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Posted by martinsan on 09 October 2005 | 0 Comments
This exhibit is a demonstration of a very strange phenomenon using cornstarch and water.
This page describes the experiments with fluid mixtures of cornstarch and water, or glass balls and water. A petri-dish of cornstarch and water is vibrated until specific frequencies and accelerations are experienced by the mixture.
It then begins to behave very strangely. No I mean REALLY strangely. There is a video on the experiments page. If you watch the video, (VLC player recommended) stick right through until the end for the big hitting finale.
Basically we want to recreate this curiosity, so that the proud burghers of Ipswich can experience this bizarre phenomenon for themselves, face to face.
At present, we speculate that a signal generator plus an amplifier and big speaker drive units might be able to recreate the experimental conditions. We’ll also have to prevent the water from evaporating somehow if it’s going to run for more than a few minutes, in order to maintain the proper consistency.
(Maybe we should experiment with using liquids other than water - something that does not evaporate readily… Perhaps some type of thin oil? Any physicists or chemists have any knowledge of this area? Also there is the question of the longevity of a cornstarch/water mixture - surely this will be rapidly colonised by moulds? Perhaps this is a follow-on experiment: what happens to a mixture of cornstarch and water when it is left alone for several weeks?)
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Posted by Cefn on 09 October 2005 | 1 Comments
Make a mona lisa like picture out of smaller pictures, but all captured in realtime in the exhibition space.
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Posted by Cefn on 09 October 2005 | 3 Comments
Concept
A simulation of riding along on a handcar, as popularised by silent movies, featured in O Brother Where Art Thou, and generally celebrated by wacky North Americans. Participants in the artwork will have to pump the handcar to initiate and control a multimedia experience of travelling along a railtrack.
Background
Got hold of some creative commons licensed content called let’s go to birmingham thanks to impressive work by the BFI in opening up some of their back-catalogue and thanks to archive.org free online movie library.
Got thinking that it would be possible to create the experience of travelling on a handcar simply by controlling the speed of such a video (which shows a train journey to Birmingham last century) according to the amount that the individual pumped. Also liked the idea of friends visiting the exhibition facing each other and engaging in silliness. A nice feature of this is also that given two back-projected screens, both participants on the handcar would think they were going forward, until they looked behind them.
Immediately started worrying about the construction of a mechanism which would seem like a handcar, but would not kill people and invalidate our insurance. Hence I settled on the idea of not having any real mechanism at all, but instead emulating the mechanism by monitoring the position of people on the handcar, and only progressing the handcar when they were doing the right action. Rapid experimentation of pretending to ride a handcar (you go up when I go down) is quite hilarious, even without any kind of screen or train tracks at all.
Implementation
Got a simple implementation of controlling the framerate of the train video using processing. Need to be able to also detect the movement of people standing on the handcar, and translate this into the up and down motion of the transom. I’d also like to interleave some of the nice audio from the original video, like the train speeding up, and the frantic orchestral piece kicking in, depending on the speed which the participants had reached.
There was a suggestion that we could use either silent movie footage of handcars or a recording of people who act out what to do. This could be shown on a separate monitor.
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Posted by Cefn on 09 October 2005 | 0 Comments
Earthquake room, walls which move, sounds which confuse - like with midsummer night’s bottom.
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Posted by Cefn on 09 October 2005 | 0 Comments
Is there a cat in the box? Be he alive or be he dead?
Cat in a bag. Matt Iles has encountered such a thing.
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Posted by Cefn on 09 October 2005 | 0 Comments
The concept
Projector LCD display firing colored lights down fibres to create a non-square, non-homogeneous video or visual display
Background
The basic idea developed from Paul wanting to have a textured surface of lights which people could illuminate, in order to draw whatever they wanted. We got to wondering how you would easily create a whole load (like hundreds or thousands) of independently controllable lights
Implementation
We worked up the idea of using fibre effectively stuck on the front of a screen. It’s relatively easy to describe a control behaviour to set the color of pixels on a screen (you can play a video, or write a processing script, or run an itunes visualiser or whatever).
Then you just use light-pipes - fibres - to take the color from your chosen pixel, to the location you want the light to be.
I’ve got a fibre-optic lamp which we played with a bit, sticking grapes on the end of the fibres as diffusers to establish how we would get a nicer effect than the directed points of light coming out of the end of the fibre itself.
Since then, I’ve been blogging a bit about the projector kits you can buy which would be a basic mechanism to implement this.
Open questions
In the end we need to choose some kind of display surface or configuration, once we’ve built the fibre display itself. Tiling boiled sweets into a sort of organic mountain structure seemed like fun, but we’re still brainstorming exactly what the options are. The other fun prospect was just having them hanging down, and when idle, they would project a picture on the floor, but when you walk through, you would disturb it in interesting ways.
I suspect it will turn out different in the end. Still in the works.
An existing experiment of this kind? The linked page lists materials and performance features.
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Posted by Cefn on 09 October 2005 | 0 Comments
Huberman Sphere which responds to proximity by shrinking, hence also known as the fear sphere
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Posted by Cefn on 09 October 2005 | 0 Comments
Finally documented the pieces, and who’s going to work on them.
The exhibits page now contains a table showing who’s doing each piece and a link to the descriptive page for the piece . Exhibits we’re saving for later have been moved to the fragments page.
A page has been created for each of the pieces. Each descriptive page links to blogged discussions (assuming people tag their postings according to the piece they’re discussing).
Contributors should be able to edit these pages through Site-Admin=>Manage=>Pages.
So go here to see all the pieces, and people assigned to them
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Posted by Cefn on 09 October 2005 | 1 Comments
I also managed to get the first version of hell in a handcar running. Just a simple applet, which plays a series of frames from the let’s go to birmingham video, and where the framerate is controlled by the position of the mouse. The higher the mouse position the faster you go.
Don’t know whether this will be able to handle the framerates that I need, so any suggestions as to alternative environments for manipulating and rendering video loaded from files, would be welcome. Processing seems to handle video loaded from cameras much better - the link to the Quicktime library is a bit flakey.
Ideas arising:
- Like the idea of using the webcam to control it - in other words, need two people to act out the handcart movement in order to power it along - could detect height the two people. Saves on having any mechanism at all, and horrible insurance nightmares from having high inertia flywheel, scaffolding bars or any other public dangers
- If I do create some kind of physical mechanism - bicycles or hand pump, wonder if I can use an actual mouse connected to the rotating wheel to control it. Would be a lot easier than a BC-24 board or similar.
Processing does seem like a fairly accessible programming and deployment environment for rapid prototyping, or for those who want to just get down to creating interactive visuals which are fairly simple.
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