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As part of a system of numerous dynamic connections and networks, we are reactive and deterministic to a complex system of cause and effect. The consequence of our actions upon our selves, the society we live in and the broader natural world is conditioned by how we perceive our involvement. The awareness of how we have impacted on a situation is often realised and processed subconsciously, the extent and scope of these actions can be far beyond our knowledge, our consideration, and importantly beyond our sensory reception. With this in mind, how can we associate our actions, many of which may be overlooked as customary, with for instance, the honey bee depopulation syndrome or the declining numbers of Siberian Tigers.

Responsive Ecologies is part of an ongoing collaboration with ZSL London Zoo and Musion Academy. Collectively we have been exploring innovative means of public engagement, to generate an awareness and understanding of nature and the effects of climate change. All of the contained footage has come from filming sessions within the Zoological Society; this coincidentally has raised some interesting questions on the spectacle of captivity, a issue which we have tried to reflect upon in the construction and presentation of this installation. The nature of interaction within Responsive Ecologies means that a visitor to the space can not simply view the installation but must become a part of its environment. When attempting to perceive the content within the space the visitor reshapes the installation. Everybody has a degree of impact whether directed or incidental, and when interacting as a group it is interesting to see how collective behaviour can develop and incite the outcome of the work.

captincaptin and Parag K Mital exhibited Responsive Ecologies at the Watermans between 6th December 2010 and the 21st January 2011. The installation was in the form of a 360 degrees multi-screened projection or CAVE (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment). Visitors to the exhibition would enter the CAVE through a passageway leading from the gallery entrance. All four sides of the CAVE were back projected with each side connecting to form a large continuous projection. The presence of people within the space would be tracked and used to deconstruct and interlace the video in response to their movement. The video documentation below was taken from the installation (throughout this video the camera is panning around the space in order to record all sides of the CAVE).

Responsive Ecologies from pkmital on Vimeo.

Source code is also available with an example part of the actual installation (10 second clip as the whole video is far too long) – though you may also need 4 monitors/projectors or scale down the size of the screen in the code (SCREEN_WIDTH and SCREEN_HEIGHT variables in testApp.h): http://github.com/pkmital/Responsive-Ecologies

More information:
http://captincaptin.co.uk
http://pkmital.com

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Come checkout the Waterman’s Art Centre from the 6th of December until the 21st of January for an immersive and interactive visual experience entitled “Responsive Ecologies” developed in collaboration with artists captincaptin. We will also be giving a talk on the 10th of December from 7 p.m. – 9 p.m. during CINE: 3D Imaging in Art at the Watermans Center.

Responsive Ecologies is part of a wider ongoing collaboration between artists captincaptin, the ZSL London Zoo and Musion Academy. Collectively they have been exploring innovative means of public engagement, to generate an awareness and understanding of nature and the effects of climate change. All of the contained footage has come from filming sessions within the Zoological Society; this coincidentally has raised some interesting questions on the spectacle of captivity, a issue which we have tried to reflect upon in the construction and presentation of this installation. The nature of interaction within Responsive Ecologies means that a visitor to the space cannot simply view the installation but must become a part of its environment. When attempting to perceive the content within the space the visitor reshapes the installation. Everybody has a degree of impact whether directed or incidental, and when interacting as a group it is interesting to see how collective behaviour can develop and incite the outcome of the work.

The installation will encompass participants in 360 degrees with a small door opening. Some pictures of a mock setup using 2 projectors:

And a short video:

Responsive Ecologies Test from pkmital on Vimeo.

Using overhead motion capture and 4 channels of video projection, users are invited to interact in an immersive cinematic environment. The video above shows a demo proof-of-concept for the upcoming installation in Waterman’s Art Centre, London, UK, where artists captincaptin and Parag K Mital have been collaborating to install their piece, “Responsive Ecologies” for their residency the next two months. The work occurs as part of a larger on-going collaboration with ZSL London Zoo and the Musion Academy.

Earlier I posted a video showing how the motion detection works:

Overhead Blob Detection from pkmital on Vimeo.

Using OpenCV with openFrameworks to do blob detection for an upcoming installation entitled “Responsive Ecologies” at the Waterman’s Art Centre in London, UK in collaboration with artists captincaptin.

