Swelter Pt 4 - Install

Swelter Pt3 - the build

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I’ve been working with to build Swelter City this week.  It’s a lot to make but luckily I have a keen and capable team to help bring it together.

Swelter Pt 2 - Thermal cameras

 

Looking a bit more closely at the thermal that has become an increasingly integral part of the installation. I haven’t used them before but they seem like a really interesting bit of kit with a lot of potential and I can easily imagine myself using it for all sorts of other projects down the track.  Everything from finding the gaps in the insulation that are letting heat out off the house, through to checking out your circuits and wiring to check if anything overheating.

I did a fair bit of research into cameras before I finally committed to getting a Seek thermal camera, considering a range of factors I thought would be key to this project. There are a host of thermal cameras out there and it seems like you could pretty much pay as much as you lie with no upper limit if you were really keen to spend big.

Price was definitely one factor since it’s going to spend most of its time in the hands of eager youngsters. I decided it was probably better to get something at the more reasonable end of the price rather than hiring a really expensive as there is a distinct risk of it being damaged. Also, buying it outright hand having it for the whole development period rather than just hiring it in for a week at the end is already proving incredibly useful. I’m sure you get what you pay for and the more expensive models are a lot more accurate, but to be honest in this instance, where I’m just after a general impression so exact measurements aren’t really super critical.

Rather than having a screen of its own, plugs into your phone or other device which has the added bonus that you can just take a feed from that and project it up large on the wall so everyone can be a part of that experience.  Many of the other (much more expensive) models didn’t seem to have a way to get a video feed out of them…let alone a wireless one.

There was one other model I seriously considered the Flir One, which works in a very similar way to the Seek in that you use your phone as the screen. This one does a really interesting thing where it combines the low-res thermal image together with a stylised version the phone’s video to give a much higher level of detail (even if the actual thermal info isn’t any more detailed). Visually it may well have been a better option for this project. The reason I decided against it however, was the fact that rather than running off the phone’s battery it has its own internal battery and I wasn’t confident that the battery life was going to cut it for what I need. Given the camera is such an intrinsic component of the work now, I really can’t afford to have it out of the equation half the time while its off being recharged. Given I need it to be working all day long I think I’m still going to be running into battery issues with the Seek but at least Ill be able to swap it onto another device while the first one recharges. I’ve also seen reports of the Flir One batteries not having a terribly good lifespan and not being replaceable when they go which I don’t like just in principal. If anyone has one of these I’d love to hear about your experiences with it, especially on the battery front. 

There are quite a few comparisons kicking around on the internet if you're interested (here's one by cleantechnica) and they both seem to have their pros and cons. You can see in the image above how Flir One's blending of the thermal vision with the normal camera gives the image a lot more definition (even if there isnt actually any more thermal info in there) but for me at least  for the time being the battery thing was what won out in the end. If I’m feeling rich, perhaps I will get one of these as well so I can do a direct comparison. If fact if anyone out there has one that I could borrow to test and would like to support a worthy cause, that would be completely amazing.

You can see in this pic above how even after just a few minutes the black of the printing on the box is starting to show up in the thermal camera just because its dark and heating up faster.

Swelter Pt1 - The idea

New project. Swelter.

The project is supported by Arts House, City of Melbourne through their Refuge project. http://www.artshouse.com.au/events/refuge/ . This year Refuge is looking at a heat event and with Swelter, I am exploring the concept of an urban heat island in a way that makes it hands-on, accessible and interesting for a younger audience. The basic plan is to build ourselves a room sized cardboard city, inflict a heat event upon it and see what happens.

Swelter will premiere at the Nati Frinj in November this year before heading down to Artshouse in Melbourne the following week for Refuge.  

More of an installation than a show as such, but building on some of those ideas I played with in Balance where you set up a mechanism to model a system and then let the participants come in and change the parameters to see what it does. Although Swelter is more of an installation than a performance, there are definitely some comparisons you could make with Balance. The citizens of Swelter city too, are similarly made of electronic elements and bare more than a passing resemble to the Balance islanders. The citizens of Swelter are built around thermal switch with a buzzer and a blinking LED so that as soon as their temperature crosses a certain threshold they start blinking and buzzing and will need to be rescues by the participants and taken to a refuge where they will be given first aid to bring their core temperature back under control.  From a design perspective its always a fund challenge to take all the elements that are needed to make something work and use these as the key elements of the character design.

The thermal camera that I got to experiment, with is emerging as a key part of making the whole a much more visual, much more immediate and much more intuitive experience (thanks Geordie).

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Compared to a thermometer that just gives you a spot temperature at a specific point. The thermal camera gives you a much better sense of what is going on temperature wise across a whole scene. Once the heat cranks up it soon becomes apparent where the trouble spots are.

 

 

Nati Frinj 2013 - part 1

The dust has settled on the 2013 Frinj Festival and, after a week of being gut-wrenchingly,  head-poundingly, bed-riddenly, ill I'm starting to feel vaguely recovered (both from the festival and subsequent sickness). Almost human.

Lots of good bike powered things this year (if I do say so myself). No single big show as in years gone by, but rather a whole suite of smaller things. This was part of a deliberate attempt on my behalf to avoid another high stress all or nothing moment like the final showing Highly-Strung show of 2011...

Basically just spreading myself so thin I couldn't possibly fail at everything.

