Mika Kiviniemi

Audiovisual studio course Final Work documentation

Mika Kiviniemi

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Title of the work: Towards Pink

My work was an interactive sound and video projection that combined live and pre-recorded video footage and a sound that was modified by the movement and the distance of the viewer.

The video footage was a pink glitch that I had produced by placing a pad on top of the screen that was displaying the pink image. The objective of the pad was attached to the screen and because it was so close the camera captured the image of the pixels, and this caused an interesting wave like glitch and distortion in the video image even though the original image was still. I did some colour, brightness and saturation corrections to the footage but otherwise it was pretty much original.

 

The live video footage came from a depth camera and I used the analyze operator with the average operation and columns scope and then sent that to math which with I used pre op negate and did some things with pre-add, multiply and post-add to create this interesting kind of horizontal lines that moved by the change of light in the image. I’m not exactly shure what I was doing but just by trying different things and clicking and adjusting levels I found this nice  looking thing.

 

Then I combined the pink video footage to the live video with the comp screen operation. This produced the white background and turned the horizontal lines into pink. I was quite happy with the minimalistick and graphical, but relatively organic aesthetics of the image that this thing produced.

 

The sound material that was a feedback sound created by poking the speaker element with the microphone that was attached to the speaker via zoom. Then I used the amount of light coming from the depth camera to define the speed and via that the pitch of the sound. So the sound reacted to distance of the viewer by going higher when being further and getting lower when approaching the camera.

 

My artistic objection concerning was simply to produce something that is visually and aesthetically interesting and that has the element of interaction in the way that the viewer does not always know what is produced by the interaction and what is not. What I mean by this that the alterations in the prerecorded material makes the piece do random things by it self and that causes that it is not always clear whether is reacts to the movement of the viewer or not. I some how like this dimension of interactivity that is not so clear and linear and when viewer cant so easily figure out what is going on. That there is somekind of element of randomness and distraction in the interaction and in the footage it self. I think I didn’t quite succeeded yet with this and I think that I should have somekind of programming done with the reactions but otherwise I’m fairly happy with the aesthetics of the work.

 

If would carry on with the piece (which I probably will in some way) I would focuse more on the elements of interactivity, I would add some kind of delay and exceptions to reactions and the way that the program alters the material to produce more subtle chances and more randomness.