GPS Orchestra with the Digital Producers Lab

I’ve spent the last week running GPS Orchestra as an ongoing element woven through iShed’s brilliant Digital Producers Lab (a development programme for 12 producers working across Wales).

As a counterpoint to the programme of presentations and discussion settings led by some great speakers, GPS Orchestra was intended as a practical set of tasks to introduce working with GPS, electronics and the Arduino platform.

Starting with a ‘site visit’ out into Millennium Square, the producers were tasked with observing the space and thinking about how they’d like to nudge the atmosphere and/or behaviours they noticed.

That was the easy bit! What followed was a steep-learning-curved introduction to coding and prototyping to get them to the point where they could control motors and LEDs through live GPS data according to the movement of the contraptions they were to make.

Layering up the skills through the week, it was very heartwarming to hear that by Wednesday quite a few of the group were already planning to purchase Arduino bits and pieces to continue tinkering with after the lab!

By Friday lunch time – after only about 5 or 6 hours on their projects – they had made some amazing things:

• Something that responded to the number of satellites it could see – initially intended to be rolled along the floor, but ended up getting lots of hugs.
• Happbee – a wounded bee whose recuperation could be assisted if you carried him fast through the air as if he was flying.
• The musical box – a small box that had the power to make you dance (or at least move differently).
• The Digital Harp / y Delyn digidol – plays when you walk towards Wales and plays more the closer to are to the homelands.

It wasn’t an easy challenge by any means, but I was really impressed with the outcomes (not just the things they made). A lovely group of people and a very inspiring week overall. Thanks to everyone who contributed.

My photos from the week are at http://www.flickr.com/photos/nikki_pugh/sets/72157637471578064/, and below are a collection of Tweets relating to the sessions:

Venue-hunting for Bees in a Tin conference

I’ve spent the Summer working on a residency hosted by The Public in West Bromwich where I’ve been designing and delivering a programme of events related to maker culture and DIY technology.

Different events have been aimed at different audiences. You can see the results at http://manyandvaried.org.uk.

One last event remains: Bee in a Tin. Nominally aimed at artists, but you can read that as something like “people dedicating sustained effort to interesting projects”. We’re all very excited about this, but there’s one catch. The Public as we know it is being shut down by Sandwell Council at the end of next month.

This means many things, amongst which is the need for me to find an alternative venue for the conference.

Please can you help me compile a shortlist of possibilities?

Here’s what I’m after:

• Somewhere that can accommodate around 50 people doing a range of presentations, workshops and more active playtesting (likely to involve going outside).
• Preferably ‘slightly scruffy’ (i.e. people aren’t afraid to colonise the space and inhabit corners for making stuff etc.
• Wi-Fi
• Plentiful supplies of electrons
• Heating (we’re aiming for a February/March date)
• Low-ish hire rates (my budget was based on free venue hire at The Public!)
• Probably restricted to either Birmingham-ish or Bristol for geographical reasons…

I can be pretty flexible, but the kind of thing I have in mind is the 2011 GLI.TC/H Festival which hit a sweet spot with size and malleability of space. (There are some photos here, but I’m not sure how much of a sense of the space they convey.) Basically the old VIVID space would have been ideal.

What can you suggest as alternative?

Coming up: Heavy Objects at If Wet…

Last week I had the pleasure of visiting the If Wet… HQ at Callow End in Worcestershire, If Wet… being a fabulous monthly salon of sonic explorations, the like of which you’ve almost certainly never seen – or heard – before.

This weekend I’ll be presenting Score for heavy objects and built environment at If Wet.. #5.

You may remember the Heavy Objects from the And Miles to go Before I Sleep… exhibition last year: large, cumbersome wooden tubes that process GPS data in order to make tapping noises in response to the type of space they are moving through.

An Heavy Object getting a test drive last year

For If Wet… we used the Heavy Objects to record a sonic profile of the village of Callow End and the surrounding area. Having first waited for a gap in the rain, we set off with our unusual instruments…

It was hard work, but worth it for the expressions of the people we encountered along the way. Sam had a few explanations to make to some of his neighbours, although I noted no-one really seemed surprised at what he was doing…

The recording currently only exists as raw data:

And a couple of visual representations:

For Sunday’s If Wet… we will play the recorded data back though the Heavy Objects for the first time – no one has heard it yet, not even me!

Weather permitting, there will also be an opportunity for you to take a Heavy Object outside and have a chance to use it as an instrument yourself.

As if that wasn’t enough, there will also be a (very) limited number of prints available of one of the data visualisations of the heavy sound of Callow End.

