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.
Showing posts with label breathio. Show all posts
Showing posts with label breathio. Show all posts
Sunday, June 13, 2010
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)
(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:
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 was. They 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.
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.
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
 | 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 was. They 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.
Saturday, May 29, 2010
Happier Here (day 274)
Getting here may have been work but being here does not feel like work at all. I find myself out of my usual context into another one that is strangely familiar. The language is familiar, people's faces are familiar, the way people move is familiar. The parts of my body that remember Quebec awaken and start dancing with each other again. It's a bit awkward at times but the dance is getting more limber and smooth. I look around and it seems that people are happier here. I said as much to Leila and she said "maybe you're the one that's happier here". Indeed, smiling people see other smiling people. I admit that being away from a steady flow of emails and being able to concentrate on production and creative work is like a summer morning after a fresh rain.
I've been trying to remember to document the experience. Documenting is not something that comes naturally to me and if I'm really enthralled by something I usually forget to document. Likewise, failed experiments rarely get any kind of treatment. Still, here is a spotty photo doc of some of the activities we've done so far. I've had to at least get this much written down before the details are forgotten.
May 25th (day 1)
We spent the day getting settled and learning about the soundfield ambisonic microphone. We had plans to take the mic to a bird sanctuary in the evening but it ended up being too windy and the Vancouver part of the team was silently grateful for this reprieve. It had already been a long day. Leila took me to The Liverpool House in St-Henri for dinner. Amazing dinner. Amazing dessert.
May 26th (day 2)
A very hot day. We spent the late morning and early afternoon recording birds (and flowing water) at the bird sanctuary in LaChine, by the rapids. A great time was had by all. When we got back we heard some of the samples in the recording/listening studio. There was some pretty great footage in there. We then made plans to go see Hubble 3D at the Imax but these plans were thwarted because the late show was in French and it was better for Miles to see it in English. We ended up at Leila's for an impromptu homemade dinner. Extreme goodness. We finished the meal at an ice cream parlour near her place where we ran into Lynn Hughes and Alain Thibault. Walking back to her place, we stopped and got a dozen St-Viateur bagels for the next day's lunch.
May 27th (day 3)
Today we recorded many sounds including:
We tried again to make it to the Hubble 3D show but last minute tasks got in the way. We made it an early night and I had dinner with my mom. Sorry, not pics. It's too bad because there were some pretty hilarious moments in there. I'll post some sounds when I have them.
May 28th (day 4)
While Leila was wrangling camera purchases at Concordia, Miles and I parallel-played on our respective computers. He played with speaker setups and sounds, and I played with lung graphics. Just as I was thinking of a lunch break around 2pm, Chantal came in and said a curator from Glasgow would be touring through at about 2:30pm. Miles said we should still have a quick lunch. As we were eating lunch Leila arrived and we told her about the curator. We decided to get something ready to show. Much like the impromptu meal of the day before, Miles and I took the ingredients we had on hand and put something together that wasn't bad at all. The previous day's recordings were very interesting when mixed with images of the lungs breathing and mapped with video. I think we surprised ourselves and it was a wonderful ramp into another stage of the residency.
That afternoon I tried the Sonic Bed by Kaffe Matthews. It's a bed surrounded by speakers which when laid upon gives a kind of sonic massage both auditory and bodily. Very interesting. There is currently a call out for compositions for the bed.
In the evening we went to a Gregorian Chant performance by the Ensemble Scholastiques Neumatiques. It was amazing. We finished the evening at an informal gathering of people performing noise music at which Zoe was performing.
A song for this post.
I've been trying to remember to document the experience. Documenting is not something that comes naturally to me and if I'm really enthralled by something I usually forget to document. Likewise, failed experiments rarely get any kind of treatment. Still, here is a spotty photo doc of some of the activities we've done so far. I've had to at least get this much written down before the details are forgotten.
May 25th (day 1)
We spent the day getting settled and learning about the soundfield ambisonic microphone. We had plans to take the mic to a bird sanctuary in the evening but it ended up being too windy and the Vancouver part of the team was silently grateful for this reprieve. It had already been a long day. Leila took me to The Liverpool House in St-Henri for dinner. Amazing dinner. Amazing dessert.
 | A sculpture I came across on my first walk towards Oboro from the Metro station. It was in front of a very regular Montreal walk-up. I wondered how it came to be. ← |
| Dessert at The Liverpool House in St-Henri. → |  |
May 26th (day 2)
A very hot day. We spent the late morning and early afternoon recording birds (and flowing water) at the bird sanctuary in LaChine, by the rapids. A great time was had by all. When we got back we heard some of the samples in the recording/listening studio. There was some pretty great footage in there. We then made plans to go see Hubble 3D at the Imax but these plans were thwarted because the late show was in French and it was better for Miles to see it in English. We ended up at Leila's for an impromptu homemade dinner. Extreme goodness. We finished the meal at an ice cream parlour near her place where we ran into Lynn Hughes and Alain Thibault. Walking back to her place, we stopped and got a dozen St-Viateur bagels for the next day's lunch.
 | Red-winged black bird at the sanctuary. ← |
| Zoe and Miles recording. → |  |
 | Zoe, Miles, and Stephane learning about soundfield workflow. ← |
| Leila with the plated food. We ate outside on her deck. Menu was Stuffed Portobello mushroom with blue cheese, basil and tomato; Grilled asparagus with reduced balsamic; Tomato cucumber salad with Tzatziki; Gin&Tonic with Basil and Mango. → |  |
Today we recorded many sounds including:
- group laughter
- individual laughter
- banter
- sounds of uncertainty
- breathing, slow and fast
- random phonemes
- singing bowl, tibetan bells
- "I like it", "I don't like it" both normal tone and whisper
We tried again to make it to the Hubble 3D show but last minute tasks got in the way. We made it an early night and I had dinner with my mom. Sorry, not pics. It's too bad because there were some pretty hilarious moments in there. I'll post some sounds when I have them.
