Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Smartly back (day 306)

Well, the blog wagon and I have become separated it seems.  Always better to just hop back on like nothing happened.

After coming back from the residency I had to prepare a talk for Smart Graphics.  I had been thinking about it for months and had a working title ("Mobs and Choirs") but needed to spend some uninterrupted hours taking notes and figuring out a structure.   This, and answering email, exhausted all the writing energy I had, hence the neglected blog.

The Smart Graphics conference itself was wonderful.  There were about 50 people that attended from around the world: Japan, Spain, Korea, Australia, UK, US, and probably other places I'm forgetting.  All were, appropriately, smart.  And all were delightful.  The sessions were interesting and had enough time in between to foster discussion.  It included a great art exhibit/performance night which really rounded out the technical papers. It was perhaps the best conference I've been to.  This and Interactive Futures are a close tie.  But the setting of Smart Graphics  (Banff, AB) tips it over to 'best' I think.  I didn't expect to feel so nostalgic for the place but there it was brought on by the smells, the trails, the familiar haunts.  I may be going back in August for Interactive Screen.  I wonder if the nostalgia will be dampened by then.

Some highlights from the conference:
  • John Bowers keynote - a wonderful stroll through a free mind's creations.  I had the delight of having many conversations with John, each one more entertaining than the next.  I'll forever be making up new units of measurements in my head now.  The best one he had was the 'Sting' which is a unit measuring how long you would walk to press a button that would discreetly get rid of a person you don't like.  Named according to the subject of its standardized unit.  I would call mine the 'Bono'. 
  • Tracy Hammond, Manoj Prasad, Daniel Dixon - Art101, a tool to teach drawing.  At first I found the very idea of this tool offensive but after seeing it in action and understanding where they were coming from (a way into drawing, as opposed to a replacement for free sketching), I started to appreciate the work.  They had many people try it and held a contest at the end (I was half the jury!).  It was really interesting to see what people had managed to draw.
  • Ji-Sun Kim, Denis Gracanin, Kresimir Matkovic, Francis Quek - Finger Walking as a means to navigate through virtual space.  An interesting approach that looks like fun.
  • Tom Schofield - Sticking point, a visualization of the word frequency in the world's constitutions, specifically sections pertaining to human rights.  Really interesting information emerges out of this infographic.  He is currently working on an interactive version.  The one he showed was a large print (3mx1m).
  • Jeffrey Ventrella - all around interesting person.  Lots of little sketches on his web site that are worth spending time with.  The work he showed was self-portraits built from a genetic algorithm based on the mandelbrot set.
  • Luca Chittaro , Lucio Ieronutti , Roberto Ranon - VEX-CMS a tool that helps curators built virtual gallery tours.
  • Robyn Taylor, Guy Schofield, John Shearer, Pierre Boulanger, Jayne Wallace, Patrick Olivier - Humanaquarium.  Interactive box with live musicians and projection.  Touching the box changes the effects put on the voice of the singer.  Was great to see it live!
  • Qiong Wu, Maryia Kazakevich, Robyn Taylor, Pierre Boulanger, Janice Annett - Trickster at the Intersection, an interactive virtual reality piece that ran in the CAVE at Banff.  The trickster was a figure in a fantastical garden which mimicked the movements of anyone entering the CAVE.   Extremely effective at generating playfulness.   We found out later in the evening that the trickster was a real person who was observing in another room trough a webcam link.  She was motion captured as she mimicked the movements, and the data was used to drive the movements of the virtual trickster. 
  • Youngmi Kim, Jongsoo Choi - Stroking a Cymbidium, a gorgeous interactive piece where stroking a Cymbidium (a plant) produces a drawing on screen.  Unfortunately the piece got damaged during shipping so wasn't actually working during the conference but I mention it here because the documentation they showed was amazing.
  • Greg Pintilie, Peter Heppel , Janet Echelman - An interactive tool for Janet Echelman to build her net sculptures!
  • Roberto Theron , Laura Casares - visualization of basketball game and stats.  I mention this here not so much because I found the topic interesting but because of the generated images he showed were beautiful.
  • Kairi Mashio, Kenichi Yoshida, Shigeo Takahashi, Masato Okada - mixing of camera views in one image (cubist style).  I found the results really intriguing.  Would be interesting to push this to its limits and see what can be generated.  Unfortunately I couldn't find any images to link to.  Hopefully the publication makes it online.
  • Ben Clayton - wonderful organizer with the BNMI.  Cheerful, funny, talented, and interesting.  He didn't present but he deserves a big honourable mention.
As you can tell by the number of highlights it's really hard to pick them out.  Just one of those moments where you're surrounded by greatness and have no idea how it happened.

