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My aim was to create an interactive animation, in which the audience interacts with an animated drawn person on a screen. A person may interact with the animation by making a sound within a specified threshold, specific to the area in which the installation is set up. By making a sound within the threshold, a person will make part of an animated video play. In order to make the entire duration of the video play, the person must make continuous sound. The sound the interacting person makes is then played back to them after a delay.
Concept
The concept for this work is part playful, part pseudo psychological. When the entire installation is realised, the animated person will be saying to the participant ‘stop yelling at me’. The only way to make the entire animation play, and to fully interact with the work, will be to keep making sound or ‘keep yelling’ at the character against its requests. One will then hear back the sound or ‘yelling’ they have created. The installation is designed to test what lengths people will go to in interacting with an artwork. As the viewer hears back the sound they have made after a delay, they are reminded of their own choices. If I were to continue this project, I would also like to have various different animated possibilities, so that if someone kept making noise, the animated person could get angrier and angrier or perhaps sadder and sadder.
The Pure Data patch is a simple patch using a microphone to detect sound within a threshold, and playing it back out of speakers after a delay. Once the sound is detected it causes the video to play with GEM. The video will continue to play if sound is detected in the previous second, otherwise GEM will receive the stop message.
Influences
Narinda shipowner: Help Yourself - interactive self-help desk, ‘Experimenta Playground’ exhibition, 2007 Carriageworks, Sydney. Mirror States exhibition 2006, Campbelltown City Arts Centre, Sydney. In particular:
- Alex Davies Dislocation 2005
- John Tonkin Time and Motion Study 2006