May 28th (day 4)
While Leila was wrangling camera purchases at Concordia, Miles and I parallel-played on our respective computers. He played with speaker setups and sounds, and I played with lung graphics. Just as I was thinking of a lunch break around 2pm, Chantal came in and said a curator from Glasgow would be touring through at about 2:30pm. Miles said we should still have a quick lunch. As we were eating lunch Leila arrived and we told her about the curator. We decided to get something ready to show. Much like the impromptu meal of the day before, Miles and I took the ingredients we had on hand and put something together that wasn't bad at all. The previous day's recordings were very interesting when mixed with images of the lungs breathing and mapped with video. I think we surprised ourselves and it was a wonderful ramp into another stage of the residency.
That afternoon I tried the Sonic Bed by Kaffe Matthews. It's a bed surrounded by speakers which when laid upon gives a kind of sonic massage both auditory and bodily. Very interesting. There is currently a call out for compositions for the bed.
In the evening we went to a Gregorian Chant performance by the Ensemble Scholastiques Neumatiques. It was amazing. We finished the evening at an informal gathering of people performing noise music at which Zoe was performing.
 | Waiting for the sonic bed. It was popular. ← |
| Zoe performing in funky Montreal loft. → |  |
A song for this post.
Monday, May 03, 2010
Resounding sanity amidst frustration (day 248)
Leila tried using the Sony TG1s with the digi-dat remote but she said it was highly frustrating to have to wait for the moment where the initial sync is less than 1ms. It breaks all spontaneity and creates a lot of tension when trying to get a good shot. She was shooting a soccer game with 10 minute periods so fiddling with the cameras for 5-6 minutes was too frustrating to be worth it. She did get some footage but we didn't have time to look at it today. In any case, it looks like we'll have to find another solution, or other cameras that are better synced than the ones we have. We do have the Silicon Imaging cameras but are still waiting on the field recorder. Hopefully we'll have it soon and can use the setup during the residency. Time is getting tight but hope lives on.
We also tried to make the singing bowl resonate without being struck. Miles used a piezo vibrating at the same frequency as the bowl (~457 Hz). The results were interesting but not as successful as we'd hoped. The bowl would resonate a little bit at some specific spots but not to the point of giving the rich sound of stroking or striking the bowl. Miles will keep working at it. It's possible we could use a mix of vibrations or some kind of amplifier to create the effect we're seeking.
Lastly, today I came across this interview with Father Miguel D'Escoto, former President of the United Nations. I had never seen or heard him speak before. Sometimes the strength and sanity of older humans are awe-inspiring. Miguel D'Escoto has that awe-inspiring quality. I think there is a lot of truth in what he is saying about the way we name things to normalize them. We name wars and they become crusades. We name groups of people getting killed and we forget they were ever individuals. I also liked the way he talked about being unashamed to stand up for 'Mother Earth'. It is not us that are insane. We should care.
A song for this post.
We also tried to make the singing bowl resonate without being struck. Miles used a piezo vibrating at the same frequency as the bowl (~457 Hz). The results were interesting but not as successful as we'd hoped. The bowl would resonate a little bit at some specific spots but not to the point of giving the rich sound of stroking or striking the bowl. Miles will keep working at it. It's possible we could use a mix of vibrations or some kind of amplifier to create the effect we're seeking.
Lastly, today I came across this interview with Father Miguel D'Escoto, former President of the United Nations. I had never seen or heard him speak before. Sometimes the strength and sanity of older humans are awe-inspiring. Miguel D'Escoto has that awe-inspiring quality. I think there is a lot of truth in what he is saying about the way we name things to normalize them. We name wars and they become crusades. We name groups of people getting killed and we forget they were ever individuals. I also liked the way he talked about being unashamed to stand up for 'Mother Earth'. It is not us that are insane. We should care.
A song for this post.
Friday, April 30, 2010
Preview day and night (day 245)
Another day, another preview of things to come.
We spent the a good part of the afternoon working with the cameras and the remote again. After giving up on finding another set of cameras by going shopping locally, we decided to give our current setup another chance. We got as scientific as we could with imprecise tools and calculated the drift to be about .6ms per minute with a period of about 15 minutes. So after 15 minutes they get in sync again. Once they are in sync we have about 5 minutes to shoot before things are too far out of sync to be usable. This is an estimate and would depend on the speed of motion in the scene. So it's workable but certainly not amenable to spur of the moment shooting. Leila will test it out this weekend. In talking with Sean, he said that he's had the same issue with recording sound and video separately. The oscillators were just slightly out of sync so the sound and video didn't match up. Luckily with sound you can play around a bit and get things to match. Not so with video. We haven't found video editing software that will manipulate a sub-frame level. Changing the frame rate to be a fractional number would not work.
We spent the later afternoon brainstorming some ideas about Breath I/O. Here are the notes (not edited):
A song for this post.
We spent the a good part of the afternoon working with the cameras and the remote again. After giving up on finding another set of cameras by going shopping locally, we decided to give our current setup another chance. We got as scientific as we could with imprecise tools and calculated the drift to be about .6ms per minute with a period of about 15 minutes. So after 15 minutes they get in sync again. Once they are in sync we have about 5 minutes to shoot before things are too far out of sync to be usable. This is an estimate and would depend on the speed of motion in the scene. So it's workable but certainly not amenable to spur of the moment shooting. Leila will test it out this weekend. In talking with Sean, he said that he's had the same issue with recording sound and video separately. The oscillators were just slightly out of sync so the sound and video didn't match up. Luckily with sound you can play around a bit and get things to match. Not so with video. We haven't found video editing software that will manipulate a sub-frame level. Changing the frame rate to be a fractional number would not work.
