interactive installation playback recording
I have previously posted a number of videos on my You Tube channel featuring 3D models of branches that I have found laying on the ground in High Park (Toronto, Canada) over the past half year. What you see and hear in this video is a playback of interaction with the installation that I have developed within which these branches (and a few more that I have not made videos of) are actors.
This installation was developed for the show ‘what’ – a self-curated exhibition which I will be presenting at Back Lane Studios (in Toronto) during the month of April in 2024. You will find the Facebook event page here. The opening is on Friday, April 12th, starting at 6pm. I will be giving a short slideshow/talk to explain my work and in particular, the installation and how it operates. The set up includes a projection screen, two speakers on either side, a sensor (Kinect) below the screen, my laptop, and a small mixer. As participants draw closer to the installation, winds pick up in a virtual on-screen environment that cause the branches to fly around randomly, as you see in the video. The collisions of the branches trigger samples that serve to form spontaneously generated audio compositions.
What you hear in this video is just one collection of sounds – the most obvious choice and the starting point – the sounds of branches banging into each other. I am busy working on many other collections of sound material to load into the installation in order to produce different kinds of audio compositions. You can think of this as an audio-visual artwork generator driven by audience interaction. Future videos will feature these different compositions – coming soon! I am also putting together a number of albums (three so far) that will feature this audio work – also coming soon! The resulting visuals, where the branches end up after the interactions are through, are made into prints and paintings that you will find here. I am in the process right now of rendering stills such as the one you see below into acrylic paintings on canvas and India ink on watercolour paper as well as prints. Expect to see them in my blog posts over the next few weeks.
more prints and paintings coming soon
The installation software was written by me in C++ using OpenFrameworks, the models were created in Blender, and the audio is generated using Supercollider. This is the next iteration of the same software used for last year’s work, Custom Catastrophe, presented as part of Nuit Blanche North in Huntsville, Ontario.
diagnostic screen
At the end of the video and featured below, you can see the second screen that only I can see during events and shows. This contains all of the diagnostic information drawn from the sensor in action. The central image is a depth-of-field point cloud captured by the Kinect – this sensor is designed to read depths. The upper right red rectangle with black pixels in it is an abstracted (and very simplified) view of the point cloud data and the teal rectangle below that is the core of the processing in this work. It is the engine that drives all of the motion that you see. It represents the input of the depth data into a system driven by self-organizing criticality. This is a non-linear process that exhibits emergent behaviour characterized broadly by a rice pile (note – not a sand pile) – the gradual piling of rice from a central source that creates tiny unpredictably evolving avalanches as the pile grows. Mirroring this process, in the software, activity accumulates in each cell of the grid and when it reaches a threshold value, it ‘spills’ over into neighbouring cells. During each frame of the animation each black pixel represents a spill in action and triggers forces to act on any of the branches in the environment.
various things or whatever
Exploring non-linear dynamic systems in my artwork has long been an ambition so it is very satisfying to now start to see this realized. I am just getting started with this aspect and still have much to learn. Expect to see much more in this direction in the future. Ultimately I am looking for insights into psyche, living presence, consciousness, through the exploration of emergent phenomena in computational artwork – such as what you see here.
High Park Branches various stuff:
things:
newmedia #audioart #generativeart #mediaart #openframeworks #blender3d #mediaartist #3dart #canadianartist #forestart #highpark #interactiveinstallation #newmediaart #complexsystems