Stealth Project, ISEA 2009 from squidsoup on Vimeo.

Stealth,a squidsoup project, created to be an interactive installation through the process of development evolved into a fully playable game set to an art gallery situation. It was first shown as part of Cybersonica late in 2008 at the start of Cold War Modern in V&A. The Cold War Modern Theme pretty much set the tone for Stealth. The concept emerged from associations with war game stereo types. Imagine James Bond in Never Say Never Again (the electro shock over the table video game).

Never Say Never Again

Stealth is connect four (board game) mixed with the classic missile defence( a retro video game ) set in real space. You aim to marking your position on the grid by firing missiles to the opposite side passing through a sweeping radar. Your opponent can shoot down your missiles and the resulting explosions can also detonate other missiles. It turned out to be quite absorbing after a few goes, The video above is to demonstrate it, in reality we were screaming at each other while playing it.
It was quite successful as a game, but in a limited way. The situation inhibits the playability. If you put that “game” in a white box room or gallery situation most viewers are still highly likely to assume a passive role rather than participant even when engaged with Stealth. The monome interfaces were actually perfect for the playability of the game, but not the most conventional form of interaction. Games being reasonably complex activities rely heavily on convention in controls and understanding of rules. Also there is an issue of time and practice. There is a lot to take in when playing a “missile defence, connect four, sculptural space, real time multiplayer shooting game” you need a bit of practice.

Game and Sculpture as exploration of space seems to form a good partnership. Sculptures occupy and define space and games tend to create or facilitate the navigation of space. Stealth ultimately is digital, the logic is digital, you play via an interface, the imagery may occupy 3D space, but ultimately it is digital. But because it looks very much like a sculpture it almost demands to be beheld rather than interacted. The kit itself becomes more intriguing that the digital work on it. Unlike cinema or digital projection where the technology is less centre stage due to existing familiarity.

What ever we made using the NOVA we would be restricted by its sculptural presence. Looking back, all the work we did with the NOVA 2008 – 2009 was in response to its physical presence and technical restrictions rather than it bending to our creative or artistic will and becoming a material used to create digital spaces.

In 2008 squidsoup went to the Technopark in Zurich to experiment with ETHZ’s Baby Nova Grid of LED lights. Over the year that followed we then created two exhibition works Stealth and Discontinuum specifically for the Nova grid.

It was a great opportunity to explore the possibilities of working with a LED grid. We had in front of us a grid of 1000 ping pong ball sized regularly placed voxels, each individually addressable to colour and all hanging from the roof in a public foyer. I guess we gave people something to step over when they entered the Technopark for the few days we were there, Experimenting in a public space, bit like having an audience with zero expectations.
We began by looking for a visual language to explore the possibilities of the grid. It made sense to start with “squidsoup” processes that were familiar to us. At the time procedural exploration of form and the illusion of a virtual object.
Step one, dividing the space into two colours or spaces and then playing with flexibility of the boundary between the spaces. It became a kind of virtual surface within the grid. Then creating forms that expand and overlap creating moving form.

The removal of the screen space initially was disorientating. The voxels do not move in real space, but the movement of virtual volumetric forms through the grid led to a powerful illusion of physical movement.
This is nothing new I guess, we look at pixel based screen, the pixels don’t move but “images” on them seem to move. When dealing with real volumes this same illusion of movement is exaggerated. Our perception of the boundaries between real and virtual movement can forge a powerful illusion that space itself is being distorted.
I’m trying to imagine what it would be like to objectively cast your eyes on a screen for the first time and be confused as to where the boundaries of reality are as volume and time merge into 2 dimensional space. Maybe as the technology for creating volumetric virtual spaces improves we could be looking at revelations as big as the first video projections.

Technically, the forms were worked out in actionscript using virtual 3d coordinates. A byte array was dispatched via ethernet to the grid. Each voxel was treated as an object that would decide what colour to present based on its proximity to the procedural forms created in the programming. The process was much more of a rendering procedure than a drawing one.

