduino team. This is a nice way to keep informed about new stuff. For you that don’t know arduino, this is basically an open-source platform for electronics development. It’s pretty easy and accessible.
Cheers
Ivan
http://musicthing.blogspot.com/2007/07/tom-from-bugbrand-reclines-in-his.html
Man, you do look pretty cool with the lab coat on!
Cheers
Ivan
Some home brewed electronics for sound devices (0’s and 1’s, Tom!):-)
http://milkcrate.com.au/_other/sea-moss/
Index
Digital Logic
Binary Numbers
1’s and 0’s and Electricity
Logic Chips
40106
4040
4051
Sound Devices
Basic Equipment List
Oscillator
Arpeggiator
Sequencer
Amplitude Envelope Generator
Sequencer with Amplitude Envelope
Eight Stage One-bit Custom Waveform Generator
Eight Stage Custom Waveform Generator
hello and greetings from lisbon. things have been busy since we left amesterdam, a couple of weeks ago. i’d like to post the wonderful time at steim. and also some followup on how the workshops relate to my work, and where to now. this post will wander a bit around the wirelessness of it all, about physical wireless controllers and camera invisible interfaces.
steim is the analog resource haven, where a wonderful crew engages all aspects surrounding creation of custom controllers/synths. it has cables, boxes, tables filled with everything useful to electronics all around. and some of the best people handling all of that.
what most caught my attention were wireless controllers being develloped. Michel Waisvisz’s hands are a super example of that. whatt power! in the diy, joysticks, wireless joysticks, and how they can be hacked to almost any kind of analog 5v sensor, how you can boost the signal to provide bigger range using a bit more voltage on the sender, like cell-phone batteries, which is great! joysticks are great ways to pass on data around, and can be very useful for theater/dance, for instance, with camera tracking going on too. they can be invisible triggers in a scene where the camera is not precise enough, or take advantage of a physical situation, like in Joergens’ example, a football wired with accelerometers hacked into a wireless joystick sender.
this gave me a lot of ideas to build wireless controls as instruments that musicians can integrate very well. last week i was programming and performing with parque in festival escrita na paisagem, where i devised the sound->spatializing->lights program on two of three different devices that were played. they were ‘os’ and ‘peça de embalar’ (lullaby piece). the third one is a pendular suspended speaker called ‘pêndulo’.
‘os’ is a piece where 4 musicians play the mirrors suspended, and has microphones attached to each man. these 4(5 with the saxophone) sounds are spatialized in the quad audio setup we had at that piece’s space. there is a graphical video-projection that pinpoints where the sound sources are, and how loud they are. the motion of the spating goes from circular runs to smooth splines traversing space at sound speed, or rapid chance operations.
as interfaces, the macro-parameters were controlled by me in a behringer midi controller and also the computer, but the musicians controlled how fast the sound travelled in the path on some programs, or controlled the light programs and the lights according to each of their sound, on each side of ‘peça de embalar’ through midi pedals, with very very long chords. a wireless joystick can make the same task and even better, you can perform your instrument, and at the same time, control algorithms that use the sound as input and also some accelerometers attached to your hand, for instance. these kinds of ideas spurred at steim. and very likely to develop more as interfaces.
processing live sound is something i have been doing in my installation series ’struct’, where microphones gather site-specific ambiances of galleries or other spaces, and the sounds are continuously recorded into audio buffers that are manipulated by the computer in the first 4 versions, by the sound presence of the user in the 5th version, and by the video presence of people in space in the 6th version ’struct_5′
my interest with controllers now is invisible controllers, mostly camera based tracking, and how one or more people can interact with a digital work. i have also built a different camera approach in 747.3, where a user’s position of arms, and the distance from hand to hand control the heading and the speed of traveling across a digital abstract terrain. here is an image of the object i coded in jitter for this work. one of the main problems/peculiarity of this type of interface is the lack of physical feedback, where the actions that you develop as a user have just a virtual counterpart, and no touch envolved at all. it has its upsides too. quite portable and lightweight. a lot of people enjoyed very much the immersion provided by my piece, and where physically exhausted mostly in the arms. but they relate they forget the real body and immerse themselves in the picture, having really fun runs of 15 to 30 minutes. sometimes it’s also a bit shaky if the conditions are not good. there’s a lot to take in as variable to be controlled in this. the lights have to be very stable, the camera must be blind to visible light, it interferes too much. and finally, the ir lightining must be well made to get good difference images and no shadows interfering. it can also be quite interesting to get different patterns of motion sculpting algorithms of image and sound. like mobs of people or single users specific motion.
future posts will wonder a bit in detail about the topics i mentionned in the works above: creating immersive audio-visual environments, intermedia instruments and camera tracking interaction, all coming around in a new simple work i am developing to be shown as an installation in the lisbon nip workshops.
Some of us discussed solar power and the possibilities behind it. Gizmodo is mostly commercial info on gadgets but they have a flag just for solar power things. There’s a couple of mats there…
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/solar/
I.
I’m playing the airstick tonight at the Lisbon Architecture Trienal.
It’s a nice event. Here are some links (sorry, some stuff is portuguese only but still there are always nice images…):
http://trienaldelisboa.sapo.pt/
http://trienal.blogs.sapo.pt/
Cheers
Ivan
