For an exhibition at the Caricatura Gallery in Kassel (January-March 2008), we created a series of playful and colourful miniature interactives:
loophole | funfaircapsule | the rush | jack in the box
Instead of developing capacious installations for months, we thought it must be nice to make up interactive artworks that fit in a casket. They are based on a simple punchline or a very accessible notion, imagery or format.
Caricatura is a Gallery for Comical Art, most often showcasing the work of illustrators, satirical drawings, animation and comic strips. On their invitation, the class of New Media Design at the Kassel School of Arts and Design presented a range of interactive and electronic artworks. Contributions comment on our everyday use of technology, reverse habitual expectations towards electronic devices and make computer dreams come true.
Find out more about the other participants at jahrmarktskunst.de (sorry, german only).
The orbiter is an interactive sound environment by Vera-Maria Glahn and Marcus Wendt.
It invites you to reach for the stars and play their music!
Documentation
These videos can hardly represent the surround sound quality of the installation, but to get an impression please use headphones and/or a good audio setup!
The Orbiter takes possession of all senses. It is a place for visitors to lay down and relax, watching the firmament above them. With a small gesture, just pointing upwards, the visitor can insert new stars into orbit with unique visual and musical characteristics. The player is enveloped by the instrument; the music filling the ears, the body and space.
The dream of reaching for the stars is as old as mankind itself. The mathematics of planetary orbits, the perfection of natural geometrical forms fascinates scientists and artists alike. Even music principles as tonality or phase displacement are based upon computational ideas and find correspondency in the Orbiters structure.
The music is played on concentric circles, with higher tones on the outside, bass notes nearer the centre. The bigger you let a star grow before you pull back your hand to insert it into orbit, the louder it plays.
Like the stars orbit on the large ceiling screen above the player, the surround sound orbits in the room on 4 high-tone-channels, supported by a bass box and a solid bourne sound speaker underneath the player`s couch, making low basses physically sensable.
Each version of the Orbiter features various scenes with different graphics, sounds and behaviour. Some create an illusionary nightsky firmament, playing more melodic or ambient sounds. Others experiment with the possibilities of graphical abstraction and rough synths, allowing you to even play drum’n bass-like sounds.
The installation is based on custom-built software using latest gaming and computer vision technology, performing real-time analysis of a camera image of the player as well as generating 6-channel-audio and video signals. The video analysis is written in C++, instructing SuperCollider for the audio generation, Processing for the graphics.
Finally there is some documentation online about our (pickledonion.com’s) Spyscanner project we did earlier this year for the Science Museum, London. Pictures on flickr
just a reminder to myself about this weird instrument which is a nice example of how to utilize electromagnetic fields as input sources. also see thereminvox and theremin world
“I said in the above interviews that when Jeff Han’s solution was shown, it was officially over for surface innovation. I called them Hypertables, Hypersurfaces and Object Oriented Objects, MIT people called them Things That Think amongst other terms (and ages before me), and then before all that there was Bill Buxton and Myron Kruger. So none of this is new. But what we needed was a starting block, a sort of ok, fiddling’s over, time to use this stuff. Jeff solved the fundamental visual-gestural language, and all we had to do from there was to start using it.
I also should mention here what got cut out of the Fast Company interview, in response to the question « are hypertables the replacement for the keyboard/mouse combination? » My answer to that was « look at the Wii ». You cannot seperate the iPhone introduction from the introduction of the Wii controller. Both are looking to phsyicalize algorithms, make algorithms maleable physically, and as far as that goes, the field is still wide open. Keyboards and mice are still workable, so they probablly won’t die, no, beacause people will be writing things for a long time to come. Neither the Wii, nor the iPhone, to Surface, will help you write your blog. Maybe your video blog, but not your text blog.
Or maybe a million little things will complement the keyboard and mouse, or maybe just a half-dozen solutions will turn out to be modular enough to solve most of the things we will want to do. Or maybe Cronenberg is right, and it’ll be your body itself. But in my opinion 1) phyiscal objects are good for abstract thinking, and 2) no single object will be fully modular enough for all uses. There will not be one single system, although touch will indeed solve quite a few of the old ones. But whatever the case, the interfacing will require interfacing algorithmically. And when it comes to interacing algorithmically, nothing beats the Rubik’s Cube.”
Regine writes a review about The Science of Spying exhibition at the Science Museum, London in which we (as pickledonion) were involved.
Read it: Part 1 , Part 2 , Part 3
Brief Design a concept for an installation that is bound to a specific a public space at the school. Construct a functional mock-up.
Concept Forget all what you’ve learned in school during biology classes. This plant-like lamp has struck roots in a dark corner and feeds on sunlight. The light that hits the floor by a nearby doorway slows down and floats seeking the bare roots. When the door is opened and light rushes in the lamp-plant lights up as a welcoming gesture.
Evaluation The installation was functional for 2 weeks in the hallway to the cantina and was given positive feedback from a lot of the passing students. The school granted the project an “A” grade.
Listening Post is an art installation that culls text fragments in real time from thousands of unrestricted Internet chat rooms, bulletin boards and other public forums. The texts are read (or sung) by a voice synthesizer, and simultaneously displayed across a suspended grid of more than two hundred small electronic screens. Listening Post cycles through a series of six movements, each a different arrangement of visual, aural, and musical elements, each with it’s own data processing logic. Dissociating the communication from its conventional on-screen presence, Listening Post is a visual and sonic response to the content, magnitude, and immediacy of virtual communication.
