My Fellow Students

Waiting for Salvation.

Marcel in his Waanzin Lab.

Report N&H VJ Farm

My fellow Snowman Ruben wrote a very nice report about the Nou&Herkauw VJ Farm at the Cinekid Festival. Here is a link to his blog Sneeuwig. Freely translated into English as Snowy;). Ruben and I are collaborating in almost every media art project, I think, for about nine years now. Together we form the artist duo Snow. We both are graduated in sculpture at the Artez. An Art Academy formerly based in the small town of Kampen, but moved to Zwolle for a couple of years already.

Krause

Yesterday Krause had her CD release in the Vera in Groningen. It was great! In collaboration with Ramon Putman, and two students from the Academy for Popculture, Egmar Irausquin and Thomas van den Heuvel, we created the visuals for her live show. The visuals are placed in Ableton Live, synchronized with her music tracks, so Krause can control them herself. Here are some photo's of her performance yesterday. When you take a closer look you can actually see some visuals;).

The Opera

Yesterday we had the last play of the Opera 'The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat'. Here are some photo's of the preparations and the performance.Very satisfying to see the final results of the stage design combined with the light and the animations.

At first the idea was to use brain activity measurements to interact with the video. As you can see in this blog, we did some experiments with this. But finally we decided to skip this idea. Mostly because of the reason that the connection of the measurements, which are not very clear, and the supposed reaction of the image was not at all obvious.  We didn't see a connection and/or an addition with the neurological lesion of the patient doctor P. in the story, and the way we could visualize this by measuring the brain activity of the singers. Maybe interesting for another project or experiments.

One of the ideas we integrated as a video concept, was an animated lecture about 'visual perception'. During the play we liked to inform the public about the journey through the brain when your eyes see a certain object. In the case of doctor P. a hat. In what way do your brains compute this information?
If you are interested in this you should check this website. There you can find extensive and very well illustrated lectures about this subject.

N&H VJ Farm @ Cinekid 2009

The Farm

Some pictures of the farm almost finished.

Processing

This is an experiment to embed Processing sketches in my blog.
To achive this I used the iframe html code:
iframe src="http://www.yourserverdomain/applet/index.html" height="500" width="500"

The 'applet' folder is the folder in the root of the server where the processing html, jar, and pde files are placed. For this action you need a web server, for example the one where your website is located.

WiiMotionPlus HackNight

I finally managed to read the yaw, pitch, and roll data from a Wii Motion Plus adapter with gyroscope. With some soldering and rewiring connected the WM+ to an Arduino, uploaded the code found on this blog, and it works! All done with my humble assistant Jippie!

A very early sketch of the new visuals for Krause

sketch for visuals Krause from Snow on Vimeo.

IME the E of building a Vee-Jay Farm

Snow has a side-project which carries the name Nou & Herkauw. Freely translated in English Now & Ruminate. N&H is VJ-collective with a variable formation of designers, artists, poets and musicians. The aim of N&H is to create a audio/visual performance by starting with completely nothing and create all the content on the spot during the performance. What starts with nothing ends up into a performance made out of beats, loops, glitches, buffers, animations, errors, and more.
For the Cinekid Festival N&H is developing a worklab for kids with the age of 8 to 14. Its called the Nou&Herkauw Veejay Farm and is a combination of a playful animal farm and animation vj/dj workshop. At this moment we are executing the design of the farm. We asked Richard, Gerrald, and Willemijn to collaborate in this project. The three of them are design students from the Academy of Popculture.

Theory

Our theory class


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Some tests with EEG

Today we did some tests with EEG equipment at the University. More information soon.

WiiMotionPlusArduino

I started to get lost in all those different types of gyros and accelerometers you can find on SparksFun. It takes quite serious research to build an IMU in this way. Although its very interesting I'm afraid we don't have the time for this. I also found some projects of people who connected the Wii Motion Plus to the Arduino, but those slipped my attention. After a tip of Frans I took a closer look to those projects. I think its actualy worthwhile to experiment on this.


http://randomhacksofboredom.blogspot.com/2009/06/wii-motion-plus-arduino-love.html
http://hackaday.com/2009/06/23/wii-motionplus-arduino/

The Mystery of IMU

To measure the movement of the singers head we had the idea to use a Wiimote controller. The Wiimote is cheap and easy to use on a Mac for example by using Osculator to communicate with the Wiimote and the computer. Once the movement data is in the computer you can easily route it via OSC to other applications. In our case we use Isadora. The problem with the Wiimote is that it contains linear accelerometers that measure acceleration along the axes, but no gyroscopes. So it is impossible to measure linear movement along the axes. Recently Nintendo released the Motion Plus extension which ads the gyroscopes to the Wiimote. Only there seems to be no software written yet to measure this data.
So what to do now? Jan Klug gave us the names of possible sensor hardware which we can use. During the research throughout the web I discovered that the device we are looking for has actualy a name. It is called a Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU). For now I have two solutions. The first one is to buy a complete but quite expensive system with the Orient3D sensor of Infusion Systems, or the make one myself with Arduino and connected accelerometers and gyroscopes. The last one is pretty hard and time consuming but way more cheaper. You can buy the sensors online at SparksFun. I found some people who are quite active with this.


www.nearfuturelaboratory.com
http://diydrones.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWDXsKlHvIs

Some sketches for the Opera

Some ideas for the stage design of the Nyman opera. The the one at the top is the most recent one. We think this one should be it. This because of the use of space, and the mix-up of the musicians with the singers and the stage. The walls behind the singers will be used for projections. And Wil of the Grand Theatre will do the light design. Now we are working on techniques to use movement and brain activity measurements of the singers to manipulate the images. Next Tuesday we have an appointment at the RUG to take a closer look at the scan equipment. After that we will meet the person who is going to build the stage design.