There’s a preview of everything on the programme at http://www.ifwet.org.uk/news/if-wet-5-preview/ and you can buy your tickets in advance at http://ifwet5.eventbrite.co.uk/. Kathy Hinde’s work is very interesting – well worth checking out.

See you there!

Inkvisible #4: smooth moves and scribbles

Today was our last day of Inkvisible playtesting. Having decided to move away from the L.A.S.E.R Tag software to a motion-tracking based system, it turns out we still stayed with the Graffiti Research Lab.

Ben Eaton hacked an installation of BlitzTag to work with a Kinect sensor.

After a bit of configuration for the space, we started getting our first curious bystanders.

They rapidly became participants!

The first observation was that this system gave much smoother results. Strangely the projected line almost felt elastic at times. The second was that people seemed to get really very absorbed into the movements – in the same way that you might run your fingers through sand on the beach or trail them through water. It’s quite a different experience from the version that tracks a laser pointer. This is much more about the movement of the body.

The snippet of video gives a small sense of this, but basically we were finding that people (of all ages) were doing this for several minutes, content to just swirl their arm around and see the traces formed.

With very few exceptions, the results all looked like this:

Although we did have one or two cases of people writing their names:

People seemed to filter out the paintings we were hoping they might respond too. I think most people would have preferred to have had a blank area of wall to mark onto.

This, however, was not what we were trying to investigate so, time to change things up a little!

We relocated to the gallery next door and set up over an abstract painting. Here we wanted to see if we could find a base layer that resonated more with the projected graffiti layer.

It started to show some promise, so we did a slow pan of the room to see what different scales and substrates did.

I very much liked the feel of working on a huge scale as when happened when the projector reached down to the far end of the room. The corresponding drop in intensity was noticeable though, in that the lines were quite faint. It would be really good to try something on this scale, but with a much more powerful projector so that the results are still vibrant.

Next we came to Ana Maria Pacheco’s Man and His Sheep.

Oh yes.

Now we started to be actually interacting with the artwork. Admittedly still through kind of scribbling, but when you mark across a face, a part of you feels it on your face too.

So, this was significant not only for the shift in interaction, but also because this was the first time we had been able to successfully project onto 3D sculpture (reflection and scatter problems with the lasers).

Both systems we trialled have their pros and cons. In particular with this one we missed the ease of being able to tweak settings and the effect of the paint drips.

As with L.A.S.E.R. Tag, BlitzTag was not without its quirks when it came to problems with tracking. For some reason it simply would not detect and respond to the movements of several people.

We weren’t really in a situation that enabled us to do de-bugging of what was causing this, but we suspect it to be partly to do with differences in clothing.

The system was generally able to detect me, so we devised a couple of work-arounds that sometimes worked. The first was to give people my brown shirt to wear (see above) and the other was for me to stand in front of people to act as a sort of shield.

In summary we think this has got a lot of potential, but we think any next steps would benefit from a particular context (giving a direction to the types of responses being sought) and a big chunk of time that could be spent de-bugging the installation and customising the nature of the projections.

That’s us out of time, though. Next week we report our findings back at King’s College.

Inkvisible #3: Associations, assumptions and frustrations

Having previously decided on our location and homed in on some of the aspects of interaction that we wanted to encourage during a planned final even, our aim for last Friday was to set up in situ and perfect the tech and social set-ups.

It all started well, with some excellent exchanges. Following an observation from Ben, we made a bit more of people having their photos taken alongside the marks they had made.

We’re interested in how this may change the dynamics of what people draw and also the ownership they take of it.

A Dutch artist echoed the paintings she usually does that consist of white and blue lines. She was very keen to take lots of photos of everything and there was a very strong sense that she would go on to share these with others.

We don’t often get people writing text (it’s quite difficult, especially on your first attempt), but someone who I’m guessing was a visitor from East Asia, contributed an I ♥ You.

I’m curious about how this behaviour might relate to whether people consider themselves tourists or not. As a nice juxtaposition, though, this member of staff was also keen to have a go and to know where she could find her photo online afterwards. (pssst! It’s here!)

We also had our first genitalia drawn – suffice to say from an unexpected source!

It’s been very interesting talking to people and finding out about their expectations and assumptions about what ‘everyone else must draw’. We think there’s some interesting psychology going on here beyond anything too Freudian.

Unfortunately we then hit a point where the technology started to seize up on us; first working intermittently and then failing to work at all.

This has scuppered our plans to hold a formal event at the end of the month, however you could argue it has furthered our learning and the conversations around it quite a bit.

