The piece is going to be setup again next fall at dansehallerne in copenhagen, and afterwards on a tour.

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.”

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.

You can read alot more at Ole’s blog

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. 

So the next 4 weeks i’m going to control sound and video every night at CampX together with these wonderfull people.

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

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.

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.

Links
Photos by me of Labyrint and Body Navigation on flickr
Blogpost about body navigation 

Video from Labyrint, Copenhagen

Video of full performance, as staged in Zagreb