Little SIS

Here is some information about Little SIS, our interactive visual and sound installation.

Our latest work Little SIS uses interaction to both observe and influence behaviour with video-tracking, sound and visuals. It is a Social Interaction System, encouraging movement and changing spatial relationships as participants are tracked with a video camera and the data is translated (via Processing and other open source software) into algorithmically generated sound (pre-recorded text, phonemes and vocal harmonics) and visuals (silhouette ‘blobs’). The real-time interactive audio-visual score creates an abstracted conversation that is reflexive of participatory involvement.

This social performance space hosts communal movement in the mediation of performer and observer. Spontaneous scores demonstrate spatial harmonics and emergent behaviour in the engagement with the “other” – space, gravity, technology, audio-visual stimulus/response and most importantly, other humans. The effect is mutual witnessing in a shared space and responsive environment revealing how we learn through relationship and relate through movement.

This work has now been shown in three different settings…here are video excerpts from the last two:

Little SIS at the SEAM Symposium 2010 from Andre Hayter on Vimeo.

This is a short clip of the Little SIS installation running at the SEAM Symposium 2010 held at the Seymour Centre in Sydney. The syllabic sound you can (sort of) hear is generated in real-time based on the movement of the participants in the space, as are the visuals on the screen. We have been experimenting with different ways of displaying this work, mostly using projection, but thought it was worth trying it on a screen. There is a lot of background noise as there was a robot installation by Stelarc just behind the camera.

The camera tracking was done using openFrameworks. The visuals and sound control was done in Processing. Sound was made from samples of phonemes that were put back together on the fly to create nonsense words. The samples were played back from Ableton Live controlled via midi from Processing. oF and Processing communicated via OSC.


 

Little SIS from Andre Hayter on Vimeo.

This is a small clip of Angela Hill dancing at Plump Gallery during the 2010 Fringe Festival, as part of the interactive sound/visual installation "Little SIS".