I'm a freelance creative coder living in Copenhagen, Denmark. My passion is using technology in new undiscovered ways, in everything from small electronics to video installations, apps and big theatre productions.
Have a look at what I have done and feel free to contact me!
First live 360 transmission from space, transmitted on national TV. We launched a weather balloon mounted with 2 180° GoPro cameras that live was transmitted to the ground with custom build antennas where there where receivers.
The result was a great chaotic nerdy experiment live on TV, showing all the beauty of the technology to the viewers.
The project was a quick sprint with collaborators from many corners of DR, started by the science department. My role was to gather data from the different sensors, and visualize it on the TV screen. It ended out with a webpage that live took the information and showed the current for example height of the balloon on a graph that we then keyed into the TV signal.
Check the video that shows the 360 video we produced when the balloon popped. And read more about the project here: dr.dk (in danish)
App:
Digital installation on exhaustingacrowd.com by Kyle McDonald that I developed. The site contains 12 hours of video footage from Piccadilly Circus, London. On the site the visitor can annotate what they see on the screen by drawing with their mouse.
Press: hyperallergic.com, citylab.com
Code:
This is a small experimental installation made during my 3 month stay at School for Poetic Computation. The installation sniffs in all the network packages on the local network for image url's, downloads them, and shows them on the screen with a distortion shader.
The installation is developed in open-Frameworks, and for the installation I created a new addon for doing the network sniffing: ofxSniffer
Code:
One of the worlds largest tv productions was this year produced in Denmark, the largest tv production ever to be made here. I was early in the process invited in to inspire the producers with whats possible with interactive technology nowadays, and ended up getting a task for one of the interval acts (the opening of 2. semi-final). The task was to live track 3 boxes on stage, and digitally render a 3D box ontop of the boxes on stage, and make it as if there where people standing inside the boxes.
I’ve worked on implementing the airlook design of all the television channels of DR (the main tv broadcaster in Denmark). An airlook is the overall design of the channel, so especially the graphics in between the programs, leading up to the next program, or trailing for something in the future and not the graphics in specific programs. The graphics are designed by DR Design, and are implemented in a mixture of different broadcast systems and a lot of homemade systems in order to handle the many possibilities the graphics give you.
Next to implementing the design i've also programmed many of these new systems for the marketing planners and producers, and making new custom render server software that starts up After Effect in a render farm and renders out previews and full HD videos for broadcast.
Watch it on air on you television or on dr.dk
And watch different airlooks with new design:
DR1 | DR2 | DR3 | DR Ultra | DR Ramasjang
In a team of 13 visual artists and lighting designers we created the visual aesthetics of the smallest of Roskilde Festivals music stages, the Gloria Stage. The stage is the only indoor stage with a capacity of 1000 people and is the intimate stage. We created a big setup of a big triangle scenography with more then 60.000 ansi lumens worth of projection on it. All the triangles where mapped, and we created a lot of custom software that could map video on these triangles, and create more complex figures out of the triangles.
Code:
A scattered array of fifty mirror balls reflect light from three projectors, filling a room completely with small reflections, casting patterns that fill the visitor’s peripheral vision. Creating a curious space that alternates between a meditative state, and an uneasy imbalance. An experiment in combining a found object with computer vision to create a profound and unusual experience. Created with Kyle McDonald at Click Festival 2013
Press:
Code:
TØRST was a short dance performance created by Recoil Performance Group at Dansescenen. I was video scenographer on the production, working especially on coding a particle system that could simulate a sand floor the dancers could move around in. The floor of the stage was created by cardboard, which made a very unique surface to project on, giving me possibilities to add something to an existing room more then creating a new room. This video had a very subtle role in the performance, and is impossible to see on pictures, so see the trailer.
Code:
For a commercial project I developed 13 wireless controlled LED Suits. The suits had each more then 5 meters of led strips with individually controllable RGB Led's, and the suits where controlled wirelessly with Arduino XBee. The patterns where designed on a GrandMA, and send with DMX.
Living Room is the result of a process in Recoil Performance Group where we wanted to step back a little bit and look at what we did at Frost. The setup has many similarities, but it’s still a very different performance because of the years in-between. It’s a performance of an hour with 3 dancers on stage, and a video scenography that is evolving during the whole performance. Most of the video scenography is made of a polygon world that in the beginning of the performance is being generated, and slowly during the performance is being crumbled and manipulated with by the dancers live, and is going from a static cold world into a mysterious dynamic world where the dancers are closely connected to the living scenography. My role was designing and implementing the video scenography and tracking.
The performance won the Reumert (the biggest theatre price in Denmark) for best dance performance of the year. The performance is going on tour spring 2014 in Denmark.
“An emotional Knock Out of rare magic”
♥♥♥♥♥ Monna Dithmer, Politiken“…captivating and exhilarating..”
