Geoffrey Drake-Brockman’s headspace

Going onwards with the approach of motion detection, kinetic sculptures and combining it with robotics, I chose for Geoffrey Drake-Brockman’s headspace. Headspace is an interactive robotic artwork with 256 independently moving rods in a matrix some 1.5m by 1.5m. The control system is loaded with 3D scans of 700 school students. Headspace is a variable relief sculpture. Collaboration proposal (With Erik Stehmann) is a proposal to make furniture pieces or living spaces made of wood that react to the human form by first detecting it.

Geoffrey Drake-Brockman’s work involve a lot with human interaction aswell. He also made origami flowers that open up when you pass by.

Messa Di Voce by Levin and Lieberman

Courtesy of Golan Levin and Zachary Lieberman Messa di Voce ( Italian for “voice placement” ) is an audio-visual system in which the oral speech, shouts and songs of two vocalists dramatically increase in real time by custom interactive visualization software. In this installation, abstract communication gives synesthetic relationships, the language of strips, and the writing of a system and production scores are discussed… Within the framework of a sophisticated and fun virtual world. It stimulates the eye and ears, and attracts you to engage with it. It’s responsive, and in a modern day and age people will still feel the need to patch up the idea of non-responsiveness. Another great example of recognition and response is the ideal concept of the future virtually conceptualized by the movie ‘Her’. Levin and Lieberman’s Software transforms every vocal nuance graphs. It’s corresponding complexity, subtly differentiated and highly expressive. Through these displays not only the voices of users are displayed, but it also serves as a ‘device’ to pre-record sound and play during performance. While the voice charts as a tool that observers/performers can use to interpret physical manipulations of these graphics, the screens reformulate the sounds of voices of users, to mimic them, so a cycle of interaction occurs and fully integrates public in connection to a healthy environment. It’s a matter of virtual objects and real- time processing. The installation was made in a different time (2003) than XBOX’s kinect (2010), which uses a similar idea of voice and movement recognition. ‘Messa di Voce’ lies at the crossroads of two extremes, human and technological, and adds the unpredictable spontaneity of the human voice with advanced visual computing technologies and discourse analysis. No words, but deep verbal sounds, the ‘Messa di Voce’ project is designed to reflect on the meaning and implications of speech, sounds provoke acts of language and absorb a language environment. It’s a form of visual art which can certainly be implemented for various technical solutions such as interactive supermarket displays or ad space when you walk along or make a sound. There’s even a possibility something might exist generated from your interests by shouting them out. http://lsdcrosslab.tumblr.com/ pinterest link: http://www.pinterest.com/mswontwerp/experiment-bliss/

Hand From Above [openFrameworks]

Chris O’Shea is a multidisciplinary artist who works a lot with openFrameworks projects. His work always had a kinetic approach and he plays a lot with human interaction. Human interaction interferes with the intellect of things and it lets objects recognize you.

Hand From Above is the latest project from Chris O’Shea, a joint co-commission between FACT: Foundation for Art & Creative Technology and Liverpool City Council for BBC Big Screen Liverpool and the Live Sites Network. It premiered during the inaugural Abandon Normal Devices Festival.

Inspired by Land of the Giants and Goliath, the project aims to remind us of mythical stories by mischievously unleashing a giant hand from the BBC Big Screen. Passers are playfully transformed being tickled, stretched, flicked or removed entirely in real-time by a giant deity.

Fitted with a CCTV camera, The BBC Big Screen is linked into a computer that runs the custom built software then outputs to the screen. The software picks a person based on their proportions & how alone they are from other people, then tracks the blob over time using optical flow. If the giant hand removes, flicks or shrinks a person, firstly it rubs out the person from the live video using the background reference pixels. Then the tracked person is redrawn over the top in relation to what the hand is doing, i.e. being picked up, or flying out to the left of the screen (not shown in this video). When the hand shrinks a person it redraws them into the video at half scale. When there is too big a crowd it resorts to tickling people, with a random selection.

Many people thought it was a real hand, or at least controlled by an operator. Many didn’t care how it worked. People liked seeing themselves on a big screen and then were completely surprised when this big hand came in and did something to someone. Apparently one lady said “I haven’t had a man’s hand all over me like that in years!” Chris

Hand from Above was built using openFrameworks & openCV.