“This entire journey is an exploration of the meanings, tools, and efforts we’ve gone through. The project can be either successfully finding calm, or knowing what doesn’t make calm. Suffice to say, we learned a lot and enjoyed the process so far.”

Mini Exhibit

It was a blast, you know that feeling when you’re happy not because something is over, but because it happened? Well, we’re glad that at least capstone happened. Special thanks to everyone who helped us throughout this first half of the journey, as well as participants in our exhibit! You all are truly amazing people.

Electric Boogaloo: The Storm Before The Calm

D-14 of the exhibition was crazy enough for us. Originally, we attempted to do “blob tracking” using Kinect Azure and Manfrotto Magic Arm from the top and project things to the floor. On paper, this sounds simple enough, hang things, yank some cables, and do some programming tweakings and voila, you get museum-like installation. But in reality, there were so many things going wrong that it’s just mindblowing xD.

For starters:

• Because we have to connect Kinect Azure to the computer down, we need to run around 5-7M mixed cables consisting of USB-A; USB-C; and power cables. Luckily, there were some technicians doing maintenance and using electric crane, they helped me managing the power sockets and lines.
• Unfortunately however, running data cables (the USB-A and USB-C), even through ethernet did not work because both our depth cameras (Kinect Azure & Intel Realsense) requires USB 3.0 connection whereas the extender we had was only capable of transmiting USB 2.0. “This means that a consideration we can have for the final project is to hang a computer up and so we don’t have to deal with running data cables. Alternatively, we can buy a very expensive extender.`
• Cheesing the projection using ceiling mounted projector to the floor and paper-covered wall was a daunting task. We narrowed it down to two things: — a » the space was too small, and the projector we borrowed (Optoma 1090) had problems dealing with the pipes and angles. However, for the distance of around 2-3 M from the top to the floor is perfect for high quality images. This is good because now we know supposedly for the final it will work once we hang more projectors. — b » After consulting with EC Staffs, the more projectors we use, the better the machine we need. Meaning that for the final project, we have to use something akin to Mac Studio to support multiple projector connections.
• We notice that both paper and curtains reflect the projections very differently, surface material matters. White paper diffuses the projections, meaning we have to use more vivid colors. Whereas black curtains absorb the colors, making them less visible despite being vivid.

Feedback, and Comments

Since you guys are using projections, cushions, interactivity, how will your installation be different than the thousands artists have done previously? *What conceptual aspect that are less touched will you guys expose? Try to find things that are different. Because your project strives for minimalism, less is more. But it also mean that every single thing that you guys add has to be backed up, it has to done something, for something, an entire bigger thing (in the grander scheme of things).

In looking at calmness, you can research what makes people calm. But think about it inversely, what makes people NOT calm: Anxiety, Stress, Frustration. If you know these points, then you can “avoid or mitigate” it in your installation. In other words, calm is achieved through dampening these elements. ~ Prof. Ume

When thinking about calm, people might think about meditation. In that case, doing nothing is the way to calm. Why would you make things interactive? Look at research that explicits that interactivity leads to calmness. If you are going forward with this, make it so. ~ Prof. Shiloh

Think about how the setup and space will be for the final project: request bigger spaces, and connect it’s reasoning conceptually. ~ Jack

How will the space react and be experienced by a person or group? Is calmness a collective effort? If one person is calm, but the other is not, how will they be both calm? Will the space track it? ~ Prof. Aya

Onwards and Beyond

Overall, the mini exhibit proved we have a solid aesthetic starting point, but the conceptual and research work needs to be solidified. In the beginning of capstone, we researched things that are related to calmness, and while we have that as a foundation, since we’ve tested so many things this semester all the way to narrow it into audio-visuals, we can start leaning our focus on how audio, visuals, calm tie togther. Time to hit the books again!