cribrosa

it's only the beginning

things unfolded a little more today.

spent some time looking at the footage we shot yesterday. trying to get a sense of how it might appear on a screen.

thought about a curved screen - half a circle only. and about a work that runs without interaction. maybe it’s simpler than that and give people more choice about what they see but still pushes to the extent of the periphery.

we spoke about peripheral perception and i dug up a bunch of research papers from pubmed about motion and form perception in the peripheral visual field (plenty of experiments on macaques as well as the human nuero/psych papers you’d expect).

there was one interesting paper about sensory memory and ambiguous vision. it was a little outside what i’ve been thinking about, but the notion of ambiguous vision is something that i like.

In recent years the overlap between visual perception and memory has shed light on our understanding of both. When ambiguous images that normally cause perception to waver unpredictably are presented briefly with intervening blank periods, perception tends to freeze, locking into one interpretation. This indicates that there is a form of memory storage across the blank interval. This memory trace codes low-level characteristics of the stored stimulus. Although a trace is evident after a single perceptual instance, the trace builds over many separate stimulus presentations, indicating a flexible, variable-length time-course. This memory shares important characteristics with priming by non-ambiguous stimuli. Computational models now provide a framework to interpret many empirical observations.

already built

the Advanced Visualisation and Interaction Environment has been developed at the university of nsw and seems ideal for this project.

although the tracking system does high res volumetric tracking, i wonder about how head movement best correlates with eye position - would it be necessary to have eye movement tracking or not. i think not but hard to know. to complete this project there will need to be a range of tests of both the tracking and of the transitions between movement/dance modules.

part of the process

i’d forgotten.

about the practice of not knowing. forgotten that i can apply it here as well.

allowing. not pushing. patience. presence.

process.

despair

some after work beer drinking revealed that all the participants in this project have doubts about their work, about their craft, about their art.

very australian.

un-un-australian.

nodal dances

we’ve been talking about an overall structure - that the work has a duration but that within that discrete time frame there are a number of possibilities for what may occur.

i imagine that there is a branching structure that has nodes where different footage is projected (and sound played) based on the direction the audience member is looking (or where their head is turned). these nodes can also be linked to a time line - so that if, for example, after 3 minutes the structure hasn’t progressed (because the audience won’t look at one screen for long enough) then a particular branch will be taken.

it seems a bit complicated in my mind right now - but i get a sense of how it will work. almost get a sense of how to code it as well.

we need to do some tests to see if we can make transitions between the little modules of footage, where there is a continuity to the choreography. or to find a method for allowing transitions from a node to a particular branch.

in the end, i imagine that there will be multiple stories that arise dependent on the audiences head/eye movement within the space and the determination of an overall structure.

simon bloody ellis

thought there was going to be some useful information on the Crevice blog about moving images across perpendicular screens… no such luck, or at least my quick perusal didn’t yield any results.

i do remember discussing it during the project though, just can’t remember what came up. remind me simon.

there is some useful information about projectors and size/range issues.

what ever happened to crevice anyway?

something that did come up after the showing of Crevice was to do with the projected space. with the dark background footage I remember feeling like the depth of the space was larger than reality. the darkness opening up. and with the projection of an actual space (well, in crevice they were drawings/animations of rooms) it felt that the depth was lost - even with the perspective drawings.

four sides and what's it about

dilemma one: projecting onto surfaces perpendicular to each other will cause problems with a body moving from one surface to another. the ugly wrap / change in perspective if the projected image is to move from one surface to another.

dilemma two: how important is dance to this project? why dance? why the body? what is the choreography? (i may just be having a little panic here after last night when david spoke about how he feels the dance needs to be exciting - to really lift film work. and he related the feeling of watching 3 days of screendance at cinedans where by the end it was all a bit meaningless/bland. i think that included my short, ready. excitement - the word bothered me at first but after some discussion my understanding is that it’s dance that is enlivening.)

but… that’s why i’m here. to find out what it is about. what the content is. choreographically. and narratively. as well as to get a grip on how it will come together technically. multiple streams.

lot’s to think about.

practicalities

as an interactive i need to find a way to effectively track where the audience is looking. the ideal system would be something that can track eye movements as well as head movements. at the same time - if it’s a walk in space it needs to track gross movement as well, to register where in the space the audience is. the university of cambridge has some great info and clips of visual tracking systems for robotics. representation below:

i think this might be a little too hard to achieve without access to the funding and resources of a uni!

other thoughts i’ve had are about using an infrared sensor built into a pair of headphones. having headphones to put on would also allow a certain level of control over the spatialisation of the sound and could be a trigger for initiating the work as well.

other ideas have included using a Wii remote - or even an iphone. both use accelerometers to produce a data stream that conveys location and position.