We spent the later afternoon brainstorming some ideas about Breath I/O. Here are the notes (not edited):
Lungs jostling/bendingThe day ended with the Grad Show preview night. I toured about a third of the show before going home. I'll see the rest during the week when it's a bit less busy. It was great to see the MAA student work all in one place. The official opening is tomorrow night.
Moving around forming clusters, groups, fights, collaborations.
Number of lungs - individual to couple to quartet to nine to multitude (varying)
Environment - rain, wind, snow, vidéo windows in bg
Internal video associated with personal internal space. External video associated with public videos.
When lungs touch each other could generate traces
External videos can affect internal videos (a mixture)
Lines in space delineating groups and boundaries
Breathing patterns affecting video speed and direction
Video particles or atmospheric around the lungs maybe more visible when they are actively breathing. Somehow visualizing sharing of the same air.
Sometimes lungs not having video (tuning out?)
Death/decay (line drawing?)
Events like a bird flying through. Each set of lungs associated with an event that can get triggered. Internal event or external event.
Provoke tenderness in viewer. A sense of protecting.
Resonance, sound, visual resonance, synching, harmony/disharmony, oscillations that are sometimes in sync, oscillations that affect each other. Rhythms, ebbs and flows, events affect the patterns.
A song for this post.
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Oscillating and Resonating (day 243)
Leila and I spent the afternoon testing the LANC twin remote with the Sony TG1 cameras, then shopping for other cameras that would work better than the TG1s. It was a futile attempt. In the end we ended up with a nice assortment of chocolate from Xoxolat, and a singing bowl from Maiwa. Not a bad day altogether.
So what about the LANC twin remote. It works as advertised but our TG1 cameras have mismatched oscillators. We have yet to do the precise calculation but it's somewhere around 1ms per minute. This is a lot. And it's hard to get them to be in sync at startup. On average it seemed to take about 15 power ups to get a sync better than 4ms. We may try to make the LANC 3D Master which is capable of manipulating the frame rate to compensate for the oscillator mismatch. The 3D Master has an open source hardware design. I have no idea if the TG1 are even capable of responding to the frame rate manipulation of the 3D Master. There doesn't seem to be any way to find out beside making the remote and checking.
We went to the Sony store to see if there would be other cameras that we could test for a match. No luck there. The cameras we were interested in either had a design flaw which prevented the physical connection of the remote, or weren't available at the store, or weren't able to be taken out of the box for testing. We looked at Canon cameras too but none seemed to have a LANC connection. Maybe their higher end cameras have this. So we are a bit stuck. We could go higher end but the higher end cameras tend to be bigger so cannot have a inter-axial distance of human scale.
The singing bowl will be used to generate sounds and perhaps be part of the interface for the Breath I/O work. We will go to Long & McQuade tomorrow and see if we find a tuning fork that will resonate with the bowl. The bowl resonates at B Flat which a quick search reveals could be heart, crown, or solar plexus chakra. There is an intriguing NPR report about B Flat which claims it can stimulate alligators to bellow, and is the note hummed by black holes (yes, black holes). Guess that means black holes make alligators bellow. There's also a nice bit in there about a room that resonates at B Flat (a room mode). This site has an interactive orchestra piece in B Flat. There doesn't seem to be any agreements on a mapping between chakras and tones which makes sense I suppose. Anyway, B Flat sounds good for now.
A song for this post.
So what about the LANC twin remote. It works as advertised but our TG1 cameras have mismatched oscillators. We have yet to do the precise calculation but it's somewhere around 1ms per minute. This is a lot. And it's hard to get them to be in sync at startup. On average it seemed to take about 15 power ups to get a sync better than 4ms. We may try to make the LANC 3D Master which is capable of manipulating the frame rate to compensate for the oscillator mismatch. The 3D Master has an open source hardware design. I have no idea if the TG1 are even capable of responding to the frame rate manipulation of the 3D Master. There doesn't seem to be any way to find out beside making the remote and checking.
We went to the Sony store to see if there would be other cameras that we could test for a match. No luck there. The cameras we were interested in either had a design flaw which prevented the physical connection of the remote, or weren't available at the store, or weren't able to be taken out of the box for testing. We looked at Canon cameras too but none seemed to have a LANC connection. Maybe their higher end cameras have this. So we are a bit stuck. We could go higher end but the higher end cameras tend to be bigger so cannot have a inter-axial distance of human scale.
The singing bowl will be used to generate sounds and perhaps be part of the interface for the Breath I/O work. We will go to Long & McQuade tomorrow and see if we find a tuning fork that will resonate with the bowl. The bowl resonates at B Flat which a quick search reveals could be heart, crown, or solar plexus chakra. There is an intriguing NPR report about B Flat which claims it can stimulate alligators to bellow, and is the note hummed by black holes (yes, black holes). Guess that means black holes make alligators bellow. There's also a nice bit in there about a room that resonates at B Flat (a room mode). This site has an interactive orchestra piece in B Flat. There doesn't seem to be any agreements on a mapping between chakras and tones which makes sense I suppose. Anyway, B Flat sounds good for now.
A song for this post.
Friday, April 23, 2010
Life Support (day 238)
I took a breather today. After attending the Masters of Digital Media graduation ceremony (which was awesome), I arrived home around 4pm and decided to make some tea, eat some chocolate from chocolate arts, and spend some time with a book that I've been meaning to re-open: "The Art of Projection" edited by Stan Douglas and Christopher Eamon. A few pages in I started to get some ideas about the screenshots and snapshots I've been collecting. I started to think of what it feels like to be observed by my own computer. At the beginning I was self-conscious, then I became annoyed, then oblivious, then embarrassed, then impatient. As the shots pile up, I've become somewhat anxious about what the end game is. What will I do with all these? Steve asks me every now and then. I've always replied that I didn't know. Today I had an idea. The sketch is below. A LCD screen shows a video of the screenshots, and the top of the screen where a camera would usually be, a miniature projector projects the portrait snapshots onto a suspended concave structure (textured material, probably paper clay). In between the two, embedded in a supporting plinth is an organ-like inflatable structure that 'breathes' (mechanics and electronics inside the plinth). The sound is similar to a life support respirator in a hospital. I'm not clear on the form of the breathing structure. Probably amorphous. I'd like it to be uncanny, like an organ. With an affect similar to the organic game pod in Cronenberg's Existenz.