After some wrangling we decided we couldn’t run an advertised event with the technology being as unpredictable as it was. We have a fair idea of what we are asking from such an event though, and increasingly how to achieve that, so we’re still going to design and plan one – we’re just not going to try and make it happen just yet.

In the meantime we’ve still got one more day at BMAG: stay tuned to find out how we’re going to use it…

Inkvisible #2: Provocations

Last week we had our second playtesting day for the Inkvisible project. (Here’s the write-up of the first one.) This time I was at BMAG with Dr Gretchen Larsen, our King’s College academic.

With or without a PhD, we all start in the same way!

After struggling to get the L.A.S.E.R. Tag software we’re using to track our green laser pointer in the orange space of the Buddha Gallery, I’d bought a purple laser pointer to try out. In parallel to this, we’d also been talking to a BMAG conservator to ensure our lasers aren’t doing any damage.

It turns out there’s not a lot of published research regarding the use of laser pointers for drawing graffiti within the museum environment!

The conservator is going to do some calculations and research into fluence and intensity, and whilst we think we’re a long way off the sorts of powers, spot sizes or exposure times that would be needed to do any damage, we’re making sure we err on the side of caution.

This means that we will restrict the use of our green lasers to glazed oil paintings (framed behind glass), ceramics and sculptures, and our purple laser (with its shorter wavelength and increased likelihood of generating ultra violet radiation) to only ceramics and sculptures. Fortunately the area in the Buddha Gallery we were interested in using contains stone and bronze statues.

We’re interested in this particular gallery partly because of its links to a community that come to leave devotional offerings and partly because of the overlooking balcony that means we can potentially project down into the space.

This affordance of being able to have all the technology up out of sight seemed to have a distinct effect on the interactions with museum visitors. In contrast to when we had the projector and laptop out in plain view and people readily came up to ask us what we were doing, here the mechanics were somewhat hidden and people tended to stay back to watch from a distance. We could still hear the appreciative exclamations, but it was almost as if when the workings are visible they act as an invitation for people to come up and ask what’s happening and how it works.

We’re also wondering if this effect is related to how many people are with the laser – if it’s just one, do visitors feel they need to leave them alone to do whatever it is they’re concentrating on?

Whilst the invitation seemed to have been removed, it was replaced with more of a sense of magic. “Is it real?”, one man was heard to say.

Something else was to become apparent too: the big bronze statue of Buddha didn’t like the laser!

The above image might look like a lot of indiscriminate scribbling, but it’s us trying to figure out why the projected graffiti would stop as the laser passed over the statue. With a bit of tweaking of the software settings, we managed to get the laser to track over the (basalt, I think) surround, however we could not directly draw any traces over the statue itself. (Only drips or traces that were offset due to tracking misalignment.) We think this was because of the reflective relief metallic surface bouncing the laser off in all sorts of directions therefore making it invisible to the tracking camera.

The result was really quite eerie and added to the feeling of transgression.

The same thing happened when we tried the statue of Lucifer in the Round Room.

Our next stop was one of the Pre-Raphaelite galleries. Having had a wander around the museum we felt that Inkvisible would work best in the more traditional galleries: the new history galleries for example are lovely and spiffy, but our stuff would just look too normal in them, it would disappear.

The Pre-Raphaelite collection at BMAG is renowned and attracts a lot of visitors expecting a particular kind of museum experience. We deliberately sited ourselves here to get a feel for what sort of responses disrupting that would produce.

This was our first interaction: a woman who was drawn to it as if to a car crash. She was horrified at the prospect of having marked over the paintings, but couldn’t tear herself away. Result.

Not long afterwards we were descended upon by a series of groups of school children. Rising to the challenge we invited them to take part, giving as many of them a go as we were able to.

This was good learning for us as up until now we had only dealt with participants in twos or threes. Instigating countdowns to mark the end of turns and designating a Special Assistant to help with clearing the screen, we kept groups of about 10 7-year-olds engaged at a time.

Chatting to them between changeovers it was interesting to explore the extent to which they had already been trained in ‘appropriate’ museum behaviour. They enjoyed the opportunity to draw all over the walls and to not get into serious/expensive trouble!

We were a bit nervous about handing over some Class 2 lasers to some excited small children, so for the most part we used an alternative method. Rather than tracking laser light reflected off of the walls and paintings, here we used a torch held so it pointed straight back towards the camera.

This had obvious advantages in terms of safety for both the artefacts and the participants, but it lacks something in the feedback for your movements that you get with the laser pointer unless you are right up close to the projection surface.

