The project

Real Eyes, Realize, Real Lies – My Max MSP project

Still getting my head around max MSP but I have a working prototype that portrays what I wanted to achieve, its just a little bit on the dull side in terms of its limited differences with sounds. I would have liked to have played with the nurbs objects in MSP and accomplished a wider spectrum of digital metamorphosis.

Overall I am incredibly happy with the outcome of the project in relation to both my essay and my initial idea. I felt like I have confidently maintained a strong critique on the concept of ownership of art. My MSP project reflects this by allowing anyone and anything that creates a sound to contribute to art being created, therefor overcasting the need and desire for a single artist.

Another updated idea!

This new idea seems for feasable in the time frame. Im going to try and get a video feed or jsut a static picture into a projection of on wall screen, kind of like a digital mirror. Around this display and the space it is situated in, tehre will be microphones that take in and monitor / deconstruct sounds and convert them to variables. These variables will then displace the media on the screen and transform it in a way that brings the media to life and creates new art work.

The concept behind this is that multiple participants and different sound spaces would create different effects ont he screen.

Realising my idea

So the idea is pretty solid, but now I find myself limited by technology. Im not too sure i can build it perfectly because it requires me learning how to use Max MSP to feed the data into the system so i can use it to create the art.

I think i see this idea becoming more of an art piece if i slightly shift its context. At the moment the idea is to have it in the background whilst people are talking, kind of like an experiment and another version where the people talking can see it at the same time as speaking. Hopefully the art created from the video would be different but now I want it to be an art piece more so than an experiment. I have discovered that adaptive behaviour would influence the art created and the behaviour in the participants but now I want to move it beyond that and challenge the issue of ownership in a different way and more in the context of the art world.

Sound relationships

From my years at Art college i remember doing a module based on sound and its relationship with imagery. Timbre rekindles in my mind so this is also something to reference and consider whilst planning on my visualisation for my chat application.

In music, timbre is the quality of a musical note or sound or tone that distinguishes different types of sound production, such as voices or musical instruments. The physical characteristics of sound that mediate the perception of timbre include spectrum and envelope. Timbre is also known in psychoacoustics as tone quality or tone color.

- wikipedia

Examples of how this will be incorporated into my works:

• Red = Anger, Hatred, Rebelion etc
• Blue = Complacent, Relaxed, Moody, Subdued
• Yellow = Happy, Bright, Enthusiastic

Shapes can also be included to further emphasize emotive responsives.

Displaying the unseen

Maybe instead of a user selecting what emotion they want to portray they are analysed for data to sense what mood they are in. Using heart rate monitors, sweat detection and other bio feedback methods my application could summarise as to what the user is feeling in relation to the conversation topics raised.

An example of this would be that “Clive” is talking to “Joanna”, Clive asks Joanna if they want to go out for a drink, Joanna’s heart rate perks up and causes Clive’s visualisation window to pulsate in a warm colour with rounded shapes, aswell as the reply from Joanna saying “maybe I dunno”. From this Clive is picking up the fact Joanna likes him and responded to his initial question.

Without the visualisation Clive might assume that Joanna wasnt interested.

Issues of privacy raised if Joanna wanted to keep her emotions hidden.

Digital Conversation

The internet has broken most cultural barriers whereby people are now able to talk almost freely to anyone in the world regardless of location. The problem with digital conversation is that sometimes missinterpretation can actually have huge impacts on peoples relationships with one another. Maybe my design could draw on these issues and address them in a way that enhances communication via instant chat applications. Body language and tone are two of the most crucial aspects of communication that help emphasize emotive responses to certain topics. By not having this available online people sometimes dont fully decode what the person is trying to say to them.

Maybe my chat application could have an addon feature that enables users to select emotive responsives whislt typing. The visualisation will adapt transforming shape colour, tempo and sound to relate to how the user is feeling. Adding a new depth to web chatting that counteracts the absent body language and tone.

Floor Plan

Here is a basic floor plan for this new idea. Im still unsure as to which I am going to go through with but I am hoping that some peer assessment and some feedback will help me refine this project.

I would also like to see this installation piece performed in 2 ways. The first of which is where the 2 users talking to eachother are aware of the visualisation output, ie they can see the screen. The next would be where they cant see the screen so as to not influence their behaviour so substantially.

Another Variation

Depending on how achievable my web app idea is I also have another variation of the same idea. People would enter a room and become immersed in an installation piece where they are the input and a projected screen is the output. They can sit down and have a conversation whislt watching a visualisation on a screen. I hope to influence their conversation int he same way the text based app would influence what they type. Using speach recognition with frequency, volume, tempo, pitch and other parameters, the visualisation would directly relate to how the users talk and even what they say.

MAX MSP will be the main software used for this.

A basic GUI of what I am trying to achieve

Above is some idea of what the GUI would look like. Areas for user input and a chat log would help anchor this as a chat application. Hopefully the graphics int he output window will help influence the users behaviour, more specifcly what they type and how they adapt to synchronize and decode the mechanics behind the visualisation.

What is adaptive Behaviour?

Adaptive Behaviour:

Adaptive Behavior explores mechanisms, organizational principles, and architectures for generating action in environments, as expressed in computational, physical, or mathematical models.- ISAB

I really want to explore the implication of adaptive behaviour within generative art and how this affects user ownership and more specificly intellectual ownership. If people are acting to meet the demands of a system symbolized by my output visualisation, then they are merely a contributor and nothing more. They are puppets within my system. I would also investigate both conscious and subconscious activity by allowing them to see the output in 1 experiment and then have it hidden from them in a 2nd experiment.