Full exhibition text follows:

As part of a system of numerous dynamic connections and networks, we are reactive and deterministic to a complex system of cause and effect. The consequence of our actions upon our selves, the society we live in and the broader natural world is conditioned by how we perceive our involvement. The awareness of how we have impacted on a situation is often realised and processed subconsciously, the extent and scope of these actions can be far beyond our knowledge, our consideration, and importantly beyond our sensory perception. With this in mind, how can we associate our actions, many of which may be overlooked as customary, with for instance, the honey bee depopulation syndrome or the declining numbers of Siberian Tigers?

The expanding distance between our lives and the natural world has created a detachment in which we begin to lose the emotion of responsibility. The exhibition references this human-nature dislocation, creating a dynamic environment which can be effeced and controlled by the audience. It aims to symbolise an embodiment of ecology, exploring the relations of organisms, and their interactions with the environment.

Responsive Ecologies is part of an ongoing collaboration with ZSL London Zoo and Musion Academy. Collectively we have been exploring innovative means of public engagement, to generate an awareness and understanding of nature and the effects of climate change. All of the contained footage has come from filming sessions within the Zoological Society; this coincidentally has raised some interesting questions on the spectacle of captivity, a issue which we have tried to reflect upon in the construction and presentation of this installation. The nature of interaction within Responsive Ecologies means that a visitor to the space can not simply view the installation but must become a part of its environment. When attempting to perceive the content within the space the visitor reshapes the installation. Everybody has a degree of impact whether directed or incidental, and when interacting as a group it is interesting to see how collective behaviour can develop and incite the outcome of the work.

Gareth Goodison and Jonathan Munro have been working collaboratively as captincaptin since 2007, creating installations and sculptures, which interact and respond to public presence, to question the role of audience participation in the display and creation of contemporary art. They have presented their work at various new media events including Future Everything Festival, Abandon Normal Devices, Leeds Expo, and the V&A. Parag K Mital is a computational visual artist and PhD student at Goldsmiths Computing Dept. investigating questions of liminality, perception, and attention in mixed reality environments.

The exhibition continues outside the theatre, presenting more outcomes of this collaboration, including the work by artists Madi Boyd and Kira Zhigalina. Special thanks to ZSL London Zoo and Musion Academy.

http://www.watermans.org.uk/exhibitions/exhibitions/future-exhibitions/responsive-ecologies.aspx

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Memory @ AVAF 2010 from pkmital on Vimeo.

‘Memory’ is an augmented installation of a neural network by Parag K Mital & Agelos Papadakis.
hand blown glass, galvanized metal chain, projection, cameras; 1.5m x 2.5m x 3m

Ghostly images of faces appear as recorded movie clips within neural-shaped hand-blown glass pieces. As one begins to look at the neurons, they notice the faces as their own, trapped as disparate memories of a neural network.

Filmed and installed for the Athens Video Art Festival in May 2010 in Technopolis, Athens, Greece. The venue is a disused gas factory converted art space.

Also seen at Kinetica Art Fair, Ambika P3, London, UK, 2010; Passing Through Exhibition, James Taylor Gallery, London, UK, 2009; Interact, Lauriston Castle, Edinburgh, UK, 2009.

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Come to the Roxy Arthouse on June 10 for Neverzone and June 26 for Is This a Test? where I’ll be presenting my latest installation X-Ray, as well as to catch other brilliant Scotland-based artists.  More info on the flyers below.

Neverzone / Thursday June 10th 19:00-23:00

Is This a Test? / Saturday June 26th 19:00-23:00

[update] Plug for Is This a Test? on creativeboom.co.uk

[update 2] video now online:

X-RAY from pkmital on Vimeo.

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Currently working on a video installation for an exciting gig on the 10th of June dubbed Neverzone. Check out the insanity on this flyer and information on the just as insane artists at Black Lantern Music

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This will be my second year supervising the Digital Media Studio Project at the University of Edinburgh. The course is a mix of over 60 Digital Composition, Sound Design, Digital Design in Media, and Acoustic and Music Technology MSc students. 10-15 supervisors pitch a project proposal and the students decide which ones they’d like to participate in. This year, I proposed Augmented Sculpture, and 3 students signed up of which 2 are Sound Designer and 1 is a Digital Designer. So far, they have managed to communicate tracking data via a reactivision framework and combine life-sized sculpture to interact with a sonic environment built in Max/MSP.