✶✶✶✶✶✶ Madeleine Saunte, Kultunaut“It is an incredibly successfull interactive performance” ✶✶✶✶✶ Vibeke Wern, Berlingske
“Beyond the edge of physical and dance technical skill…. beyond all expectation. It is tremendous”
Majbrit Hjelmsbo, Weekendavisen“Tina Tarpgaards performance LIVING ROOM subjects the audience to marvelous imaginative dance in the wake of apocalyps”
Anne Middelboe Christensen, Information
Read more at Recoil Performance Group’s homepage
Code:
Children performance about a girl that follows her own shadow into the shadow world. Together with the graphical designer Siri Carlslund we created a visual storyboard for the performance and created all the shadow worlds she was entering. It was double-projected from front and back to be able to create a layered shadow play (where the shadow could get behind and in front of video we projected). I also had two kinects to manipulate her real shadow, and delay it. And also to make the worlds react on her position. It all is packed in a van and is able to be put up in 3 hours at a school.
Code:
The Self Operational System is a autonomous float that can navigate the Copenhagen harbor by itself. It uses two old motors from battery driven drills as propellers for steering and propulsion. The controller is a Xperia play phone with GPS, 3G and compass to navigate.
The system was completed in three days to explore the possibilities of the Xperia phones and work the intuitively wrong concept of the combination of phones and water. On the final day the challenge was to prove that it was possible for the boat to sail from the Teglholmen to the south-harbor without interference or control from our hand. Once the way points was placed the boat was left to navigate on its own, while we were following its position over the internet. Although it came frighteningly close to crashing on the rocks, it managed to make the trip and landed right in the arms of its creator who was waiting at the docking station.
This project was a part of a larger Illutron exploration with Xperia Studio. We want to convey the message to the world that technology should be designed for remixing, hacking and by its users. The process was filmed, and will published as part of a larger promotion about the phones.
Credits: Jonas Jongejan, Benjamin Weber and Nikolaj Møbius.
Code:
THE ONE WITH THE ASYLUMSEEKERS AND SOME REJECTED ONES
A live theatre performance and sit-com recording in front of a live studio audience.
For 10 seasons the all time favorite sit com Friends aired all over the world. A show about ordinary people with ordinary problems, trying make it work in New York. Trying to get a job, a place to live, maybe get a girlfriend, or try to get rid of one.
This theatre performance casted some other ordinary people who just wants to make their lives work. A group of asylum seekers living in the asylum camps around Copenhagen starred in the roles as the six friends.
For 13 episodes they where hanging out in Central Perk instead of the camps in a serial performance. It was just like real friends, just like real life. Just a little bit funnier.
Together with Recoil Performance Group (choreographer Tina Tarpgaard and programmer Ole Kristensen), I created this dance performance at Dansescenen. Like Frost we developed our own software that was tracking the 4 dancers live on stage, and generating video projected on the floor and screens from 2 projectors.
The show premiered at Dansescenen in Copenhagen, and has been shown in Firenze 2010 and Stockholm 2010.
Read more at Recoil Performance Group's homepage
Photos by Søren Knud Kristensen and Søren Meisner
Code:
Dance performance made together with Danish Dance Theatre, Tina Tarpgaard (choreographer), and Ole Kristensen. All the software that generated the scenography with one projector, was created by me and Ole in approx. 1 month in OpenFrameworks.
The show won in 2010 a Reumert for best dance performance, has been shown several times in Copenhagen, and has been on tour to Amman (Jordan), Düsseldorf (Germany) and Århus (Denmark)
“….. eminent, exemplary, imaginative, poetic, humorous, enchantingly beautiful, showing Tarpgaard’s unique talent for meaningful reconciliation between dance and interactive technology.”
✶✶✶✶✶ Vibeke Wern, Berlingske Tidende“The choreographer Tina Tapgaard fuses steps, music, light and computer graphics more originally imaginative and fascinating than we have seen until now.”
✶✶✶✶ Henrik Lyding, Jyllands Posten“Tarpgaards technology is a mystery which puts us on the edge of our seats and captures our fantasy.”
✶✶✶✶✶ Aline Storm, Børsen“The dance performance ‘FROST’ is a transformation of the most beautiful.”
Anne Middelboe Christensen, Information
Official site | Blogpost on Creative Applications
Code:
Art project by Ståle Stenslie on the National Theatre in Oslo as midnight performance where the audience where suited up in custom made suits with 64 vibrators, blind-folded and heard music/texts composed for the performance. I produced in collaboration with Ståle the suits in Oslo during the summer where we had to create a custom software to design the timelines for vibrations that could be played back on a small computer on the audiences back.
Official site | Blogpost on Arduino.cc
The industrial robot N7331227 has been used to grind toilet seats – repetitively, monotone and precise. Each of them perfect, each of the similar.
Now that its working days are over, Illutron equipped the Robot with new attributes, which spot light on the robots limitations as a machine and the humans need of emotional attachment to things.
