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 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.
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.
Copenhagen 2007 This project is made together with Emil Jacobsen for a art project at school. From outside it looks like a boring box with the text “Fragile” on it only with one hole in it, but when you look inside you see moving eyes looking directly at you from all over the box. The project was about things can look very ordinary and neutral from the outside, but when you look closer into it, you see a completely different object that is much more intelligent then first thought. Like surveillance systems, or viruses on the computer. The eyes where projected from the bottom of the box with a projector.
