the surface

The second piece in my visual instrument series is a multitouch membrane controller I’ve been calling the surface. It uses a usb webcam alongside a modified version of ccv to extract the location and depth of touchpoints. It then scales and converts this information into quickly repeating midi messages which can be used in the software synthesizer of your choice.

Documentarist David Holmes took some footage of me sharing the Surface and rambling a bit about my practice in April of 2011. The actual sound of the surface is much more refined than is demonstrated in this footage, but hopefully this can give you an idea of what the instrument does in the meantime:

After I have the formal documentation for the surface finished I’ll post the modified CCV as well as build instructions for the frame…

the touchquilt

The touchquilt is the first piece in my visual instrument series. I undertook it as a means of solving some of the problems I had run into involving projection interaction with the wiimote whiteboard setup in performance. The wiimote whiteboard approach often required sensitive calibration, placement, and lighting, the touchquilt can just be plugged in via ethernet. Here’es a schematic for the first implementation of the quilt:

As the video suggests, with this resistor ladder approach I was able to get a fairly accurate reading on which button was being pushed if I held the button for long enough, but associated with each press was a significant amount of electrical noise which made the quilt unpredictable. As an installation piece the unpredictability was interesting, but as a visual instrument it was problematic.  I later modified the quilt to utilize a time based method for much more stable results.  I found that by attaching each column to a digital row I could scan a voltage across the surface of the quilt allowing me to test each individual button to determine if there was contact.  This enabled 16 point multi-touch ( 1 press per row ) as well, which is nice.  Here’s a shot of it opened up from the back:

 

Shoot me an email at brian@amanamun.com if you’d like more information on this project.  If you’d still like to see the code or more details on the construction prior to the time-based changes I made, you can also check out my post on the arduino forum. To download the code for the stable version of the quilt click here.

exploring

brainfilter

In Spring of 2010 I did a performance at the Black Box theater at the University of Georgia alongside Geisterkatzen and Ted Kuhns. My brother, Eric McGaw, filmed the event for a documentary film screening at Athfest and gave me a chance to talk about the conceptual nature of the aman amun performances as well as explain the technical side a bit. In the performance i used the emotiv epoc eeg to extract information about my brain activity to be displayed above and behind me on a screen. I also used this information to control the filter cutoff and resonance knobs on a software synthesizer.

scapegoating

This performance of (12/19/2008) marked the beginning of my experimentation with projection-interaction for the use of live performance. The song is a resequencing of scapegoating, a song you can find on my record waxing.

It is meant to be a conceptual exploration of taking something that is open source (the monome) and making it even more flexible and open. The monome itself is only a grid of buttons, but this very simplicity also opens up room for almost endless functionality. For this piece I have virtualized this instrument in Max-Msp and added ways to dynamically control it both functionally and visually.

The performance seeks to explore the gradiated region that sits between “live performance,” “djing” and “vjing.” The monome is clearly an instrument, but the use of pre-recorded samples is very reminiscent of the practice of Djing rather than live performance. The active control of the visual display enters the realm of Vjing, but the visual information (as you will see more clearly in future documentation) is largely controlled by the music itself.

Here’s another live performance of the piece:
Scape Live

berlin

In Winter of 2009 I worked with Justin Roberts to create an interactive installation to celebrate the destruction of the Berlin Wall. Justin, who is an extremely talented craftsman studying Dramatic Media at the University of Georgia, built a life-sized rear-projection surface which looks a lot like a segment of the wall. I wrote a java sketch which allows you to use a wii remote to throw virtual bricks at a physics-simulated brick wall projected on the segment. When the viewer successfully destroyed the virtual wall they would discover various contextual videos playing behind it, and hopefully experience a semblance of the relief felt by those living in and around Berlin as the wall came down in 1989.

soundrawing

the soundrawing project marked the beginning of my computer vision research. the pitch, volume, and brightness of the sound is analyzed and used to determine the respective color, width, and height of the paintbrush. the xy location is determined by the location of the mouth.

soundrawing test from Brian McGaw on Vimeo.

the sound analysis is performed using the wonderful analyzer~ object by Tristen Jehan in max/msp:

http://web.media.mit.edu/~tristan/maxmsp.html

it’s then bussed to a processing sketch via OSC where the head-tracking is performed and then a visual representation of the sound is drawn over the mouth. there are several different key commands:

s – save image
d – stop drawing the image
c – clear the shapes
r – switch between rectangles / ellipses
l – “line mode”
o – show outline
space – save movie / close ( use this instead of the escape key )

feel free to download the application and its’ source code and post any questions you might have in the comments. if you use it to make a video or extend it, please share your work back with me as well, i’d love to see what you come up with.

hexagon

My first hardware electronics project was the creation of a unique wireless foot controller. Athens sculptor Andrew Ferrer helped me create a reclined 6 sided box in which I mounted 7 sturdy pushbuttons. I then modified a bluetooth wireless keypad to be controlled by the 7 switches by following this tutorial.

blobdance

this is an animation i created during my experimentations with batch processing in photoshop and illustrator. it was created for my myspace page back when myspace was relevant and they allowed for page customization.

direct manipulation video

The ‘direct manipulation video’ series consists of three experimentations I did in early 2008 with giving the user the ability to manipulate time and space using their mouse within the browser. The images are large, so please be patient as they load.

The first experimentation, Unicycle, allows you to manipulate time using the left/right movement of the mouse.

The second experimentation, Silo, allows you to manipulate space. The close your mouse is to the middle of the browser window, the closer you are the the middle of the image.

The third experimentation, Climb, allows you to manipulate space and time with one gesture.
Up is up, down is down.

I’m interested in taking this process further, if you’re interested in commisioning a direct manipulation video piece for your website/brand, shoot me an email at brian@amanamun.com.

fractals exploration

i love fractals because the concept of the fractal succinctly describes my entire world view. an algorithm accepts a random number, scales and alters that number, and feeds it back into itself in order to choose the coordinates and color of a pixel. tons of random numbers are pumped through this algorithm and you get images like below.

the following were generated using apophysis.