PhD Website

Link: http://www.daisyrust.com/phd/

PhD Title

Expressivity and the Digital Puppet:
Mechanical, Digital and Virtual Objects
in Games, Art and Performance

PhD Summary: The aims of the investigation

The current PhD study explores the interface between traditional puppetry and emerging computer technologies, through historical, theoretical enquiry, case studies and practical experiments. The thesis will evaluate and test with users (puppeteers, audiences, animators and programmers) the expressive qualities of innovative interactive systems.

In this context ‘innovative’ means both emerging, new, technology or established technologies that are being re-defined by their communities of use and are finding new applications within the performing arts, particularly puppetry performance.

(1) I aim to explore the related contexts of digital puppetry, real-time animation, mimetic and non-mimetic kinetic objects, automata, ‘cybernetic sculpture’, performance systems and the technological interfaces to such phenomena.

(2) I aim to create evaluate and create puppet/object theatre performances/installations that use original software and hardware systems that are designed to explore ‘performance expressivity’, with reference to relevant historical, art, entertainment and technological precedents.

(3) I wish to theorise and form a taxonomy of ‘expressivity’ in relationship to digital domains and puppetry. By ‘expressivity’, I refer to different domains of action including: voice, face, body, hands and gesture.

We are here today to remember and celebrate the Life of Keith Grant: a loving husband, inspirational father and grandfather.

Our dad was a man who, in the many phases of his life looked out for others, and worked hard to provide a stable and secure future for himself and his family.

We all have loving memories of his HUMOUR and SENSE of FUN, his dedication to our FAMILY, his political convictions, CIVIC SENSE and SERVICE TO COLLEAGUES, and again his wonderful SENSE OF HUMOUR.

We remember our Dad for his CIVIC DUTIES and SERVICE TO COLLEAGUES: he worked for the town (as an elected councillor), for schools (as a parent governor), he raised money for charities (with the Moose), gave his expertise and skills in erecting Christmas illuminations in the Town (his “star” is, we think still atop St Johns Church after 20 years). Importantly, as a long standing EEPTU (Trade Union) member and pensions trustee, Dad worked to secure equitable and generous pensions for himself and fellow Westland employees.

His HUMOUR: we remember Dad’s love of performance, pantomimes and spreading fun to others (with early days concerts in St Peters Youth Club and Summerlands old folks home), to the Wessex pantos where he met our Mum.

As a young boy, I personally wet myself while watching our Dad and Dad’s best man, Keith Burgess (who some of you know), mime and perform to the Goons “Ying Tong Song”. We are playing that song at the end, so watch out if you are walking behind me.

As a FAMILY MAN: our Dad provided an inspiration to us and has given Kevin and I solid values to aspire to and live by with our own families. He can rest assured in our total conviction to look after our Mum as he wished us to. We are all very proud of him.

Bravely, without complaint, Dad battled a fearful illness with dignity and strength.

We sincerely thank all those who have looked after Dad during this time: the wonderful people at the MacMillan Unit (Yeovil), the incredible team at St Margaret’s Hospice, and at the Salvation Army.

And of course our wonderful Mum. Their absolute oneness is an inspiration to us all.

It is difficult today to remember all the joy and laughter our Dad brought into our lives and to the wider world. We have our memories, Mum and Dad’s stories and we really look forward to talking to you, and hearing your memories of our lovely Dad, over a sausage roll (in the Airfield Tavern).

Ian and Kevin Grant, for the Grant Family.

soundlines in quartz composer from Ian Grant on Vimeo.

Great when sound activated – good for graphing!

A harmongraph generator made with quartz composer. Using transparent png as a texture, the composition modulates the x, y position using sin / cos waves while the image scales. Expensive and a little slow, but the process of watching the images being made is nice. Some of the final images produced by changing x, y position, parameters to the waves, switching presets, alpha and colors (using a MIDI controller) were usable as stills and textural elements.

Download Link: harmonogaphs_001.zip

The zip contains a version controllable by the keyboard and another with controls in the parameters. It is designed to be controlled with a midi desk. You will need to dig into the patch to explore the principles of the harmonograph generators. You may wish to add a clear patch. To see things better. I used the included QCToMovie application to render movies with alpha of the animated textures to be taken into After Effects.