A song (clip) for this post.
A song (clip) for this post.
Friday, December 11, 2009
What does online feel like (day 105)
I had an interesting discussion with Miles today about what the feeling of being online. I've been thinking about this a lot lately because of my self-surveillance project that snaps a picture of my desktop every 15 minutes on all 3 of my screens if they are active (and sometimes my iPhone too, though that is not automatic). I've now collected close to 500 screenshots and looking at them in a fast (10 screenshots/second) sequence it doesn't even get close to the feeling of being online. I'm going to investigate varying the duration of each frame by random amounts and see how that changes things. I've added a bit of blur to the movie for privacy but here is what the movie for one my screens looks like for now:
226 screenshots (test) from Maria Lantin on Vimeo.
The feeling of being online is hard to describe. It's not embodied but it can feel vast and rich. It sometimes feels social but sometimes anxious. Much of my time is spent processing the information that is coming at me (the social network as recommendation engine). Making decisions about this information seems to be the source of a low grade anxiety stemming from a reluctance to spend time and the fear of missing out (FOMO). There are moments of relaxation into a time commitment such as watching a show, scanning family albums, or programming an application. There are quick smiles like interesting pictures in twitter. There are lots of interruptions, little blips and popups. Email anxiety is never far but seems to ebb and flow depending on time of day and how much the physical world needs my attention. There is a both a satisfaction to answering email and an anxiety about the conversation progressing too quickly from there. There are moments of boredom when there is not enough will to separate from the online but not enough interest to continue (the feed has slowed and the stand-bys are exhausted). There is definitely a feeling of being in the flow of information but it is usually interrupted by having to click or type which brings me back to the screen. A bit like being into a novel and someone asking you a question about work.
The more I think about it the more the rhythm seems to be important. I'll see about adding different timings. I also thought about doing a character recognition scan which would give me a data set to maybe assign an emotional 'score' to an image (many of my screenshots are mostly text). Either way I'd like to play around with adding an emotional curve which can then be mapped the lung breathing pattern.
A song for this post.
226 screenshots (test) from Maria Lantin on Vimeo.
The feeling of being online is hard to describe. It's not embodied but it can feel vast and rich. It sometimes feels social but sometimes anxious. Much of my time is spent processing the information that is coming at me (the social network as recommendation engine). Making decisions about this information seems to be the source of a low grade anxiety stemming from a reluctance to spend time and the fear of missing out (FOMO). There are moments of relaxation into a time commitment such as watching a show, scanning family albums, or programming an application. There are quick smiles like interesting pictures in twitter. There are lots of interruptions, little blips and popups. Email anxiety is never far but seems to ebb and flow depending on time of day and how much the physical world needs my attention. There is a both a satisfaction to answering email and an anxiety about the conversation progressing too quickly from there. There are moments of boredom when there is not enough will to separate from the online but not enough interest to continue (the feed has slowed and the stand-bys are exhausted). There is definitely a feeling of being in the flow of information but it is usually interrupted by having to click or type which brings me back to the screen. A bit like being into a novel and someone asking you a question about work.
The more I think about it the more the rhythm seems to be important. I'll see about adding different timings. I also thought about doing a character recognition scan which would give me a data set to maybe assign an emotional 'score' to an image (many of my screenshots are mostly text). Either way I'd like to play around with adding an emotional curve which can then be mapped the lung breathing pattern.
A song for this post.
Monday, December 07, 2009
Inside/Outside awareness (day 101)
I created another test of the lungs breathing. The breathing pattern is the calm breathing that I had worked out with the egg. The videos are the same two videos of the pelicans and garden. One video plays on the lungs and the other on the trachea and bronchi. The lungs fade out at the top of the in breath and fade back in at the bottom of the out breath. The video slows down at the in breath and goes to normal speed at the out breath.
I was trying to emulate a feeling I have when I meditate of the out breath being a little anxious with only a slight pause at the top, and the out breath feeling more relaxed with an extended pause before the next in breath. In that pause there is lots of space and a feeling of being more aware of the outside. This is why I ended up with the fade in at the bottom of the out breath. I initially had tried it the other way (fade in at in breath) but it somehow didn't work.
The next step is to get the video to slowly come in to the trachea/bronchi as the breath comes in. I have to write a small shader to do this. I'm hoping to have some time tomorrow.
Here is a video. Unfortunately it's only 2 minutes long. It's really nice to keep breathing with the lungs. Very calming. Next time I'll make the video loop. It's too late right now to rectify that little oversight.
fade out lung test from Maria Lantin on Vimeo.
A song for this post.
I was trying to emulate a feeling I have when I meditate of the out breath being a little anxious with only a slight pause at the top, and the out breath feeling more relaxed with an extended pause before the next in breath. In that pause there is lots of space and a feeling of being more aware of the outside. This is why I ended up with the fade in at the bottom of the out breath. I initially had tried it the other way (fade in at in breath) but it somehow didn't work.
The next step is to get the video to slowly come in to the trachea/bronchi as the breath comes in. I have to write a small shader to do this. I'm hoping to have some time tomorrow.
Here is a video. Unfortunately it's only 2 minutes long. It's really nice to keep breathing with the lungs. Very calming. Next time I'll make the video loop. It's too late right now to rectify that little oversight.
fade out lung test from Maria Lantin on Vimeo.
