I’ve simplified the event topology to a bare minimum that still has a chance of flow in two dimensions, and has a beginning, muddle, end. Let’s call it the VISIT4 topology, since it’s got only 4 states: NIGHT, DAY(=DAYDREAM=DESERT), GLASS, FIRESTORM.

We media folks met and talked about the experiential aspect of these states last week. Basically, the room leaves its NIGHT activity as the clock shows it’s Gallery business hours (9 - 19h?).

NIGHT is time for the Gallery to dance (danse macabre, sibelius’ valse triste, hiphop, etc. according to the season) as you like. It would be interesting to suggest autonomous life, autonomous intentionality, locked behind glass.

DAY is when the clock shows Gallery is open for business and there’s a minimal activity in the room. (We can set the threshhold just below one-body’s-worth of activity by calibration under the Gallery’s conditions, or we can use the surveillance camera trained on the receptionist desk to see when someone is near the receptionist area.) It could be interesting to characterize DAY state as when no visitor is there in the Gallery, but it’s open, and showing its dreams. What those “dreams” are is up to the creators to interpret. We did speak about playing back processed, previously recorded material.

As visitors infuse the Gallery, the room gets “wetter” (derives more energy from visitors). As it gets wetter, more weather happens: i.e. the state tends away from DAY and toward the mixture between GLASS - FIRESTORM .

GLASS is viscuous, liquid, continuous. In this state, horizon is distinct from sky: the projections on walls are distinct from projection on the ceiling. The visitor may be able to “write” on the surfaces — only one attractor (that associated with the biggest blob?), permits writing, e.g using a scattering of dust.

FIRESTORM is violent; sparky, atoms in void. Maybe nervous in the sense that the dynamics are quite sensitive to perturbations from sensors. Eg. motion from camera input drives the particles very hard, bc the particles’ masses are low, or attractors’ gravitational masses are high.

In terms of physical configuration, what distinguishes GLASS from FIRESTORM could be how people are positioned and / or moving near the sculptural elements in the room: the Cells, the Sensate Tapestry, possibly the Suitcase in the other, hidden room.

I don’t know what activity should tend to correlate with GLASS & FIRESTORM in the most tangible or compelling way. My first cut guess would be to sense whether people (a person) are gathered close to a (any) sculptural element. For example, people “touching” (within threshhod of our sensors) any part of the Cell structure or Tapestry could send the system into FIRESTORM.

This we’ll have to work out in situ, in vivo, of course.

Here’s a thought about transitions between instruments like

water - ice - … - waterfall

One question is how to make a 2 (or more) dimensional transition between states that is more interesting than a cross fade between two (sets of ) instruments.

For example, as we approach waterfall, maybe the NUMBER of particles can increase as DAY —> 0. While the SPEED or LIFETIME can increase as FIRESTORM —> 1.

Also the responsivity of the particles to human movement as seen by the Motion patch, should increase in FIRESTORM. We could decrease the mass of the particles, or multiply the strength of the attractors associated with the movement density distribution.

As GLASS –> 1 (and FIRESTORM and DAY necessarily –> 0), the particles (if that’s what they are) could increase in mass until they are relatively insensitive to the movement of the human visitors.

Another point: as the event goes to its terminal DESERT = DAY state, the particles perhaps should return to their original constellations.

Ever since Meteor Shower, I’ve asked for being able to set the initial positions of the stars according to simply the (x,y) coordinates of the brightest N pixels in the input video (could be a static bitmap). Michael Fortin may have provided this as an external to Max, but surely this can be done, simply enough, in native Jitter.

It would also help if the instruments near the boundaries of neighborhoods of the fundamental states look the same. In other words, it would be helpful if the FIRESTORM instrument(s) look like GLASS instrument(s) for some choice of parameters. So we can make multi-dimensional transitions.

For times series that suggest “intentionality,” I suggest
1. Mapping the game controller joystick via Max to a DMX instrument
2. Parametrize an instrument
3. Use Tim’s sensor data recording tool (a very important research instrument !!!) to record the INPUT (not cooked) sensor data while manipulating the DMX instrument.

You can re-use the sensor data

Alternatively just record people’s signatures on a tablet,
Use the x,y,t data mainly for the temporal dynamics,
Map the dynamics to all sorts of temporal processes, e.g. speed (or acceleration) along a trajectory, like the moving beam trajectory, whose (x,y) path is independently determined.

