Hull
Back to life, back to reality…
Back at work and last week already feels like a dream. I’m lucky enough to have a job I really love but I do miss the “Lab”. I didn’t have time to blog on Friday so I’m doing a retro blog…and I think it will be a bit of a long one. Day 5: Bought my graphics tablet in today to try make some hand-drawn animations. But neglected to pack the pen I needed to make the darn thing work! Oh well! Glenn kindly lent me his sound recorder and I went round rubbing...
Day 5: Cleaning up the mess
Today was about documenting and wrapping up loose ends – making our experiments with touch screens into more resolved works that could be presented in contexts beyond the Lab. With the help of Ben Dalton, Bob Levene and I got the code for the dirty hob piece finished, so that now when you rub the screen the ‘clean’ image is revealed in a more subtle way, not with the blocky pixel effect that seems to work so well on the Scratch Cards. We made a short film of the piece...
mousetrap
On the Friday of our Digital Media Labs residency I decided to develop a simple prototype piece which could make use of some of the skills and new understanding which I had been able to develop. I wanted to try and make something which could involve an engaged audience in some of the more critical dialogues which have been taking place during the residency, relating to touch and participatory art practice. I considered some experiments other people made during the week: Ellie’s...
tea, tea, tea. Tea for everybody!!!!!
OK so a frustrating day but great day (yesterday) I started by (with more than a little held from Ben) working out how the interface would work, so that each time i rolled over a certain point in the screen as frame from the animation would be selected. Great it worked. But my images looked really dirty and dark so.. I cleaned up the images that i was using using yesterday. then i put them in and YES it worked except for a little warning that there were 11 images missing (this...
Final day at the Lab
I have put together three experimental works for tomorrows presentations today. They are all unresolved to different extents, however I feel they demonstrate my progress in terms of how to consider the possibilities of interactive artworks. The light model that Stuart Childs and I have been collaborating on has turned out well, and demonstrates the idea of controlling things outside a building from within. The sensors on the outside of the structure represent touch screens,...
Materials
Thinking on the week its been amazing to be given the freedom to play with all kinds of materials and to remember that wandering round markets is where i love doing research; so thanks Hull for your wonderful pet shops, joke shops and Butchers stalls. Markets help you really connect to the city your in; it’s a cliché but true! I forgot to mention about the placement of touch screens; im really frustrated by the standard kiosk presentation format, so i think the apple...
Can’t Touch This
Untitled from Ross Dalziel on Vimeo. Have finished a prototype touch screen model; its not a finished work by any means but a model of how I’d like to approach them. Rather than based on visual elements that the touch screen can interact with I’ve thought of them as flat planes of control that can be accessed by the touch of other objects. In this prototype placing apples on 4 different areas trigger 4 different samples of the bells ringing near Hull college. Im interested...
Almost time for tea
so when i left you yesterday i had said about how mr lynch had floated the idea of trying out a basic version of an interactive animation that i had been thinking about. however, as i have some pics i thought i should just say that prior to this i had 1) played with a digital SLR for a while and taken loads of pics from around hull (or between the hotel and the site of the new NHS city center development; which we went on a tour of and which look like it has some quite nice...
Engagement and Collaboration
During the week everyone made a short presentation of their work and it so happened that mine took place yesterday (Thursday). I thought that the most valuable way to spend this time would be to try and articulate and demonstrate some important principles upon which my artistic practice operates. Two central aspects of the work which I develop with the artist collective Re-Dock are “engagement” and “collaboration” – we always involve people in our...
It looks like this
Compared to working alone, a shared medialab has the huge advantage of having other people around who know something about code, and can cast a spare pair of eyes across the work you have been doing. After a heavy day’s wrangling yesterday, Ben Dalton kindly looked over my code and has been helping me make it more streamlined and functional. Some small changes fixed a few sequencing problems, and some speedily implemented reorganisations finally made it function as intended....
Cleaning The Surface.
Complete relief. I had a really constructive day and actually made some stuff. At an unearthly hour I read the article Ellie Weir had linked to yesterdays blog about how the core material Indium that goes into making touch screen technology work is running out. I found an image of this ‘Indium’ and have started playing around with ideas that relate to this and erasing, rubbing out and eradicating. Myself and Ellie Harrison manged to get into the catering section at...
under glass
Day 4: Visited the site of the Wilberforce Centre today. Couldn’t really hear a lot of what the site manager was saying because of the ambient noise. So spent the time aimlessly looking around at the interesting geometry of the metal skeleton of the building, and at some of the dilapidated buildings that surround the site. I know the building of this Centre is socially beneficial and will hopefully bring about an improvement in many people’s lives, but I felt sad...
A winding journey through technology
Trying to find nice examples of touch screen art feels hard to me. A few projects come to mind that don’t use the technology we are focusing on necessarily, but do introduce nice modes of interaction and aesthetics. Khronos Projector – timelapse seems to lend itself to well to touch. Alvaro Cassinelli & Masatoshi Ishikawa’s morphable ventures through time and the timelapse ideas that proceeded it are outlined nicely in Golan’s Slit-Scan review. Manual...