Genius, or idiocy?

Only time will tell.

Right now my gut response is that it was more of a juggling weasels experience than a pushing a rhinocerous into box type experience but not really less stressful in any meaningful way.

Still a few good things came out of it. A few things I'm really quite pleased with.

Such as the dueling unicycle puppets, concieved by me and realised by Anthony Schellens. Its a race and these larger than life-sized puppets get propelled around their course by two punters pounding away on their respective stair-masters.

And then there were the games, a series bike-powered virtual reality machines, my first experiment with the Oculus Rift and still very much a work in progress. With the help of an arduino (and another big learning curve), I managed to take a bike covered in sensors and hook it up to the rift to give festival goers their first taste of Virtual reality (in exchange for a pint of sweat). It really feels like there's a lot of potential for this and its definitely something I plan to flesh out in the near future.

And last but by no means least... "Somethings afoot in the dead of the night" a performance event and LED lighting spectacular with 8 Foot Felix where the entire energy needs of the show were created by just four bikes with the audience being invited to step up, take a turn on the pedals and help to make the show happen. It was really create to have the band throw themselves into this so completely and embracing the spirit of experimentation and risk taking that has always been the strength of the Frinj. I'm really happy with what we managed to achieve with a whole bagful of unknowns and not a whole lot of time to bring it together.

I'll come back and revisit each of these three bits with loads more photos, videos and a bit of behind the scenes type stuff but just wanted to get something out there for now,  just to prove to myself that it all happened.

Thanks so much to the Frinj folk, the committee and the volunteers for all pulling together and making this the most action packed festival yet. And thanks especially to Callum and Anthony for stepping in to pick up all the pieces I'd scattered so widely and helping to turn them into something better than I could ever have done on my own.  Thanks also to the funding bodies VicHealth and Festivals Australia for having the vision to back us in the development of these ideas.

Feed Development Video

Here is a 5 minute edit from some of the Feed development workshops (mostly from the Natimuk workshops).


Feed: Development from dave jones on Vimeo.


Currently working towards the next Nati Frinj Festival. We've been extremely lucky with our funding applications this year and it looks like a lot,lot, lot of good things are starting to come together. Worth another blog post in its own right.

soon...




....no really!

Highly Strung - In retrospect

Well its taken a few months for me to get around to editing this together (not that I spent a few months on the edit, I just had a bit of other stuff to catch up on) but here it is. A five minute collection of shots from  Highly Strung, the silo show.



Don't expect it to make a whole lot of sense, its all out of sequence and taken from both the rehearsals as well as the final show. Its just a collection of shots to demonstrate the kind of stuff that was going on in the show.

Putting it together, I really wished I had more footage of the puppeteers doing their thing actually. Looking back that's possibly the most interesting aspect of the show for me, the things that people (who were nearly invisible during the performance) had to do to put the giant puppet through its paces.

An early rehearsal where we had 3 operators up on ropes (Wendy, Callum, Kate)

Damo A and Callum on the legs as the puppet is caught in one of the all too common freak gusts of wind

Kete, Damo J, Michelle Anthony, Gareth, Jac, Callum

Michelle McFarlane (Head Turn Technician)

Gareth Llewellin (Chief Up/Down Guy)

Anthony  (Left Elbow Operator) & Kate (the Bird in the Hand)

The coordination required to get the puppet into pose sometimes involved up to 10 people all doing there part and with no way to see how the puppet actually looked. They just had to have faith that, when each of them did X at time Y, it was a good thing.

(photos Michelle McFarlane)

If I did the show again I'd definitely make more of a feature out of the puppeteers, lighting them up rather than hiding them away.

Highly Strung-Silos Show is Go!

Exciting times! The Funding is in (thank you Festivals Australia and Arts Victoria) and its looking very much like there's going to be another big silo show at this year's Nati Frinj Festival (28th-30th Oct).

The new show will feature animation I made with the local Natimuk school kids projected onto the front of a 12-meter puppet. The animation is mostly done and looking great and I'm just now starting to get my head around the construction and operation of a puppet that's 12 meters tall.

Here's some concept art cobbled together variously from tea-towels, bed-sheets, projectors, silos, maya, photoshop, etc.

The actual puppet will most likely NOT look like any of these but I'll be sure to post some actual real photos once the R&D gets a little further down the track and Ive got something more impressive to show than a back veranda waist deep in fabric and broken poles.

Nati Frinj Festival

Ive just been setting up a blog to help promote the upcoming 2011 Nati Frinj Festival and thought while I had the embed vid code in my copy buffer I might as well put it up here too.


The show "Space and Place" was performed on the side of the Natimuk silos as part of the 2004 Nati Frinj Festival. Y-space did the aerial performance and Transience (mostly me) did the animation. I know these days every other building you see has got some sort video installation taking place on the side of it but back in 2004 when we did this I think it was at least vaguely innovative. Also I think the combination of aerial performance and video projection is a niche that still has a lot of potential. We are hoping to develop a new Silos show for the 2011 festival but it is still very much "funding pending" at the moment. Ive got a whole lot of new ideas Im pretty excited about....just need a few dollars to make it all happen.


Also of note...this is the show that inspired the"silo" scene in the Rhyme of The Ancient Merino.

I have been involved in a few other projection type shows as well...I will try and get myself organised to finds some links to a few of these also.