GMU:Speculative Atmospheres/Andrea Geyer

When walking in the park with plain perception, it feels to me like the whole park is a stage. And everything that’s happening is reacting to each other like in a stage play. The bird reacts to the jogger who’s passing by, the joggers rhythm is commenting on the rusteling of a tree's leaves, and the tree is reacting with a glittering of its leaves to the bird that is still after the jogger… it’s like a concerted orchestration.

– I draw connections, without intending to do so, and even though these things are most likely not meant to be connected it just happens intuitively and automatically in my head. It feels like everything is interacting with each other, the ‚natural‘ as well as the ‚unnatural‘ parts in this park, They are all ONE organism. and it would be an even more difficult task to NOT draw links between all the elements that are there.

While walking in the park it’s never silent. There is no single moment… when there is nothing to be heard. Moreover I have the feeling, that sounds, voices and other noises are becoming even louder when you are focused and you’re listening closer to them. It becomes almost overwhelming the more you focus; there is no real silence, no second,

Everything’s alive.

I see little shells of small seed swinging in invisible spiderwebs in the wind

I see blooming blossoms, that are about to flourish up

I see traces in the bark of an old tree,

scratches,

Crust,

and traces of the sun, carved as shadows on the ground of the walking path.

When I look closer I see that everything is in a transition state, in a transformation process, and and some of these transformations will leave traces, some will not. I just realize everything I see and hear it’s just a momentary state, it will never last forever.

I hold the fragile soft beechnut shell in my hand and I don’t want to let it go.

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An experiment with the LED sensor of an Arduino, linked to Processing graphics:

pulsating cat’s eye

When the light is high, the pupil of the cat’s eye widens,

when the light is low, the pupil of the cat’s eye closes.

[I know in reality, the cat's eye works the other way round… ;) ]

--> The color of the pupil also changes, from bright (high value) to dark (low value)

the relevant part of the processing code:

 if (data != null) {
   int intData = int(data); // ---> !! variable for incoming data

   background(255, 255, 0);
   noStroke ();
   ellipse (560, 360, 600, 600); 
   /* ---> 1. circle: 'background circle' (just as a referrence for the 2. circle) */

   noStroke ();
   fill (intData, intData, intData); // set fill colour with the value read
   ellipse (560, 360, intData, 600); 
   /* ---> 2. circle: the 'pupil' (visualizes the incoming data) */
 }