In the end ...

Conclusion Experimental Animation:

[link to video from show: http://www.rsd.no/documenta_web/ ]

My last effort was to have a public showing of my interactive animation pieces, with the help from the local high school and a teacher I happen to know over there. There was a couple of useful lessons to be learnt from that experience. First of all, do not trust what other people say, at least if it is of great importance to you. I was hoping that some of the art students would come and visit my show and maybe ask some questions either about what I was showing, or about how it was to be an art student abroad, or possibly both. The teacher I had contacted promised me to inform the students about my presence, but being in the midst of their final exams, and him personally being very busy with other private things as well (he told me), I guess he just forgot to mention it. If not that, they have some students with a very strange attitude towards digital art, studying abroad, and higher education. I think the former was the reason.

In any case, my primary goal was not to have an audience for what I was doing, but to try out new equipment in a gallery-like setting, and to document my work from the present term. The new equipment I was going to test out, was a projector (instead of the good, old computer screen). Simple enough, one should think. But, there was a lesson the be learned. Part of my concept was to use a camera to capture a video stream of the viewer, thus making the viewer not only a passive viewer, but an active participant in the piece (by very simple means, of course). This concept of making an active viewer was also utilized through the use of a panel of four knobs, giving the viewer a certain amount of control over the piece shown on the screen. The problem with the whole thing, though, was that the room I was given was a class room with very poor possibilities of making it dark inside, thus being very poor conditions for a good projection of the image (which in my case must be said to be of major importance). This made me think of what would have happened if the room was totally dark, and I was to try to use a video camera there? Well, I guess that would have been difficult, but not impossible. It would probably be necessary to use some sort of spotlight to light up the area (i.e. the viewer/spectator) that was to be filmed. It would probably have yielded a much better result than what was the case for me now, in a very light room. To conclude this, the projection came out lousy, so my documentation of the whole thing, is really not much to look at. All of the applications can be tested and evaluated on a computer with a camera connected to it though, but that was not the point of this exercise.

In general, I spent a lot of time lately to 'convert' my applications to be able to use with my potentiometer panel, and to tweak them to work as good as possible. Although being very different, they are all based on a fundamental principle, namely that of elasticity. My latest piece, the 'elastic video player' to give it a name, uses the elasticity principle to make an interesting twitch on the idea of watching a movie. I have seen this idea before, but then without the user controlled interface, and I am not sure if that was real time either. The thing with elasticity, though, is that it is very hard to control, as it is in real life. Sometimes the velocity and the forces involved goes a little crazy, making you loose control, but there are also means of getting the control back. Another, and bigger problem, is that Processing is not built to handle video in this way. The people behind Processing explains that it is Java that is not built for it, and since Processing is built on Java, that is how it is. I found it really interesting to work with video in this way, so it would be nice to find a (preferably open source) software that could be used for it ... I downloaded an old b/w movie, "The man with the golden arm" with Frank Sinatra as the main character, from Archive.org. It worked very well for this kind of project, having a lot of clean shots, and long cuts. It is also in the public domain.

I found myself spending a lot of time tweaking the Seaweed application as well, making it move in very realistic ways, again utilizing the elasticity code. It is pretty amazing to see how naturalistic a 'computer designed' thing can behave, with relatively simple methods.

I always ask myself, though, if programming is the way to go to make interesting art, finding myself actually spending a whole lot of time trying to achieve exactly that. And the answer is that I still do not know ...