Erosion at Exploding Cinema

We’ve been working on some Processing sketches involving coloured pixels falling like sand. This is a pretty common algorithm. The interest is that the colours are determined by what is on the Exploding Cinema screen over the course of one of their events. This event was in The Others venue in Stoke Newington on the 9th December 2011.

The sand forms piles over time, and the colours of the layers reflects the colours of the films. In this case the sand is falling from left (where the webcam image is) to right (where the pile is). We could control the rate of sand flow and there was also an erosion parameter so the sand would form fissures and cracks and compress in more organic way over time.

This was a test for a work we are developing for Papay where the coloured sand pixels will be compressed into the shell of a Nautilus.

Interactive kinect ants at Exploding Cinema’s 20th Birthday

Exploding Cinema held its 20th birthday event at Dogstar bar in Brixton. They asked the members to show a film of their choice mixed in with the best of the 20 years of shows. On the top floor we decided to project the first project we did with them as resident artists – the interactive ants piece called It’s Alive! – but we also added in a simple Kinect silhouette which we have been working with more recently. It was good to see two different inputs (the webcam and the Kinect) working together.

We strung up a lycra screen about 4m across which looked like a spider’s web. The webcam got color information by looking at the short films and then used this information to seed a colony of pheremone crazy red and green ants.

So for example below is the scary clown image from their screen.

And then here is the effect it has on our screen – where the ghost of the clown is in blue, with the ants on top in red, magenta and green trails.

The show was great fun. Happy 20th Birthday Exploding Cinema.

The Fly brings Kinect to Deptford X

The Fly is showing at Deptford X and has brought Kinect interactive art to the local audience. By moving in front of a screen full of disgusting flesh parts and animal organs the user can navigate a Kinect-driven avatar over the landscape – shifting the guts below its path.

This piece is a development from an earlier series of large scale tests we carried out at Glastonbury also using the Kinect.
We built the PVC screen ourselves at 2.4 * 1.8 m which gave the back projection a clean flat look, from the short throw projector.

We worked with sound artist Patricia Afari who generated a series of evocative sound effects to attached to the individual parts.

We are presenting The Fly again this weekend Friday 30th September and Saturday 1st October, upstairs at the Amersham Arms on the border of New Cross and Deptford.

Papay buildings, nature & lore

Here are some of the buildings of Papay.

An abandoned croft. There are lots of these on the Island – hard to live from the land any more. Families hold onto them some converted into holiday homes, but many abandoned still with plenty of furniture, and ghosts.

A kelp house now used for repairing boats, and used during the Gyro Nights festival as a movie theatre.

A grain store that has been converted into a community hall.

A farmhouse with a driftwood roof.

Most of these will be used in the Gyro Nights art festival in February. With the Islanders defying the elements as they parade from one venue to the other in search of the elusive island troll woman that is the Gyro.

We have been continuing our beach trips collecting mussels and other chewy things.

We found out what the peedie (small) red jellies were – beadlet anemones which when dry adopt a round form, but once under water they unfurl tentacles for catching passing food.

The locals here call them Selkie Spats, which means the spit of seals. There are many selkie around the island, we’ve seen a few bobbing in the sea. Folklore has it that the selkie come to shore transformed into beautiful men and women to seduce the locals.

The wildlife most at home on windswept Papay seems to be Lichen and there are several impressive varieties encrusting anything that doesn’t move – particularly the gravestones of St. Boniface kirk.

Papay Exhibition

We presented Growth Lines and Animacules to the Papay Islanders. Thanks to Ivanov + Chan for giving us the opportunity to visit the island and experience Papay life. Even with 80 mile an hour winds, over half the island came to the Papay Listskjul (art centre) and interacted with the art. Looking forward to coming back in February.

Papay Jellyfish

Day 3 : Globster search continues …

Papa Westray beach

Following a complex 2 day journey of plane, coaches and ferries we arrived at Papay.  

By Thursday we were ready to do some research.