A song for this post.
Wednesday, December 02, 2009
Breathe with the egg (day 96)
I've started to animate spheres stretched into egg shapes (as stand-ins for lungs). They breathe. I'm trying to simulate regular breath, calm breath, excited breath, anxious breath, and so on. So far I've got calm breath down I think. I'll post a video soon. It's an interesting process. I tweak the animation curves and breathe with the egg. I keep breathing with the egg and notice how I'm feeling. Sometimes I end up out of breath and feeling like I need to breathe more often or more deeply. Sometimes I feel I have to get up and do something. Sometimes I feel light-headed. Sometimes I even feel good. It's an interesting process.
Just looking at the eggs breathe makes me think that we might want to consider a more stylized model for the lungs. Not necessarily cartoony but maybe something with more personality. I'm not sure which would be more effective. Certainly the anatomical look of the current lungs gives a kind of visceral feeling. Something would be lost with a more drawn look. May be worth a try though.
A song for this post.
Just looking at the eggs breathe makes me think that we might want to consider a more stylized model for the lungs. Not necessarily cartoony but maybe something with more personality. I'm not sure which would be more effective. Certainly the anatomical look of the current lungs gives a kind of visceral feeling. Something would be lost with a more drawn look. May be worth a try though.
A song for this post.
Friday, November 27, 2009
Self-surveillance (day 91)
I just started taking a snapshot of my computer screen every 15 minutes. It's all automated on all three screens I typically use (mac laptop, PC laptop, PC desktop). It's actually fascinating to see the shots at the end of the day. How long I spent on something. The tidbits I read during the day. The videos I watched. The emails I wrote. Sometimes I don't remember having looked at a particular thing. It all goes by pretty quickly and somewhat compulsively. It would be neat to get a snapshot of my face as well...and to record my breathing pattern. For now, it's just screenshots. It's for the Breath I/O project. I'll collect hundreds of screenshots and make a quicktime to map into the environment and onto the lungs.
For those that are interested, it's pretty easy to set this up. It's easiest on a Mac because cron runs natively. All you have to do is issue the command "crontab -e" and edit the file that opens. I run the following script in mine:
Here is the command in the Scheduled Task:
A song for this post.
For those that are interested, it's pretty easy to set this up. It's easiest on a Mac because cron runs natively. All you have to do is issue the command "crontab -e" and edit the file that opens. I run the following script in mine:
#!/bin/bashOn a PC it's not as easy. I downloaded and installed the MiniCap application. Then I made a script in cygwin, again using bash. Then I made a batch file to run the bash script. Then I made a shortcut to the batch file so I could set it to run minimized (so it wouldn't pop up the svchost.exe window). Then I used Scheduled Tasks to make the script run every 15 minutes. Here is the bash script:
/usr/sbin/screencapture -x $(printf "/Users/mlantin/Pictures/screenshots/macscreen-%04d.png" $((`ls ~/Pictures/screenshots| grep -c ''`+1)))
#!/bin/bash
/cygdrive/d/Program\ Files/MiniCap/MiniCap.exe -capturedesktop -exit -save "$(cygpath -w $(printf "/home/mlantin/screenshots/desktopscreen-%04d.tiff" $((`ls /home/mlantin/screenshots | grep -c ""` + 1))))"
Here is the batch file (called takeashotdos.bat):
D:\cygwin\bin\bash.exe -l /home/mlantin/takeashot
exit
D:\cygwin\home\mlantin\takeashotdosshort.lnk
A song for this post.
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Infopong (day 79)
Informavore is a term that Frank Schirrmacher uses to describe our current propensity to ingest information. It's obviously a term that relates to information overload but without a negative connotation. I like the term and I'm certainly a fan of food and eating metaphors but I wonder if it's the correct metaphor. Obviously I'm biased here because of the Breath I/O project but it seems to me that a breathing metaphor may be a little more apt. I say this because the act of digesting is inherently a one way transformation (not to get too graphic) whereas the act of breathing is one of exchange and shared environment. This is an excerpt of a response from Daniel Kahneman to the Frank Schirrmacher interview on Edge.org
For sure neither metaphors go far enough in describing the affect of having a multitude of information feeds that we somehow process, pass on, and contribute to. There is something too crude with food, and too insubstantial with air. And both suffer from a certain amount of passivity. A better metaphor might be a game of pong with thousands of balls in play. But then we're back with the no-body problem.
It seems too that any metaphor should have a dual, a metaphor to describe the negative space of what's happening -- what is not felt. In the case of processing information, I feel this may have to do with space itself. A sense of the bigger context that comes with a moment of reflection.
A song for this post.
The interview vividly expresses the sense many of us are getting that when we are bathed in information (it is not really snippets of information, we need the metaphor of living in a liquid that is constantly changing in flavor and feel) we no longer know precisely what we have learned, nor do we know where our thoughts come from, or indeed whether the thoughts are our own or absorbed from the bath. The link with Bargh is also interesting, because John pushes the idea that we are driven from the outside and controlled by a multitude of cues of which we are only vaguely aware — we are bathing in primes.I think too that the metaphor of ingesting information implies the right of first refusal -- that we are not being force-fed. In reality, it's a combination. We can choose what information we take in by choosing our context (who/what we follow, who we friend, what we surf) but the information bits that are presented to us are not of our own choosing. For certain, this can be a great thing, rather like christmas morning when you get a particularly relevant tidbit you weren't expecting. But there are also many instances where our context may be chosen with a particular purpose in mind (shopping for food, for instance) but is usurped for another purpose (selling celebrity lifestyles or diet fads). So we are forced to hold our breath or just breathe and deal with the cough later.
