Telematic dress

The telematic dress project began at Nottingham-Trent University's DAP lab as an exploration into the development of performative fashion and the sharing these garments across distance. The Arizona State University team joined the project in the fall of 2004 with an interest in exploring shared telematic space and ultimately the notion performers cooperatively embodying remote spaces.

Paper The Telematic Dress: Evolving garments and distributed proprioception in streaming media and fashion performance
Web site
Video

Secret under my skin

Today I met with Valerie Bugmann who works on the e-Skin project. She shared her ideas about the perception and simulation of touch for visually impaired persons.

I discovered her performance works and especially liked Secret under my skin. "With the Skin-to-skin communication the body stands as a medium between the technology and the world. In the performance, the participant exteriorizes inner thoughts by inputting them into the keyboard and interiorizes them into the body again with the use of Skin-to-skin communication for the purpose of transmitting them personally by touch to the performer."

The performance takes place in the room of secrets where a skin-to-skin communication network is employed. Here, the performer and the space await the opportunity to become alive through the interaction with the participant who comes to intimately confess/convey a secret by touch. A lighted keyboard floating in the darkness invites the participant to type a secret into its glowing keys. Once typed out, by simply touching the keyboard the secret is reintroduced into the participant’s body in the form of its new physicality – an electric wave. The secret, now flowing from the keyboard into the participant’s body is ready to be further transmitted/confessed to the performer by touch. Once skin-to-skin contact is established with the performer, the participant will be able to see his/her secret revealed on a wearable display on the performer’s body; the participant is then confronted with a very intimate part of him/herself. Despite the secret being displayed on the performer, it remains unread by anyone expect the participant, or has the performer – this almost inert object of inscription, desire and redemption - actually become aware of the secret through the transmission?

Skin-to-skin communication, as a suitable technology to express intimate thoughts, generates an intense effect as we recognize ourselves as part of the other through touch. Secret under my skin brings together different notions and implications of touch in this confession-like context, exploring new behaviors and novel parameters of social interaction that can develop out of this contact.

Motion mapping

Enlighted by Marc Downie's work at the MIT Media Lab, I just checked his company Openended Group where he co-creates digital artworks for stage, screen, gallery, museum and public spaces.
His PhD thesis (459 pages) on choreographing the extended agent is available for download online.

I selected this quote that I find particularly interesting regarding my current research ...

If you cast your mind back to childhood, you will soon discover our topic – motion-mapping – most clearly and imaginatively revealed. There in the games and pursuits of your earliest years you can distinguish this phenomenon in its three most basic forms. You can also follow each form forward in time to find out what they grew into -- forms of art.

You might start by bringing back the movement games you played so ardently as a child – in particular the games of imitation and mimicry, like Copycat, Follow the leader, Charades, Simon Says, and the innumerable variants you and your friends would improvise. These games had you map the movements of others onto your own body, sometimes in the simplest one-to-one transformations (as when you followed the leader), but sometimes more intricately, as when you mimicked a lion, or a horse, or a gladiator...

Enabling musical expression

Rachel's graphical representation of Dan's musical composition

During the H2.0 event, Adam Boulanger, researcher at the Hyperinstruments group with Professor Tod Machover presented their most impressive latest research: enabling musical expression.
Dan Ellsey, who has cerebral palsy, has been composing with the Hyperscore environment for almost two years. Adam developed a head-set and supporting software so that Dan could expressively perform his hyperscore compositions as a soloist. Dan worked closely with the team to perform his “eagle song” using head movements during the event. Rachel Roppolo worked on translating the sensor inputs from Dan into minimal graphics. Zach Watts worked on the curve algorithm to determine the type of shape Dan was making.
The performance was clearly impressive, very detailed and empowered the public.

I later talked to Adam about the project. He explained that the project necessitated a number of important steps. The team initially built on the commercial head tracker that Dan usually uses. However the commercial tracker was unsuccessful for a performance because it is not fast enough and is not reporting continuous data. Adam had to create a continuous head tracker.
Regarding the design aspects of the system, Adam had to work closely with Dan to come up with the algorithm that he needed to get clean data from Dan’s head movements, the team later calibrated the sensors for Dan.
The other step consisted in designing a controller that could run a performance. The team designed a new software that could take Dan’s range of motions and velocity of movement. They also had to do curve analysis to determine the type of shape Dan was making. Adam had to also figure out, based on his piece and movement, how this would be represented as an expression of the piece. The whole process was a discussion back and forth between Dan and the team. The system being done, they went through the piece of music and defined the type of movement needed for expression.

The performance was incredible. I cried, impressed by what the team had achieved.
The speakers were all impressive, I missed a few of them that I have to catch up on the archive. The webcast of the event is available online.


