(land)moves

(land)moves is a project developed in collaboration with Marco Liuni (music) e Bruno Zamborlin (gesture analysis). It consists of an interactive system which relates user’s gestures to the evolving landscape they have in front.
 
The system generates a representation of an artificial planet where the experience of time is set by cycles of days and nights. The morphology of the land vary according to the qualities of user’s movements. These firstly relates to a reactive flock of polygons which flies over the land.
 
Sounds are associated to visual events in order to create a symbolic yet surrealistic meaning. Twittering metallic polygons defies gravity while seismic evolutions shape the land. Wind blows constantly on this world as the guitar restitutes the flavor this electric landscape.
 
The explicit influence that movements have on the morphology of the territory is intended as a suggestion of the direct link human beings have with their environment.
 
 
Exhibitions
New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME) 2011, Oslo (Paper and demo)
Audiovisiva, Milan

The workshop focused on the development of an interactive mulitmedia artwork linking real gestures to simulated physical models.
 
The experiments arised a discussion on how user’s haptic experience build a mimetic link by which the visitor interpret the piece.
 
Programming relied on Processing and Max/MSP/Jitter, with a particulr focus on my side to the library Mass Spring Damper by Nicolas Montergmont for Max.
 
Download Max Patches.

Day 1 – Notions of interactivity in art. The specta(c)tor is the center. The meaning of actions.
Day 2 – Analysis of “classic” and contemporary interactive artworks. Frontiers between art and cinema and music.
Day 3 – Glance on the tools: sensors and softwares. Mini projects proposals (video to audio to video) .
Day 4 – Introduction to Max/MSP/Jitter.
Day 5 – Group development of the projects.
Day 6 – Finalization of the prototypes.
 

Composer Sami Klemola asked me to contribute in the development of Sculpt!, an interactive sound installation presented at the Kunsthalle Art Gallery during Siba Fest organized by Sibelius Academy. Sami worked on the music while I developed the camera motion tracking and then we had fun with the mapping.
 
In an empty white room people could walk, pose and move to shape the sound they hear. The feeling of “sculpting” is emphasized by remodelling the sound’s frequencies spectrum.

Descritpion

Link is a ludic interactive artwork entwining physical and virtual experiences. It consists of three parts: the Creation Desk, the Playground and the Eden of the Avatars.
 
At the Creation Desk the participant creates an avatar, a visual representation of himself, modeling it with the voice. The sample is recorded and will be used as raw material to generate a personal soundscape.
 
In the Playground, a maximum of three people can play together through (and with) their avatars. Modulating their respective distances the avatars will link and unlink themselves, generating a personal soundscape according to their movements. Everyone can hear others voices.
 
The Eden of the Avatars is an extension of the physical experience. It is a virtual world populated by the avatars of former participants. Here they survive for a limited period of time and, moving as their owners moved, evolve in a virtual dynamic network. The Eden of the Avatars is only visual, the sound experience being personal, subjective and limited to the physical experience.
 
 

Aesthetics of Interactivity

Link – Interactive Experience

The experience is immersive but social and unbounded. Participants are immersed in the light of the projection of their avatars which follow them like shadows and interact with their movements.
 
Users wear wireless headphones (equipped with a light motion capture device) which allows them to move freely modulating their own soundscape (based on their vocal sample) and to interact with the others sending and receiving sounds particles.
 
The experience can be personal while opened to the external world, audio and visual elements, beside glances and smiles, are exchanged in between participants.

Exhibitions
Portes Ouvertes de l’Ecole Nationale Superieure de Beaux Arts de Paris.
Enactive 07, Grenoble.

These 4-days intensive workshops, given at Ars Longa, (Paris) got through the fundamentals of the graphical programming environment Max/MSP and its visual library Jitter. They covered notions from the basic functioning logic to some advanced audiovisual experiments, reasoning around the primary computational paradigm input-computing-output.
 
I’ll upload the course once I’ll have the time to properly comment the patches. Meanwhile if you’re interested in taking a look, drop me a line, so that I’ll prioritize the process..

Trois Fois Rien by Altinai Petrovich

Trois Fois Rien, interactive movie by Altinai Petrovitch. Interactivity design and development of the navigation interface.
 
 
 
 

In the Air by Alejandro Moncada

In the Air, audiovisual installation by Alejandro Moncada. Quadriphonic spatialization of frequency scanner interceptions.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

421 by Loic Bontemps

421, aleatory interactive movie by Loic Bontems. I developed the tracking of the dices by image analysis.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Salle d’Attente by Cyprien Quairiat

Salle d’Attente, interactive installation by Cyprien Dedeurwaerder Quairiat. I developed a tool to correct the optical distortion occuring from camera to projector lenses.

Ad Occhi Socchiusi

Our eyes half-closed, looking both inside and outside, our perception shifts to an audio-tactile dimension; favoring the awareness of the body, the presence of our selves and the wakefulness of being. Ad occhi socchiusi is an invitation to a certain feeling, to a certain perception of our-selves. Due to its aesthetic system, Ad occhi socchiusi is an experiment on cybernetics as a science of regulation and communication between living beings and machines.
 
The participant soon becomes an “interactor” simply sitting, resting and breathing. He learns to use his body as an instrument that produces the sound that he can hear. In public space the interactive experience is exclusively aural, but the full recording of it (audio and video) can be downloaded at home.
 
The experience leads from the chaotic state to the “birth” of a virtual entity that take over the user’s interaction in creating sounds. This process passes from disorder (chaos) to organized patterns (order), according to the rules of the Game of Life de John Conway. The crucial element in treating the information is the correlation of the cardiac, resonant and chromatic frequencies, according to their consonance or dissonance.
 
The system is retroactive and generative, and the notion of cycle is deep-rooted within it. This cycle is sensitive to the past: every audiovisual instance is the result of the system’s condition at the time of the experience as well as previous states.