So I completed the VJ box project and gathered video documentation of the project (unfortunately filmed on an NTSC camera – doh! – so have sent tape off to be converted to pal).
The project was a real success, as far as I am concerned. I think the reason I was given a relatively low mark for the project was because the theortical side of it seemed a bit flimsy and tenuous. And infact, although I had always seen the project as a kind of simulator for a halluncinatory state of consciousness, as the project neared completion and as I dialogued with my tutor chris speed, and started reading up on the “philosophy of mind” I realised that there were deeper implications.
Infact it got me thinking along the lines that I could start building models out of plastic and electronics (and audio/video equipment) that exemplified well defined stances in “the philosophy of mind” such as “material dualism” which states that mind is merely a product of the matter of the brain. So for that stance I could create a model which had a physical basis like a big white box, signifying the “body/brain”, and that the “mind”, signified by a video projection could emanate from that structure, much like the current box project. Or as another example there is the “mental idealist” stance which asserts that the physical world exists only in the mind, in which case i could create a video projection which created an illusion of a 3D object. And so these basic examples show how the different philosophical stances on the “mind/body” problem can be represented with different physical and “projection based” interactive models.
But the more i think about that kind of stuff the more boring it sounds. I am a very practical thinker, and as much as i love deep thinking and art work with real meaning, at a fundamental level i think if a work is not fun and sensually appealing then it is a waste of time because it will never draw in an audience inthe first place to then concider the work on a deeper philosophical level. Its got to be fun dam it!
And at the same time another practical idea has occurred to me (characteristically ambitious):
A pair of gloves, that are covered in LEDs and bio sensors. I have to research whether these things have already been doen to death or whether there is still a foot hold left for a cowboy like me to make an origional(ish) intervention.
So the glove has flex sensors in the fingers, which detect the flex of the fingers, and buttons on the end of the fingers which can be pressed against the thumb or other opposable objects to trigger an “on” signal. So the dynamic degree of flex mesured in the fingers, and the binary on/off signals of the finger tip buttons is sent to an arduino chip which then sends the signal to a “Xeebee” chip (which allows data to be sent wirelessly across a network) which sends the information to a reciever which sends it into a computer and into max/msp which interprets the data into midi and uses the midi data to control VJ software. The data is also analysed by the max/msp patch and sent back to the glove to light up the leds in a certain sequence, in correspondance to the origional data gathered by the glove. So as the fingers extend to their fullest from a closed fist, a sequence of white LEDs could light up one by one along the fingers untill at full extension of the fingers the LEDs had lit up all the way to the ends of the fingers.
The glove could also gather other bio data which could also be represented by LEDs in the glove and audio visual displays coming from the networked computer terminal.
Then if the glove was used as a performance tool or a social/personal development tool in a group communication context in conjunction with immersive video projections and a mediated enviroment then these gloves could enable people to start developing new non verbal languages as they discovered new and innovative ways to communicate.
Then the glove would serve as a prototype for a full body suit.
