APD Week 5

Theme

Play and Forces

Context

For this week's theme, when I was thinking about forces, I thought about using gestures as the force for affecting the artwork and also surrounding. The first inspiration was one of teamlab's work, which is Moving Creates Vortices and Vortices Create Movement installation in NGV. "Variations in the work are born and continue to change, perpetually influenced by people's movement." This is the quote on their website that leads me to think more about how I would be able to plan on how the audience gesture would be able to influence the artworks movement.

Next, I was inspired by Behnaz Farahi's interactive installation, Breathing Wall 2,0. It was a kinetic wall installation that would morph it's shape according to the audience's gesture. I was interested in their inquiry of the project that looks into the amelioration of the relationship of gesture-based interaction and dynamic space. Although the project uses leap motion as the motion sensor for their installation, I decided to go with my computer's camera as it was more  portable and easily accessible for the audience.

Method

I built an interactive interface using Touchdesigner and my computer's webcam as the main camera. 

Response

I decided to create an interactive artwork that the users would be able to control its movement by gestures movement.

I started with linking the point x and point y of the moving objects that were detected by the computer monitor. I then set the x and y of the ball to the moving points. 

To make it more interesting to interact with, I added lines into the project. The lines within the installation would warp around the ball like a guitar string. I also added in the opacity customisation option for the users so they could tweek with the opacity of the camera background. This would enable the audience to customise the interaction a bit more.

Reflection

I was looking to test with a more digitized method for this project where I was quite happy with the outcome. It was quite confusing at first, as I was trying to figure out the interface for the application. The results turn out great, and I was happy at the playability that I was able to feast out of this project.