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 interacting and 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 tree thats rusteling with its 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 intenting to do so, and even though these things are most likely not meant to be connected it happens intuitively and automatically. I have the feeling that this state of pure perception it would be an even more difficult task to NOT draw links between all the elements that are there.

It feels like everything is connected and reacting to each other, the ‚natural‘ as well as the ‚unnatural‘ parts in this piece of nature, built as an area of leisure and recreation, called ‚a park‘.

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) */
 }