MEDI 264: Interactive Sound and Vision - Tone Matrix

Ok so bassicaly for my project I want to create a Tone Matrix like the one here that I have thought brilliant for quite a while now.

This is proving to be vastly harder in Max than I thought. So far I have the sound playing, and I have the matrix registering the on and off commands. Considering I have been so ill and have missed all of the Max tutorials I do feel I am doing really well at this point.

I am however having huge difficulties getting the sounds to be pre-loaded in at this stage and also for the sounds to take thier ques from the matrix.

Update1:
I have finally managed to make the matrix talk to the sounds. The main problem now is that all of the dots switched make the same sound if you switch any of them on. They are all feeding into the same sound.

However at least if they are then turned off the sound stops. I also havent managed to make the sound loop or auto load.

Update2:
I have so far managed to link the sound to the correct button but it doesnt work via the matrix. It only works via the on off switch that I have made for the matrix.

I am really not sure how to get this working.

Upadate3:
After struggling for ages with no real progress I decided to mine Youtbe as the educational resorce it is and find some kind of tutorial. Thankfully I found one. I now actually know what it is I am doing and can produce what I want to produce.

This is the result. an actuall working tone matrix. It uses synth as opposed to sounds that are external so its much easier to controll. It is fully working and also users can change the pitch of the sounds with the added number boxes. Its a fun little toy to play with and is actually interactive. 

I decided that for the purpose of this project the tonal controlls are not a very important feature. However since some of the time the tones produced are increadably loud I was thinking of volume controlls. This also lets you pick which speaker is the loudest so its usefull. 

 

I could easily put back the pitch controlls but I don't feel that there is a huge amount of point in having them. 

The main idea would have been to hook this up to some form of motion capture that would see the grid in an actuall real life space. For instance applying a grid of detection to an area of floor either via arieal tracking or some sort of motion detection cable on the ground. Going by this theory I would be pontentially able to create a hybrid of the tone matrix and one of thoes floor keyboards. This would make one very intresting interactive toy. I also think that this kind of technology can be applied to many uses for adults and children alike. It could be used as a learning tool or with the right sounds can enrich an enivronment to add a layer of imersion.

MEDI 264: Interactive Sound and Vision - Motion Tracking + Capture

So motion tracking is one thing I am very intrested in. I have looked at projects involving motion tracking including a Fourth Years Honor Project. I first started becomeing intrested in motion tracking after watching a video on how easily you can retro-fit the Wii-motes.



However as it combined virtual reality (something I also have a great passion for) It's not suprising that I love it. Now we have plenty of motion tracking toys avalible such as the EyeToy from Sony, The 3DS from Nintendo ( the first ever hand held consol to have motion tracking, 3D and Augmented Reality) also the X-Box from Microsoft has its own VR and motion tracking system the Kinect. All of these gadgets are awsome and with more and more sophisticated technology being produced there are only going to more and more breakthroughs in this field.


(Warning the video is almost sickly cute, it does however showcase just how sophisticated yet accesible this technology is)

We are using it more and more for practically every area of media, from video games to movies and also sometimes for art installations. There is even a specific role in the industry now for a Motion Capture Artist! It is so wide spread yet it remains as a toy that needs a certain amount of proficiency to use to create.

Motion Capture is also being used more and often in animated films to achieve greater degrees of realism in the way the characters move.

There are actually fairly heated debates now as to weather or not motion capture is an art form or if its fair on animators. Their is a lot of extensive work needed to be done with motion capture in this purpose. There has to be massive amounts of information passed back and forth between software and hardware and also between the humans using these new tools.



Robert Able who worked on this advert is known to be a pioneer in interactive media and computer visual effects, one of many that paved the way for what we have today so widely available and (in my opinion) enriches or lives.  

I am hoping to use motion tracking in my project.

MEDI 255: Consumption and Media Presentation

Common Culture
Rich D, Holly C, Emily D + Lyndon T

Grounded Aesthetics:

• “For the grounded aesthetics documented in this book are not only a rebuke to formal ‘aesthetics’, they and many like them should also be understood as the basic ‘ordinary’ micro-mechanisms which are producing daily and in concrete contexts what we regard as ‘general’ social and cultural change, ‘periodised’ shifts and reformations of human identities.”

• Grounded aesthetics evolve with the current youth culture. Brit art began in 1988. The use of “shock tactics”, throwaway materials, wild-living and oppositional and entrepreneurial viewpoints appear frequently. A noted artist of this movement is Damien Hurst. 

