Via ymfy

Recently Frank Maguire, Liam Ryan and I came together to discuss the brief for the latest Vivid light art festival, slated to run later on this year. The theme of the festival, fiat lux, didn’t give too much away regarding conceptual or curatorial direction for the festival, so we took that as licence to think as broadly as possible. In part the desire to work on something small for vivid was to stretch creative wings which had remained folded since November last year , but for me the idea grew out of a desire to work with these two talented designers on a project of our own direction. We met to talk about ideas and thoughts on where we might take this festival of light, and within a matter of minutes we’d settled on the crux of the piece, the conceptual core which would flow through right to the delivery and communication of the idea.

Our piece, quite simply titled Social Firefly, is an active social network of small electronic fireflies, all vying for the attention of their peers, interacting and communicating primarily through the silent medium of light. Messages spread from one part of the social network to another, only through the incidental connection of neighbouring fireflies, with messaging patterns and behaviour emerging over the colony as a whole. We were inspired by the emergent synchronising patterns of fireflies in real life, and the incredibly fascinating implications of social network theory, taking these two ideas as our conceptual cornerstones, to anchor and frame the design.

It took a few attempts to get the thing off the ground, with Frank being a proud new father, and suffering a few missed connections ourselves, but take flight we did, and we’ve been informed that we’re on the short list for artists to take part in the festival — which of course we find incredibly exciting. To us, the piece has been alive since before we submitted the design proposal, we imagined the movement of the lights, the interaction between socially connected fireflies and those who live more on the fringes, we see the waves of communication propagating over a large tree canopy, observed by curious human observers on the ground, from the nearby ferry terminal, from the high rise buildings that peer over the social miasma that is Circular Quay.

The design of the fireflies is relatively simple — it’s a small arduino controlled robot, with servo motors moving a small 4W LED light, using an array of small LDR (light dependant resistor) light sensors to pick up ambient and nearby firefly light. Each firefly will happily blink and move around by itself, either content to be alone with its thoughts, or eagerly reaching out to others nearby trying to make a connection. When the light sensors pick up light coming from (in all likelihood) the other fireflies in the tree canopy neighbourhood, the otherwise lonely fireflies perk right up, moving around to find their new friend and blinking brighter to signal their existence.We’re interested in a number of things in this artwork, in the interplay between actors in the crude network we’re establishing, the interaction these strange creatures will inspire in their friends. Can’t wait!

Fluid Blobs v2 from Jason McDermott on Vimeo.

OpenCV blob tracking – calibrated from Jason McDermott on Vimeo.

The second example is a first attempt at combining the live blob tracking with the wonderfully funky and playful MSA Fluid library also for processing.  This lib is geared towards touch screen interfaces and screen based mouse interactivity – but I immediately thought it would be the perfect partner for my webcam based projects (or even accelerometer/phidget/slider/midi sensor data).  It wasn’t very difficult to swap out the mousex/pmousex variables for centroid x/y data, so the first test has been deemed a success.  I showed this yesterday to Frank/Ale/Amy/george/anyone who would stop for more than 2 minutes in the interactivation studio and it was a big hit

OpenCV + MSA Fluid (Processing) from Jason McDermott on Vimeo.

The third example is significant for a couple of reasons – it is another combination this time using recorded video of an actual installation space (filtration fields / DAB courtyard) thus requiring another version of the calibration – but also my first experiments in putting together an arrayed interface between the blobs and the fluid.To explain further; Firstly it’s easy to switch out the mouse for ‘something else’ and inferring movement velocity for a single object/blob is simple.  Secondly I wasn’t so sure about the way to apply this singular blob mousex/pmousex-esque technique to many objects at once.  Thirdly I wasn’t sure if it would all explode in one big fluorescent, particle mess!

OpenCV + MSA Fluid (processing) test 3 from Jason McDermott on Vimeo.

[Update]< <note, v3 will be embedded when vimeo uploads my video. since when does a new video have to wait in a queue for 30 minutes??>>In the end I’d say it’s mission accomplished, certainly with calibration tweaks to occur before I’m happy to unleash this on an unsuspecting public.  I’d be interested to see how this could influence peoples’ behaviour in the space – whether or not we would see people dancing/swimming/painting the space of the courtyard.  I’m curious also to see how this kind of new interaction with the space of the DAB could filter into a new perception of the building as not merely a space to move through but one which is open to new forms of physical conversation.

