Ritual Union [iv]

Ritual Union: A Follow Up: The Past, Present, and Future: A Postmortem Blog Entry

After many a hectic week Rohan and myself (the group responsible for creating the upper half of the Ritual Union cumulating composition) have finally found some time to sit down and hammer out some means of production as it were.

Past: In recent weeks Rohan and myself have been working heavily with software aspects of the composition. This mainly consisted of working with code: Rohan with the Synapse Library for X-Box Kinect, and myself with some code graciously provided by and interactive artist, Niklas Roy. Ultimately after having not succeeded in getting the Synapse Library to work fluently with the Kinect we have decided to peruse using a webcam (hopefully relatively out of sight/out of mind) along with Processing and Niklas’ code. This will enable the interactive features of the project.

Present: Currently we are working on the main construction of all of the physical aspects of RU. After acquiring the necessary parts we have been tediously assembling the mechanics for the interactive aspects of the composition. However ambitious our previous efforts were to create a face with three moving eyes (as inspired via the sketch done by Rohan), we have since decided to scale down to two eyes. Much of this part of the process will deal with aesthetic design and artistic influence.

Future: In the up and coming weeks our focus will primarily be concentrated on connecting the two aforementioned aspects these being the communication between the software as well as the physical composition. A big obstacle will be translating a viewer’s movements into the turning of the motors ultimately alluding to the “viewer vs. viewed” conception.

While working on this project I feel that I’ve learned a fair deal about the software tools used to bring this project t life. Given my background in programming with Java, using processing was not a hard transition as Processing programming is very Java-like. Also given that I have somewhat a background working with Arduino, it was easy to connect it to the computer, load up the programs we were using and use it with Max. It was the first time encountering code such as Niklas’ code and took some time to understand.

If given another chance to take on a project such as this, time management would be a key factor to reconsider. As well the acquiring of materials sooner than having required them would have been a great help. I feel that this process assignment does not relate to the project so much as it is apart of the project itself. It is important to take a look from past, present and future. It is also important to realize the struggles you encountered and how you might tackle them in the future, this alone may be the most important tool learned on any project.