Tate Encounters - Archive Interface

Contact zone is now at the prototyping stage.  Despite my conflicting statement that I wrote last week, we are pulling together a design.  Our lecturer insisted that the look of the project at this stage was not as key as having functionality.  In some cases this is true, though I still fail to see how you can have a function application with out a look? So at this stage my pixel people idea was humbly rejected, though we are presenting to the Tate on thursday, so i may well put this interface back to open suggestion.  In the meantime, contact zone looks more like a black expanse that reacts to sound (just about), and at this stage we are worrying about getting the first stages of the coding out of the way.

Though I know exaclty how painful it can be to apply a new design to an interface once It has been completed in Flash, that program does not make it easy to change things.  I wish the lecturers knew this!

I think at this stage in the project it is important for me to voice my concerns over all about this unit.

I feel that from the word go, this collaboration has been poorly planned and disorganised, resulting in students in our class becoming concerned about the the nature of this project.  It seems as though, the first 6 weeks of the unit were spent waxing lyrical over the conceptual side of this project, which is all very well but it has (as everyone anticipated) resulted in the production stage being incredibly rushed.

I myself have felt that over the past two weeks everything has been rather ‘on a wing and a prayer’.  I personally dont like working like this, and I feel that whenever I have approached the lectueres about my concerns I am met with a lack of interest.  Furthermore, when requesting feedback from said tutors, as constructive as it is, each time it has left our group scratching our heads and feeling as if we have had to return to square one.

Last week, due to sickness I was off, but I did however contact my group members and allocated roles to begin production.  These roles were based on the feedback from the previous week, from the technical assistants and from the lecturers.  My group mate Pawel had attended the class I missed and was given I more feedback, which countered most of the feedback given on the previous week, thus confusing  the situation further.

At this stage we are working based upon the feedback I was given in my last attended class.  The group is aware that the Tate are not have with the space metaphor and have come up with a new interface design that will be shown this coming thursday.

The interface so far is below.

The saga continues……..

In light of my last encounter at the tate, our group have developed 3 design ideas that are molded around our concept of emotion as a theme.  Attached are the first images of the designs, and a flow chart of the interaction.

Coming soon will be our design document that will have a full explination of the interaction.

These designed were presented to the Tate Encounters Research Team yesterday, and to representatives of the Tate itself with positive feedback.  Andrew Dewdney mentioned that he wasn’t 100% sure about the space metaphor on the design “welcome aboard the starship Tate” I recall him saying!!!, though as I explained at the start of my presentation the space metaphor is easily changed, and what I am interested in at this stage is the mapping technique as a means of recording one’s journey around the virtual space.

Tahera Aziz mentioned in the feedback session that the use of sound would be a nice feature on the main screen.  Using sound effect from the gallery itself and having the volume fade up and down as you pass closer or further away from each ‘quasar’ (encounter data).

Having an Encounter with the Tate:

This piece reflects a map I drew as I walked through the gallery space, each bullet point correlates with a point of emotion or experience indicated on the map.

We begin with my life, and everything I have ever experienced right up to this point, I bring this with me as I wondertowards the front extrance, instinctivly, subcontiously, contiously, curiously.

1. At this stage I am feling Tired, Daunted and In-different about embarking on this journey.  On my way to the front entrance, an appropriate starting point, I am over whelmed by the enormity of the building.

2. Its architecture displays grand ettiquette and traditional british architecture.  I as I wonder through the sculpture garden,

3. I notice a lady sat quietyl on a bench reading a book, it made me feel as though I was surrounded by a sense of academia and cleverness.

4. As I walk up the steps and through the doors, the buildings vastness opens up into a hall that made me feel petit, like a small spec in the grand history of the building and its contents, as if the building itself represented time, and the displays are moments of record.

5. The inside is warm and vast, voices echo.  I wonder where to go? what do I need to see? What begins my experience at this place? The sense of randomness is a little overwhelming.

6. Silence, quiet, footsteps, the faint hum of the humidifying units.

7. I met one of my class mates at this point, also experienceing a sense of in-difference

8. After a relativly uneventful first few minutes in rooms 23-25, I leave feeling puzzled again about my next destination, across the hall I see a stunning picture of a sunset.

At this stage I dont care about what it means or what the artist thought, I care about what it means to me.  I get lost in it’s landscape, for a moment I am participating with the figures I see, it reminds me of a fantasy land, a place of magic and stories.

9. There are school kids here pondering the work on the walls, what do they think they are seeing? Do they know why they are here? What does it mean to them if anything?

10.  Vastness again, but after my previous encounter with that painting, I am excited by what else I might find that will make me feel like that again.  I set out on a quest.

11.  I am amused by a painting of a dog that looked like one of mine, he is pulling a face just like Zen used to.  Made me giggle.