For sure neither metaphors go far enough in describing the affect of having a multitude of information feeds that we somehow process, pass on, and contribute to. There is something too crude with food, and too insubstantial with air. And both suffer from a certain amount of passivity. A better metaphor might be a game of pong with thousands of balls in play. But then we're back with the no-body problem.
It seems too that any metaphor should have a dual, a metaphor to describe the negative space of what's happening -- what is not felt. In the case of processing information, I feel this may have to do with space itself. A sense of the bigger context that comes with a moment of reflection.
A song for this post.
Friday, November 13, 2009
Email Apnea (day 77)
An unexpected find today had be smiling all the way to the bus stop. I was listening to the Spark podcast of November 3rd (which is a great one btw, two longer interviews both on fascinating topics). Nora interviewed Linda Stone who coined the term 'email apnea' to refer to the lack or shallow breath that happens when we are anticipating the next email, tweet, or txt. This is wonderfully in line with the investigation in the Breath I/O project. This is an excerpt from our grant application:
A song for this post.
We have chosen to work with lungs as a visceral representation of personal interior space that is in a direct relationship of exchange with the environment. Even more directly than the heart, the lungs are a link to life and health. They offer the first clue to the quality of the surrounding environment, and breathing patterns are in a reciprocal relationship with emotional states. With these traits in mind, sounds and image streams are added to the environment of the lungs to mimic our modern situation of being surrounded and sometimes overwhelmed with images and sounds. Our relationship with media sources competing for our attention is often one of unconscious ingesting in a constant search for meaning, connection, diversion. This can be compared to shallow breathing where the body is forgotten and left to react to a starving mental state. Conversely, images and sounds may bring attention to the body by matching its rhythm or otherwise bringing the mind out of its usual patterns, triggering curiosity or calm attention. This can be compared to deep mindful breathing. Breath I/O intends to investigate the individual and collective act of apprehending media spaces as it relates to personal history and the physical body.I was so happy to hear/read Linda Stone talk about her breathing practice and how she noticed that when she sat down in front of the computer her breath became shallow and sometimes stopped. She has since studied the phenomenon and how it relates to the sympathetic nervous system. She has written an article about this in the Huffington Post and this is an excerpt from her interview with Nora Young (starts at about 28 minutes into the podcast).
...email apnea means...temporary cessation of breath or shallow breathing in front of any screen it could be a computer screen it could be a television set it could be a mobile device. ...with anticipation most mammals humans most certainly do a sharp intake of breathThe interview is really interesting and I highly recommend hearing it in its entirety. I completely relates to what she is saying and I would love to integrate some of the thinking into the Breath I/O project, particularly integrating some of the sounds of our devices that call us to immediate attention: the small chirp of TweetDeck, the trill of the iPhone when a new txt comes in, the ding dong of a new email. The moment where there is nothing happening and we wait for it like a kid anticipating the movement of a monster in the closet. Or we stop waiting for it and turn on the light and look everywhere. For me the sounds are much more evocative of what she is talking about than the actual content of the information that is constantly pouring in. It would be great to bring the affect of that anticipation into the chorus of lungs.like that and so between the inhale not exhaling because of our posture we were breath holding and many people think of breathing really as an inhale take a deep breath and they go but the really most important part of breathing is the exhale...There are a number of things that begin to happen when you cumulatively over time shallow breathe or breath hold the first is that it kicks sometimes low level sometimes not so low level flight or fight stress response. The part of the autonomic nervous system that is all about flight or fight is the sympathetic nervous system so this breath holding up regulates or really activates the sympathetic nervous system sending us into flight or fight. A few things happen when we're in fight or flight. The part of our brain that creates habit is activated, it blooms so to speak. and we become more compulsive in all our bevaviours and I'm sure that we've experienced and those listening can recognize gee I just can't stop texting or I just can't stop checking my email. It activates actually the part of our brain that compulsively behaves.
A song for this post.
Monday, October 26, 2009
Feel the lungs (day 59)
Today I had lunch with Joy James and we talked about the Breath I/O project. She asked me some interesting questions about the type of affect we would like the piece to have. Why do what we are doing? How will people feel the experience of the lungs and the video and the sound and the interface? As she was talking and asking questions I could feel my mind going from the how to the why. I am so often preoccupied with the technical details of doing something. It felt nice to speak of the audience, to picture them in the room, to imagine the sounds they might hear. At first I pictured only one person entering a large dark room (the mocap studio actually) where the sound was louder than the picture. The sounds were enveloping, breath like, rhythmic and calm. There are several places to sit down near the ground and in front of each seat there is an object, each one different. The lungs are in a chorus formation breathing in sync, the video interchanges between them. The person picks up an object and holds it. One of the lungs gradually takes on more importance visually and the video is more consistent and clear. The sound of the video is heard over the breath. The singled out lungs have more personality and are not so in sync with the rest of the chorus which has faded to the background. The lungs are reacting to the video that is playing within them, sometimes sighing, sometimes coughing, sometimes fast breathing, sometimes deep breathing. The object vibrates in a association with the lungs. When more objects are picked up more lungs approach and start to interact with each other and the objects.
The feeling of the environment to be calm and conducive to a reflection on the bittersweet nature of life, the life cycles, the exchanges we have with people, the constant give and take of life. The preciousness and sadness of being human. The joy of movement and breath, of health.
Thanks for the talk Joy.
A song for this post.
The feeling of the environment to be calm and conducive to a reflection on the bittersweet nature of life, the life cycles, the exchanges we have with people, the constant give and take of life. The preciousness and sadness of being human. The joy of movement and breath, of health.
Thanks for the talk Joy.
A song for this post.
