Tag Archive for Events

Smart Light Fields

August 6, 2009 Projects No comments

In addition to my involvement with the janus project for the Smart Light Sydney Festival, Joanne Jakovich and I were invited to collaborate with the NSW Department of Planning in an ambitious short term project during the festival.  The Department of Planning, along with Metropolis and D-City had the initiative to setup a small amount of resources for live event data tracking to be visualised for the duration of the festival.  Our first taste of this was in an email inviting us to join, with a specific aim towards generating realtime visual information using passive bluetooth tracking technology.I’d worked before with bluetooth tracking (in the 2008 UTS MDA masterclass Street as Platform), and I’d recently mastered the small monster of embedded MySQL insert queries so it felt quite appropriate to combine these two techniques in producing the visualisation.  In essence, the project asked for the following;

  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/

Related Posts:

Janus

August 6, 2009 Projects One comment

As part of the Smart Light Sydney Festival, May 2009, Tom Barker (Professor of Design, Architecture and Innovation at UTS) and Hank Haeusler (Post-Doctoral Researcher at UTS) were commissioned to design and produce an interactive light sculpture to be exhibited on the light walk in the Rocks.  The piece conceived by Tom was called Janus and was pitched to the SLSF body as;

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.

IMG_1095

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

Related Posts:

Filtration Fields

August 6, 2009 Projects 2 comments

Recently Joanne and I were given the opportunity to exhibit in the DAB Lab Research Gallery at UTS, in the Design, Architecture and Building faculty building, as an opportunity to refine and showcase our collective research into realtime responsive architectural environments.The filtration fields exhibition in the DAB Lab gallery was a realtime interactive installation using simple camera tracking to measure daily activity within the DAB courtyard.  The exhibition was as a prototype test for ideas on the overlap of surveillance information and participation in architecture by its’ inhabitants.  Our premise for the installation was that the architecture of the DAB Lab gallery and surrounding courtyard space would be given eyes and ears, a brain to consider and a mouth to speak its’ mind.  The exhibition space of filtration fields was, unlike all pieces held in the DAB Lab, not the space of the gallery itself but the outside world upon which it had a threshold.  The silent box would become an active element in the architecture of the courtyard, no longer only passively inviting people inside but actively seeking to make its opinions known.  The void space of the courtyard would act as a performance stage for the activities and life of the DAB, and the natural bookend to the void was an appropriately matching wall of glass facing the space of the gallery.

The DAB gallery sits nestled under the canopy of one side in the DAB courtyard, standing as a window into another world, a place of existence in the imagined mind of another.  All of our experiences in the DAB Lab gallery were of surprise and delight, the little gallery had observed us and prepared something appropriate to show.My initial thoughts for the piece revolved around an image I had imagined of the DAB Lab gallery space existing as a small part of a sensory system extending the fabric of the whole building – the glass wall fronting onto the courtyard was in fact the glass lens of a large and ever curious eye.  The rear wall of the gallery would be the retina upon which the useful information would be refracted and transferred for processing elsewhere.  Other senses of the building were to be placed in the surrounding architecture outside, remote senses (microphones as ears, light/temp/hum/vibration as skin) of a much larger organism.  Each of the senses would be dislocated but connected, each informing the other regarding the goings-on of people in the courtyard.As the project took shape, it became clear that the focus of the exhibition should not only be the ‘eye’ of the DAB, but rather the effort to interpret the overlay of many eyes, ears and other senses into information, all representing the happenings in the courtyard.  The focus of the exhibition is not the DAB Lab itself, but the affect it could have on the lives of people moving through the space in-between.  Each of the glass wall panels would form opposing viewpoints on the courtyard, illustrating different relationships between the viewer/participant and the data they created.  The concept of the DAB as being a semi-conscious entity gave us the notion of eyes (an overload of information, all visual and uninterpreted for meaning) and brains (filtered information, abstracted for patterns of activity).

More to come..

Related Posts:

SO-AD Triptych 01

February 24, 2009 Thoughts No comments

Looking forward to the next SO-AD installation, Triptych 01 at the DAB LABGallery, (Level 4 DAB cafe courtyard, 702-730 Harris St Ultimo) on the 11th March 09 at 6pm.
A new feature of the DAB LAB Gallery opening will be a public lecture at 7pm by David Burns, so make sure not to miss it.

Related Posts:

Rider Spoke in Sydney

February 5, 2009 Thoughts No comments

Tomorrow evening I will be taking part in the latest installment of the acclaimed Rider Spoke interactive artwork by UK Arts collaborative group Blast Theory.  The premise of the work involves a serious of bicyclists moving around an urban environment, following instructions and making additions to a system of audio recordings.  I will be posting pictures of the event, where I’m taken by the voices in my head and an update of the artists’ talks happening in the MCA (tomorrow and Saturday afternoon).

Related Posts:

Stranglehold – James Jirat @ First Draft Gallery

February 5, 2009 Thoughts No comments

Last night saw the opening of James Jirat Patradoon’s first solo show, at First Draft gallery in Surry Hills.  I first came across James’ work on his art blog It’s not for lack of trying boss and have been following his work since.  Word has it that some of the pieces made their way into the hands of some happy new owners, so congrats all round for a great show!A surprise of the night was an encounter with the final hours of a 24 hour endurance stand up comedy routine – I’m not exactly sure what inspired the combination of comedy and endurance, but suffice it to say the comedy had mostly petered down to self-deprecating tiredness, and more than just a little bit of crowd support and participation!

Related Posts:

« Older Entries