Going back home was a bit sad but life goes on.  The Centre of Stereoscopic 3D needs building and this is the bulk of what I did when I got back.  Now I'm off on vacation for the next 3 weeks.  First to Bainbridge and then the Okanagan to pick some fruit.

bacterial update:  This is the season of fresh fruit and I've been making smoothies with my kombucha.  The best so far is the rose pu-erh kombucha with strawberries and mango, sweetened with a bit of steevia.  It is so delicious and fresh.  I start my meal with it and it's easily followed by a kale/beet/asparagus salad.

A song for this post.

    Monday, June 14, 2010

    Massaged nutrients (day 290)

    Dr. Fuhrman says Kale, Watercress, Collard/Mustard/Turnip greens are the most nutrient dense foods and we should be eating them more.  He put cheese and butter at the bottom of the list, along with...doughnuts!?  That was depressing.   While in Montreal I was mentioning to Leila how Kale may be nutritious but it's a bit hard to eat -- lots of chewing and the texture not so great.   She said "massage it!"  Massage it?  I googled it.  Sure enough massaging is an accepted way of tenderizing a tough green.  And it's fun.  Just add a bit of oil and salt to the cut and de-stemmed greens and massage away for 3-4 minutes.  It gets really green and some brine is released.  If you let it sit for a half hour afterward, it gets even more tenderized.  I adapted a kale and root vegetable recipe found by the google search, to match what my mom had in her kitchen.  It was the best kale salad I've ever had.  I've made it twice since then.  Dr. Fuhrman also says the salad should be the main meal.  This salad makes that a pleasure.

    A song for this post.

    Sunday, June 13, 2010

    Resident home (day 289)

    The last day of the residency was June 9th. We toured the NFB StereoLab in the morning. They have a great setup with many passive polarized projection systems matched with SANDDE 3D drawing stations. That week they also happened to be testing out the Panasonic twin lens 3D camera. The Director of Photography didn't give it great marks mostly because of bad compression artifacts and poor performance in low light. When I saw the footage I didn't think it was that bad. They were just starting to work with it and it was a pre-production model so it is quite possible their opinion will change. But for $22,000 the expectations are high.
    In the afternoon, Valerie Walker of Studio XX interviewed Leila and I for her radio show. She is a skilled interviewer and it was great to talk with her about the project. The interview will air shortly. I'll post a link as soon as it does.
    The rest of the afternoon and early evening, we packed up the studio and transferred files.  We ended the day at Mochica, a Peruvian restaurant on St-Denis.  Great food as always.  I will miss the easy access to delicious food, the warm nights, and the street level terraces.  Such great sounds.

    I finally got around to posting a partial documentation of the work done at Oboro. It doesn't include most of the sounds that we recorded, and that were used during the artist talk in a live mix. What it does show is a trio of lungs breathing at different rhythms, with distinct videos and breath sounds. The three breath sounds match the breathing rate. Anyway, here it is. I'll post more as it becomes available.


    lung trio from Maria Lantin on Vimeo.

    Bacterial Update:  It has been a while since I posted a bacterial update.  I was slightly worried about going away for almost three weeks but everything worked out fine.  I put the Kefir grains in a dormant state in the fridge with twice the amount of milk I would normally give them.  When I took them back out they recovered right away and I would say are going through a growth spurt.
    For the Kombucha I started a new brew about 6 days before I left and just assumed that the brew would be ruined when I got back but that the scoby would be fine.  Turns out the brew was fine, quite fine.  It was a batch I brewed with Pu-Erh tea and red rose buds.  You can really taste the roses (yum!). I just started a new brew today, Pu-Erh tea and Chrysanthemum flowers.

    A song for this post.

    Tuesday, June 08, 2010

    A few left (day 284)

    June 4 (day 9) -- 
    (written on June 5)

    The new build of the Touch was posted already!  I got the textures working and now we have many lungs with distinct videos.  The next step is to get them breathing at different rhythms.  I'm not exactly sure how I'll do this yet.  Right now the instancing is done at the group level (whole lungs) and the animations are on its components.   That separation may be an issue.

    We also got the communication going between the graphics and the sounds.  It was a thrilling start but it still needs work to sound good.

    We ate at L'Express and met Glen Lowry there before showing him the studio and our progress so far.  We ended the evening recording the Montreal night ride with the soundfield microphone.  Right at the end of recording a group of girls out for a bachelorette party wanted to be recorded.  It was a really kind of sweet and joyful encounter.

    June 7 (day 10)
    (written on June 8)

    This was the last day before the presentation the next day.  We prioritized the things we wanted to get done and all our priority lists were longer than humanly possible.  Nevertheless we set out to do the first things first and munched on cacao nibs to keep the momentum.

    My priority was to get the lungs breathing in sync with the breaths.  Zoe had isolated four examples of each person's breath (miles, leila, zoe, maria).  Unfortunately in the end I wasn't able to use Zoe's own breaths because they were too quiet.  I matched the other breaths with the lungs by stretching the animation keys to match the length of the breath clip.  I combined the animation transformations with those of the geometry instancing.   It all worked well except for the transparency of the lungs which, for various reasons I won't go into now, didn't follow the breath properly. 

