happiness is twelve hex bytes, generated by a pocketable custom LED fixture on detecting a bounce, transmitting that via xBee, receiving into the computer via RS232, being parsed correctly, outputting into a QC comp, doing a dance, and commanding back to the fixtures via Artnet via DMX via xBee.
the iPad-screens interaction isn’t even half of it, though. the project is to be a roadshow travelling through china, a modular setup of stage and staging reaching out into the club. two ‘hero’ videos with dance choreography and interactive props (hello LED balls), a video feedback piece, a live drawing piece, the backbone of the evening as the iPad interaction and audio-reactive graphics, all feeding out onto the mains screen, duplicated onto any in-house video system each venue might have, with LED sticks extending the video canvas out from the stage and video controlled stage lighting effects.
…it makes for a nice diagram.
and mid-stripdown here are the audience tables, each one microphon and speaker’d up. these all turned into a lot of wires, a big multi-channel sound card, and a heroic max patch made by henrik. not a trivial task conceptually, making audience audio feed back - as in, bounce around, echo, etc. - without actually feeding back - as in, screeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeech!.
lost the dvd drive, moved the hard disk into its place, and installed a super-fast solid state drive in the original’s slot. as philikon says, “you can have your cake and eat it, too. warp drive and good old V8 muscle.”… this not only makes the system “biblically fast”, but now means i can pull multiple high-def streams for vjing without the laptop breaking a sweat. more than that, with genuinely instant random access, i should be able to scratch, stutter, trigger to my hearts content. so… time to play!
stepping out of character, no oyster card surveillance subversion for us. instead, a trip to the fun fair for the group i was in. we made dr dimaglio a dice maestro, betting punters on the classic game of chance. except that dr dimaglio being inside the computer, he needs you to throw for him, and he can see inside the shaker due to each side of the dice having an embedded rfid tag… suffice to say, he isn’t quite sure your throw was quite vigourous enough until he’s confident of winning.
a happy afternoon and evening taking part in a rfid workshop run by tinker.it as part of the takeaway festival. making! things!
of course, whats missing from the photo is the arduino + rfid shield. they’re the right type to read oyster cards too, which being essentially ubiqitous amongst londoners leads to some pretty crazy thought-trains.
new übercool project courtesy of sheep music’s archive of visuals equipment: grass valley controller to be turned into a midi/usb interface. so thats the buttons and lamps of high-end 80’s broadcast tech (not to mention the death star itself) but attached to the current state of the art in the form of a laptop with vdmx rather than its crate of obsolete analogue electronics. best of all, the connector isn’t some serial device we’d need to decode, its just an array of all the switches contacts etc, perfect for plugging straight into diy controller electronics like arduino or midibox.
it turns out that after a year, all the keys on an edirol pcr-30 will just stop working. just like mine did. mixed reports about getting them back, oxidising contacts type rubbish. so i thought i’d see if i could extract the useful knob-and-sliders bit and shoehorn them into some improvised box. file under: in progress
