Objectify is a monthly party for Intelligent Technophiles and Discerning Fetishists from the past and future.
This video is a rendering from the real time system in place at the party on May 10th. Having taken photos of some of the more dazzling partygoers, their pictures were sent wirelessly to the video projection system where they interacted with the pills onscreen.
I’ll be driving the system again at the next Objectify, June 14th at The Delancy. Come see.
Recently, I have become particularly interested in systems that are capable of meaningful interaction with a large group of actors. I will address my thoughts on the pitfalls inherent in many such systems in a forthcoming post. Suffice it to say for now that I am really drawn to the prospect of sending [hot] photographers into a group of actors to actively engage and shoot them. Images are displayed immediately on a video system in some visually stimulating manner, also interacting with the music, lighting or ambient motion in the space. Partygoers get their moment of extremely visible interaction with the system without clogging up the system for more than a maximum of a few seconds. They are free to express their creativity in front of the camera, but are inherently censored by the presence of the docent/photographer who may always choose not to snap a photo. I plan to explore the possibilities as I further develop this system.
Some technical notes:
I shot the party with a Canon Rebel XT on the lowest possible quality, giving me the fastest transfer times. Considering the resolution of the projector, this had no visible bearing on image quality. I used an EyeFi SD card and an SD-CF adapter card to transmit the images to a portable wifi hotspot in my belt, then to a small laptop from which I could monitor the incoming images and remove them from the system if necessary.
The small laptop monitors a folder for new images using a simple C# application. When a new image arrives, it is sent over a wired network to the rendering laptop, which inserts the image into the show. New images preempt the regular flow of existing images in order to minimize the delay from camera to screen.
Each pill is associated with a dummy target position and a “spring.” When an image is loaded, it is scanned for areas of greatest luminance. Pills’ target positions are set randomly to points of greatest luminance. When the spring is enabled, the pill is pulled to its target position and fades to the color of the image at that point. When the spring is released, the pill falls back into what I’ve taken to calling “the bathtub.”
The graphics are driven by a C++ application written with the openFrameworks OpenGL libraries. The pills’ physics are modeled with the nVidia PhysX libraries.
Oh: And music by Me, on Ableton Live.
For more information, please contact me directly on gmail: jhsilverman