12.  I encounter another painting, of a reather stunned looking woman.  I wonder who she is, why is she significant? Why should I look at a painting of you, I thought? Why should I care?  For further info, I turned to the card for the first time on my trip!  It gave me nothing, it was titled with a mans name, and told me she was the Duchess of Bolton, in the 1700’s at some time.  But I was no more enlightened as to why I should be interested in this painting, but none-the-less, I was looking at it, and it was the one that I chose out of a room of similar displays, so perhaps there was something special about it!

13.  I continute to wonder, wonder being the operative word since it portrays an act of randomness, I wonder into a room and see a sculture that reminded me of a movie a saw once

14. The Gallery is bussier now, the main hallway is very noisy, and there are school kids everywhere!

To all you humble Tesseract readers as I know there are so many of you - this site is changing to the production log for a new collaborative project by myself, Pawel Klasa and Sandy Legge.  We are creating an interface for an archive of research conducted by the Tate.

Watch this space for more information on our future presentations and research progress :o)

Friday was an awsomely successful day with regards to film this project. Though I could have used an extra pair of hands, David and Maria were extremely helpful in help me set up. The practic shoot last week really gave me a good idea of what I was to expect from this shoot and how to get it lit up properly. I made some massive changes after the practice shoot. The first major on being the ’scrapping of the actor’. Luckily I hadn’t hired him yet! so there was no-one to disappoint! I decided to do this mainly becuase I am starting to feel the pressures of time now. With just three weeks left to get this project complete, I thought that my using myself instead of an actor would be more productive since it was rtelativly easy to direct myself, also should anything go wrong later down the line I can easily set up the chroma key again and not have to worry about working around some else’s schedule.

The second major change was the decision to switch from green screen to blue screen. In affect this doesn’t really make a massive amount of difference, since Final Cut Pro simply works to subtract a certain colour out of the shot. However I think that FCP had an easier time removing lighter backgrounds in this case, and I had more lights to work with this week so I could spread the light a lot more evenly. So these two elements - the lighter blue, and the extra lights really helped create a smoother image.

The third major change this was was the size of the blue screen I used. I added an extra blue screen to the wall mounted one giving me an extra meter or so of screen to work with, improving my character movement, and viewer dept of field perception.

all in all it went well, as I said before it was a little difficult to do on my own, as I was filling the roles of camera men, sparky, actor and director! below are some pictures of the set:

The bedroom and the lounge have finally been chosen, attached are the final rooms and I am discounting the room that was on my previous post as the lounge as it simply doesn’t fit into the general theme of the house and seemed out of place.

Bedroom:

Lounge:

I have been spending the past few days thinking about props for the shoot on friday. I’m not actually going to use them during the chroma key shoot, but I am going to be having close ups of hand inspecting things that are found on the table.

I figure it would only be prudent to demonstate on this blog exactly how it is that I have made them. Today we learn how ot make a Tesseract aka a Hypercube.

1. Take 2 ordinary pine banister poles

2. Saw the ends off into cubes 1.25 inches cubed and sand them down until smooth

3. Puchase some metalic silver spray paint and over the course of two days lightly spray until completely silver

4. Using industrial strength glue, attached the cubes together as shown in the picture to create your Tesseract

and there we have it - next time on props with Lugz - we’ll talk about how to make ancient Hypercube Theory math papers.

Today myself and a couple of the technicians set up a test shoot with the green screen. This was quite possibly the best idea I’ve ever had. It gave us the opportunity to trial and error different camera angles to make sure that we get the perspective right.

We spent a lot of time lighting the set, since the background lighting and the lighting on the subject has to be perfect in order for the chroma key filter to work on final cut pro. Today we learn’t on the day of the shoot, we’ll be needing 4 red head lights, 2 to light the background and 2 to light the subject from above. We need to reduce the shadowing as much as possible as this also affects the chroma key.

Today we only had 3 red heads lights available so we made do. We got the positioning sorted for the dining room shot, and we took a small take of film. Following this I decided I wanted to digitize all this and test the chroma key filtering. After we imported it to final cut, we decided it would be best to import the background at this point rather than later in flash. Sure enough the lighting wasn’t sufficient however we got the proportions perfect, and all in all the days shoot was really beneficial. We are now scheduled to shoot on the 11th of April, and I’m looking for actors!!

I also need to begin thinking about music and ambient sounds for this piece. ie: the clock ticking in the hall way - that scurrying noises of the shadows. But it is with sound that in think the key emotions for the piece will be conveyed. I need to create a tense atmosphere and a feeling of claustrophobia, and I can do this using sound. I’m wondering if I can have one piece of music play through out the whole piece regardless of the stage, and have it time based. Therefore as more time passes, the music becomes more tense and even louder, carefully initiating panic in the user. I say carefully because sound is delicate, if I overuse this ‘panic’ music the game could become irritating, causing the user to switch off. A good example of this would be the old atmosphere TV board game. This is time based, and as the minutes count down the music becomes more and more tense…..maybe I should include a time element into this piece?

  Atmosphere 1 Link