Rescue and tuning

Yesterday the computer, today the accelerometer, although it was working for weeks..

Todaysart 2011 The Hague/NL

Dear bloggers,
 here an other chance to see Imagie/Ce que la vie doit à l'imaginaire
at Todaysart September 23,24.

Experiment with glass; a dancing hand

We had a great day with Emmanuel with our new experiment,
very promising dancing hand with texture and fluid, have a look


Glass projection experiment # 2

The première is done!

The premiere and second show of imagine have been really good received. Over the 4 presenters present, 4 proposals came along!

After a short break, MCDance is again on the road, more precisely at Artez in Arhem. We are doing a new work for twelve students under the title Cheek to Cheek. The music is chosen, its gonna be physical connection to stamina, gravity and a liberation of energy at the same time.

Last day in the studio

We reached the end of the frame time allocated for studio research and development.

So far the project is on open source philosophy, see the entry of Ali, our hardware developer.

Marcus created not only a fantastic machine with codes and algorithm but a real platform to engage a discourse with us over man/machine technology relationship to generate beauty and dream. The struggle have been there, as usual, but the synergy between the trio remain fantastically creative.

The tryptic is an 18 months project, so the 3 parts are different but now linked together to make a full show. Let's see the result!

Thanks for all the visitors, don't hesitate to contact us or leave a message.

Photo Benschop

The imagimotion

Today was the test to run the show on two powerful computer and one beamer. The vga switch is the solution. Marcus is doing a great job compiling all the patches.

It was as the first time to link Isalien, Short Circuit and the new part; it felt good, although the new part is still a bit patchy. Meanwhile Emmanuel is finalizing our installation project, the imagimotion; it will be great for the public to play with a beautiful virtual curtain, just with the hands in the foyer.

'Imagine' installation test#1

test of Imagimotion

And software emerges into the physical world

The Hardware

The setup for the each dancer consists of two accelerometers and a button connected to an Arduino FIO with an Xbee module for wireless connection.

The Microcontrollers
Arduino FIO is chosen as microcontroller unit because of the size constraints of the setup and ready made socket for a lithium polymer battery and XBee connection.

The Accelerometers

After a little research, I decided to use ADXL 345 accelerometers because of the i2c support.
The wireless communication constraints of the setup made it impossible to use the SPI protocol for the arduino - accelerometer communication.
The breakout connection for two accelerometers was a bit tricky but after checking the datasheet the connections for assigning different accelerometer addresses.

The difference of two breakout boards is to assign the address of (0x53) the SDO needs to be connected to GND and for the address of (0x1D) the SDO needs to be connected to VCC.

The breakout board circuits can be downloaded for etching (0x1d) (0x53)

Once the connections are made coding is pretty straightforward,

1- Initiate i2c connection
2- Initialize the accelerometers
3- Request the readings from each accelerometer
4- Transmit the values read over XBee through serial connection

In depth information and the original source code on the arduino and adxl345 communication can be found on Live fast - Code Young blog

The source code can be downloaded here

One more week to go

We got finally the second set of wireless accelerometer and we connected them without problems, thanks to Ali. Now we are playing together with Isabelle on four device..

complexity, complexity here we arrive!

Emmanuel will develop the kinect project, the installation that will be in the foyer, on this wall. We are really excited about it, since this device developed by Microsoft has been hacked end of October, just a few day after its release, and is therefore a completely new toy for us, developers and artists.

Marcus is here measuring the angle of the circle by measuring the radius of the circle; an essential operation for video mapping.

One more week to go for two shows, the Dutch tour will be in May 2012!

Into the void

Argh... which patch line does what? And why are things moving when they shouldn't? It was working a moment ago, and now it seems to behave differently. Where is this erroneous data coming from? Somebody please make those dancers stop moving! In which sub-patcher did I rescale that data again? TODO: Remember to reset when turning off patcher #5. How can I store this in the studio without overwriting all theatre data?

Silly stats:
3335 max objects of which
148 are subpatchers connected with
3268 patchlines using
3 java externals desribed in
3742 lines of code

... and Isalien and Short Circuit haven't been included yet.

Got to tie up all the parts!

Here we are! Putting the dots together and look for the meaning of the whole...

Isabelle is sharing her time with an other production, she is labeled super-bionic-women!