This may yield effect of “intention” …

(JC has general notes)

I’ve asked Louis-Andre to come up with an overall design of the vitrines that makes a more coherent
landscape / timeline, and incorporates and contextualizes the individual contributions.

We need to commit now on the individual elements, so
Louis-Andre can work out a global design for the vitrine.

Here are the potential / actual elements for the vitrine –

Flower — plants clustered, perhaps around pillars, or w/r the gaps in the glass;
Tim — 1 subwoofer, small mics perhaps near the gaps in glass;
JS — a projector on a remote control car (potential).
Ayesha Hameed — a representation of the Sebald table with Mark Sussman. (to be confirmed)
Ayesha, can you describe explicitly what it is?

Louis-Andre is available to meet after hours and on the weekends, so he will call folks together.
Please proactively contact him and give him your phone numbers and emails,
availabilities.

One of LA’s concepts is a long ribbon of paper, a semi-mythical, curly “river of history”
clear across the entire width of the vitrine … cut variably
with perhaps hand-drawn as well as printed images texts from all the TML documentation
(eg salient stills)

Nadia Frantova will help Louis-Andre with the print and physical (sculptural) production,
and associated work (perhaps getting salient stills, making photos of potential
detritus around the lab)

JC & JA will confer with Louis-Andre provide some continuity of design across the cards, TML brochure.

At the campfire, we raised the possibility of a poster that comes out of the same design
(maybe looking like part of the paper river?)

The idea emerged of using the same / similar material (tissue papers, cheescloth, ??) to dress the speakers
and even the atrium (west) wall for Touch2.

Maybe the paper “screen” across the glass of the vitrine could be ripped in a way to lightly suggest unwrapping the Gallery.

If I understand your idea — the irregular running strip could be pasted to the glass at eye height, with some holes to peek through and other places where the image is printed directly on the paper sheet.

The peek-holes would line up with printed images behind the paper screen, but since I imagine the strip is not very wide (12″ to 36″ irregular ?) these are symbolic peek-holes, not really necessary.

We have some ideas from last night that may begin to make more coherent material connections across the show: vitrine — wall treatment — dressing the loudspeakers that will be on the floor of the main Gallery. Even the costume for Touch2, perhaps….

Josee-Anne, can you verify with Lynn when exactly we can work in the vitrine?
- Xin Wei


See Patrick’s drawings of cells now in the TML Galleries / album “cells” –particularly the suspension side image:

jelly + cell

2_cell

musclecells

nervecell

plant cell

shadow-projection cell

shadow-projection cell

sonic cell

structure_side_image

suspension system

Hi Soo, Kiani, Josée-Anne,

What do you think of this as the beginning: The idea would be that Touch2 picks up where Touch1 ends, in an indirect way, In fact we could project the Desh’s video onto the Atrium wall right up to the point where we see Kiani’ facing the camera, fading.

What if the way we open Touch2 is to have Soo, the one who emerges from the womb (in Touch1) emerge from the Atrium wall in the following way. I imagined that the emergent dancer (Soo) would, initially be covered in a very large film of tissue paper wheatpasted to the wall, so that her body is behind of a continuous sheet of very thin translucent fibrous material following the contours of her body and blending into the rest of the wall. (Josee-Anne, Harry gave precise ideas of how to make this. He and I think it is eminently buildable. We will always make it breathable, and as comfy as possible! Of course we have to see what Soo and Kiani think
Soo’s initial pose could be a frozen moment of a movement of escape, emergence. Kiani initially would be offstage (ready to enter from the blackbox gallery). Desh’s video could be projected over Soo’s body-as-part-of-wall-as-screen.

At a given moment, (say the end of the video), Soo would emerge out of the tissue paper wall, bursting through the layers of tissue paper,
(EXFOLIATION is one of the themes of Remedios.)

The sound could be quite strong bc paper is stiff. I imagined with Harry that we could prepare this as a “costume” in the form of a sandwich of a cardboard back and tissue paper at least 8′ x 8′…. It is important not to read as clothing, but as “wall”. The edges of this would have to be dressed to make flush with the actual wall.

Obviously we would pre-assemble of sandwich, complete with pre-drilled holes in the wall for attachment of the sandwich to the wall, and store the assembly somewhere in the Gallery together fast-drying plaster-water mix ready for rapid assembly minimum time before showtime. That time is the time of comfortable wear for the Dancer, of course. We must figure out a way to rapidly assembly, and dress the set+costume, before — but not much before — the vernissage starts.