Chandan, Helen and Ev playing with a ReacTIVision controlled Max/MSP patch developed for the Digital Media Studio Project at Edinburgh University. This is the very first ever test run of the system, and it worked!

Follow more developments on their blog.

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I had the pleasure of exhibiting one of my works, Memory, with glass artist Agelos Papadakis at the Kinetica Art Fair 2010, from February 4-7th, 2010. The work was presented by TINTarts as well as another piece by Dave Murray-Rust, Agelos Papadakis, and Owen Green, called ChaoDependant. The fair was an incredible selection of contemporary artists and historical collections of kinetic and interactive art. I’ll be looking forward to next year.

Also worth checking out is a panorama with some interesting viewing options: www.z360.com/full/kinetica/
If you click to find the ‘Balcony’, you will see both ChaoDependant and Memory off to the side as well as Dave Murray-Rust and Agelos Papadakis in the foreground. 

As well, here is a link to our work on artstream: http://www.artstream.org/artists/view/250

I’ve also uploaded pictures on my flickr account

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I’ve just uploaded an old pdf of the Memory project:

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I’ve recently finished up a project in collaboration with a Glass Artist, Agelos Papadakis. We built a structure of 25 glass neurons the size of a face and chainded them together in a 3x3x5 meter sculpture. We had 2 cameras hidden in the piece tracking peoples faces and a projector then creating visualizations of the recorded faces resembling something like a cloud of neurons firing in different patterns. We presented it first in Edinburgh at Lauriston Castle’s Glasshouse, and then at the Passing Through exhibit in the James Taylor Gallery in Hackney: http://jamestaylorgallery.co.uk/exhibitions/2009/03/passing-through.html

It’s a bit tricky trying to film the piece since it uses projection onto glass. Sadly I’m left with only a few images that try to portray what went on.

Here’s the code, http://ccrma.stanford.edu/~pkmital/share/Memory.zip It makes use of the openframeworks library so you will need to be familiar with how to setup an XCode project with the openframeworks library if you plan on using it.

The original idea was to use glass balls so that’s why all the code says glassBalls instead of say glassNeurons. If you manage to get it running, press ‘d’ to see the live video input. As it collects faces, it fills up the image buffers with each “glassBalls”. Once all the glassBalls are loaded with images of faces, then the visualization begins. Neurons will “fire” and brightness values of each neuron will go up and down based on Gaussian functions and these values are sent to the brightness shader.

It was a bit of a sculptural challenge placing all the glass pieces within view of the projector, avoiding any other glass pieces or chains in the line of sight of it, having it fit within our view of what we wanted, and also within the amount of time we had. We did the projection mapping by just creating the object with a bounding box. Once you moused over an image of a person’s face, you could drag it around, use ‘-’, ‘=’, ‘_’, or ‘+’ to resize it. I used a text file to store (‘w’) and read (‘r’) the positions of the faces in case I had to reload the program. I think memo has some MSAInteractiveObject class now which would be 1000x nicer to use.

Just a note as well, I wrote this against of573. I also ended up extending ofxCvColorImage with a few functions so I’ve just included all of ofxCv* files in the project. There may very well be other functions that I’ve edited and forgotten about so please let me know if you have any problems with it. Have a look through and please let me know what you think!

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Collaborating with Agelos Papadakis, he had an idea of creating televisions with distorted perspectives and projecting video clips of faces onto them. The idea of this installation focuses on the reaction of the viewer and the liminal experiences of fear and being watched.

Montage of 9 viewers from pkmital on Vimeo.

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If anyone has used Google’s event system, they must know how terrible it is. It’s beyond me why if someone changes a detail such as the time from 7 – 10 p.m. to 6 – 9 p.m., Google then sends out e-mails to all guests saying the “Event is canceled”.

Great, thanks Google.

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Some close ups of the testing:

Artists interpretation by Varun Cursetji:

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Working with Agelos Papadakis, this installation will investigate interactivity, agency, and memory within an installation space. Can an art piece evolve and contain the memory of its participants? Is reaction simply a side-effect of art or *the* effect?

More to come… Exhibit in late April.

((MEMORY)) installation on Vimeo.

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