GMU:Breaking the Timeline/projects

Projects from the course Breaking the Timeline, a Fachmodul by Max Neupert, Gestaltung medialer Umgebungen Summer Semester 2010:

Kyd Campbell:

Still

concept

I'm interested in exploring time-related breaks between the senses of sight and hearing. I believe there is a sensory gap when one moves in perception between the spaces of micro and macro. In this instance, time and sound are stretched, as the body adjusts to receiving intense macro detail. A journey/passage from one time/space environment to another is an overwhelming experience, a momentary loss of one's self into an aesthetic space, which may be considered cathartic.

In my work I wish to turn this phenomena into a public experience. It is my goal to produce the conditions, in a performance/screening setting for the audience to feel lost in the aesthetic space between micro and macro. I will use HD video images in micro and macro visions and unique techniques for recording motion. In the final work I will move rapidly between different image positions and search to bring and then hold the audience into a hyper-sensory experience.

I will take a minimal approach to sound, reminiscent of breath and focusing on silence to imply motion and change, remaining abstract.

The imagery will be taken from very textured manufactured objects and from nature, outdoors and animals in very high resolution.

process

UPDATE: 20 June.2010

I have recorded the numen/foruse team building up a large installation of plastic packing tape in the Tempelhof airport in Berlin, for the Design fair. I am now using this footage (very short clips) and the sound from them. I will create tape sounds myself in front of my computer microphone and a PD patch will relate the sounds made to the sounds in small video clips, creating visuals which jump between different clips of my recorded footage of the designers making their tape sculpture. It will be a loud, noisy performance.

Tape Pic 1

Collaborators please!~~ any feedback is more than welcome!

I must think about the image processing; sound and also the screening format (single channel or multiple monitors; screening/performance setup or installation; large or small)

I'm undecided how I want to proceed technically. As described above, I have the idea to create a certain atmosphere for viewers, to move then into a perception gap. I have some stock footage or HD video, chopped into very small clips and I would like to begin by inserting this into a large amount of different softwares (or hardwares) to see what effects can be achieved.

if anyone is intested, I would really love to make a workshop session where different epople from the course take this footage and stick it into the different processing or editing tools they are familiar with, to see differents perceptions of the moving images I have.
is this something we could do together in class for an hour or so? Is anyone interested? Should we set-up an additional session for it?
possible tools to check out: different Pd patches, different editing softwares and filters, trying to watch it on different projectors, multiple monitors, self-made patches, specialized slow and fast motion HD plugins... I'm really open at this stage to try the footage out in any setting.

Andreas Beyer: Prosody

the keyword for this projekt is "prosody", that means the science about rhythm, stress and intonation of speech. I'll try to manipulate any given speech with a specific overlay to generate a new meaning or a strange combination of content and meaning e.g. reading the telephonbook like a holy speech and so on. The "overlayed" "structure" is given by the performer and the imput will be live. I want to realize this with a pd patch that i have to write or build till the semester. The background is a theorie that any kind of speech independent from the cultural background could be identified by anybody because of the intonation, the speech, the pitch (political, religious, news, sport, and so on) - this instrument could be used as a "translater" of the cultural melody of the voice or just to play with different meaning. It is the other way around how an anchorman works, he is trying to speak any typ of news in any combination more or less neutral - this is more difficult than it sounds.

Anja Erdmann:

- in this class i will get to work on "Schatten→Klang"

GMU:Audio+Video/projekte/Schatten→Klang

Dominique Wollniok:

Konzept

Skizze

Idee:

In einem Raum kann man durch Bewegung Geräusche auslösen. Von einem Bild ausgehend, liegen die Geräusche in verschiedenen Ebenen. Durch mehrere Lautsprecher entsteht eine räumliche Klanglandschaft. Der Besucher erfühlt die akustische Umwelt und kann sie durch seine Bewegungen beeinflussen.

Ziel:

Ziel ist es eine akustische Topographie einer Landschaft auf ein sich im Raum befindliches Raster zu übertragen. Der Körper des Besuchers ist Auslöser der Geräusche. Inhalt ist das Zusammenspiel von akustischem Raum und dem Körper darin. Durch Reproduktion der Klanglandschaft in detailreiche Einzelgeräusche erlebt man eine Landschaft anders. Es entsteht ein anderer, interaktiver Zugang zur Landschaft.

