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.”
This is a project i developed in two weeks together with two friends 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 photowall, where a empty canvas (beutifully cut out with a lasercutter), could take photos that the audience choosed, 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 4×8m big backprojected 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 alot 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 concenpt (even drunk) right away, and told it to each other when passing by. Many came back later and took some more photos
Ole Kristensen and i developed the interactive scenography for this dance performance, choreographed by Tina Tarpgaard. I was on the project in the early programming states for a couple of weeks, helping Ole with programming all the ideas there where, and developing the visual style that Ole then would work further on until the premiere.
I have just finished 2 weeks of workshop in Oslo together with Ståle Stenslie, where we have been working on a theatrepiece Ståle is doing in september in Oslo. The play is going to have 5 stories the audience can listen to, and at the same time the audience will (one at the time) have a speciel suit on with 64 vibrators (like the ones in mobile phones), and some sensors. And it is this suit i have been working on. First of all making the electronics (controlled by a Arduinio) work, and secondly making a application (in Processing) to design the “animations” that are going to run on the suit together with the recordings of the stories.
Later we are going to add interactive elements to the timelines that are created with this application. But for now the people in Oslo will work with this and the test suits we got until i come back.
I visited my friend Ole Kristensen some days ago to see how far he was with the technical setup for TimeMap. And i got some video recorded of his presentation of all the elements. I havent been working on the project the last month since i was doing Hush Little Baby theatre play, so i looked forward to see what he had accomplished. This week we then moved all the stuff the rehearsal room, and the next couple of weeks he will be trying it with dancers, before we go to the right location. And i will have some more time the next couple of weeks to help him a bit with getting the last programming done.
Winter 2009, Teater CampX, Copenhagen The past 5 weeks i’ve been working on a theatre play on theatre CampX called Hush Little Baby as video/image designer. And last week we had opening night after a pretty tuff period. The play is about Filipino au-pairs that travel abroad to earn money, leaving family and children behind in the Philippines. And here in the west they live without any legal protection from their homeland, and earn money under a system that was intended for something completely different. In the play we got some philipin women telling us these stories, together with 3 danish actors that tell the danish story about getting a girl into the house.
So the next 4 weeks i’m going to control sound and video every night at CampX together with these wonderfull people.
The last 2 weeks i have been working with Ole Kristensen on developing tools for the next dance performance by Ole and Tina Tarpgaard (the same persons as Body Navigation). The main tool we have been programming is a interactive physics simulation of letters falling down when something (here a dancer) touches it, or in other ways react in physical simulated way. We have been coding in OpenFrameworks (C++), and used the open-source physics engine Bullet to build up our code, and used some standard OpenCV blob tracking to detect a person on a stage.
We have also been working on making a new blob library that is not a perfect match around a body, but instead like a bubble with a person inside. It can give some really nice organic effect when the forces are very low in the bobble, and it just follows slowly the movement of the body. This is build by me with some basic physics laws.
For now we got this video of it, but we will cut something better later
For the last couple of months i have been working on a multitouch table together with Ole Kristensen for Vision4. It has been a project i have worked on on very part time, but it has been funny to investigate all the techniques and materials i needed to do it. And now we have made a presentationvideo of the table. It is very much a technical preview, so the demos are more to demostrate what is possible. I have builded the table myself (in my garden), and the code is primary done by me, with some help from Ole Kristensen.
The hardware The surface is a thin glass plate with a Lee filter 400 underneath to project on. In the bottom of the box there is an ordinary surveillance camera with a IR filter in (so it only sees infrared light, and not visible light), and a BenQ short-throw projector and a lightbulb wrapped in some color filters. it does give some visible red light, but its not very much. This technique is called DI (Diffused Illumination).
The software The tracking of the fingers with the camera is done by the opensource application tBeta, and send with OSC to my own openframeworks application that does all the graphical work. I might release the code at some point.
If you have any suggestions or questions, feel free to ask me!
Fall 2008, Halmtorvet Copenhagen Tue Biering and Jeppe Kristensen created a theatre play which was based on the well known movie called Pretty Woman, but this time performed in 3 containers put together on halmtorvet in copenhagen with room for 50 audience and with a real prostitute from copenhagen on stage every evening. The play was probably the most discussed cultural event in copenhagen this fall. Many politicians went out without knowing anything about the play and taking distance from the project. Even though the organizations that are supporting the prostitutes where supporting the project. The discussion resulted that we had fully booked already before the premiere.
We wanted to create a film-like feeling in the play, so the whole play was recorded with cameras and shown on monitors above the small stage live edited by me. So the audience could look into the hotelroom that we had build (with a glasswall between the audience and the actors) and at the same time look up and see our cut of the movie. To make the delay between the real actors and the tv-monitors as short as possible, i had to buy a old videomixer (Panasonic WJ-MX50) with all the oldschool effects and sit live and cut between the cameras. And have lots and lots of BNC video cables.