The following were found on the beaches of the Island which we walked around today. We’re not sure what all of them are.  We will need to investigate the red jelly like  ’glob’ in particular.

We found a small sandy beach with a gentle tide which is visible from the attic window of Papay’s art centre. Perhaps we will create a large Globster (or Eye of the Sea) and place this on the beach and then connect a webcam to a telescope in the attic and provide a live image of the Globster as it faces the challenging February sea and wind conditions. This could run throughout the festival.

Here’s a view of the beach and the attic. They are 300m apart.

The Globster project

We’ve been invited to Papa Westray by Ivanov+Chan who organize a northern arts festival called Gyro Nights.

The island is in Orkney and is 4 miles long and 1 mile across. 70 people live there and some livestock. We’re visiting in August to research a project based around Globsters, which are unidentified organic masses that wash up on shorelines. Here’s an old photo of a Globster off America.

Whilst we’re on the island researching, we are going to put on an interactive show presenting Growthlines and Animacules. But also we are going to display some early test globster models we’ve been making with latex and plaster, wax and hair.

These are small experimental fragments of a larger creature we hope to build in February for the main festival. Below is the rough idea. This would form the centre piece for a series of performances or experiments or projections – we’re not sure yet.

The working title for the piece is “The Eye of the Sea”. We may link it to St Tredwell. Legend has it that a Pict King fell in love with her and praised her beautiful eyes. She responded by plucking them out and sending them to him skewered on a twig. Miraculous cures are associated with St Tredwell, particularly in those suffering from eye afflictions. Here is what remains of her Chapel on the island.

Shangri-La virus @ Glastonbury 2011

We survived Glastonbury 2011 and brought our interactive art to thousands of late night punters in the Shangri-La zone – a Blade Runner inspired village of sex, drugs and drum and bass.

Animacules swarmed across the Slumbarave Metropolis Hotel which served as some sort of decontamination unit for the Shangri-La narrative.

We were given an interactive space in the tunnels and tested our latest Kinect installations on a continuous stream of revellers. The pieces that worked best were the ones where several people could interact at once using their silhouette to bounce around our mutated viral constructions.

As the DJs played through the night people danced away with the ‘antibody’ made from our body protuberances. Whenever we sat behind the back projection screen it was great fun to watch the variety of interactions and calls of delight and disgust. Mainly disgust.

Here’s a close up of what people had to contend with.

We also created a large-scale and small-scale version using the same graphics and Kinect interface. The large-scale version worked especially well with people floating (and attempting to steer) their way across a vast green mutated cosmos.

The small version (where the silhouettes were much larger than the body parts) was less interesting and people immediately treated it as a game, flapping their arms to keep the bits off the ground. Although the interaction here was more furious it was also more obvious – as every other Kinect game currently uses this style of batting shit around. We need to avoid the Kinect signature as we develop more work.

We even had a chance to test out some maggot Kinect crossbreeds, these are probably more suited for a calmer audience.

All in all we had a great time and learnt a lot about where we need to take these ideas in the future. We even managed to see a couple of bands. Thanks to James Waudby, Kevin and Lawrence of Astral Design Ltd for getting us on board. We’re looking forward to working with them again, developing large-scale interactive installations.

The Old Vic Tunnels

‘It’s Alive’ left the Exploding Cinema roost to join submit2gravity artists at the Old Vic Tunnels in December.  This marked a significant narrative development in the piece encouraged in part by the location – we would be projecting onto one of the tunnel’s decrepit and crumbling brick walls.  As usual we’d have our ants with their pheromone trails, but we wanted to introduce a wriggling element of horror, namely maggots.

So, in this version, interaction is brought about by a torch (standing in for Exploding Cinema’s projector) which has been suspended from the ceiling, shining a narrow beam onto the wall.  On looking at the wall you might notice the scurrying around of red ants, and a hole that the torch appears to have burnt through it’s surface.  If you move the torch beam you will open up a fissure, revealing a nest of writhing maggots, now the red ants scurrying around the wall will come together to mend it.