Leave No Trace

We now have a website specially for the Erasure exhibition. There’s still a bit of tweaking to be done, but this Leave No Trace blog is now officially transferred. All new posts will appear there.

Over the past few weeks I’ve built up a collection of links to post here, but there’s a lot to do in preparation for the opening of the exhibition which has to take precedence just now.

I’ll write a few quick posts here and there to pass on some of these links, but for the moment here’s a moment of self-indulgence: I’ve already posted a lot about various things done with Microsoft’s Kinect, but I’m fascinated by its potential. Yes, the technology has been available for a while but it’s now so cheap that many people can afford to do this, and the ease with which you can create activities using Processing is staggering.

Here are two more examples on Vimeo, both interesting trials:  here and here.

I’ve finally completed the editing of the films by Gladstone Primary School, after a few run-ins with the mysteries of Adobe Premiere. (I had to remove one still image that seemed no different from any others yet was causing the software to crash, then experiment with various settings until I found some that worked.)

I’ve also been creating a DVD with some generative art, also to be shown in the exhibition. That, too, had its mysterious error messages, requiring different solutions. Still, it all worked in the end, and we’re two steps closer to being ready for the opening day.

Now that we’ve started work in the gallery for the Erasure exhibition, it seems a good time to set up a Twitter account, and the first message was tweeted today.

The username, as a result of Twitter-imposed limits, is restricted to ErasureExhbtn. Hope to see you there!

I’ve been editing together the short films and images created by pupils at Gladstone Primary School. Everything was fine until it came to exporting the film to DVD, then it kept crashing. Grrr!

Things are moving – we’ve taken down the Stoke 1910 exhibition and rearranged the screens into the configuration for Erasure, so we can finally see what the layout will feel like. Gordon has started preparing the surfaces for painting – white for most walls but black for two areas requiring low lighting.

We’ve deliberately allowed longer than usual for this changeover, in case we encounter problems with the technology. Most of the pieces are relatively straightforward, but even so, it feels like a short time until the opening.

A few months ago, this interactive sound and light installation in Lima would have been considered amazing. After all, being able to conduct so many lights and complex music without pressing a single button would have been so cool. The set-up is certainly powerful and complicated. It must have taken a long time to devise, create, test, build and install.

Yet now that we have Kinect, well… I found myself expecting much more direct control and clearer reaction, with some movement at least by the lights as well as changing colour. How our expectations increase!

And, as always, when mentioning Kinect, there are lots of cutting edge experiments going on out there. Here are my latest finds: firstly, air guitar! It’s only a prototype so far, but Chris kindly provides a link to a theremin-controlled Guitar Hero in case you want to see some more buttonless controlling.

Secondly, still in the musical realm: a virtual piano keyboard – on your desk or on the floor.

Finally, here are some videos from Flight404:

• Self Occlusion (particularly nice accidental effect)
• Temporal echo (like the multiple arms)
• Getting stuff done (funny)
• Invisibility (inspired by an optical camouflage demo – and Predator movies!) 

UPDATE: Here are yet more Kinect-based activities that are well worth a look. Elsewhere, how about a Kinect and Arduino-controlled miniature helicopter, complete with link to source code! Or a modern version of Pepper’s Ghost using Kinect, Processing and a transparent screen.

It’s reminiscent of Flight Patterns by Aaron Koblin, but I still like this data visualisation of Facebook connections. The obvious patterns are immediately interesting, yet there are subtleties to reward careful observation. A new way of seeing our world.

You can read about how it was created in Facebook Engineering.

UPDATE: The Guardian newspaper has just announced its new data visualisation website:

“Besides our award-winning datablog, the site includes:

• The key data of the day – broken down for you
• Our pick of the data blogosphere – which sites have the key posts?
• Search the world’s government data – and global development data
• What have you done with our data? Featured apps”

Are you creating interactive new media or digital art? Watermans in London are calling for submissions for a year-long programme of ground-breaking installations during the year of the London Olympics. There’s a fixed fee of £3,500, plus travel and accommodation costs in London, as well as technical assistance and promotion.

Alternatively, if you’re aged 17-24 and looking for a career in one of the media industries, why not apply for one of the DiVA Advanced Creative and Digital Media Apprenticeships?

Another meeting with one of the artists who will feature in the Erasure exhibition – yesterday it was Chris Twigg.

I first worked with Chris about six or seven years ago, in the days when he was part of b.Arts. Chris did a lot of the design and coding for a CD of Quicktime VR movies of Chatterley Whitfield plus other work by young people set in and inspired by the former colliery.

For Erasure, Chris will supply some vinyl-based photographic images, treated in a striking and unusual way. It was good to meet him again after all this time, and I’m looking forward to seeing his work up on the gallery wall. There isn’t long to go until the exhibition opens, and it’s starting to feel really exciting.