Meanwhile we took out our old winter anti-depression light, yes we are working with video projection, hence dark studio.

Work work work

Tuning our instrument is our game. The real time sound and image is a complicated combination, especially went it comes to decision. Meanwhile we are hopefully developing with Emmanuel a little installation where the public can play with image and sound in the foyer. The idea is to introduce the interactivity and for the audience to have a feel of it.

Robert Benshop did some great shoots, thanks!

Pre-montage in the renovated Korzo theater

We had an impressive montage

session with Albert and Marco, two light designer and technician of Korzo theater. It looks very promising.

Visit during the process

Leo Spreksel and Stacz Wilhem, Emmanuel Flores and Marcus Graf listening to Isabelle Chaffaud explanation about the two worlds section.

The piece is not ready yet but strong elements emerge from the exploration into technology-sub and non-local consciousness and dance.

Great fun with Toxicity and Marcus

A hyperbolic image of alter-ego, magnification of energy and sound with toxicity and real time video triggered by accelerometer

When technology meets poetry

Profiling presence and absence with tools that looks just like electronic boards is a challenge; but can when tamed they become a reel partner for creating amazing images.

It seems we have it!

Our flyer, probably last version.

Body of codes, body of light, body of imagination

New flyer version

“Imagine” is a work that aims for a new language

that zoom into different layers of perception.

The work offers visuals and audio keys generating an

unique journey about the visible and invisible layers of reality.

Body language and visuals are created to deliver a window

into a singular world of each performer in a authentic way.

Concept by Meyer,Chaffaud,Graf

Choreography and performance by MC Dance and Florito

Visual coding by Florito

Korzo producties/MC Dance

World premiere 14 of February 2011 at Korzo theater

www.marcusgraf.com

www.jeromemeyer.com

Who is controlling what?

New instrument force us to adapt our way of moving. How do we dialogue together? What comes first: the projected image or the movement? How do we label the end result?

Reverse image: monitoring your self

When there are no mirror in a studio and you need to monitor your self, get a camera and plug it in a TV. The only problem is that the image is reverse. The solution is the mirror. Here is the solution.

Dual wireless accelerometer

Our prototype for the button before a the soft one that will match the form of the finger

Working on patching a second device on the same receiver. Now two limbs of the body are triggering data.
Works perfect!

Set up

Our prototype has some problem: it is switching off randomly. We don't know if this is a hardware or software problem.

First try to use the accelorometer as a sound controler.

Building an instrument

While developing a new instrument to control image and sound, we were looking at traditional instruments' properties:

• Complexity: Most actions on any instrument have repercussions on more than just one parameter. When plucking a string of a guitar, the player is controlling amplitude, timbre and duration. When hitting a key on a piano, three strings are starting to oscillate with again different durations, timbres and amplitudes resonating through the body of the piano
• Learning curve: For any instrument, you need to invest a certain amount of time to learn how to play it. When your instrument does not produce the wanted result, don't change the instrument. Start practising.

Our 3-axis accelerometer has the beautiful property of outputting the acceleration measured on each of its three axes, so any change of orientation results in more than one parameter being modified. Acceleration being measured can also mean two things:

• Orientation: Slowly changing the orientation of the accelerometer can give us a reference to Earth's horizon, since Earth's gravitation is downward acceleration.
  
• Change in motion: When a change of movement occurs, acceleration is being measured. This can give us an idea of the properties of movement.

To have this data streams available to us, we are using the raw data of three axis, low-pass filtered data for orientation and high-pass filtered data for change in motion. We implemented these (recursive) filters in a Max/MSP patch to be quickly linked to whatever parameter we want.
On the image on the left you can see the original stream at the top, the LPF-filtered stream on the bottom left and the HPF-filtered stream on the bottom right.


Now that we have this data, what to do with it?

Looking again at traditional instruments, we were looking for existing digital instruments that already have an inherent complexity and see what happens when we hook up some of their parameters to our accelerometer.

Reaktor by Native Instruments is a synthesizer-building tool that comes bundled with a lot of ready-made synths. Skrewell is one of them, and has the properties of being in a way very hard to understand. So we hooked up our accelerometer to it and started playing....

And now we need to practice...

But the results are already promising!

Work in progress for "Ce que la vie doit à l'imaginaire"

Developing ways to track movement. We are now having a prototype of wireless accelerometer.
This data are generating sound and images.