I first met Experential Electricae at the Liminal Screens residency at the banff new media institute in Canada. They had built Pixy in the constraints of a basement in banff. The problems of finding space and hanging in banff lead the screen to be more volumetric. Natacha, presented Pixy as “conceived for both it’s own use and collaboration with other video artists who would create other content for the object or even live performance”. This intrigued me. A lot of artist and technologists are creating ‘tools’ for other artists to then appropriate. Does this really work? I was both interested in the screen and also interested in this nature of collaboration. In April I first contacted Experential Electricae about becoming involved with the chameleon Project. We then met briefly in Vienna where I was delivering a talk about the Chameleon Project.
While trying to understand where we have come to with Pixy, I have looked back on the dialogue we have had together about Chameleon and Pixy coming together. This is an extract of the first email ever sent to Natacha regarding Pixy, and how it may work with the Chameleon Project. I looked at the screen yesterday and thought about how it had developed for the Chameleon Project.
“Interestingly I don’t think the low resolution would affect the emotional reading of the piece. Neuroscientific research has done tests on how much information you can take from an image of a face, and still read the emotional tone of the face. Its amazing how much tonal range you can take away.
I proposed to create a screen that hangs from the middle of the room. You can see four different faces – one to the north. south, east, west. Their is mind reading technology that interacts with the viewer. The face in the video responds to the emotional expression of the viewer and tries to begin a dialogue with them. If you walk through the screens (into the mind of the work), the screen will react as well. Maybe getting annoyed or something.
A lot of what i am trying to say in this work is about the delicate nature of our inner and outer world, and how we are constantly adjusting to what is around us. I like the delicate nature of your screens- and the fact that you don’t know where the sort of begin and end. They are not ‘contained’, much like our emotions – always a bit leaky and prone to infection. The lovely messy bits that make us human, and that technology loves to deny.
It would be a great collaboration, and interesting for the space. It would probably require a grant to be written to develop the screen a bit more to work in four dimensions and to install it. Who is developing this work? Is it Michel or you? I remember you mentioning you were working with another artist as well.
what do you think? I think it would be great’.
Experential Electricae’s Pixy display is gorgeous in the dark. We enter a nearly black room. We get stuck looking at fluttering pixels, at a part of the room they make sense reading a face, on the other side of the room, we just see flickering pixels. It feels like a digital forest.
I love seeing people’s faces when the image reveals itself to them – and they ‘get it’. However, the contagion aspect I was hoping to explore seems to not work. When we look at Pixy, we are more ‘perplexed’ than any thing else. We are trying to work out what is going on – I was hoping the screen may reveal and more visceral bodily response. When I look at it ‘i feel in my head’ more than my body.
The sound track gives us more information about emotion, but there is a disconnect. I wonder with pixy if you need more ambient sound? People think Pixy is a sound spectrograph or something. Some people sit in front of it for ages and don’t see anything. Their face reveals more confusion than anything else. Again, confusion is not something I am exploring for this project.
For Chameleon we introduced a lot more pixels for legibility of image with in Pixy. But other than that, we didn’t experiment much with the hanging of the screen. Maybe we needed four weeks and not two? A lot of building was done, leaving little time to try and work out what else we could do with Pixy to suit the Chameleon content? I know Michael loves to see the faces on Pixy, I sense natacha has enjoyed it too, but there is still a disconnect. I think we needed to shape the display to the project look at the display from all sides. Also, the current interaction of Chameleon demands that you drive it – This definitely doesn’t work for Pixy – in my ultimate pixy we would walk through it, as if entering the body of emotions, and they would be fluttering around it. We see it from all angles.
On Wednesday Helen Sloan came in, as well as Matthew Miller and Micahel Maydon from Fabrica. We look at both iterations of the work. Helen walks into the room with the screens we have built with Gordon from Solent University – she loves they way they have revealed and shown faces – that you can see one side clear and the over more ambiguous. She then walks into pixy and she sees a completely different rendering of the same project. But this one is more
I need to arrive at a decision of how to progress with these iterations.
I haven’t written over the last couple of days because my time has been so stretched, and my thoughts are so embedded and confused that I haven’t been able to talk about approach, nothing seems too clear right now. Its been busy, bus, busy over this residency – and now I need time out to reflect – more in reflecting than doing. My thoughts are scattered, trying to reflect – and the reflection is at a space that I still haven’t been able to translate into words. But now, I guess I will try. Start thinking about what has happened over the last ten days.
I have shot 5 different portraits, each a really amazing journey of attempting to read people, give and take. I have enjoyed the journey, the people have given and shared and often exposed a lot. I then have sat and analyzed and categorized that footage – more as looking at narrative and science of what an emotion is. This process has felt harsh – as if I am fragmenting a lovely relationship, objectifying it, making it into a production.
