The body has extraordinary ability to express itself. Something which we often struggle to translate into our interaction with computational systems. We are often limited to conventional mouse and keyboard "interaction" but digital artists and designers have been pioneering new interfaces for almost a half century in an attempt to bridge our physical and digital environments.
With increasingly powerful computation, even a modest laptop can do sophisticated gesture, speech and object recognition. With open source communities like Processing, the code and libraries to engage with these technologies and techniques enables us to explore and innovate without the need for computer science degrees.
Harnessing the expressive quality of human behaviour you will build a processing sketch that explores the process of drawing, sculpting, carving, moulding, generating and growing digital artefacts. Words that you might consider as starting points for developing ideas are gravity, collisions, performance, chaos, evolution, morphogenesis, fluids, networks, exchange, illusion, bio-feedback, play and complexity.
How you capture the expressive quality of human behaviour is up to you but a good place to start is video or point cloud (kinect) analysis. Sound is also an option but be warned, doing anything more than basic frequency and volume analysis takes considerable work. Whatever you choose to do, it is best to separate out the challenges of the project into small component parts and then assemble them later. If you are building something that will use gravity and colour tracking, gain an understanding of these things separately before bringing them together.
Presentation of Project
Each student is required to produce a single Processing sketch which you may be asked to demonstrate, and a 3 minute video presentation. It is strongly recommended that all films are tested on the laptop in advance. You should also have your own laptops at hand with your code running if we wish to demonstrate. It is important to know that your video presentation will be shown but you will NOT speak over it. The video must speak for itself. You may choose to put a voice over but ideally some well chosen titles or short descriptions should suffice. This is good practice for communicating the essence of your work quickly and directly to an audience. Some questions will follow from the critics.
Video Structure
This should roughly be in 3 equal parts over the 3 minutes.
1. Context
2. Development
3. Final Piece.
Before you begin the context section please include:
1. Your name
2. The Project Name "BODY DRAWING:" followed by your own name for the piece.
3. And finally "Tutor:, Adaptive Architecture & Computation 2012"
Context should demonstrate that you have researched artists, designers, architects, performers etc that have used the expressive potential of our bodies to interact with digital systems particularly in playful and performative situations. It is also valid for you to include references for less computational inspirations if for example you were inspired by Piet Mondrian painting or an Alfred Hitchcock film. Development should show how your work progressed. Start recording the development of your code immediately and document any interaction tests you may have done with public, friends, family etc. Finally present the current state of the project.
Learning Outcomes
The brief is intentionally open to give you the freedom to explore the techniques you've been taught over the past 5 weeks and explore the many additional functions and libraries available to you. You will also develop video presentation skills. This is an opportunity for you to start to use code as a creative medium and push the means through which we can interact with computational media. It is critical that you use this opportunity to cement your understanding of the fundamentals of processing and give this priority in the coming 5 weeks.