Just some updates..

Getting closer to the final show! I have created a new sketch for how my work will be displayed according to Jonathan's suggestion. I have also been allocated a space that is "dark-ish" so I have arranged to get an LED light from my college so viewers can go through my book.

Yesterday my friend Florian came over and finished another audio piece for the water colour. There are 5 left.. it will be a race against time, however we know the processes we just have to get to it. In the meantime Maria is working on finalising the interface.

Book has arrived!

The Book printed with Dust Jacket from Blurb

Front

Back

Application online

Here's my application online. I still need to change the play icon and some things are still a bit buggy.. loading is also slightly slow since it's on free hosting but in general it works! (This does not include the fixes mentioned in my previous post)

(Please give some time to load)

Interface fixes

Had one of my final meetings with my developer today. She's fixing the last few bits after I showed her some results from the case studies. This is what she will be looking at:

1. Changing the percentage of the time that a story will stay / change.
There is a 70% chance that the recorded story will keep going when the user clicks.
There is a 30% chance that it will change to another story.
The reason for this is that there are some stories that are quite long, and some of the users were listening to the story without interacting with the rest of the interface.

2. The parameters for the width and height of each video are going to be more extreme, now ranging from a minimum of 10 (% of the screen) to a maximum of 70. (Before these were set to 30, 50)

3. Since the user can now pinch to zoom in and out, sometimes when the interface is zoomed out completely, one can see the edge of the application and it is aligned to the left. Maria is going to try and centralise it.

4. Hiding the scrollbar using a Chrome plug-in.

5. Now that the water colours have sounds attached to them I'm going to give them a lower chance of coming up, something like 30%. This will avoid too many overlapping sounds that might cause frustration.

6. There doesn't always have to be a recorded story in the background.

7. Resizing and moving videos will not be available during the show but will be an option when the application is online (due to the touch screen multi-function).

8. Automatic refresh will happen every 30mins, otherwise the user can simply click F5 to restart the application from the beginning.

Source

Video Chat with Jonathan

Just finished my video chat with Jonathan and it cleared out a lot of things that I was worried about as well as made me reflect about some new things for the Interface.

I'm very keen on trying on the documentation and tests suggested where it would involve the user seeing him/herself trying out the application on video. I will need to read more about this in the email that Jonathan had sent Mariana a few days ago.

I will also need to think about what happens if the user zooms onto one of the videos if the interface will revert back to normal after a few minutes or not.

There will be two scenarios at the final show; a busy one right on the opening, and a quieter one after the opening, so I will need to check that my application will perform appropriate on both.

I had already had my doubts about the monitor stand and now that I have spoken to Jonathan I am quite sure that the stand is not going to look right. It might look too blocky and big and hide the slender frame of the screen. I will therefore use a backless plinth and the laptop + cables can be hidden there.

Finally I was slightly worried about the documented paper, however now that Jonathan has cleared it out it should be fine.

The paper should ideally include

1. Final reflection and evaluation of the work.
2. Summary of my work (that can be included next to the project itself)
3. Future development.

Ordered Book Documentation & New Audio processes

I have just sent the book for printing on Blurb.com so it comes back in time for the final show. Unfortunately my final posts will not be able to make it in the book, however these are just the finishing touches. The major development has finished by now. I wanted the book to be available for viewers who were interested to see the thinking process behind the project.

Here are some details from the latest audio that will be linked with the water colours compiled by my audio person, Florian:

Story 1



Andrew Robert

It was decided that for this recording, key terms that make up the essence of the story are cut and put in the recording timeline up till a maximum of 1minute.

The cut terms are put in the timeline next to each other with a gap of silence in between. The amount of silence in each case varied according to a random number generator found online.


Times cut


Moira

00:07 - 2003
00:34 - America
00:47 - Fat individual
01:07 - Possessive
01:59 - Sister
02:13 - Garage
02:18 - Jumped off of it
02:26 - Drastically
02:28 - Point
02:35 - Panic Attack
03:01 - Dying from
03:13 - Gay
03:19 - Ethics


Josef

00:28 - boyfriend
00:19 - Obsessed
00:34 - America
00:39 - Photos
01:07 - Possessive
01:15 - Noticed
01:19 - Confident
01:59 - Sister
02:13 - Garage
02:26 - Drastically
02:37 - Hyperventilating
02:46 - First
03:13 - Gay
03:16 - Incompatable
03:30 - Depression
03:36 - Sprung back
03:50 - Void


Dude

00:15 - Live Journal
00:19 - Obsessed
00:27 - Official
00:34 - America
00:42 - Head up
01:07 - Possessive
01:25 - Invisible and Unloved
01:41 - Aaaaa
02:18 - Jumped off of it
02:36 - Panic Attack
02:38 - Back alley
02:45 - Come around
03:16 - Incompatable
03:30 - Depression




00:07 - 2003
00:15 - Live Journal
00:19 - Obsessed
00:27 - Official
00:28 - boyfriend
00:34 - America
00:39 - Photos
00:42 - Head up
00:47 - Fat individual
01:07 - Possessive
01:15 - Noticed
01:19 - Confident
01:25 - Invisible and Unloved
01:41 - Aaaaa
01:59 - Sister
02:13 - Garage
02:18 - Jumped off of it
02:26 - Drastically
02:28 - Point
02:35 - Panic Attack
02:37 - Hyperventilating
02:38 - Back alley
02:45 - Come around
02:46 - First
03:01 - Dying from
03:13 - Gay
03:16 - Incompatable
03:19 - Ethics
03:30 - Depression
03:36 - Sprung back
03:50 - Void

Total: 31


After we chose all the terms we opened them in Ableton and put them after each other. The effect was similar to a summery of his story, so to randomize it further, we decided to use a random number generator, so as the terms would not have a particular order, creating different possible meanings.

