July / August 2k5 : switchless V4 - ResetLess.
Part of "The Plot Thickens" exhibition, London, Berlin, Prague.
After a bit of a break to learn some new tricks, we were invited to participate in the plot thickens exhibition. We really liked the concept of modelling the whole exhibition around a story, chosen from stories written by the participants themselves. What made this installation challenging is that the exhibition was also travelling, London, Berlin, Prague, Sarajevo and then back to London. You can find more information about the whole project here: The Plot Thickens.
The winning story was quite interesting, in the near future a very sick girl is connected to a lot of machines, being plied with drugs in a hope to save her. Through an accident she realises that when she sings machines shut down. So, she practises her song, enters a TV gameshow hunting for the newest stars and sings her song on national TV. The near future world relies heavily on machines and therefore can not survive as her song shuts down all of the robots, factories etc.
The Pitchless collective decided to design a whole room. The idea was to create a piece evoking the room where the sick girl realised her song had the powere to shut down machines. As you can see from the photos, the artists created an excellent robo-hospital atmosphere, complete with bed, machines, cabling, pulsating lights and of course sinister sounds.
 |
The screens were displaying a nice mix of text from the story in a variety of languages, some custom written video glitches and some carefully chosen video clips. Next to the screens was the interactive element of the installation. Visible to the user was a metallic box with a hand shaped copper control surface, made from recycled PCB parts. Using some custom designed hardware and software the box was made touch sensitive. Although it didn't look like buttons at first just brushing the surface brought about changes in the whole piece.
Any users brave enough to touch this copper control surface would start to trigger the interactive elements of the piece. Firstly new sounds were triggered, the atmospheric background mixed nicely with the chosen samples. The triggered noises included explosions, machine crashes and pure noise. In addition to the interactive sound, each trigger also controlled one of the screens. Users would start to realise that touching the control surface changed parameters on one of the displays. The main effect was that as a button was pressed a 3D object with video came spinning wildly onto the screen. As more buttons were pressed the objects started to cut in and out of each other, creating quite a disconcerting effect. The videos mapped onto the 3d objects included an EKG flatline, explosions, robots falling down etc. The idea was to show what may have been going through the sick girls head as she lay in hospital and as she realised her new power.
Here are some snippets from the backgrounds created by the collective, these were very long tracks used as background loops. Particularly succesful was the material with the sound of an EKG machine getting confused!
|
By:
|
MP3 Name:
|
|
Ben
|
|
|
Ben
|
|
|
Anxt
|
|
Technical details
This installation was the most technically complex we had pulled off so far. Thre were a lot of elements all interacting with each other. On the one hand there was an infinite part of the installation, the background soundscapes that repeated endlessly, the random story parts that faded in and out of the screens and the screen images/glitches that algorithmically changed to never repeat themselves. On the other hand there was the interactive element, the user control surface, triggered sound and video.
The interactive part can be split into 2 parts, hardware and software. The control surface in itself was quite simple, 8 areas of old copper PCB were cut and sanded into a hand shaped area. Each area was electrically isolated from the others and can be thought of as a switch. Being made from conductive material meant that these areas became "touch switches". Then these areas were connected to a custom Midibox set up to read the capacitance of the 8 areas. You can see below the surface had 4 brown parts which fitted the human hand, the other 4 areas were connected to the PCB tracks below.
 |
The Midibox was custom wired so that the 8 conductive areas sent a MIDI messages to a computer. This MIDI message was then processed by a pure data patch written to trigger the sound and graphics. The sounds used in the interactive element were pre-prepared using a variety of tools such as pure data and the Kyma system. The processed output was chosen to conjure up the sounds of the machines crashing as the girl tested her song. Some examples of the material are below.
|
By:
|
MP3 Name:
|
|
David mK
|
|
|
David mK
|
|
|
David mK
|
|
|
David mK
|
|
|
David mK
|
|
|
David mK
|
|
|
David mK
|
|
|
David mK
|
|
This meant that processing power was saved to provide the graphics, also created in pure data and the extension GEM. The pure data patch had 2 graphic mode, sleep and interact. When in sleep mode the screen displayed random algorhmically generated visuals, similar to the other screens used in the installation. However, when a user was detected through the user control surface the screen the screen cleared. As the user triggered different areas of the control surface different videos in tandem with the sound were flown into the viewing area of the screen, mapped onto 3D objects. The effect was that the various symbolic videos flew around the users head as the sounds crashed around the room. Some example screen shots are below, the stills don't really capture the psychadelic feeling though!
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
Links for further research
www-crca.ucsd.edu/~msp/software.html
