“The…” is an interactive installation that conisders the theories of David Bohm, that it is not the mind that generates thoughts, but a thought is a universal entity that enters our brains and influences our actions. Taking social media such a Twitter as an expression of a “global” thought and making it visible, we want to see if that is indeed a truth or whether we can take some control of it and influence the course of “our thinking”.

The interactive installation “The…” enables viewers to interact with ‘thoughts’ by casting their shadows on the wall of a gallery. Thanks to the motion and body shape sensing cameras such as Kinect, the shadows of the viewers casted on the walls will be able to engage into an interactive play with “thoughts” loaded from live twitter feed. Although seemingly accidental and random, displayed messages are the result of algorithms that construct searches from a pool of words and then reach out to twitter, finding users who express thoughts in connection to the search words and phrases.

As the thought returns to the application, animated from the head of the viewer we see the words that connected it and as these are returned back to the cloud, two new words are selected and search process begins again.

“The…” was conceptualised and created by Kasia Molga and Brendan Oliver, produced by V2_ Institute for the Unstable Media and shown in ISMAR@SHIFT Festival in Basel, Switzerland, October 2011.

The tweets that were discovered and used as part of the installation can be seen on this twitter account: twitter.com/​#!/​theinbasel

More info:

ISMAR@SHIFT
Kasia Molga
Brendan Oliver

Great Balls of Fire is an interactive application commissoned by Birmingham Hippodrome and designed for the BBC’s Big Screens.

Participants are accompanied on screen by three theatrical roaming fire-eaters that are desperate to be fed fireballs.! The audience is tasked to feed the fire-eaters by guiding the fire-balls dropping down the screen in anyway possible, using their bodies, limbs or any type of motion to target the fire-eaters! Feed the heads too quickly and they start to over heat and vibrate before bursting at the seams!

Great Balls of Fire will run as part of the Six Summer Saturdays festivities in Birmingham UK. For more info visit: www.sixsummersaturdays.com

Originally designed to run on the BBC ‘s Big Screen in Birmingham, Great Balls of Fire will now be running across the entire network of 20 screens. Find one near you here: www.bbc.co.uk/bigscreens/

Here’s a short film showcasing the Six Summer Saturdays events and includes some coverage of Great Balls of Fire.

Great Balls of Fire was created with the openFrameworks  coding library and box2d physics engine.

‘Le Cadavre Exquis’ is a new in interactive artwork comissioned by the Broadway Media Centre as part of the Making Future Work initiative and funded by Arts Council England. Working with Brendan Randall (www.thewoom.com) we responded to the call for submissions with  ‘Le Cadavre Exquis’, an art installation that explores the notions of co-creation and online space. ‘Le Cadavre Exquis’ is a research and development project that examines how audiences can work together locally and remotely to generate an artistic installation created soley by the audience.

‘Le Cadavre Exquis’ is a contemporary re-interpretation of the of the surrealist game “Exquisite Corpse” and the parlour game “Consequences” in which players define parts of a visual image and dialogue before passing onto future payers for further contributions.

Developed as an interactive installation, participants control both the narrative and recorded footage of the piece. Using a custom gesture interface and digital cameras, participants record a stop frame animation as a response to a pre-defined simple dialogue. Upon completion of the animation the players provide the next line of the dialogue for future players, thus creating a performance and narrative generated entirely by the participants.

The ‘Le Cadavre Exquis’ aims to explore how notions of co-creation and user-engagement within the context of digital art and interaction can be used to create a piece of film generated entirely from participants.

Check out the Making Future Work website and especially our blog posts on the progress of the project and research.

We will also be taking at a public forum on the 2nd June at 6-8.30pm at Lincoln Performing Arts Centre (LPAC), Lincoln with other MFW artists Hetain Patel & Barret Hodgson and guest Speakers Blast Theory and Rachel Coldicutt. The event is free to attend and open to all. You can book your place over at Event Brite. We hope to see you there.

UPDATE: You can come any experience ‘Le Cadavre Exquis’ and get involved with the story at both

the Victoria and Albert Museum London 15-16th July 2011. More info can be found on the V&A website.