Aside from our tests of rendering form and movement, we made a system to inverse project a webcam onto the grid. This was, of course, only viewable from a sweet spot. The grid itself was constructed in the code and then the co ordinates of each voxel projected onto a webcam image where it would get the pixel underneath to set the colour of that voxel in the Nova grid. Also were were give the opportunity to test our experiments on the Larger 50*50*10 NOVA hanging in Zurich Train station. In a way because it was so high up, proportionally it presented itself as more so as a screen. Nonetheless an awesome piece of kit to behold in a public space.

Looking back, this was the first time of many that I had worked with an LED grid and I approached the task with quite a bit of scepticism. I could not appreciate exactly what you could get out of only 1000 lights when used to working with so many more pixels. Most people that passed though Technopark and gaze at the NOVA expecting some kind of image, comments were made about its resolution and initially I shared these same thoughts. Its not easy to create virtual aesthetics absent of the “image” and this is probably why we felt compelled to introduce the webcam, but working in this way truly is when virtual spaces can begin to inhabit sculptural space in a very real way even more so as we moved onto the Ocean Of Light.

flickr slideshow

Pest Control, Glastonbury 2010 from squidsoup on Vimeo.

more Pest Control images on flickr

The interesting thing about Pest Control for Glastonbury was not so much the location, but the volumes of people for whom the project was created and how interactivity would be delivered in this situation. Not that programming while the sun rises with damp grass under my feet was not an interesting and new experience, but that was evidently the calm before the storm. Creating Interactive art for the individual or the few to interact with is the usual route we take when building for a gallery environment and most of our other pieces in “a glastonbury environment” would have most certainly been completely trashed. Pest Control is an adaptation or sequel of an earlier much more sensitive squidsoup piece called bugs, built to work in a space which is packed with bodies so subtle interaction is out the window. The situation demanded quick gratifying interaction, in someways not far off what you would supply in a arcade style computer game. Pest Control has probably become the most “Gamey” squidsoup work since Altzero 1 and I like that.However it’s hard to see Pest Control working in a gallery situation which makes it difficult to quantify its relevance since most of our work is built to reside in the gallery space. Nonetheless I think we successfully managed to create a “touchable” virtual space in one of the most crowded open spaces we are ever likely to exhibit.

Pest Control used infrared camera detection and opentsps communicating with actionscript to control all the bugs in the alchemy version of box2d and despite all the lack of sleep and navigation around that massive glastonbury site was good fun to complete. The first part of the video was shot the morning of glastonbury starting at about 5 in the morning just after we finished.

Also adding to the uniqueness of the situation some awesome graffiti to show who we were.

I recently found this photo and it got me thinking about the situation of installing Digital Art. I mentioned Discontinuum in an earlier post about the background of Ocean of light, things moved so fast since then that some times interesting Ideas get left behind or on the kerb. Its definately a concept worth revisiting.
This particular Installation was an odd experience, setting up a digital art work in a catholic church in Engien les Bains in Paris, where Amelie was supposedly set. After you have left these locations sometimes you forget all the time spent with your head buried in code or working out the logistics in the strangest of locations. The installation invoked a lot which i wasn’t expecting. We’ve set up a ton of these things but for some reason setting up in a church changed the landscape somewhat despite our tendency to remain objective about our work. It was a digital Art festival called Bain Numerique, 2009, more about it on the squidsoup blog. Discontiuum as an interactive piece is quite straightforward, your image is taken and played back to you fragmented over time and space through the physicality of the LED grid, the location in this instance did distort the project. Not a big fan of churches, and our presence there seemed to get a mixed reaction. Most people, in general, were intrigued, but a few found our presence bit challenging which at times left me feeling a little at a loose end attempting to justify in French what we were doing, when I can hardly find the words to justify any of this in English. We found ourselves asking questions that we rarely ask, as they are not so relevant to our process. This resulted in taking a more figurative/narrative route by including recognisable imagery from the stained glass within the church. It helped this potentially invasive technological instrument seem more compliant to its traditional and visually established environment.

