#pva15

my Avatar....this took a while 

as you move your mouse around the screen, so will the avatar

Future Self, 2012

Aluminium, custom electronics, Metrilus 3D cameras, LEDs, brass rods

1200 x 1500 x 3450 mm

MADE space, Berlin

supported by ABSOLUT Vodka

While there is definitely a performance component to the initial concept of this piece, there is also a great chance for audience interaction once the dancers and musicians have left. Anyone can stand in front of the sensors and interact with the layered curtains of light, as we can see at the end of the video. The code has taken into account movements on all sides, so as to make it easily accessible to anyone in the audience. As it says on their website “viewers are bound together –in the moment– as an ethereal, illuminated presence.”

The main force behind the piece was the studio rAndom, as well as with the help of choreographer Wayne McGregor and scored by Max Richter for the performance aspects. It was commissioned by MADE space, who brought everyone together. It was said that the code took at least a month and I believe around another month to get everything working properly with the hardware. McGregor then worked with his dancers and the work for a few weeks - to get the hang of such complex algorithms and how they wanted to interact with them.  

I can’t be 100% sure how the code was created, but it definitely seems like something that would be done from scratch in the Processing environment. rAndom has done some other similar works before, however, so they may have used bits and pieces from their own original code. 

Before college, I was under the impression that all Engineers and Computers Scientists had turned to Math and Cold Hard 1s and 0s so as to hide their abysmal writing ability beneath lines of code and formulas. Now, of course, I know that I shouldn’t be surprised when someone can write as eloquently about learning to code as Charles Petzold, or that an Engineering manifesto can read like poetry, but I still marvel at it. After just reading the Communist Manifesto for another class, I greatly appreciate how modernly this declaration of policy is written - less than a page of concise bullet points. This is a manifesto for the people, even more than Marx’s. We are all Critical Engineers, weather we be Artists, or Scientists, or just everyday problem solvers. Everything is a machine, as #6 explains.