APD Week 10 - Play and Stillness

Chicken Orchestra AR

In case you thought it couldn’t get any more ridiculous, try watching the above video with Closed Captions (CC) to find out how YouTube’s automated system made sense of this piece!

Theme:

Play and Stillness

Context:

I was thinking of stillness in terms of negative space, silence (as in John Cage), nature and ambience.

I was thinking about what would happen if I combined these ideas.

I also wanted to try AR: because I was inspired by Rui Sun and his work Anikull; I wanted to try something I hadn’t done before; and I thought using still images combined with breaking a sound track or song into it’s components and then combining them again would help us think about the space in between sounds, or beats in music.

My friends have chickens, which are each named according to their different personalities, which would have taken time and patience to detect. This was the final inspiration behind Chicken Orchestra AR.

Costello and Edmonds ‘A study in play, pleasure and interaction design’ discusses the concept of a pleasure framework for playful design. Chicken Orchestra aligns with the ideas of subversion (making chickens part of a choir or orchestra), sensation (through listening to the sounds and seeing the images and staying for the build up to the final mix) and camaraderie (by placing these chicken posters in a public space so that people can share the AR experience and laugh about it together. Zapworks also has the added feature of being able to share your experience via their ‘Zappar’ app.

Method:

I asked my son to take some pictures of our friend’s chickens while we were at a BBQ. After we’d eaten I asked a few people there - who are excellent musicians - to break away from their normal instruments and to ‘bok bok’ like a chicken (in time with a beat).

I paired these tracks individually with a chicken photo, which I adjusted in photoshop a bit in the style of popart. I then layered the four tracks for the final mixed down version (ie full Chicken Orchestra song).

I got a free trial of Zapworks – a ZapWorks an Augmented Reality software for designers that you can use without coding. I created projects and downloaded associated ‘zapcodes’ for each chicken image then added my sounds and settings.

Download the Zapper app to participate in the final AR experience.

Response:

Here is a video documenting the ‘Chicken Orchestra’ AR experience.

Photos of the original chickens and a screenshot of the Zapworks interface are also attached for documentation.