Pixelache

I’m traveling on the second week of March, with the N.I.P. crew, to go and play at the Pixelache festival in Helsinki. If you don’t know about Pixelache, it’s a festival with seminars, performances and workshops on the topics of Digital Media. But no one better to explain it than Juha Huuskonen in this recent interview on We Make Money Not Art. I’ll bring along the Airsticks and get together with André Gonçalves (PT), Tom Verbruggen (NL), Teresa Dillon (UK), Kathy Hinde (UK) and Rudolfo Quintas (PT).

Ernesto de Sousa happenings

Today starts a series of events dedicated to the 15 years of the Ernesto de Sousa Scholarship. This scholarship is specially dedicated to intermedia arts and have been supported by FLAD, Gulbenkian and Phil Niblock, who has tutored all of these students in NY. For this event a series of installations and concerts are happening in Espaço Avenida, in Av. da Liberdade 211. I’m playing too. Here’s the program:

A New Controller - using the Wiimote for Free Gesture Performance

A week before the N.I.P. crew arrived at Amsterdam I was already at Steim, experimenting with a new controller for my performances.

Since I’m mainly interested in free gesture interfaces, like the Theremin, this new controller is also using this principle.

For some time I ruled out tracking systems based on computer-vision because I felt most of them were inappropriate for the level of interaction I desired. They were always too dependent on environmental conditioning (like light) or two slow or imprecise. Usually I’ve tried out using 320×240 video matrixes, with CPU based blob detection and so. These systems never fully satisfied me and that’s why the Airstick is based on physical IR optical rangers, with much more responsive rates. Nevertheless the Airstick also has it’s own restrictions, the biggest being the lower resolution of the x-axis, which results of the horizontal sensor array distribution.

A month or so ago I saw an experiment of Johnny Lee, from the HCI group at the Carnegie Mellon University. He’s been doing interesting experiments with the Wiimote and he explained how the tracking system for the Wiimote works.
Basically it has on-board blob detection of up to four IR points at a resolution of 1024×768. This makes it much more precise than the typical webcam approach and the hardware blob calculation is much faster than the CPU correspondent.

This turned me into experimenting with this and I ended up building these small IR led fingers that I point at the Wiimote. With two leds in each hand I can control two different 3D objects, with position (x,y), angle rotation and size.

It’s looking good and I think I’ll try to incorporate these into my next performance to happen on the 18th January, in Lisbon. Soon I’ll post a You Tube video of a demo.

Lastly thanks to the STEIM crew for having me. They create the perfect environment for this type of experimentation. Special kudos to Jorgen Brinkman for all his patience in bearing with me!

The winter N.I.P. session outcomes

Again the N.I.P. crew was together at STEIM (Amsterdam). This time around we concentrated essentially on theoretical thinking about performing with new media. A very good exercise was to build some mind maps and find out about the different issues that each one of us is concerned about.

One word that sticked to my mind was “fragility”. Is fragility what makes us interested in performance per se? Knowing that the performer is expressing his own thoughts and ideas into an improvisational scenario and that it can all just go wrong.

Of course it is easy to point that it could simply go wrong (or be bad) because the performer is not good enough, but we must also consider that the digital system itself is prone to misbehavior. The digital media should, in theoretical terms, be immune to error or failure, since machines should always behave the same, with certainty to them. Thus it should be controllable by definition, which doesn’t really happen.

I think it doesn’t happen because we’ve connected two worlds: digital and biological. The variability of the biological environment is automatically mapped onto the digital system and thus it becomes much more evident to us, performers, that we live in an environment full of chaotic functions, very distant from the digital precision. This is very visible if you simply take any analog sensor and connect it to some kind of digitizing device. Any sensor has noise to it. The digital values jump up and down. Our biological environment does so too.

Regarding the performer side, this indeterminacy adds up to the fact that we are makers and performers. By building our own instruments we must then learn how to use them. This is already a big step. An even bigger step is learning something that doesn’t always behave equally. And that makes it interesting! If we ever got to the totally deterministic response, maybe even us, performers, would loose some interest into exploring this media’s “experimental possibilities”.

But that leads to other issues, namely one that really strikes me as very important: Who is restricting who? (if the word “restriction” is applicable). Are we controlling machines and making them the instruments of our precise vocabulary or are they just restricting our creativity, blurring our expression?

Are we adapting to the machine’s behavior or is it adapted and designed around our own purposes?

These are very basic questions which I’m sure many of the researchers of this field have already addressed, but it is very good to see some of this discussion emerge in our own group.

We’ll keep commenting on these. Soon Teresa will have our mindmaps freshly distributed. I need to take another look at those!

Some food for thought:

NIP residence @ STEIM

The NIP group is currently at Steim, in Amsterdam, doing reflexion work on Performing with New Interfaces.