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Hello lungs (day 57)
I took some time today to render the lung model to see if I could get the transparency to work correctly and maybe play around with the video mapping. I got as far as getting the transparency to work and then ran into a resolution problem. To my chagrin, Touch Designer will only render to a maximum horizontal resolution of 1280...unless I pay $599 for a commercial license (per machine). I've asked if they have educational pricing and we'll see. It's strange that I hadn't notice this before when I rendered to the screen in the lab. But looking back, it does explain the slightly squished look of the lungs. Even at the slightly lower resolution, the lungs look pretty good. I'm really starting to get fond of the shape of the lungs. They're almost friendly and sweet. Here is a pic (which is down-res'd):
The grey scale give it a medical X-ray look. I wanted to keep it neutral until the video is added to see if it has a fluoroscopy look. We'll see. Trent is currently working on the texture coordinates.
I also spent some time learning Field which I can run now that I have my Macbook Pro. It feels like learning a new language even if the component elements (Java, Python, OpenGL) are familiar. It feels to me like a tool I could seriously love after spending some hours with it. It reminds me of the old Unix days with lots of command line and immediate feedback. It also makes me a bit worried that I would write something in Field and a few months later remember nothing of the mental model that led me to a particular design (i.e. more than one way to shoot yourself in the foot). But this minor worry is not going to stop me. I'll just trust that I knew what I was doing at the time I wrote the program which, believe it or not, is hard to do. The belief that I am smarter in the present, so smart in fact that I know better than the previous self who was immersed in the code, is always lurking.
A song for this post.
The grey scale give it a medical X-ray look. I wanted to keep it neutral until the video is added to see if it has a fluoroscopy look. We'll see. Trent is currently working on the texture coordinates.
I also spent some time learning Field which I can run now that I have my Macbook Pro. It feels like learning a new language even if the component elements (Java, Python, OpenGL) are familiar. It feels to me like a tool I could seriously love after spending some hours with it. It reminds me of the old Unix days with lots of command line and immediate feedback. It also makes me a bit worried that I would write something in Field and a few months later remember nothing of the mental model that led me to a particular design (i.e. more than one way to shoot yourself in the foot). But this minor worry is not going to stop me. I'll just trust that I knew what I was doing at the time I wrote the program which, believe it or not, is hard to do. The belief that I am smarter in the present, so smart in fact that I know better than the previous self who was immersed in the code, is always lurking.
A song for this post.
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Act now and... (day 55)
Have you ever been so busy that new opportunities seemed more like problems? Especially ones that come with some kind of expiry date? Like act now or forever lose out to another that will take advantage of this opportunity because they're not so busy? I feel this way about a lot of things these days but I figure one of the better skills in life is learning how to properly finish things. Anyone can start things. So I must finish some of the projects I've started before taking on new ones. I know this. But there is a lagging feeling that perhaps I should 'reserve my seat' at the table of the other opportunities. Just start it and then sort of sit on it for a while. It may be disingenuous. In any case, it's a good problem.
Meanwhile, the projects go on. The Interactive Futures conference is less than a month away and the lineup of events looks great, if a little full. I'm very grateful for the help we've had. Such amazing students helping out. The lung project is crawling along but definitely still moving. The lungs look good and I've been able to import them into Touch Designer with some tweaking of the model. Next up is the bump map texture, and texture coordinates. After that I'll try to make a chorus and see how many we can get in there before the frame rate drops too much. Then I'll mess around with the video and see if some good effects can be created in and out of the lungs (then alternate this step with the last one). This will take us the Interactive Futures easily...and perhaps I'm being overly optimistic about that. Time moves on.
A song for this post.
(as an additional musical note...I heard Cris Derksen perform tonight at the Western Front and I thought she was fabulous. Here is one piece that she performed).
Meanwhile, the projects go on. The Interactive Futures conference is less than a month away and the lineup of events looks great, if a little full. I'm very grateful for the help we've had. Such amazing students helping out. The lung project is crawling along but definitely still moving. The lungs look good and I've been able to import them into Touch Designer with some tweaking of the model. Next up is the bump map texture, and texture coordinates. After that I'll try to make a chorus and see how many we can get in there before the frame rate drops too much. Then I'll mess around with the video and see if some good effects can be created in and out of the lungs (then alternate this step with the last one). This will take us the Interactive Futures easily...and perhaps I'm being overly optimistic about that. Time moves on.
A song for this post.
(as an additional musical note...I heard Cris Derksen perform tonight at the Western Front and I thought she was fabulous. Here is one piece that she performed).
Friday, October 02, 2009
Stereo ahoy! (day 35)
This week Leila and Thea were here from Montreal to work on the Breath I/O project. It was worth the stress of carving time from a busy schedule to work on the project in a more sustained way. The main thing we are trying to work out is a workflow for the output of the Sony HDR-TG1 cameras we are using to shoot stereoscopic footage. We had great hopes for the little Sony's and I think they will work out in the end but we've hit many walls along the way. The TG1 is ideal for us because of its small size. We can mount two TG1s beside each other on a Slik twin camera mount and shoot stereo at varying inter-ocular distances. Miles built us a remote that controls both cameras so we can start/stop and zoom them in tandem. Another ideal aspect of the TG1 is that they record surround sound. With such a small microphone we wondered how good the sound would be. It turns out to be quite good! Overall we were pleased with the output of the camera but we started to hit some snags when it came time to edit the video. The footage is in AVCHD format and the sound is Dolby Surround. Here is what we know so far:
Despite these setbacks we had some nice stereoscopic results with the footage that Leila shot of her nephews in track and field, and hockey. The twin camera mount needs a level so some of the footage had some vertical disparity but we were able to fix that in post-processing. We tested the stereo footage on the old lung prototype and it looked interesting. It kind of looked like the lungs were transparent. Not exactly what we were looking for but perhaps with a little bit of a bumpy surface on the lungs, they won't look so mirror-like or transparent.
Another highlight was Trent's new model of the lungs. They look great! With any luck we'll be working with these on Monday (Leila's last day).