Story 2



00:38 - Vapur (Ship horns, sonar)

00:46 - Nibza mill-bahar (underwater bubbles, wind light)

02:16 - Daru kollha fuq naha wahda (underwater sloshing, metal strike)

02:18 - Cafcifa (splash soft)

02:21 - Qbadt it-tfal

03:15 - Biza (panting male)

Up till 31.5


Opened Ableton, and found library sounds that in my opinion correspond to what the woman was saying in the above times.

I loaded these sounds individually in Izotope Iris. On each spectogram I wrote the time of  but chose the size of the effects based on a random number generator online, and on the last two numbers of where the words were placed in the recording.

The sound 'Ship horns' was used throughout the 1 minute, but the effects were done according to preference. Pitch was modified throughout to bring out the effect created.

Research

This is just an excerpt from Paul D.Miller (DJ Spooky)'s Rebirth of a Nation that was performed live in various locations. I found this example from the book "New Media Art" by Mark Tribe / Reena Jana. Unfortunately when I took the book home from the library I realised it was in Italian, but fortunately (thanks to Italian TV channels in Malta) I can read Italian and understand it!

The authors say that most New Media artists are criticized for now being familiar with historic art movements that have contributed to New Media such as Dadaism and Popart. Most of the time this is untrue, and this is reflected in some works of New Media artists, in this case Paul D.Miller's Rebirth of a Nation(2002) that was a live performance when he remixes D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation, whilst assembling improvised sound.

In the same book I have also come across "Brandon" by Shu Lea Cheang, that is a true story about Teena Brandon who was a twenty one year old girl who was raped and killed after trying to be passed on as a man. (I have also seen this interpreted as a film in "Boys don't cry" (1999).

(The following in an English translation from the book)

The artist Shu Lea Cheang was commissioned by the Guggenheim to produce a web-based work of art that expored Teena Brandon's story in an experimental manner, non-linear, in order to communicate the fluidity and ambiguity of sex and identity in contemporary societies.

"Shu Lea Cheang's 1998 work "Brandon" is a multifaceted web project that uses the nonlinear and participatory nature of the Internet as a means to explore and illuminate Brandon Teena's tragic story. From the opening image of morphing gender signifiers, Cheang propels the viewer into a probing investigation of human sexuality. It is an inquiry that utilizes hyperlinked images of a disembodied human form, once-live chat rooms on the subject of crime and punishment, and graphic moving images in order to illuminate the wide-reaching effect of Brandon's life and death. Exploiting the highly mutable "skin" of the Internet, Cheang reveals how this emerging virtual environment enables individuals to inhabit and play with different gender roles and characters. A prime example of "cyberfeminism," Brandon utilizes technology as a means to break down social assumptions about gender in both the realm of technology and in society at large." Guggenheim(accessed: 2012)

Unfortunately the website does not seem to be available online, however I found it to be relevant to my body of work since it deals with true stories, interactive imagery and non-linearity.

Yet another website that my programmer found and that reminds me of my work is this one and this time rather than in Italian, it's in German. I believe it is a preview of various artists / student works. Each pictures can be dragged around and can be clicked to direct to specific works. I really like the white space however in my case I fear it might not work because it uncovers the somewhat ugly borders of the videos.

Schedule

Less than two months left!

So hopefully this will be my final schedule and I will stick to it! I am determined to stick to it especially since this last month I had been working on 2d animation for an architectural projection for the final show at the college where I teach, and it took all my time (since I was also teaching and grading at the same time!). Ok I'm done ranting here, I will now explain what I will be doing in the coming weeks.

I will be presenting my final essay with my documentation in a book using Blurb's Blog-to-book (see previous post). I will try to finish this book by next week in order to send it for print. If I don't manage to write my documentation I will simply present it in a separate paper rather than in the book. The book will basically contain my two-year process that is now present in the blog. It will be presented together with my application.

This week I will carry out some final research from a few interesting books I got from the college library. I will also be starting the book (structuring / cover / layout).

Next week I'm meeting my programmer to show her the touch screen and see what we can improve. I will be meeting the sound guy so we can have some sort of sound schedule.

In the third week I want to review and finalise all the water colours. I will also be working on improving the interface and speaking to a carpenter who will create some sort of stand for the touch screen.

In the fourth week I will be finalising all recordings, working on the interface and the stand. During these two weeks I also want to run some tests to see if the improved interface is working or not.

August will be dedicated to finalising the interface, and if there's time, to film some extra stories that can easily be added to the database.