Symbolic Creativity:

• Willis explains why youth culture is so important:-''forge new resistant, resilient and independent ones to survive in and find alternatives to the improvement roles proffered by modern state bureaucracies and rationalized industry''

• British culture are fascinated with horror and drama. We are fascinated with our own mortality. We feel that by making it more tangible we can deal with and understand it in a more effective manner. 

• By making things funny and ironic we feel that we are making things feel less threatening. 

• By making threats part of our everyday lives we feel that we are better enabled to deal with problems and it makes us feel that we are not alone. We feel It’s our responsibility to get involved in police business as we feel we have a right to know what is happening in our communities. 

Universalism:

• Meaning applying to all.
• Religion meaning a lifestyle that is a set of rules.
• Huge variety of mixed cultures.
• We are becoming tolerant to diversity.  
• Abandoning prejudices. 
• Acceptance of multiple religions. 
• 1960s CND ‘’peace man no nuclear’’ 

• The internet is becoming the infinite transmission medium for any cultural material you could possibly think of. -Lyndon

Prophesy?

• The set text we got given was written over 20 years ago.
• However our first thoughts were about things we all take for granted now.
• Mainly speaking the internet + YouTube. 
• He may not have know how spot on he was with relation to inter-webbing.

• Paul Willis stated “There is now a whole social and cultural medium of inter-webbing common meaning and identity –making which blunts deflects, minces up or transforms outside or top-down communication In particular elite or ‘official’ culture has lost its dominance."

Creativity Day to Day:

Leisure-

• “..young people feel more themselves in leisure than do at work’’ 
• The perception of the media has changed the minds of the younger generation today that are more interested in leisure than work. 
• What a contradiction! We now work so that we can do nothing. 
• Leisure has become so important to culture. 

Work-

• “we have to conclude that, in general the public sector cannot do better than the commercial sector….There is no point in hopeless competitions with the market.” 
• This is not necessarily true today as software is more widely available.
• Also with the occurrence of the internet there is a much wider platform to showcase and discover creativity. 

Feedback Loop:

• “One simple way of pursuing the ‘best side’ is to seek to give everyday culture back to its owners and let them develop it.” 
• More and more we are taking items from ‘high’ culture and changing them. 
• Examples are spoofs or satire and remixes or image manipulations. sss
• Parody:- Example / Definition
• Remix:- Example / Definition

• We are constantly using and re-using media materials presented to us. 
• This creates a feedback loop. ‘Youth’ takes and then creates and in turn the media listens and produced what they think will appeal, this is then again reacted to and the loop goes on. 
• A prime example of this would be anime music videos. 
• Leek Spin - This has become an internet wide phenomenon. And has turned into a meme. 
• Meme = a relatively newly coined term, identifies ideas or beliefs that are transmitted from one person or group of people to another. The concept comes from an analogy: as genes transmit biological information, memes can be said to transmit idea and belief information. 

• “Most importantly perhaps, cultural commodities can function not only as consumables but also as factors of production for repeated and different kinds of symbolic work, creativity and the production of grounded aesthetics in informal cultural production. This informal cultural production may be many times more significant in terms of human meanings and human involvements of time, skill, effort and satisfaction than the original commercial production.” 

•  Caramelldansen: An internet phenomenon that started when someone combined a 3 second anime clip with a Swedish song remix. Now most everyone knows of it. Convention go-ers even dance to it in the hundred. Its an example how mutable the internet makes things. It also is a further example of how many people share an element of culture through remix. 

Stereotypes:

• “They implicitly and explicitly pose questions and propositions: ‘it might be more fun consuming than…being traditional…being married…going to trade-union meetings…being a housewife…being bored stiff of work…dealing with social security…going to labour party meetings.” 
• This insinuates that traditionalism is boring. We have more fun by indulging in things that we do not need. We don’t want to give up without a fight and just become housewives, white collar/blue collar workers, politicians etc. 
• Someone once said that “Without stereotypes we would go insane.” The media have taken this idea to heart. It is rare to see an average person on television, apart from in adverts. Confrontational reality television epitomises this, where examples of conflicting stereotypes are placed in situations created to inspire arguments.

Link with Plato’s Allegory of the Cave:

• The Cave was not mentioned in the text, but Lyndon wanted to find the meaning of the term ‘epistemology’ and this led him to Plato. I remembered the Allegory of the Cave, and his train of thought led him to adapt the meaning of it to be an interpretation of the role of the media. 
• We are like the prisoners chained by the fire. The media are like the people with the shapes casting their shadows. It is too easy to let them think for us and to accept their interpretation of the world as canon. We all do it. It is very difficult to try and look for one’s own understanding of reality and the world itself. Because of this difficulty, most people allow the media, in some form or other, to feed their knowledge (documentary), understanding (stereotypes, stories, fictional media, advertising), or comprehension of the world. Nobody will ever admit this themselves. 

