Our afternoon, in my experience, was about MAKING REAL OF SENSING TECHNOLOGY. I was aware of the extent of preparation undertaken by each maker. Each one intently busy, doing, setting up, and I felt touched by this. We gathered around to learn about and interact with each design. Somaya’s ‘gloved’ accelerometers, George’s Wii stick, Lian’s transforming fabric creations and Jonathan’s proximity sensor light display evoked and augmented evolving choreographies. To my surprise my personal experience in each case was embodying, deeply satisfying and aesthetic. In context the conditions relied on invitation. We were invited by the makers to relate through felt experience to interactive designs. We were part of their not knowing and their wish to discover more about themselves, their own imagination and research. I experienced the fusion of the maker and participant through interaction. ‘Astro’ means, as in stars, ‘in composition’. ‘Astronomic’ refers to scale. ‘Technics’ refers to ‘the science or rules of a field of knowledge, especially a technical one’. That’s exactly how I experienced this afternoon. I felt able to interact with a vast field of knowledge about which I know absolutely nothing, to feel wonder and aesthetic pleasure, to be in composition.

An opportunity to play with a range of sensor-based prototypes/tools and costume. The session was structured so that each person had 3 minutes to try out a prototype, followed by a quick group discussion.

Somaya offered “Idio”, an apparatus that generates sound in response to accelerometer data provided by two accelerometers, one strapped to each wrist. My impulse was to play with the relationship of the accelerometers on my wrists, to see what effect this had on the sounds generated. It reminded me of an approach to generating movement imparted by my dance teacher, Annetta Luce that had a particularly powerful effect on my own dancing. That is, by relating one part of the body to another, be it elbow to ankle, head to coccyx, or heart to ovaries. The positioning of the sensors on the body can facilitate this.

George had patched together a simple, yet mesmerising sound generator that took accelerometer data from a Wii remote handheld. His motivation was to encourage slow movements. The sounds generated were tinkling bells +. I decided to draw on my Butoh Bodyweather training in bizeku, where you move as slowly as possible. In doing this, I listened to the sounds produced – delicate and meditative – , but did not attempt to influence the nature of the sound through my actions. The delicacy and fragmented phrasing of the sound made me wonder about a group of performers composing a soundscape through the intermingling of their individual effects.

Jonathan had rigged up an array of liquid crystal panels that changed their opacity in response to data from a proximity sensor. The proximity sensor used ultrasound, with the distance calculated from the delay in the reflected wave. In playing with it, I tried approaching from different angles, at different speeds, to see where the envelope of sensing ended and its sensitivity to change in position.

My offering was costume, with a view to body augmentation, wearables and organic? environments. I had draped a skin-coloured stretchy fabric over a beam and stitched the ends together. This created a membrane or cocoon for people to inhabit and play with. The costume consisted of a plain skin-coloured bodysuit that could be stuffed with a variety of padded shapes filled with dacron soft-fill and/or popcorn. The popcorn gave a nice weightiness and texture to the pads. I was interested to see how people would react, explore, experience. And later to imagine the connections between the use of costume and the sensor technologies …

For many, the putting on of the garments was a performance in itself … and very funny.

George escaping the cocoon

Lizzie's big bust

Catherine's corrugated legs

Jonathan testing the limits

Maggie crawling to the cocoon

Monday

We converge at Riversdale, a place of retreat, generous offering, unbelievably beautiful.

Danielle Wilde has devised this simple, yet fabulous wearable interface, the hipDisk. I met Danielle at OZCHI2008 in Cairns. The hipDisk consists of two disks that you wear above and below your waist. An array of soft switches is positioned on the perimeter of each disk. A sound is generated when two switches touch. The disks exaggerate and make visible the changing relationships between the torso and the hip in motion. Cap it off with an Esther Williams-style bathers and swimming cap, multiply the number of performers, and you get this wacky musical ensemble playing The Girl from Ipanema.

http://www.daniellewilde.com/iWeb/daniellewilde/hipdisk.html

for the past four years i’ve been moving towards developing creative work (slowly heading towards research) around anxiety and post traumatic stress disorder (ptsd). basically on putting audiences in an environment that heightens their awareness – perhaps making them anxious.

while i find the available research and discussion surrounding ptsd narrow – basically soldiers coming home from the war – there are one or two articles that start to reference technology in association with the management of ptsd… that i think are worthwhile

http://www.noahshachtman.com/archives/002189.html

i think the discussion on the relationship here between technology helping and hindering a process can be applied more widely. the knowledge that the wearer has something attached, only aggrivates the whole process

arduino lilypad

george, lian and i met up about 2 weekends ago to continue discussion on what we’d be doing at the next workshop (and beyond) as part of this i’d like to see a couple of small tools, methodologies or techniques that we can apply in future work.

for some time i’ve felt like i’m only beginning to scrape the surface on this research – in the relationship between body and technology – and developing meaningful engagement. whether that is for myself as a performer, or an audience member in an installation. and i’m still considering this weekly (or daily) depending on how busy i am….

so, perhaps one of the small components, should we want to make a wearable tool of sorts, might be a small arduino board called the lilypad. its just a microcontroller, but the board is laid out in a way that much easier to attach conductive fabric/thread etc to it.

Thought this new device from Yamaha might interest some of you

Biobeat

we started talking about mouths and wearables at some point today. and it brought to mind: SWAMP – aka. studies of work atmospheres and mass production – www.swamp.nu

these guys (doug easterly and matt kenyon) whom i met recently when we presented our work at ISEA in the same session work with a range of traumatising performative art experiences.

i have recollections of asking about traumatising art experiences today at some point. i think that there can be a focus on rewarding art experiences – although, reflecting on the works in the mirror states exhibition now, i realise that many of these works aren’t exactly “fun” and “inviting”. david rokeby’s VNS growls and hisses as you move into the active space – and one woman who walked there got a fright the minute this occurred. mari velonaki’s bird fish is a heart-wrenching story of unrequited love between two wheelchairs that litter handwritten notes across the floor. and alex davies’ dislocation had a teenage girl let out a scream this afternoon in the space when one of the virtual bodies came a bit too close to her. none of these works are warm and fuzzy and make me want to curl up next to them.

but i do want to spend time with them (the more distressing and challenging works), much more so than sickly sweet cute japanese animated girls.

i think i’m really interested in developing challenging art pieces that push people into zones of discomfort and risk bringing about a potentially negative experience and response. but that doesn’t have to be the case. of course just because the content/concept of the work is hard to cope with doesn’t mean that the response is negative. here i’m thinking about my own response to the gusen sound walk (audiowalk.gusen.org) i undertook at ars electronica last year. the sonic material was heartwrenching – but it did change my world. i still think about this work every few weeks.

so getting back to my point – we were talking about interactive works using the mouth today, and it reminded me of the SWAMP guys who have developed a work – called the Consumer Index – with a barcode scanner placed in their mouth and wires that run through a hole pierced in matt’s cheek (thats dedication to your art…). then he wanders through wallmart scanning barcodes with an open mouth.