Description of Piece
Aleksandra Dulic: visual concept, photography, installation, animation, interaction, image post production
Kenneth Newby: visual concept, animation, visual / audio software, music composition, interaction, lighting
Martin Gotfrit: music composition, music software, installation
Post-production assistant: Naghmeh Abbasi
Production assistant: Kunal Sen
Interactive Installation, Media Diffusion: 6-channel audio and 100-channel video.
Commissioned by: UCI Beall Center for Art + Technology, 2008
Supported by : Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada
Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design + Media
Media and Graphic Interdisciplinary Centre, UBC
School For the Contemporary Arts, SFU
in a thousand drops... refracted glances is an interactive audiovisual installation in which participant's movement is tracked by a motion sensing system that maps their flows and locations onto a set of generative musical processes and video animations.
in a thousand drops... refracted glances explores the way identity is constructed in an increasingly fragmented milieu. This construction works in multiple directions. We perceive, ourselves and others through a series of multiplicities. The work creates a dynamic cinematic environment encompassing multiple screens and audio channels that work to present fragments of the bodies of humans in hybrid relations to themselves, thereby creating a sense of the fragility of experience. As the Cubist's expressed in their work that our world is made of a series of slices of reality--temporal and spatial that then we try to assemble in order to understand the world we live in--in this work we see this process put into a dynamic and i nteractive environment. By choosing the face as its center of attention it points to the way we judge and gain a sense of both ourselves and others. The dynamic and interactive nature of the work becomes a symbolic actuality (simulation) of the dynamic nature of how we both construct and discover our identities. The work reveals a background made of deeper perennial questions: Who am I? What is my community? Where do its boundaries exist and how permeable might they be?
The experience of in a thousand drops... refracted glances is a audio/visual sculpture in fragmented space and time that becomes a single audiovisual image as one interacts with the space of the exhibition. The sense of embodiment creates an interrelationship between the visible images, our movement and the harmonically rich sonic environment. The interactive aspects of the work provide points of focus for flows of both audible and visible images. As one moves around the work a subtle effect is exerted on how the images are animated. Characters composed of multiples emerge and are accompanied by synchronized emergent musical gestures that are produced by the engagement of the participant.
The resulting audiovisual environment is one of construction and deconstruction of bodies through processes of stitching, repetition, collage, stretching, contraction, multiplication, and reduction. As a result of these processes new hybrid fugal bodies are born that speak to the variety and complexity of the ecological and interpersonal balances that depend on the mutual interdependencies of the community of agents that make up its population. The work continuously and dynamically shifts its focus providing opportunities for the participant to engage in a spectrum of modes of attention -- from lateral to narrowly focused. Interactions with the work take the form of refracted glances both rewarding and confounding in an ongoing process of making sense of a chaosmos -- the balance between confusion and order -- the fantastic and the logical -- dreamt and waking realities.
Biographical information
Aleksandra Dulic is a media artist and theorist working in the area of interactive computer animation with current research underway in performative visualization of sound and music.
Kenneth Newby is a media artist whose research and creative practice explores expressive applications of computer assisted media composition, performance and diffusion. He teaches new media composition and technique.
Martin Gotfrit's research centres on the creation, performance and function of music and sound in many different disciplines and contexts. He is the Director os the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University.
Together the three authors of this work have been working together as the Computational Poetics Research Group for the past four years.
Spatial Requirements, Dimensions and Preparations
The work requires a quiet darkened space for installation. The projections can be thrown on a wall as long as it has been prepared by treatment with white paint to make the surface suitable for projection. For installation we will add black borders around the 100 video channels for better visual presentation. The projection dimensions are 3 meters wide by 2.25 meters hight. If we have the opportunity to scale the video animation system up each additional module will add another 3 meters to the total projec-tion width. We will need to be able to mount or hang the camera, computers, monitors and projector(s) from the ceiling above the work.
Technical Description
in a thousand drops... refracted glances is constructed of four systems: 1. a camera-based motion tracking system; 2. a control system that mediates the interactivity, controlling musical processes and video animation process; 3. an interactively controllable multichannel music system; and, 4. a multichannel video animation and diffusion system. These four systems are programed in MaxMSP and Jitter and make use of two high-performance computers which are networked together to form an integrated system
1. Camera-based Motion Tracking. Firewire IR camera, motion-sensing and analysis software. The camera is mounted over the interaction area in front of the projected video channels to capture any movement on the part of participants. The analysis is able to sense multiple participants and outputs parameters such as location, speed, direction, change of direction, etc.
2. Control. A control module mediates between the motion tracking information and the musical and video animation processes. A set of encoded compositional processes are accessible to the control module allowing a wide range of musical and visual responses to participant presence and interaction.
3. Multichannel Music. A set of encoded compositional processes are sonified through a virtual chamber ensemble composed of a samploed prepared piano, modelled violins and cello and synthetic timbres drawn from a set of formant synthesis modules. The output of the audio system is in six channels. Four loudspeakers are mounted in a line above the video projections with the two
remaining loudspeakers behind the participants to provide a panoramic and immersive aural experience.
4. Multichannel Video Animation and Diffusion. A multichannel system that manages 100 discrete channels of animated video drawn from a database of more than 1000 images of faces and hnds in various detals drawn from approximately 100 subjects. A variety of compositional processes guide the compositing and animation of these materials across the 100 output channels. A single video projector can be used to present these discrete channels.
The work is scalable for specific conditions of installation and level of technical support available. The artists will be able to provide for a modest presentation in which a single computer integrates systems 1 through 3 (camera sensing, control and music) with a second computer running system 4 (video animation).