After this event, we could paint over the eruption “scar” so that it simultaneously remains as evidence of the event, and can hold projected image, so subsequent Jitter imagery would pick up the traces of the physical peeling layers of the exfoliation. (Thanks to Harry.)

Cheers,
Xin Wei

On 19-Feb-08, at 3:43 AM, Josée-Anne wrote:

I saw Kiani on Sunday and we talked about it. That’s cool! She’s interested.

I need to check with the Gallery director tomorrow and see if we can cut into on of the Gallery’s walls.

JS, we would probably want to to project Desh’s film first and at the end (shortly before the dancers emerge from the wall) move-on to the one of the patches that you have been using to do it. Would that be something possible?

XW I’m back at the drawing board on this. Now trying to put together the paper and what I showed you before… did you have sketches for this as well? Or an event design.

Talk with Harry re specific construction ideas, and bring back notes. Then we can enroll production help. I would say Marine Antony.

I’m also wondering, Soo, if you think the movement should be centered on/close-to the floor or not. (Vertical crack - like the Remedios paintings or Horizontal-on the floor to accommodate Touch-like movements…)

Whatever the movement — Touch, as Soo and Kiani know, is concerned with the ethical medium in-between bodies.
See the forwarded email re Aristophanes below.
Touch2 indirectly (NOT literally) follows after the emergence event in Touch1.

Could we schedule a meeting towards the end of the week, as things get better defined.

Thanks.
Bye.

On Feb 19, 2008 3:00 AM, SOO <chohansoo@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Jo,

Yeah!

I asked Kiani and she would be available as well for the event. If you want, we can set a schedule to talk about it more specific.

Soo

On Feb 17, 2008 9:36 PM, Josée-Anne <joseeanne@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi,
I’d like to work with the Touch team (and possibly JS) on costumes and a temporary installation for the video-movement performance event Touch2. If there is time/interest.

I thought that Touch2 was part of the vernissage event? any updates regarding this? What do people think, together, separate, beginning, middle, end…

On the calendar we have the opening on Monday the 17th. What about the other event(s)?

Reminder: 3 Weeks before setup, 4 Weeks before opening.

On Feb 16, 2008 10:30 AM, x w <shaxinwei@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi,

Among those of you who are not already committed to one of the
productions, would one of you be able to take charge of managing the
events: the vernissage, the possible performances (Touch2 and Sebald3) ?

Xin Wei

Begin forwarded message:
From: x w <shaxinwei@gmail.com>
Date: January 27, 2008 1:07:05 PM EST (CA)
To: sutton Timothy <tim@synthist.net>, Jean-Sébastien Rousseau <jsrousseau@gmail.com>, Morgan Sutherland <morgan@morgansutherland.net>, Ludwig Manahan <vjmoots@gmail.com>, Soo-yeon Cho <chohansoo@gmail.com>, Marine Antony <marine.antony@gmail.com>, desh Fernando <nacando@gmail.com>
Subject: Aristophanes on love; and going beyond Aristophanes

Hi Touch Folks,

People have made excellent work preparing for the shoot. So we’re almost there. This is a good moment to take stock of where we are in spirit….

In Plato’s Symposium, Aristophanes presented a history of sexed love, based on Zeus splitting the atom of round, primeval man. In the beginning, man-woman were powerful, spherical creatures, with four legs and four arms. But for their arrogance, Zeus split them into halves that Apollo healed and shaped into the sexed bodies we have today. Doomed to seek our other halves.

I’m augmenting this myth by de-emphasizing the human organisms and foregrounding the medium of tissue and the liquid plenum of the world. So the effects we’ll see from the live video process will make palpable the

0. the single composite body (only light, some moments of delay)
1, the bodies internal forces (textures — only within the bodies)
2. the forces between the bodies (with bodies in black silhouette)
3. the forces suffusing everything - the bodies as well as the space exterior to the bodies.

How the visual dynamics work is up to JS. The staging of the different swirling video textures as the event unfolds step by step, should suggest that:

1. ethical relations are mediated by tissue (substance, not formal grammar of a moving part of body);
2. the very fabric of space itself is a medium (not just body tissue).

So the “womb” is merely a context for a dramatic event of “birth” but we don’t have to over emphasize the womb (too clichéd, and too over-coded with expectations). But the birth event itself is the moment at which the sound connotes to much huger space, and more clarified voices — as Tim has been suggesting — and when the video textures display the delayed forces / tensions built up from the earlier activity between the two separated halves — Soo and Kiani.