• Maybe we are all just sitting in that cave looking to the media to show us life?  

The End :)

MEDI 236: Critical Evaluation

Documenting Destiny - The Tarot This project originated from my desire to document Paganism. However this proved to be more complicated then I had first thought due to; high costs and no budget, travel needed to get to willing models and in part a lack of time to cover the vast subject properly. I also suffered a lack of model interest and availability to further complicate things. Although it would be a very interesting project to attempt in the future when I have more time, more models and access to better funds. The project itself then evolved to focus on Tarot cards. It still fits within the theme of Paganism since a lot of Pagans use the cards as a divination tool or a method to seek guidance. I think the project benefited greatly from actually having something less vast to home in on. Although there is still a lot of scope within the remit of the cards I found it prudent to focus on one aspect, this being the art of 'reading' the cards. I have a friend who kindly agreed to share this experience with a camera and a Dictaphone. I was originally planning to have a transcription of the reading next to my images but I decided against this as it is a very personal thing for the client being read for and in terms of ethics I wanted to be ethically responsible towards my models like KayLynn Deveney, who's methods I personally agree with. I have researched artists that deal with ethics and although the images are stunning I can't personally agree with Paul Kransler's lack of ethics with regard to 'the Land of Milk and Honey' series, the images may be wonderfully shocking and eye-popping in their composition but I feel we are obliged to our models as responsible photographers. Consequently I had both the 'reader' and the client sign release forms even though in the final images only their hands appear, I also gave them control of the image selection process to a degree. Therefore I can confidently say that my images are ethically responsible. Lots of artists have influenced me and been inspirational but Sophie Calle is one of the main photographers I keep coming back to time and time again. Her images, I feel, really bring objects to life and tell the story of and give personality to objects. I would hope I have achieved this with my images at least to a degree. In terms of research I feel I have been quite thorough since not only have I researched artists and documentary makers but also I have researched my subject (Tarot) to a high level, enabling me to do my shoots with a very solid grounding in the subject. I feel this was very beneficial since it let me explore my subject in an observational style of documentary with some actual knowledge of the objects and the etiquette surrounding them. I chose to adopt an observational style of documentary since it is one of the styles that most grabs me personally, the factual way that they are often presented and also the sense of the person documenting being taken on a journey of discovery themselves, I personally find very effective. The other style that I find most impacting is the participatory style with things like 'Super Size Me' and one of the most jarring documentaries 'Bowling for Columbine' I however opted against participatory as I thought an observational style would do the subject more justice. For the images I used a Nikon D40 as I like the camera, I tried in a lot of my images to have one strong focus point with the rest of the image fading to a soft focus so that it emulated the 'shrouded' and 'mysterious' nature of the Occult. A lot of the images came out well however some, I do think, could use tweaking or re-shooting. I also wanted to give them a good depth of field to reflect on the nature of the cards, they are not just paper with pictures on to those that read them but they have hidden depth and a wealth of meaning. I also chose to have one very strong focus point to try and convey what happens in a reading, focus shifts and occasionally cards have been said to 'pop' and make themselves forefront. I wanted my images to be as true to life as I could get them so editing is very minimal the biggest change I made was to crop the images to give a greater focal point in each frame. In all I did a total of three shoots, each with a different card 'spread' I would have liked to do a lot more and would do many more shoots possibly with different readers if I could do it again. However the very personal nature of 'reading' means that willing models are very few and I am lucky to have found one. I would also if I were to re-do the project focus solely on one aspect as opposed to trying to give a broad view since I feel this would add to the overall cohesion of my images as a set. I was pleased with the over-all reception that the audience had towards my images, as I asked my course mates for feedback, most of them liked my images and had a few constructive points of feedback, in particular they seemed to like the depth of field of some of the images which is pleasing. Also both of my models were very happy with the images which I feel is important. I do feel I should have employed better time and resource management and know that in the future I need and intend to improve on this, I have learnt a lot from this module and will take forward a greater understanding of documentary practise. The overall project went well, although it is hard to negotiate around a lack of willing models but I feel with this in mind I did do my best to compensate. If I could do it over I would love to have a much wider selection of shoots to choose from. Also I may not focus on just one shoot and instead have the best images from every shoot, so that my chosen angle is clear and the images more cohesive. I am however satisfied with how the project turned out and believe there is lots more room for scope should I wish to re-create or carry on the theme.

MEDI 236: The Final Images