Over the Lighthouse Residency I have been developing new ways of looking a displaying video, both with the pixy project and experiential electricae with the rapid prototyping group at Solent Universiy.
Over the last couple of days I have tried to understand pixy and how it reveals and image, and what images may break through the challenges of the pixy display. Last week I tried shooting for Pixy, concentrating on voice and movement. Much of that didn’t work at all. We worked out the screen liked closeness of the face, really cropped in – it liked a sort of swaying movement in order to capture glimpses of a face. I created many different video tracks to put through – few worked. Pixy likes great lighting and my recent video portraits have been shot in a studio with one light – I decided to be more adaptable and respond to content and not be so focused on the technicalities of lighting. In the end we were down to two men – one called Kevin and the other Simon. Not particularly long portraits – they repeat themselves pretty quickly. I have a bout 35 portraits now. Some of these are a few hours long.
Dr Karl Broome Is currently a research fellow in the sociology department working on the project ‘Supporting Shy Users in Pervasive Computing’. He has been at Lighthouse over the last ten days – helping, writing notes –
“Oh, oh. Is it on? I am not being filmed am I?” The man seems to beconcerned with whether or not his face, and more importantly his facial expressions are being recorded. Our core five facial muscles work throughout the day expressing emotions; concurrently others are constantly reading our facial expressions. Numerous people have come forward to allow Tina to film them expressing a broad range of emotions in front of the camera. As Tina has commented, this is literally an intensively ‘emotional’ experience with the process often resulting in those being filmed breaking down in tears. A very intimate and moving process for all involved, and Tina is aware of her privilege in going through these very personal journeys with her participants, who she has acknowledged have revealed very personal and precious information to her. Visitors to the Chameleon exhibit have frequently asked if it is their own face displayed on Pixy. Despite not being able to recognise whether or not it is actually their face, discovering whether it is in fact their face seems to make a considerable difference to how they experience the ‘image’, and perhaps more importantly how they think others may experience the image. Maybe the experience of being ‘read’, and thus presented back through Chameleon, inaugurates a new moment in the experience of ‘myself as other’ (see Celia Lury’s ‘Prosthetic Culture’). In some sense, the concern exhibited by visitors maybe the thought that Chameleon has potentially taken something profoundly personal and defining of the individual: their emotional self and made it ‘public’. Where as a photo image, or a film can be taken to retain the ‘visible’ surface expressions of ‘self’, Chameleon through reading these expression probes even more deeper, and understood as revealing more deeper thoughts and feelings. Is there a fear that the ‘mind reader’ technology has the power to reveal the ‘truth’ of who we are – how we feel ‘inside’? Thus make publicly available our neuroses, reveal our ‘inner demons’, warts and all? Or maybe still, make public that which we are unaware, something like our ‘unconscious’ selves. In a sense, the emotional dialogue afforded by Chameleon shows “look what my emotions and feelings do to other people”. The video in front of us becomes a reverberation of ourselves, we feel ‘I am responsible for this’ – ‘I am driving this’. If we choose to ‘interact’ with Chameleon, we have little scope for strategically controlling the reception of our mediated self-presentation, and its subsequent reverberations. According to Baudrillard, we now exist in culture where we live as if we have a video recorder in our heads: we are always transforming ourselves in anticipation of what we might look like as an image (Lury 1998:78). Perhaps it is this heightened self-awareness, and anticipation of ourselves, or of visual emotional response attributed to our ‘selves’ being made a ‘image’ that makes people feel more comfortable in interacting with the Pixy than interacting directly with the face reading software for any length of time.
Conner – 16 years old, spent last week work on the project
Saturday 1st August:
Today there was an artist talk at the Lighthouse Arts Gallery in the Digital Lounge. The talk lasted for around 1hr 20mins and consisted of the artist,Tina Gonsalves, talking about the history of Chameleon Project and where it is today. Tina was joined by some ‘Specialists’, one of whom was Natacha who is from the Experimente Electricae Programme in France.
Monday 3rd – Wednesday 5th August:
During this time, I washelping Natacha from Experimente Electricae build her 3D ‘PIXY’ screen that the Chameleon Project is being shown on. This ment that I was doing all sorts of different things from glueing the pixels onto wood so that they could be hung from the ceiling and and also wiring the pixels together to be placed on the wood. I even made a pixel line near enough from scratch which allowed me to see how the pixels are put together.
Michael, from Experimente Electricae, was at Lighthouse on the Tuesday and Wednesday and he was the person who built the circuit board that will allow the ‘PIXY SCREEN’ to work. I also done an Hours worth of transcribing for Tina but only managed to get through 3 minutes of the tape. All in all, for my first experience, working with digital artist was interesting and fun as everyone was kind and I’d like to thank them all for allowing me to help out, so THANKYOU everyone, especially Gen, who was the experience host and the Head Co-ordinator at Lighthouse.
