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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