I like this a lot – it’s a very different experience when you can see the brush marks on the surface you are graffiti-ing over and this method also encourages you to move your (whole) body in a different way. We got some of the groups to try jumping and making marks as high as they could.

Struggling a bit with the lack of correlation between movement and mark, also with the tracking system not being able to keep up with very fast movements, we switched back to the laser pointer method with some of the later groups.

Here it was very apparent that the children would treat the area of wall above the paintings as their canvas, avoiding the artworks below unless they were specifically encouraged to work lower down.

After the school groups had all got on their respective coaches, we were paid a few visits by chaps from the Digital Heritage Demonstrator project. One of the comments was “I bet everyone draws lines across the eyes straight away”. Well, er, no, actually. Nobody had! It was interesting to think about what people assumed would be the obvious first thing to do.

We’ll be running a public event on the 26th of July where you can come and do some mark-making of your own.

What will you do?

Inkvisible #1: Getting to know the medium

Last month I was invited to take part in in Arts and the Digital Ideas Lab (part of King’s Cultural Institute’s Creative Futures programme, produced in collaboration with Caper) as a creative technologist.

About 40 people took part – split more-or-less evenly split between representatives of academia (primarily King’s College London), cultural organisations (such as the Maritime Museum, Coney, Crafts Council and the Royal Shakespeare Company) and the creative technologists (always a delightfully ‘misc’ collection).

At a previous event 19 challenges had been arrived at and we started off by aligning ourselves to one of these. I gravitated towards “How can we nurture and sustain spaces for collective creative and critical thought in the digital world?”.

By the end of the day I was on a team pitching an idea that we later wrote up as:

Inkvisible is a hybrid framework of digital, projected graffiti; game mechanics; and narrative applied within the interior space of the museum.

Our aim for this phase of the project is to playtest different variations of the framework at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery (BMAG) in order to gain an understanding of how it can be applied to create a channel through which the audience’s critical voice can be expressed and heard.

We got some money; we got the go-ahead from BMAG and now we’re doing it!

Starting yesterday, we began what’s effectively a 4-day residency to get to grips with what the affordances of this idea might be.

‘We’ now being a team consisting of:

• Me (project lead)
• Dr Gretchen Larson (our King’s academic)
• Linda Spurdle (Digital Manager and our host at BMAG)
• Ben Eaton (A member of Invisible Flock and our main techy person)

(Others also contributed to the development of the initial idea.)

So, our first task was to get to grips with the technology we would be using to project the graffiti. We’d short-listed the Graffiti Research Lab’s L.A.S.E.R. Tag system (which seemed very much in the spirit of the voices we’re trying to encourage and the brief to use open source software as much as possible) and an alternative using motion sensing via a Kinect and outputting with Processing.

Ben and I set up in Gallery 10 and started experimenting…

We had a bit if hoo-hah caused by insufficient cable-age and interference from the display cabinet lights, but before too long we were up and running and attracting curious observers.

It was immediately obvious that this was something that draws people (of all ages) in and can be used as a catalyst for conversation. Our task next is to make those conversations productive. We’ll be exploring that more when Dr Larsen and I are back in the museum again on Tuesday and Thursday next week.

For the remainder of yesterday’s experiments, we tried a few more locations.

Our attempts at projecting down from the balcony into the Buddha Gallery were thwarted by what we think was a combination of distance, reflection angles and the background orange light.

Next we tried the iconic Round Room – the first bit of the collection you encounter as you come in from the main entrance.

Wanting to cover an area that overlapped with several paintings, we struggled again due to angles of incidence and the matt paint on the walls preventing the laser spot from being detected. We’ve been given permission by the conservation team to use our lasers on certain materials (not egg tempera, textiles or watercolours), but we don’t really want to upgrade to using a more powerful laser (we’re currently using Class 2).

So, out of a combination of necessity and curiosity, we then tried honing in on one single painting.

As you can imagine, this had a very different feel compared to when we were using a blank area of wall above the cabinet in the ceramics gallery.

Having a specific and almost-tangible object to interact with (you really get a sense of the (im)materiality of both the pigment and the overlaid light when you’re up close) gives the opportunity to respond to something in particular.

We had people telling us about what they thought of the painting, for example: having grown up in that area of Oxfordshire and how the landscape reminds them of home. We also had someone backing-off to sit down and think for a bit before returning and asking to write the word ‘sky’ – the element that struck her the most.

The location in this part of the museum was very well trafficked and we had an almost constant stream of people coming up to us to ask questions, share their thoughts and give it a go.