1. Networked and located sensor nodes, tracking any visible devices nearby
2. Central storage and collation,
3. regular output of recent activity (the last 3 hours)
4. visualisation of current activity and any paths of movement picked up by the sensors

The project had been allocated resources for sensor nodes, internet connections, software programming and some kind of visual output – in this case a projector.  Joanne managed to secure space in Customs House for the project to live, we arranged for the hardware and software combination to be installed and we were off the ground.  Ben Coorey (who had been a stellar student in the streetasplatform masterclass) came onboard to help us produce the visualisation in what ended up being a solid fortnight of work.  We went from concept through design and installation in just over two and a half weeks – not an insignificant feat!This project marked a first in many regards – it was the first time I’d worked in this capacity as an artist/designer with an external client, providing data surveillance and visualisation with aesthetics and information.  It was the first time I’d been given access to such a large data set, with potentially hundreds of thousands of visitors making their way to the SLSF precinct during the three weeks of festival activity.It happened to produce the first meaningful coalescence of a body of researchers Joanne and I had been working to pull together for the last 6 months – into the newly founded and launched anarchi.org.  We were now an organisation, able to pull in assistants and coders, all within the framework of a budgeted project, able to provide payment for their time.  This mightn’t seem like much of an achievement, but having worked with friends and colleagues for some time now (relying on generosity and willingness to help), it gave me a huge sense of pride in being able to offer a small sum of money to repay the hours of work put in.See Also;anarchi.orghttp://www.designbuildblog.com/2009/06/16/smart-light-fields/http://www.australiandesign.org.au/

a giant floating human face in The Rocks..inspired by Janus, the Roman god with two faces, Barker and Haeusler’s installation is part of their ongoing research into complex and non-standard media facades.  Janus uses social media and new technologies to engage the public and influence its art. Photovoltaic cells are used to power the installation.

The concept for the project was for the face sculpture to act as a mirror to the emotions of the city, as measured using the social media of mms, email and blog updates.  Toms’ earlier research had lead him to explore notions of the nature of facial expressions, our abilities to read and emote via the expressive capabilities of our faces.  With this in mind, it was an interesting experiment – is it possible to measure, collect and respond to accumulated faces – can you determine how happy a city is by watching its’ inhabitants facial expressions?I was invited to join the project as the software design component of the project, as Tom had seen some snippets of my interaction design work, as well as the work of my students in the computational environments class.  Naturally my first thought was to ask Frank Maguire if he was interested in joining me on the project – having worked with Frank on the Filtration Fields installation, his industrial design skills and generally snappy logical mind made him the perfect partner in crime..

The main crux of the project production from our end was in coding the algorithms which would translate images of faces into emotional readings (happy, sad, surprised, angry, fearful, disgusted and neutral), using these readings to trigger pre-recorded videos and controlling the video output to a non-rectilinear array of 192 pixels.Having worked frequently with camera images, facial emotions I was confident in that component of the programming, as with the data munging and video triggers.  However, having never used more than 4 LEDs to output recorded/live video, I couldn’t be so sure I could guarantee the display robustness – but with such a challenge, how could I say no to the project!After a few initial tests using a standard Arduino board in a non-stanard manner, I had managed to get ~20 LEDs lighting up with varying PWM values and we were off and running.  It turned out that the technique I had tested was naughtily using the arduinos’ onboard resources and was not a sustainable way of outputting video – so we had to look elsewhere.Options included using a daisy-chain of chips to multiply the output of an arduino duemillanove board, an arduino Mega and the phidgetLED 64.

With project timelines fairly short, we opted for the output mode we felt would be simplest/most trusted/idiot proof, which our experience told us would be the phidgetLED 64.  The phidget range of interface kits are bread and butter for the interactivation studio, as well as my computational environments students, as well as being able to claim a dedicated output of 64 PWM leds per board – which meant that we could order 3 and end up with spare LED output pins.The face itself could then be split up into separate sections to be addressed individually by each Phidget board – the forehead, center and chin regions containing around ~60 pixels each.  This allowed us to divide up the phidget output coding into regions and simplify a bit of our output matrixing.  I’d spent some time earlier working with maxduino to get greyscale LED output from pixelated video (a matrix of 6 x 1 pixels!), and luckily I was able to put that patch to work with a little bit of scaling, upgrading to the required resolution.The first issue we came to was the phidget method of sending single line matrices to the phidgetLED64 from top-left pixel to bottom-right pixel.  Since we were not working with a rectangular screen, each row of pixel data had to be offset from the starting 0 point, yet still line up with the neighbouring rows.

See Also;http://vividsydney.com/ http://www.smartlightsydney.com/artists/barker-and-haeusler http://www.timeoutsydney.com.au/aroundtown/smart-light-sydney–vivid-sydney.aspx