    Thea kept working on the stereo videos.  Miles worked on foreground sounds and Zoe worked on background sounds.

    Dinner was a bit scattered because we had to get back to the studio quickly.  Miles and Jocelyn went to Schwartz.  Leila and I took out some sushi.

    June 8 (day 11)
    Everyone put finishing touches on their little bits and pieces.  Leila went out and shot some last minute urban video which I felt we needed to balance out the more natural shots.  We moved the whole project over to the big gallery space.  It looked much better there and had room for many people to sit, move around, listen, look.  The Oboro techs were so gracious and amazing to arrange to move the project.  It all went smoothly.

    In the end I didn't manage to do more than three pairs of lungs for the visuals.  One was mapped with a video of wind in the leaves, one with Montreal part and cityscape, and the other with pelicans swimming in the Bow river.  They each had their own rhythm.  To scale it to more than three lungs I'll have to redesign and offset the bad design choices of a sprint to deadline.

    Zoe had a really great background audio composition which played while Miles added some foreground sounds like laughing, uncertainty, like it/don't like it, humming, etc via OSC messaging.  It sounded a bit cacophonous at times but I think it worked well for a crowd feel.  The stabilizing breath sounds helped offset the chaos a bit.  I really enjoyed walking around to all the speakers and listening to the individual voices speak or hum, and the returning to the centre to hear it all together.

    Once again no pictures.  I am embarrassed by this.  The event was documented by others so I'll try to get some pictures from other sources.  Just before I archive the files tomorrow, I'll make a video of the lungs breathing.

    I'd say about 15-20 people came to the artist talk.  Lots of great questions and discussion afterward.

    We finished the day at an Afghan restaurant nearby.  Great food.

    A song for this post. (an unexpected nostalgic group favourite one evening)

    Thursday, June 03, 2010

    A few good lungs (day 279)

    June 2 (day 6)
    More recording in the studio.  It was a slow start with a discovery that all our previous recordings had been somehow faulty.  They didn't sound bad or anything, just inaccurate in the soundfield aspects.  A couple of hours later the problem had been located and we were able to record.  We had a list of sounds to individually record:
    • words and phrases of uncertainty
    • yawning
    • dialogue and gossip pronouns (I, you, we, us, together, they, them)
    • throat clearing
    • breathing
    • humming
    It took about a half hour to record per individual.   We then recorded group sounds like footwork on the wooden floor, skin rubbing, and Tibetan chimes and singing bowl performance.  We finished the day at a Portuguese Grill.  Yum.


    Miles in the recording booth.

    June 3 (day 7)
    A great day.  The new build of Derivative was posted and I was able to have multiple lungs breathing using geometry instancing.  It looks great.  The Macbook Pro I'm working with doesn't seem to have any problems dealing with the load so far.  I was so happy to see the multiple lungs breathing I forgot to take a screenshot or make a movie.  As I said enthrall is inversely proportional to documentation in my case.   At first I thought the multiple lungs looked kind of busy but when projected large the feeling was different.  We displayed them in conjunction with a collection of breathing sounds and it created a kind of reverent space.  I liked it a lot.

    We ended the day at Sala Rosa, where they have great food and a performance space upstairs.  After eating we took in a Vaudeville show by Les Filles Electrique upstairs.  And what a show it wasThey really made us feel believe all the tricks.  It became such a magical place by the end of the show. There were some great visuals and projections. In one they projected talking faces on someone's face. A surprising result of a morphing face. In another they had a box made out of semi-transparent scrims with someone inside. Very interesting 3D kind of effect when projected from either side.

    A seance right at the beginning of the show.

    June 4 (day 8)
    A somewhat unsatisfying day.  My goal for the day was to get varying videos playing in the instanced lungs.  I got close to a solution but ran into a slight hitch.  I was trying to fill a texture array that I could use in the shader for the lungs.  After struggling with how to do this, I posted to the forum and was delighted to get a response very quickly again!  How amazing that is.  The next build of Touch will include a quick and good way for me to fill my texture arrays.  It makes for a slow process but not one altogether unrewarding. 

    Meanwhile, Miles processed the audio samples we've been recording, getting them ready for automatic generation of soundscapes based on OSC messages that I'll be sending him.  Hopefully we get to that bit tomorrow. 

    Leila, Thea, and Zoe all went out to record stereo video with the new Canon Xacti cameras.  We'll take a look at the footage tomorrow.

    We also have some more time in the recording studio tomorrow afternoon.  Now that I write it all down, it may be that some of these things don't get done.  Who knows.  Getting more material at this stage is both great and daunting.

    We ended the day at a Lebanese restaurant called Daou.  Amazing food.

    A song for this post.