Ton: Die Soundscape besteht aus der gesamten Geräusche-Umwelt und ihre Einzelheiten. Die Einzelgeräusche sollen so konstruiert werden, dass sie im Kontext zur gesamten Soundscape bestehen bleiben. Die Ton-Ausgabe geschieht über eine 5.1 Anlage.

Tracking: Ausgehend von einem nicht sichtbaren Raster auf dem Boden, werden bestimmte Sounds ausgelöst. Ist man weit vom Bild entfernt, nimmt man die Soundscape als Gesamtes wahr. Je näher man an das Bild herantritt, desto mehr bekommt man den räumlichen Eindruck vom Bild. Man geht sozusagen in das Bild hinein. Einzelne Geräusche werden durch entsprechende Positionen ausgelöst. Das geschieht über ein Tracking in x-y-Ausrichtung. Außerdem soll die Geschwindigkeit getrackt werden. Je langsamer eine Bewegung geschieht, desto länger soll der Übergang von einem Geräusch ins andere sein.

Anstehende Tests:

Geräusch-Selektion einer Soundscape
Lautsprecher-Aufstellung
Foto oder Video der Ausgangslandschaft
Rasterform (Drei- oder Viereck) für Tracking

Hyun Ju Song: a emotion switcher

Abstract
Everyone has emotions. Though emotions are easily influenced by the circumstance, who governs emotions is the person himself.
Principle
There are 4 monitors(or digitalframes). Each monitor shows a same person’s expressionless face. In front of monitors 4 interfaces are located and have own emotional expression(joy, sorrow, pleasure, pain). By controlling the interfaces, the emotions of human in monitors are changed.

idea sketch
test - anger

Jeffers Egan:

Theory

Viewing Live AV as a platform for experimentation, my live sets explore the inscription of visual culture in time. By utilizing custom algorithms and animation software and without the use of prerecorded video or still footage, these works result in a hyperreal fluidity of visual mutations, ranging from tightly synchronized passages, to moments of free improvisation. Developing the concepts of digital as organism and software as ecosystem, my sets create a focused, personal aesthetic, finding commonalities in tone, texture and movement between audio and visual elements.

Practice

I have been invited to perform Live Visuals with vidderna, at ROJO/NOVA, a multimedia event this July in São Paulo, Brazil. We will play a 1 hour show together at an event alongside other AV acts.

Technically I am building a visual instrument in Touch Designer, . For the performance with vidderna, I plan to add a HD multi-movie stream compositing system(with alpha), a 3D timeline, and build/consolidate some GLSL shaders into 2D filters I can use in the compositing system.

I will also create new artwork specifically for this performance.

Matthias Breuer: Deconstructing the truth

Besides doing some research and experimenting I am trying to do one smaller project.

The project focuses on the truth and reality of the images we see. Taking any kind of video source as input, the stream's audio channel is continously played back. The corresponding frame is calculated from similarity to all previous frames. The most similar frame will be displayed. Each new frame is then placed in a database for comparison with forthcoming frames. This creates a steadily growing and learning mass which—after some time—can replace reality with frames from the past. At that point no clear distinction between reality and fiction can be made anymore.

Similarity between frames depend on an amount of chosen factors. Most commmon are histogram, structure etc. but always depend on the features one sees as important in an image. It's not important to match the look of a frame as close as possible but to match a frame in a given set of interests.

References:

Bernhard Hopfengärtner Tanzmaschine
Sven König: sCrAmBlEd?HaCkZ!
Perry Bard: global remake project

Maureen Anderson: Ulysses

The Starting Point

James Joyce spent 7 years writing a story that takes place on June 16, 1904, the day he met his future wife. It is the product of his attempt to depict the haphazrdness of thought and action of Leopold Bloom as they occur in their own separate and distinctive versions of "real time" in turn of the 20th century Dublin. Though Ulysses depicts a kind of disorder of what has come to be called "stream of consciousness," a concept of real time as something already broken and fractured for which it can depict in its wholeness by means of depicting its fractured nature, it is one of the most rigorously structured works of modern fiction, but one which does not exist in a "definitive edition."

