With the ideas from last week about pairing down the experience to be something more in line with modern times, I created this sketch which uses the leap motion. It creates a sensory experience of visual and sound from hand movement but again avoids touch. With removal of senses, we have to focus on others. In many ways when I experiment with using this sketch, I find that without using your eyes at, as in sound only, the immersion feels more sublime. The lacking clunky nature of modern technology isn’t restrictive in this single sense form and because of this, the intuitive nature of the code, and the simple reactive pleasure that follows feel much purer. Pouring intensifies in volume from greater heights, and the pitch changes dependant on pouring angle.
From here I want to create a series of outputs which convert analogue or physical inputs into alternative digital outputs. I’ve been focusing on reproduction in a very literal sense, attempting to carbon copy what already exists between digital and reality doesn’t provide as much insight as subverting this information which is what I began with through the erosion of the teapot model. If I completely alter the output within digital space, the reproduction becomes much more subversive and intriguing.
As the first experiment with subverting reproduction through digital means, I first drew the above sketches which all have vibrant colouring, starting the thought stream for this concept. This gave me the idea of scanning objects and converting their colour into sound or image in some way. I have included the code which I generated, which takes the colour from a webcam feed in a 1 dimensional scan like system then displays these colours across the screen in a repeated fashion. This not only creates something which itself looks like a print but allows the variable of colour to be tapped into to create noise.
I want to explore more with the sound output alone because it is so far removed from the original objects which are placed before the camera that it is almost uncanny. The video above shows the visual as it develops alongside a preview in the top left which shows where the colours come from and the sound is also played through the video which is generated in sync with the colour being displayed.
Here I was experimenting with the way in which certain colours makes sound. I realised that having the drown play throughout everything was too much and made the noise overbearing. Instead I decided that I would add in a form of gate which would stop white or an absence of objects from making any sound.
Here you can see several other visualising elements I added to the code to go along with the audio changes. I added an indicator to show at which point the colour is currently being read from the video feed. I also introduced a scale graph at the bottom which links to the colour in a non visual way. In some ways this is more intriguing and could be used to influence this reproductive system in even more obscure ways.
This image displays how the code recreates a certain series of objects on the table. The code reproduction is so interesting in its own way. I enjoy how unexpected the series of objects is from seeing the original set of colours represented in this way on a screen. Finding ways to make it so the user doesn’t see the initial input at all, and instead can only view the output could prove really fascinating.
This concepts follows on from how we are three dimensional beings, yet we experience life in 4 dimensions. We can understand and comprehend time because of the way it affect our three planes of visual understanding. A two dimensional being could comprehend the third dimension through its understanding of its two planes and so on. The tesseract scene from interstellar shown above visualises some form of what this four dimensional space could feel like. Reproducing their world for a lower being to understand is the climactic scene but in my case, simply pairing down our visual brings it into a raw state. Reproducing objects usually erodes them causing them to lose information, but this feels like a much purer form of this. Turning three dimensional objects into sound and flat visual in a state which is no longer tangible to ourselves but could easily be fully understood by a 1 dimensional species.
Here you can see the top down camera taking the colour data which is then converting that backing into a view which looks 3D. The white graph at the bottom in taking the shadows and from this able to extrapolate this into an image which is very close to a side on photograph taken of the objects. This is due to the colour sense understanding darker shades and from this being able to reform this silhouette.
Here I have expanded the top view to be cropped in to just the scanned section of the top down view. This in many ways allows me to more accurately depict the overall view of the image. Because of this lining up, it also makes the silhouette at the bottom of the screen more obvious as well as the form of the data being dragged down into the data on the bottom 2 visuals on screen. I want to create some visuals with this tool that I have created that specifically highlight its strengths.
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