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):

Lungs jostling/bending
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.

The 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.

A song for this post.

You lookin' at me? (day 237)

Morgan Rauscher defended his thesis yesterday.  I was one of the faculty members on his committee.  He did very well and was an interesting person to talk to as always.  The best part of his thesis is the project which has two parts: Zeugen and Mind Machine.  Zeugen is a large suspended board with 32 half faces (eyes and nose) whose eyes follow the people currently looking at them.  The faces are backlit and turn on and off according to an algorithm that I'm not quite clear about.  There is a half-mirror in front of the faces which becomes more of a mirror when the faces are not lit.  There are servo motor sounds from the eyes tracking the viewers' faces.  The back of the board is open and shows the mechanics and electronics of the work, as well as the netbook that controls it.  Morgan calls this open source.  I've seen this work a few times in different instantiation but this was the first time I saw it with the half mirror.

After being with it for a while it started to make me think of social media.  The board is a kind of screen and the faces are looking at me and I'm looking at them and at the same I'm looking at myself.  And it's all quite ordered.  The whole thing is self-conscious in a mechanical and somewhat unnerving way. 

The piece will be on display during the Graduate Exhibition May 2-16th at the Charles H. Scott Gallery at Emily Carr University.  I recommend.

A song for this post.

Craigslist poets (day 234)

Penny Leong, one of my graduate students, defended her thesis today.  She did really well.  The topic: acts of giving on craigslist free stuff section.   She analyzed the ways in which people phrase their listings and conduct the actual exchange.   Her thesis project will be exhibited in the Charles H. Scott gallery from May 1st to May 14th.  It will be a participatory display of objects that exemplify the categories of giving that she has identified.  Her process blog documents some of the objects (and categories) that will be on display.

In came out during the defense that Veda Hille produced a musical with Geoff Berner called "Do You Want What I Have Got?: A Craigslist Cantata", that played during the Push Festival.  I wish we both would have seen it!  I think it might be playing again in some form on May 2nd at the Arts Club Theatre. 

A song for this post (from the cantata).