The Experiment

I will be working with speech-to-text dictation software to re-write Joyce's Ulysses. Though current speech-to-text software has acchieved a high level of accuracy over the years, interesting mistakes happen in relation to Joyce's text.

Due to problems of censorship in the US and UK, and the publication and dissemination of the text in pieces, an accurate or authentic edition of Ulysses has never existed. It was changed and manipulated by it's first editor, by Joyce's inability to be a faithful transcriber of his own work due to failing eyesight and a writer's inclination to re-write complete sections 3 or 4 times. The first German translator of Ulysses went beyond mere translation or even interpretation when he ended up changing and adding his own material to a text that can be impossible to translate in the first place. I will start by using the 1922 first edition and the academic standard 1962 edition. In the future, it would be interesting to work with translations of Ulysses. The speech-to-text dictation software I've been using has given similar results.

James Joyce was very concerned with the spoken and the aural, and their relation to the written form. Joyce is often considered and discussed as having the largest lexicon of any writer known. Ulysses alone consists of 265,000 words and a lexicon of 30,030 words covering a broad range of English, foreign, and invented words and sounds. But it was his attention to the auditory, that might explain such an expansive search through the written form of many languages that drove him to develop such a large vocabulary. With this in mind, it was the open language and way of oral expression of Dublin at the turn of the last century that Joyce attempted to acurately depict: its slang, its grunts, its unfinished sentences. In the development of speech-to-text dictation software at the turn of the 21 century there is an odd Joycean understanding of languages. Voice recognition software has been developed to recognize quite a number of individual languages that can be recognized in separate vocabulary databanks or dictionary files, but they are often further broken down by specialization, accent or region including a separate category for "American teen."

While running tests it has often occurred that many words and phrases from Ulysses were matched with those from a contemporary American lexicon:

answered through the calm...answered.com

come up, Kinch...cut low jeans

Buck Mulligan...black militant

Introibo ad altare Dei...NGO well at all that day

and made...MAO (as in Monoamine Oxidase inhibitor)

This seems to reafirm, in a disassociated way, Joyce's account of himself as a "scissors and paste man" of writing and that our words are hardly ever our own.

Suggestions

--max 17:39, 10 June 2010 (UTC)

Natercia Chang: Mutually Intelligible

Background

I remember the first few meetings and classes when I got here last semester, they were all in German. And without any knowledge in the German language, it sounded like noises to me and I started making up the content when they talked. The initial idea that I came up was to film some of the lectures and edit subtiles on the images, which would be totally unrelated to the acutal content that they were discussing.
I have been attending lectures and workshops that are held almost entirely in German. To me, sitting in a classroom for more than 6 hours and listening to something not comprehensible at all is kind of a torture. Similarily, I am also interested to find out how would a person feels when he/she is forced to listen to something not in his/her first language.
The expereince of watching movies here in Germany is pretty hard because most of the movies, they are synchronised with German language instead of screening the original audio version.

Concept

Select a (or some) German movies and extract some of the scenes and/or shots without the audio
Select a collection of foreign movies and extract the audio (dialogue) from some of the scenes and/or shots
Synchronise the extracted images and audio and export it as a short video
Create a booth that contains monitor and keyboard buttons that one can select languages (no German available) for viewing the video.

(I do not know the technical parts to build a booth with sensory buttons...)

Sebastian Wolf

"VideoRecorder"

Those were two rather rough concepts waiting for more detail work.

a video-controlling musical instrument, a digital flute
ldrs controlling pitch/color channels or triggering specific scenes (there's an infinite number of possibilities actually)
a microphone manipulating loudness/brightness/speed of the video or so

I think I will stick with the instrument-idea, starting with some Arduino-/electronics-/sensor- experiments and some research on how a real flute actually works, how the sound is produced and what the possibilities to control those sounds are. The mapping in Pd will probably be the most tricky part, so I will have to work on that simultaneously.

hi sebastian, look at that flute --max 20:03, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

wtf!