Stan Wijnans |
MuDanx |
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Academics Masters PhD Publications |
Webdesign by Stan Wijnans |
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4 Artistic concept & Sound programmingThe original idea was that the machine would be able to ‘dance’, but the leg movements were very hard to program and control in the limited time the engineering team had for the project. It was very interesting to work closely with the Faculty of Construction, Computing and Technology of the Nottingham Trent University and become aware of all the problems the crew had to face in the machine design. At the last stages of the engineering process it turned out that the legs could not bear the weight of the chassis and this delayed the project considerably. Problems like these were foreseen by Stelarc as we can read below:
When you physically realise something, you are faced with engineering and design problems that have to be looked at, modified, sometimes totally altered. And although there is a belief in form following function, there is also concern about the appearance of the machine. Decisions about materials include consideration of their weight and strength, not to mention their cost. It would have been great to make this robot out of titanium tubing and plating but we had to use aluminium and mild steel. And of course this big robot is probably the most problametic design that we have had to work with because it is a novel engineering design. Ordinarily you would avoid combining electrical, pneumatic and mechanical systems in this way (Stelarc in Hall & Zylinska 2003:3). These problems reflected in the wireless Blue Tooth sensor transmission and reception. Due to the electrical boards on the machine, that enabled the operation of the legs, there was a lot of interference and the Blue Tooth system only reached a range of 2 meters instead of the normally garantueed 14 meters (which I tested fine when the system was still a separate device). In the end we attached the Blue Tooth transmitter to the hose that connected the electronics for the pneumatic system to the host PC, in order to be close to the Blue Tooth data receiver. In this way we unfortunately ‘lost’ the usefulness of the wireless design. The legs were only capable of limited movements until 2 days before the actual performance and thus there was very limited time to program the data for the sensors in MAX/MSP in the roughly finished patch. Working with this sensor system also confronted me with deficiencies like gaps and irregularities and consequently having to smooth the rough response. In the end I decided to use this to my advantage and therefor some random sounds were playing during the entrance of the public in the performance space.
The original concept for the performance was to build a mechanical cricket / insect on 6 legs. In the second semester I had collected a variety of mechanical animalistic sounds as well as different industrial robotic sounds. (see accompanying CDR). Due to the above mentioned engineering problems and thus the unavoidable delay in receiving the sensor data that measured the movements, I had limited time to make an artistic decision about the sounds and effects. The decision was made to opt for the industrial robotic
sounds as, in Stelarc’s opinion, they seemed to be more comprehensible for the audience. The original idea of keeping to the concept of turning the machine into a high-tech insect could have given the machine another artistic layer, but there was no time to experiment with this more elaborative idea. Various real time sound manipulations had been investigated for the interactive processing of the samples like lowpass / high pass filters, flanging, delay, chorus, granular synthesis and chorus. Because of the intuitive relationship between the movements of the Exoskeleton and the choosen sounds, granular synthesis, pitch- and speed transformations on the pre-analysed sample segments were particularly interesting to use. As I concluded in the first semester, it is often favourable to choose simple transformations of the sounds as they seem more effective in interactivity.
Hall, Gary & Zylinska, Joanna(2003) Talking Heads Listening to Stelarc. Publication on the occasion of the launch of ‘The Anatomical Exoskeleton’ Nottingham Trent University. |
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