Compliments to all of you,
Xin Wei

514-817-3505

I’ve sketched some ideas on the layout of the main gallery, capturing some of the discussions with Patrick, Harry, JA, Tim…. (Also had conversations with Flower, Lenka, Elena for the blackbox, and Louis-Andre, Elena, Tim, … not represented in these sketches.)

Waiting on other folks.

The idea is to cluster the head-height cells near the corridor side of the space, leaving a scattering of them in the central area. Harry suggested bouncing the ceiling projection from a suspended projector (2m from grid), off of a 2m wide mylar, for effective throw of 6m. JS should confirm with Harry & Patrick+JC whether this would yield enough coverage of image-bearing cells on the ceiling.

Perhaps the Weaving (20′ x 4′ Sensate Tapestry) could be suspended from the ceiling near the entrance to the Gallery. (Marguerite and Elliot can confer with Patrick et.

Currently, I’m assuming that JS projections go onto the walls, eg the Atrium, ceiling, and Mackay walls (if we can fit the Sensate Tapestry parallel to the short wall on the corridor side of the Gallery). Need to confirm this.

Spoke with Harry re. Lightfield. Current idea: one good place to mount the moving beam (light) would be near the grid, about 1m out from the center axis of the Atrium wall. Its beam should have a clear play over the floor, over the bench. It may (or may not) scatter through a few carefully placed, transparent, head-height cells that “trickle” into the main air space.

The other lightfield installatio, along the base of the St. Catherine wall, would work best if that wall is left blank, I think. We could project from a projector suspended from the grid flush with wall, beaming down to a 3.7m wide x 5 cm high image-bearing custom-made screen / reflective surface. The point of that projection is to transmit and transmute (perhaps contrapuntally) the activity from the sidewalk. (We can mount a web-camera atop the St Catherine wall, looking out to the sidewalk, and process it through a simple Jitter patch.)

The main atmosphere effects: I’ve been emailing / talking with JS, Tim, Morgan about the states of the room. Now I have some semantics for the VISIT topology; it can be a fusion of season and weather: spring (EXFOLIATION), summer (verdant), fall (FIRESTORM), winter (GLASS stillness).

The Rolls Royce of such work will be Doug van Nort’s sensor time-series filter-based and geometric-model based predictors,
an outcome from his PhD and WYSIWYG work.

So for now we should look into Tim’s and ARJ’s patches for calibration as a solution for the medium term — this semester. But the important thing is to agree on a common procedure (protocol) for instrument-level and system-wide calibration at a sufficient level of abstraction to accommodate swapping out individual support externals or abstractions
without breaking the code you write.

This is specific to calibration
TUNING will be your own responsibility — but it’d be useful to write some ways for an instrumentalist other than yourselves to re-tune or even reconfigure your instrument.

Speakig of that — I think the Jitter instruments should now permit someone other than JS to save a set of parameters for a specific behavior. It would be smart to think of these “presets” as different (sub)instruments (on a fixed build of Jitter patches), and even name these pattr files as presets each defining an instrument/. (Much like presets for sound hardware synths.)

I recall JS was making this work for Cosmicomics — so does it work now? If so, can we learn how to do it?

Teachers: JS, Tim?
Students: Morgan, Marine, Xin Wei
Class: Friday after 5:30 ??

Cheers,
Xin Wei

On 14-Feb-08, at 11:00 AM, Timothy Sutton wrote:

Another example, here’s the patch for the Jamoma modules to do autoscaling, done by ARJ (now PhD).

If you open the main patch, there’s a bunch of dependencies not there, but they’re just shared system components for Jamoma. the help file gives some explanation and examples. but what’s there is very simple - using trough and peak for the most basic mode (a cleaner version of what i posted), and a bit more complex modes using a running window with standard deviation calculation.

more food for thought,
-tim

<jcom.autoscale.help><jcom.autoscale.mxt>

To structure the software development, we should adopt the tgvu-Oxygen-Ozone conventions as documented in the TML WIKI (thanks to Yon Visell, Emmanuel Thivierge).  Every developer should understand the OXYGEN software architecture, so you know where your code sits in the framework, and know what sorts of data goes where,  the processing layers, and strategies.   You can start by reading the documentation

http://www.topologicalmedialab.net/fields/tml/field.php?n=Category.Oxygen

Technical description of state engine (mostly for Morgan) :

http://www.topologicalmedialab.net/fields/tml/field.php?n=Projects.Eerm

If we make progress on integrating our software, and if we get funding to put it into shape, the OXYGEN epoch will be replaced by OZONE.

- Xin Wei