Nottingham Contemporary 23rd July 2011 – 4th September 2011

Nottingham Evening Post review Le Cadavre Exquis – http://www.thisisnottingham.co.uk/Keeping-wig-cameras-art-bring-worldwide-fame/story-13179845-detail/story.html

“l33t Hax0r” ran between 11th April 2011 and 11th May 2011

“l33t Hax0r” is an interactive game and data visualisation of the conversation around the @broadwaycinema twitter account. Involving Twitter, the Broadway website, brochure and venue to challenge participants to ‘pwn’ or ‘own’ the Café Bar projection and Play section of the Broadway website.

Twitter users become participants in the game by simply interacting with the @BroadwayCinema twitter account, scoring points through the content of their tweets, with their avatars (pictures) being displayed as a competing network of “Hax0rs”. All tweets to @BroadwayCinema are read by the application behind the game and
a secretive scoring system is used to find keywords and phrases in each tweet that reward the user with points.

Keywords may be discovered around the venue, in the Broadway brochure , on the Broadway website or via tips delivered by @broadwayHax0r twitter account.

One user will become the “l33t Hax0r” on a weekly basis and be rewarded with prizes from Broadway Cinema.

“l33t Hax0r” is a name taken from leetspeak, an alternative alphabet used on the Internet in the early 1980s by crackers and hackers to avoid detection when discussing
forbidden topics and translates to “Elite Hacker” – a computer user who can find and exploit opportunities to ultimately ‘own’ or ‘pwn’ a system.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leet

The l33tHax0r visualisation can be seen on the link below. The game has now stopped and the information you see is the final scores of the game at 16.30 on May 11th 2011.

View l33tHaxor Data Visualisation and Twitter Game here.

A short video showing some of the experiments I have been doing with giving pixels physical properties based on their RGB values and brightness. Created in c++ with openframeworks, vertex arrays, VBOs, and point sprites.

Attention Seeking Bores is an interactive video installation that uses OpenCV face detection technology to create an intimate and responsive audience experience. Playing on notions of allurement and rejection a set of mouths seductively vie for the attention of the audience. As the audience moves closer and interacts with the indvidual mouths they respond positively to the attention, whilst the others project emotions of jealousy and rejection.

The application was shown as part of the MyGo Exhibition that ran in Nottingham UK October 21st to 6th November 2010. To find out more about the MyGo exhibiton visit http://www.thisisengagementparty.co.uk or check out the video further down the page.

Over the past 6 months I have been working with a group of other Interaction Designers and Artists planning an Interactive exhibition in Nottingham. Working under the name “EngagementParty”, the exhbition “MyGo” showcases a range of digital and interactive artwork that runs for 2 weeks from the 22nd November 2010. You can find out more about the exhibtion and artists by visiting the EnagagementParty website.

The Worlds Biggest Photo Booth is exhibiting at Nottingham Contemporary Art Gallery From 24th July 2010 – 6th September.

The Photo Booth is an interactive application housed in Nottingham Contemporarys’  “The Space” exhibition area to promote the Diane Arbus exhibiton at the gallery. The booth features custom software created by myself in Openframeworks (openframeworks.cc) that uses face detection (openCV) technology to detect the presence of users in front of a the physical physical booth. As users take a seat and strike their pose a custom Flash is fired by the software and a series of four photo’s are taken on a Canon 500D, these are download from the camera, and then compiled into a polaroid image in the Style of Diane Arbus. These images are displayed on a 30ft x 20ft projection as if they were falliing from the pocket of a real photo booth and are uploaded to Nottingham Contemporarys’ Flickr site for visitors to download as a memento of their experience.

Visitors have already had lots of fun with the installation and there are some great images up on Nottingham Contemporarys’ Flickr site.

The project has been created using Openframeworks, OpenCV, Canon SDK by Brendan Oliver and Flickr upload functionality in Processing (processing.org) by Mark Selby of WEARELAB and custom circuit bending / hardware hacking for the Flash via Arduino by Neil Thompson of WEARELAB.

Many thanks to the BBC East Midlands Today, BBC Radio Nottingham and The Evening Post for all of the coverage of the project.

Glastonbury Spirit Interactive Application on the Village Screen at Glastonbury Festival 2010.