I’ve written a chapter in the following book: “Experiments in Digital Puppetry. Video Hybrids in Quartz Composer”. It involves the material on this site and elsewhere that describes real-time video processing and the use of Quartz Composer in performance. I feel quite proud to be in such interesting and diverse company. The chapters on digital puppetry are really welcome. The subject deserves a book all of it’s own!

I have a chapter on Digital Puppetry and real-time performance systems (including Quartz Composer) in the following book:

Transdisciplinary Digital Art. Sound, Vision and the New Screen
Digital Art Weeks and Interactive Futures 2006/2007, Zurich, Switzerland and Victoria, BC, Canada. Selected Papers
978-3-540-79486-8_1
Editors: Randy Adams, Steve Gibson and Stefan Müller Arisona

I’ll post more details and some excerpts asap.

If you are in a position to, please order the book for your college or local library!

I’ll post some further details of the work here soon. But for now:

I completed ‘Texturisr’ in 2005 as a nod to the then booming obsession with ‘Web 2.0′ and took advantage of the Flickr API. Flickr was then not owned by Yahoo. I was also interested in the public display of personal images. I have added a few other aspects to the project for this exhibition included a small element of natural language processing – my take on the ‘sense detecting’ of the exhibition title.
Sense Detectives is Watermans’ latest collaboration with Thames Valley University’s Digital Arts department to explore sensor and search technologies through an innovative and participative working practice. Sense Detectives combines four different exhibits that will be on show at Watermans in late 2006 and early 2007.

Charlie Gere, author, historian of digital art and academic, has written the catalogue introduction for the Sense Detectives Exhibition: http://mercury.tvu.ac.uk/~richardc/kwomodo/sensedetectives3.php

Paul B Davis, of the BEIGE ensemble/collective, says of ‘Texturisr’:

“While Web 2.0 is a bit of a technical buzzword, as it’s underlying delivery technologies are no different than whatever you’d want to call what existed before, to me it represents a conceptual shift in thinking about network-based information. As pieces like texturisr demonstrate, the semantic web really takes shape when we stop thinking about the network as a broadcast medium and instead think of it as a medium for user-guided information interchange. Collaboration, communication, remixability…these are the operative words which describe our Web 2.0 interactions. These interactions are a sort of meta-level complement to current information infrastructure, and they have the potential to be equally comfortable at home, in public space or a gallery.”

Sense Detectives is Watermans’ latest collaboration with Thames Valley University’s Digital Arts department to explore sensor and search technologies through an innovative and participative working practice. Sense Detectives combines four different exhibits that will be on show at Watermans in late 2006 and early 2007.

A second version of my ‘tiger reflections patch’. Now with a simpler interface and Noise Industries ‘FXFactory’ ready!

The patch is simplifed and slightly more reliable than the previous version. The generated image can now rotate without producing artifacts. The gradient setup is now automated. Less control but simpler. I have done this to create a test composition that works in ‘FXFactory’ – which is very simple to use. It really unlocks another realm for Quartz Composer developers.

Link: http://www.noiseindustries.com/fxfactory/

A second version of my ‘tiger reflections patch’. Now with a simpler interface and Noise Industries ‘FXFactory’ ready!
The patch is simplifed and slightly more reliable than the previous version. The generated image can now rotate without producing artifacts. The gradient setup is now automated. Less control but simpler.

The patch does a simple thing of producing an ‘aquafied’ circle. I created this patch when I was exploring masks and how best to create a circle using the current Quartz Composer toolset. The patch contains some useful techniques working between pixels and Quartz Composer units. It is also an exercise in ‘pixel based positioning’. I am sure the visual effect can be improved upon, but I quite like the principle of instantly produced graphics using quartz composer. I followed several online tutorials for producing aqua styled graphics – then simplified the process. I reckon quite complex aqua graphics could be produced in this way, like widget graphical elements etc.

Some Issues

The accuracy of positioning of bottom gradient may need improving. Hence the ‘tweaks’
Better control over how the bottom gradient is generated. The rules seem to break down at smaller sizes. Fun though.