People’s responses were not always positive – which I think is fair enough – and these were also important conversations to have. A few people said they didn’t see the point and one man in particular felt that we were being quite disrespectful to the work of the artist.

That last conversation came towards the end of the day when the overlaid projections were getting quite scribbly and doodley. Our experiments also came the day after a portrait of the Queen was defaced with real spray paint.

It seems that use of the laser pen and seeing the resulting ‘paint’ traces is experience enough, and we’re not sure how much narrative we want – or need – to wrap it up in. What I think we will have to focus our efforts on is how to steer the use of this tool towards eliciting comment on the institution.

We’re in again playtesting on Tuesday and Thursday next week (18th and 20th of June) – do pop in and join the experiment.

Building Fun

Following on from the Gallery Hack Camp at The Public back in February, I’ve been working with fellow attendees Rachel Sutton, Dave Checkley, Kim Wall and Garry Bulmer on a commission to build a Mobile Fun Factory to inhabit The Public’s atrium space over the summer.

Our brief was mostly centred around this steel frame that’s just a leeeetle bit smaller than the goods lift:

We’ve been tasked with turning it into a Mobile Fun Factory: a structure that can rove around the atrium space of the arts centre and be used to display the products of the summer workshops, as well as being a playful thing in its own right.

First step: a ginormous brainstorm to figure out what a Mobile Fun Factory might be…

Second step: breaking out the cardboard and gaffa tape!

We’ve moved on a bit since that first cardboard maquette built in March. For a bunch of people who, for the most part, had barely even met before, it’s turned out to be a formidable team. I’m also in the role of project manager, so it’s my job to keep an eye on these things, and my considered opinion is that these guys have some truly formidable making skills. HIRE THEM!

As we slowly get closer to completion, here are a few images from the build process so far…

An early sketch. The final Fun Factory won’t be entirely dissimilar to this…

Fettling new plates for the new castors

Yellow is the colour of Fun

Possibly the sexiest assemblage of soil pipe ever.

Seekrit bunker

Testing the camera feed

Periscope simulator

The Secret Cinema starts to take shape…

We’re pretty much onto the final assemblage of component parts now, so hopefully the Mobile Fun Factory should be mobile and fun soon.

Other people’s brains

I just felt the need to mark that this week has been a good one for meeting people and having meaty conversations.

On Monday I was in London hanging out all day with Lynne Bruning, Rain Ashford and Jamillah Knowles [Outriders]. I’m not even going to attempt to sum up the topics covered, suffice to say that there were many and they were heartfelt. And there was a lot of cake. Rain took loads of photos, of which the above is one of the few that didn’t feature cake.

To be honest, some of the ones I took featuring cake didn’t technically feature as much cake as they could have done…

Tuesday featured a Pecha Kucha Night afternoon Coventry event – always good – and a meeting that involved much passionate talk about making stuff and making stuff happen.

Wednesday I got to chat to some knitters as I started a new residency at The Public (you’ll be hearing more about that later…)

And yesterday I was back in London for a Creative Lab at King’s College London helping to develop projects and new digital prototypes for cultural organisations. I was in a lovely team with a stimulating blend of familiar names and faces and people I hope to hear from more in the future.

There was no cake.

There is a shipwreck…

A few days ago I spent the day down in London with Lisa May Thomas at the Chisenhale Dance Space. Lisa’s been in residence there developing a version of her piece There is a shipwreck in my bones.

I was invited to get involved after Lisa heard me talking at the Pervasive Media Studio last year – she liked the combination of technology, sculptural materials and the sense of movement within my projects.

So, having already armed her with a selection of wax pods, on Sunday I filled a large rucksack full of microcontrollers and sensors and headed over to see what I could add.

Lisa was already experimenting with projecting onto different surfaces, including the pods which resulted in a really nice scale and distorted image.

I made some systems for colour shifting some LEDs in response to inputs of touch and distance. I also grabbed some snippets of the audio accompanying the piece and rigged up an ultrasound trigger in the passageway leading through the seating tiers to the performance area (Shipwreck is to be a promenade style experience where the audience moves freely around the auditorium, making discoveries along the way.

Of life.

Of death.

Of sea.

What was really interesting though, was the process by which I decided to not include any of these. Putting circuitry in the pods limited the way they could be carried and the sense of otherworldliness. The effect of the proximity sensor in the corridor could so easily be replicated with an mp3 player for a fraction of the stress and uncertainty in my absence (I was only there for the one day).

In the end it may be that the one make I have contributed to the eventual realisation of the performance is a scrunched up soaked piece of brown paper.

Sometimes that’s just the way it should be.