The stage seen from the audience with the monitors in the top.
My videosetup backstage from where i was live editing
Ole and I where invited to New Media Meeting 03, a annual media and art festival held in Norrköping in Sweden, with our installation Stop Motion that we originally made for a big LED screen in Copenhagen. This time we projected it on a big wall outside the main stage of the festival. We decides to rewrite our code, this time in OpenFrameworks, since we had seen a major performance boost in C++. And we decided to try remote trigger a DSLR camera when we took pictures, but this gave us some pretty big problems, since the standards aren’t very well incorporated in the cameras we used. But we got it to work in the end.
I have been playing around with perlin noise in processing, and come up with some pretty organic worms i think. Not rocket science, but funny to look at
Tosca is flying in the air with wings. She is actually lying on the floor under the eyeliner
Vision4, summer 2008, Kopparberg Sweden Vision4 was asked by Opera på Skäret to do the visual work for Tosca, and i was hired to do the video programming and assisting on creating the 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 addon 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.
RE:NEW Festival, Copenhagen central square, summer 2008 With extremely short warning I was invited to make something on a huge LED screen that was put up by a electronic music conference in Copenhagen. They had in the last minute got money to built this 8m tall LED video monolith on the central square in Copenhagen for 2 days, and they needed people to make something on it. So Ole Kristensen and I developed in one week an art work called Stop Motion that was developed for this screen. The concept of the art work is a interactive non timeline based stop motion “movie” that is developed over time. On the screen you see a person stand with an ordinary lightbulb in his hand, and from the air there is hanging a lightbulb down. When you take up the lightbulb yourself and move it around in the air, you see a marker move around on the screen in the same way as the bulb, and at the same time images of other people holding the bulb at the same spot as you do are loading on the screen. When you hit a spot where there has not been taken any photos, a countdown begins, and a camera takes a photo of you, and add you to the grid of images of people holding the lighting bulb.
People really enjoyed playing with the piece, and see them self projected on a big big screen on a spot where many people walks by, and come by later and see them self again.
Because it was made in so little time, it was suffering many technical problems in the begin. We made it in Processing, and the first major major problem with processing is the limit of RAM. We had to save the images in the computers ram, but when we used more then 2 gigabytes of ram it crashed. And loading from harddrive was way to slow. In a later version of this application we ported it to OpenFrameworks witch solved our problems.
Recoil Performance Group, spring 2008
Choreographer Tina Tarpgaard, Recoil Performance and my good friend, programmer Ole Kristensen invited me to help them create body navigation. The body navigation performance was originally part of a larger installation and modern dance performance in copenhagen, by Tim Rushton, Danish Dance Theatre called Labyrint. 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.
Hotel Pro Forma, spring 2008 I assisted Andreas Buhl on video and light on Hotel Pro Forma’s performance called Relief, and assisted on animating several of the videos. Hotel Pro Forma is a copenhagen based performance group that creates very non-traditional plays in different theatres all over the world. Many of the plays are shown touring around, including this that has been shown around in europe and in Copenhagen.
Vision4, winter 2008, Damascus Syria
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 (12×8m), 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.
Vision4, fall 2007
I helped Vision4 doing the re-performance of The Third Tango in Svalegangen i Århus. The Third Tango (or Den 3. Tango in danish) is about the storyteller Carl Quist Møllers journey into his dreams about a girl. The play had live music by a tango orchestra, and used the eyeliner technic for visually taking the audience into a unreal journey filled with movie effects live on stage.
My job was to make the technical video setup, but we chose to remake the setup from last time and convert all the video into Isadora on a Mac Pro.
CampX, fall 2007
I helped do the video on the play called QUEER on CampX Aveny. It was a big performance with lots of televisions we had to control individually, and 3 projectors. I ended up helping on the techicnical side of the setup, doing some of the video material and running all the video every evening.
Photo from technical setup where you see the frame that was going to hold the eyeliner foil. Photo by me
Vision4, summer 2007
This was my first theatre project. I assisted light designer Andreas Buhl on the play called The Miracle (Miraklet in danish) by Mikael Fock and Vision4. This was a big eyeliner production on Kaleidoskop K2 in Copenhagen about a man that became pregnant – a true miracle. The eyeliner was used to make real film effects live on stage (like slowmotion bullets and 3d mazes the actors got stuck into).
My job was to help setting the eyeliner foil up, setting up the technical part of projectors and computers, and help a little bit producing some of the video material. The setup consisted of 2 front projectors, and 1 back projector all controlled with Pandora.