Following on from the Village Screen 2009 I was asked to be lead developer at Village Screen 2010 heading up two other interactive artists and to develiver a programme of interactive content on one side of the double-sided screen. Following on from the previous years experience I developed Glastonbury Spirit, an application that uses face detection to find and track users in front of the screen. As users are tracked the softeare generates a custom set of headware inspired from images of festival goers from previous years with a touch of hallucinogen thrown into the mix.

The headware is regenerated every few minutes or until the user looks way and their face can no longer be tracked.

The application selected babies to seasoned festival goers alike, anyone brave enough to look up and see themselves on screen would experience the glastonbury spirit and see themselves in away they may never again.

Data Visualisations of three Twitter feeds using Openframeworks for the Written Images book project. Created with Openframeworks

Mirror of Infinity is a piece about an ephemeral connection between the universe and us. Through the active engagement into experiencing this piece, spectators become a vital part of co-creation of this piece. The user is an element of a bigger net – bigger pattern, without him them piece couldn’t be completed.

The installation starts with the visual projection of the dark rectangle onto the wall of the gallery. There is a blue stroke in the middle representing river Thames, suggesting that the projected image depicts a map of London. Through visible instructions, viewers are asked to participate by sending a text message from their mobile phones, starting with the first part of any London’s postcodes, e.g.: “SW1 my message about something”. Once sent, the content of the message appears on the projected picture, in the spot equivalent to the chosen postcode located on the map of the city.

By sending the SMS text message viewers reveal a star or constellation, these gradually light up the screen, above the location equivalent to the given postcode. In return participants receive text messages with short information about the celestial bodies they have just revealed. All stars are imposed on the map of the city, so that each postcode has one assigned star, planet or constellation. The configuration of stars reflects the real configuration of the map of sky above London during winter.

http://www.kasiamolga.net/

Updates to the blog are well overdue and there are alot of new projects that have been completed over the last few months. Whilst these are being polished up I am really pleased to annouce that the Village Screen is back for Glastonbury 2010. I was apart of this project last year, along with a team of interaction designers and we delivered a programme of interactive content over the course of the festival. Last year was a great success and its a real pleasure to be asked to be lead developer this year. We will be running selected apps from the highlight of last year alongside some new creations. If you are attending the festival we are positioned at Williams Green, opposite the Queens Head right at the heart of the festival site.

Its not only interactive content that gets shown on screen, their is huge programme of short films, animations and motion graphics throughout the festival. There are still opportunities for film makers and artists to show their content on the screen (you can even take it along to the screen during the festival!) More information on this can be found on the Village Screen blog, which will also be used for regular updates on what we are getting up to.

The idea behind the event was to run a series of open projects that would be developed over the course of the weekend with members of the Openframeworks community coming together and working in small teams to push the projects as far as possible in the time we had. All of the projects were “open” to the public, who could watch what was going on and many curious folk were given a personal tour of the lab as we busily worked away.

I worked as part of a team on the excellent People on Pop application – www.peopleonpop.org initially developed by Cyril Diagne and Nico Gui. This project interested me as it included many of the aspects of interaction that i have worked with before (motion detection, frame differencing, video manipulation etc).

People On Pop uses a video camera, canon SLR and mac book pro to capture images of users who participate in a choreographed pose.  Software created in openframeworks would detect the position and pose of the user (via background differencing) and then score them on how accurate their pose was in comparison to the target choreographed posed. Once the user achieved this pose the software would then capture an image of the user via the canon SLR (using a canon SDK). This image was them sent to the web server that hosted the project online.

These images are then stiched together as individual frames of a movie and played back against a sound track. If you visit the website you can see how this creates a really interesting video piece combining of all of the particpants.

Loading these images as individual frames meant that users had to wait a while for the frames to load into the flash movie on the website, which works, but wasnt the best user experience. I took on the task of developing this part of the app so that images take with the SLR could be stored in memory and once a certain number of frames had been collected a Quicktime movie would be created on the fly and uploaded to the website. This process would start again and other Quicktime movies produced as more and more frames were added. The movies could then be streamed into flash.

More info on this project can be found on the wiki.

Openframeworks is a c++ library for developing interactive artwork. If you want to know more check the website and join up at the forum.