As usual we had other things to think about, we also had to set up a trio of ghosts using the French character set. After a load of baguettes, some loss of patience and a bit of over priced beer, we got it all ready in time for the show. It was all such a whirlwind I had almost forgotton about it all until more recenly browsing through iPhoto. When the event happened ite surprised us how many people were there. This was mainly due to the antics of body>data>space that led a gathering through out most of the exhibits across Engien and generally contributed to the overall madness.

Here is the video Ant put together for Discontinuum:

Discontinuum derived from on of our experiments from the previous year when we had spent an intensive weekend in the foyer of the TechnoPark in Zurich with the sole purpose of seeing what visual, spacial and aesthetic qualities we could achieve with the Baby Nova. One of the routes we took, that we were keen to explore further, was reconfiguring a realtime image from a webcam into the cubes space, where I created a virtual representation of the cube and from it’s 3d images mapped the pixel colours of the realtime image to the locations of the LEDs. I wasn’t t really sure what to call this process, but it was suggested that the image was being projected onto the cube, which is kind of true in a virtual and conceptual sense, but considering each LED “projects” it’s own light outwards rather than being projected upon this is an interesting paradox. A kind of virtual/real space inverse projection. Considering all the work we had done with interactive virtual 3d and stereoscopic projections to this point, it certainly felt like we were moving in the right direction.
in this particular installation we took still imagery from the church, mainly the amazing stain glass windows and intermittently inverse projected them from various angles stopping at the angle where the camera input originated.

Because Digital 3d Form is based on a very determined set of mathematical principles, experimenting visually with this “material” often leads down the same route of a kind of “ordered chaos” This ordered chaos, I think reflects very well on the human understanding of digital, in that everything we do or use we do not fully understand, we depend on structures and digital ecosystems that have been put in place for our use. Much like the real world :0) so thats why I love these pics, and am glad I kept hold of them.

the images

I also played with As3DMod some more when I had an opportunity to recreate a book, “page flip”, turning effect that I had created a couple of years prior to enable us to make ebrochures. It seemed perfect to use As3DMod with away 3d to create a flexible page turning engine. The Mccoy’s website required a book section called “the man guide“. While the content for the man guide became more bespoke through its design process, it became next to impossible to create a CMS as with my previous page flip “template”. Nonetheless it still works with different sized movie clips as individual pages and consists of a default class to handle pages that can be extended for more bespoke pages such as the contents page etc.

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A useful tool created by Richard at available on codebyfire.com
It nicely demonstrates how you can air can be used to create some useful applications that are quick and easy to install, update and to use. If you need to out put a lot of screenhots of the same size then this is really useful.

Ocean of Light from squidsoup on Vimeo.

Ocean of Light sketches from squidsoup on Vimeo.

So where does Ocean of Light come from? Through an experimental and playful approach to creating interactive digital installations, we often found ourselves exploring where real and virtual space coexist. We had explored this through multiuser activity and shared experience of audio and visual virtual space (altzero, ghosts), then entering physical space, perceptually through stereoscopy and physically with wearable proximity sensors (come closer) also using stereoscopic cameras to analyze physical movement to navigate virtual space (driftnet,freq2).

Each project led to their own discoveries but until we started working with LEDs in space it seemed like we were making experiences and environments that a user peers into through some kind of portal, or the screen space. Working with the Nova grid (Stealth, Discontinuum) certainly took a leap out of screen space and into the real world in a more determined way. However the close proximity of the LEDs still created a screen like situation as the viewer would be forced to view the work from an external proximity.

The Ocean of Light Grid is part of the evolution of this development process, Designed on the back of all this investigation and experimentation by squidsoup Ocean of Light should enable audio/visual environments to be experienced from within.
Surface is the first artwork to be exhibited using the Ocean of Light hardware. It uses minimal visuals and sound to evoke the essence of character and movement. Autonomous entities engage in a playful dance, negotiating the material properties of a fluid surface.