Miles was also around working with different sounds. Making soundtracks on the fly for the silent videos we were playing. We talked about different ways of teasing out the deeper resonance of someone voice in real-time. He showed us an effect in super-collider which may be the start of what we're looking for.
A song for this post.
- The Picture Motion Browser software that comes with the camera will export the video to mpg2 or wmv with surround sound but not full resolution (it downgrades to 720x480)
- Final Cut Pro downgrades the audio to stereo
- Adobe Premiere can import the mts with surround sound and full res, but cannot output surround sound. We did find a plug-in that may help but it's $295 and at this point we haven't given up on a cheaper solution. CS4 says it comes with a trial version of said plug-in but we don't seem to have it.
- Stereoscopic Player does not play the surround sound (this is just a minor irritant since eventually we'll be playing the stereoscopic footage in a virtual environment)
- Interlacing is an issue. The TG1 records at 1080 60i and needs to be deinterlaced to 1080 30p.
Despite these setbacks we had some nice stereoscopic results with the footage that Leila shot of her nephews in track and field, and hockey. The twin camera mount needs a level so some of the footage had some vertical disparity but we were able to fix that in post-processing. We tested the stereo footage on the old lung prototype and it looked interesting. It kind of looked like the lungs were transparent. Not exactly what we were looking for but perhaps with a little bit of a bumpy surface on the lungs, they won't look so mirror-like or transparent.
Another highlight was Trent's new model of the lungs. They look great! With any luck we'll be working with these on Monday (Leila's last day).
Miles was also around working with different sounds. Making soundtracks on the fly for the silent videos we were playing. We talked about different ways of teasing out the deeper resonance of someone voice in real-time. He showed us an effect in super-collider which may be the start of what we're looking for.
A song for this post.
Thursday, October 01, 2009
Mood dips in step with temperature (day 34)
I've noticed that the stock market gyrations need a story. You can't just say "the stock market dipped by 300 points today". You have to say "the stock market dipped dramatically following investor doubts about...". I have read many of these headlines. Over time an image has formed in my head, helped by the many trading room stock photos. I picture chemicals (economic indicators) being piped in and landing on the crowds of traders in uneven but clustered patterns. They there is general barking and howling that spreads to local neighbourhoods. A frenzy of anxious trading takes place, and when the chemicals subside, exhausted stunned traders reckon with the result. To put a story on this behaviour is interesting but most surely wrong because the traders are barking out of habit and neighbourly influence as much as reason. The headlines are like a running commentary on a cock fight. They create mini-dramas out of very immediate facts. Some of these mini-dramas will actually fit the facts longer than others and you'll feel good about the narrative arc. It's good to feel like you might know the next thing that happens, or to feel like a tragedy is in the making. The anticipation is good. Good like dessert.
The problem is that eventually drama exhaustion sets in. There is only one cure for drama: deep engagement. But how does one actually get beyond the fine grained noise to the deeper currents in financial systems? It's not clear to me that anyone is even relatively sure of the deeper narrative taking place. And maybe there is none. It's quite possible that we've created a machine so mesmerizingly complex and with such high stakes that we're stuck in a fearful narcissistic moment. This may be one reason to see the movie "cloudy with a chance of meatballs".
There is not real conclusion to this post. The compulsion to stay at the surface of things because it's more immediately interesting is a trap that eventually robs us of insight. It's related to discernment in the choice of information we take in. It's also one of the topics we are researching with the Breath I/O project. The frenzied consumption of the new eventually leads to shallow breathing and anxiety. What kind of media consumption leads to a deeper breathing?
A song for this post.
The problem is that eventually drama exhaustion sets in. There is only one cure for drama: deep engagement. But how does one actually get beyond the fine grained noise to the deeper currents in financial systems? It's not clear to me that anyone is even relatively sure of the deeper narrative taking place. And maybe there is none. It's quite possible that we've created a machine so mesmerizingly complex and with such high stakes that we're stuck in a fearful narcissistic moment. This may be one reason to see the movie "cloudy with a chance of meatballs".
There is not real conclusion to this post. The compulsion to stay at the surface of things because it's more immediately interesting is a trap that eventually robs us of insight. It's related to discernment in the choice of information we take in. It's also one of the topics we are researching with the Breath I/O project. The frenzied consumption of the new eventually leads to shallow breathing and anxiety. What kind of media consumption leads to a deeper breathing?
A song for this post.
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Curious noise (day 20)
Today Miles and I talked about what an environment of mixed soundtracks might sound like. In Breath I/O the videos and their associated soundtracks will 'swirl' around in the environment surrounding the lungs, mixing with each other. When there is no video playing on the lungs it makes sense for the sound to be noisy with a slight foreground of interest, a hint of some of the soundtracks. As more videos are playing, the noise retreats more and more to the background but is still present. There is a seamless blend between when the soundtrack is fully audible and when it goes back as part of the noise. All of this is in five channel surround sound. One of the things we talked about is that the noise would be algorithmically composed of the granules from each soundtrack. Much like the video pixels are being used to shade the atmosphere surrounding the lungs. I like that parallel a lot. Miles had some great examples of composers who work with noise and subtle foregrounds of interest.
One of the aspects of the atmosphere that we still need to develop is whether it will be influenced by some kind of action. We've even talked about the possibility of the virtual affecting the real by being able to generate air currents in the installation space. Personally I think it would be ok if the environment was like weather, unpredictable and interesting. Something the lungs would be subject to.
A composition for this post (courtesy of Miles).
More of Rosy Parlane can be found on myspace.
One of the aspects of the atmosphere that we still need to develop is whether it will be influenced by some kind of action. We've even talked about the possibility of the virtual affecting the real by being able to generate air currents in the installation space. Personally I think it would be ok if the environment was like weather, unpredictable and interesting. Something the lungs would be subject to.
A composition for this post (courtesy of Miles).
More of Rosy Parlane can be found on myspace.
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