N7331227 is superior, when it comes to accuracy and endurance, despite of his fascination of us unintelligible and fragile creatures. In an effort to understand us it tries to copy our movements and actions. In the interactive dimension of the installation, the spectator is asked to express his or her own creativity in paper drawings. N7331227 then attempts to copy the drawings via a panel which controls 96 light bulbs in a matrix
Kunsthallen Brands Kladefabrik describes the installation as following:
"The Danish artist collective Illutron participate with the work “N7331227” which imbues an old industrial robot with new life. Via computer vision the robot has been equipped with the ability to see and has been programmed to read and reproduce the audience’s drawings on a large wall comprising 96 light bulbs.”
Code:
The installation was developed during two weeks together with students from the royal school of architecture in Copenhagen for a big event that a group of schools held called Holmen Event. We wanted to make a big interactive wall that the audience could play with. It ended up being a photo wall, where a empty canvas (beautifully cut out with a laser cutter), could take photos that the audience chose, and afterwards used to hang the photo on the wall next to all the others.
The canvas was tracked by a camera in the roof when holding it in the light, and when my program saw that it was stable in the frame, a photo was taken inside the square that the canvas formed. At the same time a sound was triggered, and the whole sound universe (designed by my friend Rasmus Kreiner, a theater sound designer) changed. Afterwards the audience could hold the canvas against the 4x8m big back projected wall, where a infrared camera behind could track where it was, and how it was rotated. And again, when my program saw it was not moving, it attached the photo to the wall, where it moved in a physics simulator (pushing to other photos) and slowly moving upwards before it was deleted again.
The software is developed in OpenFrameworks, using a lot of OpenCV code. The tracking of the canvas on the wall was done with tBeta.
The installation ran for 7 hours during the party, and there was taken more then 500 pictures, and the audience really liked it. People understood the concept (even drunk) right away, and told it to each other when passing by. Many came back later and took some more photos
Vision4 was asked by Opera på Skäret to do the visual work for the classic opera Tosca, and i was hired to do the video programming and assisting on creating the visual material. Opera på Skäret is a old big sawmill in the middle of nowhere that now is used by a private opera company that makes one to two plays each year, getting people from far away with special train to see it.
We builded 3 small eyeliners in this beautiful room hanging in long wires from the roof, and created virtual walls in the room. A mac pro running isadora was the core of the system creating the 3 projections, and in one scene i had Eyesweb running to track the opera singer and make blood float out of the body reacting on the movement of the singer. It was accomplished with a custom programmed adon for isadora i did myself. The material was otherwise primary prerendered video made by Arthur Steijn and me, and a couple of times live cams places around on the stage.
An interactive photo installation created for a 4,5 x 8 meter LED monolith that works fine on a projection. Combining infrared tracking of a normal light bulb and still images, to index photos of audience in a database according to bulb position within the picture frame. When participating audience moves the bulb within the field of view, the screen flickers through previous images of other people having had the bulb at the same position. When someone moves the bulb to an unihabited spot with no previous images, it will flash and that person will now be shown when the bulb is put in the same position.
Ole Kristensen and I sketched up the installation in a few days for re:new 2008, on a very short notice. First iteration was done in processing, but with memory issues. Despite that it ended up having a playful and informal presence in the Copenhagen Main Square.
We have since then been invited to New Media Meeting 03, where we decided to port the software into open frameworks, and spent two days bashing a Nikon D80 into submission. The installation ran smoothly.
Read more at Recoil Performance Group
Code:
Choreographer Tina Tarpgaard, Recoil Performance and programmer Ole Kristensen invited me to help them create Body Navigation. The performance was originally part of a larger installation and modern dance performance in Copenhagen, by Tim Rushton, Danish Dance Theatre called Labyrinth. We had one room out of five rooms to make body navigation in.
Body navigation is a reactive floor-projection where dancers can dance on together with a digital reproduction of themselves. It consist of a camera tracking the dancers on the floor, and a projector that creates a image on the floor around and on the dancers. With this system we where able to create connections and visual images about human relations and emotions that where not otherwise possible.
Ole and I developed a application built in Processing based on a concept developed by Tina Tarpgaard and Ole to track the dancers and create the visuals projected down again. All controlled live by Tina with a control panel developed with Isadora under the performances.
Our part of the show has been touring around the world for several years (Holland, Firenze, Geneva, Brazil, England and more)
Read more at Recoil Performance Group
Vision4 was invited to Damascus to open it as Arab Capital of Culture 2008 in the big opera of Damascus, and i was hired to do the video technics and assisting on animation. It was a crazy eyeliner project with very limited time far away from our usual workplace. I was there in 3 weeks, the first two weeks we builded the eyeliner (12x8m), produced all the video material together with the video designer (Arthur Steijn) and a photographer and the concept developer Mikael Fock. And the last i was there alone with Mikael putting all the bits together for the show. The result was a big show shown on Syrian tv and seen by the president of Syria and Turkey and lots of other important people. The evening with most nerves in my live! A really crazy trip.
The technical setup was one big front 20.000 ansilumen projector for the eyeliner (we got it from Denmark by plane), one smaller back-projector and a mac pro running Isadora controlling both screens.