Adam, Dan and Tod

Mary Farbood, harpsichordist

Morwaread Farbood. Photography by Susan Wilson.

Presenting a harpsichord/piano sculpture in my previous post, I thought it would be nice to attend an authentic harpsichord concert. My friend Mary Farbood is performing in Cambridge and in New York this April.

Morwaread Farbood, American harpsichordist of Iranian and Japanese descent, is quickly becoming recognized as one of the rising young stars in the harpsichord world. She was selected for the Pro Musicis International Award in 2006 and won First Prize at the Prague International Harpsichord Competition the previous year.

An excerpt of her playing J. S. Bach, French Suite No. 5 in G Major, BWV 816 - Allemande


An excerpt of her playing J. S. Bach, French Suite No. 5 in G Major, BWV 816 - Courante


An excerpt of her playing Louis Marchand, Suite in D minor, Pièces de clavecin


An excerpt of her playing Domenico Scarlatti, Sonata in D Major, K. 119



The audio exerpts are unedited and from a live performance at the MIT Chapel in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Recorded April 12, 2006. Engineer: Mike Fabio.

When and where?
Saturday, April 21st, 2007 at 8:00 PM - Pickman Concert Hall, Longy School of Music, Cambridge
Tickets

Wednesday, April 25th, 2007 at 8:00 PM - Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, New York
Tickets

Program
Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764)
Pièces de Clavecin from Suite in D minor
Les Tendres Plaintes
Les Niais de Sologne
Les Soupirs
Les Cyclopes

Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)
Sonata in E minor, Hob.XVI/34
Presto
Adagio
Vivace molto

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)
Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue, BWV 903

Hubert Ho (1976 - )
Manual Labor (World and New York premieres)

Ellen Taaffe Zwilich (1939 - )
Fantasy for Harpsichord

Domenico Scarlatti (1685-1757)
Sonata K. 502 in C Major
Sonata K. 1 in D Minor
Sonata K. 119 in D Major
Sonata K. 455 in G Major

Sensory experiences

Today I watched Signers Koffer by Peter Liechti (1995, 81 min.), a movie on action sculptures made by the Swiss artist Roman Signer. Signer uses common household objects sometimes in addition to his own body to create a combination of explosive, compressed and released sculptures. He plays with compression and expansion such as in a harm stretch that gives a sense of pleasure. He works on the ideal speed. He uses his body in extreme conditions to engage in a personal discussion with nature. He borrows activities that use nature, readapt nature, and destroy nature. He re-instantiates the viewer shock that can happen facing consequences of natural catastrophes, and this within his action sculptures. He collects and revisits specific polish toys, toys that are charged with a period, a sense of magic. He describes their form, their functions in relation to their history and sometimes misery.

I had difficulty finding media about his work online, however a german band called Blumentopf borrowed and recompiled visuals of the movie.
Sequences from the Movie.

The sculptural actions of Roman Signer reminds me of the Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa.

Taking nothing seriously and recognizing our sensations as the only reality we have for certain, we take refuge there, exploring them like large unknown countries. And if we apply ourselves diligently not only to aesthetic contemplation but also to the expression of its methods and results, it's because the poetry or prose we write - devoid of any desire to move anyone else's will or to mould anyone's understandng - is merely like when a reader reads out loud to fully objectify the subjective pleasure of reading.

Feedback for people with OCD

UBICOMP TO PROVIDE FEEDBACK FOR PEOPLE WITH OBSESSIVE-COMPULSIVE DISORDER

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD): Patients are Impaired in Remembering Temporal Order and in Judging Their Own Performance, J. Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology, vol. 24, no. 3, 2002, pp. 261–269.

Today, Rob Van Kranenburg sent me an interesting article he wrote in 2003 on how ubicom applications could provide feedback for people with OCD. He is developing solutions in the framework of contemporary performance and theatrical practice.

The paper can be found here.

The paper mentions that in the US and Netherlands, one in 50 adults currently has OCD, and twice as many have had it at some point in their lives.

How could ubicomp be instrumental here? Phase 1 is researching if ubicomp applications can assess if a person has a tendency for audio, visual, tactile, or other kinds of feedback that would signal the task scenario’s closure. In Phase 2, we would have to access, for example, if visual feedback on clothing or another appliance could break the chain of repetition for a person who functions on visual feedback but is dealing with an apparatus that does not provide such feedback. Working closely with psychiatrists and OCD patients, in Phase 3 we could test whether such ubiquitous computing applications could break the loop of repetition, assuming that it is the kind of feedback that is responsible for the taskloop’s nonclosure.

Finally the paper concludes that ubicomp applications could focus on temporal markers and serendipitous feedback scripting into various scenarios to raise self-awareness.

In pervasive computing