@BUSTLELAMP

“The Dress That Eats Souls” is close to completion. You saw some of its evolution in the last post – and it’s been evolving and growing. It will premiere in a survey exhibition of 20 years of my interactive cinema work “Toni Dove: Embodied Machines” curated by Matthew McLendon at the Ringling Museum in Sarasota Florida from February 25 to May 20, 2018. There will be an exhibition catalogue available.

Experiencing the POV a someone wearing the dress in the 1950s

“The Dress That Eats Souls” is a complex interactive matrix that uses the Kinect gaming interface to track a viewer’s head and body movement. The Kinect, recently discontinued, has a sophisticated camera tracking system that combine video tracking with infrared to create X,Y and Z space – or a video tracking field of 2 dimensions with an infrared sensor that adds depth. It does she pretty interesting things – I think its subversive re-use by the creative tech community has far outstripped the use Microsoft had for it. Very sorry to see it go, but many similar camera systems are surfacing. More on that another time.

This piece was fascinating to make – an R&D process working with students and a wonderful team of technologists. Some adventures experimenting with 3D printing and vinyl cutting, robotics, programmable LEDs, and cinemascope raw video shot with the 5D III using Magic Lantern that is responsive  in the installation to a viewers head movement. The robot uses skeleton and head tracking to mirror a viewer’s body movement and alter media. The experience is almost like being lifted up into a movie. A viewer’s body and head are connected to the piece through movement and it feels as if you’re both inside it and looking out – as if wearing the dress.

Voiceovers  representing different characters take you through time to form a narrative that traces the human body’s interactions with technology. Choosing a dress as the form for the installation came about as I was thinking about technology’s most intimate interfaces with the human body and clothing seemed like a logical place to start.  It was also a response to the current explosion of wearable technologies that I find both enhancing and colonizing in a disturbing mix.  I collaborated with the novelist Rene Steinke on the text for voices. It was a fascinating process of exchange. I began by creating extensive timelines of human invention, technological and cultural events and disasters. Then broke it down into a series of 10 decades from the 1900s to far into the future. Each decade has 3 versions: dark, neutral or technology driven, and light. Rene used the alchemy of her inventive mind to create the details of who these people could have been. The text is a sequence of interior monologues over time tracing our relationship to technology and perhaps how we lag behind the inventions in our comprehension of their impact, both ecstatic and ominous.  I think of the piece as the wreck of the ship of progress. A cautionary tale – but not without seductions and pleasures.

Here are stills from the 5 videos a viewer  navigates with head movement to experience the POV of someone in 1918. A woman in a rocking chair talks about an iron brace that reshapes her spine. She connects with a soldier who has had part of his face blown off in WWI.

From the age of six, I was strapped in a metal corset to fix the curvature of the spine. My mother and my nurse carried me, my dear friends tried to lift me by summoning the spirits…and I heard Fred talking to me: “The mind grows just as the body grows, you know that? But how do you show that in a metal face? Half my face blown to bits. Who knows where my eye landed in that forest? We were running. I saw my blood splattered on the dead brown leaves…thought I was a-goner. I woke up on a stretcher and later they gave me this face. It looks more like my brother’s face than mine. He died in the Marne.

Links to preview articles about the exhibition:

The New York Times

Sarasota Magazine

My talented team of collaborators:

Tommy Martinez is the software designer, Paul Geluso designed spatialize sound using a unique binaural broadcast speaker system, Medianoise did sound design,original music for the 1960s and 180s by Elliott Sharp. Brooklyn Research created the responsive robotics, Andrew Dintenfass (of early Stevie Nicks and Pointer Sisters music video cinematography) was the Director of Photography, Karen Young, scrim design, LED design by Smooth Technology.

Stay tuned for more teasers from the exhibition.

Lucid Possession, a multimedia performance, premiered at Roulette in Brooklyn, and combines musicians, VJ mashing, and stage-controlled robotic projection screens to present a contemporary ghost story – a poetic musing on managing the mass of information “noise.” Todd Reynolds live scores and composed the finale. Hai-Ting Chinn stars in the video and sings onstage. I run all cues from the stage and scrub video across multiple screens. Elliott Sharp composed the song cycle. The technologies of Lucid led me to a new installation project.

Lucid Possession and The Dress That Eats Souls will be part of a retrospective on my interactive work to be presented in early 2018 at The Ringling Museum in Sarasota, Fla.

First a little on Lucid Possession. The central character, Bean, is a young artist who designs virtual personalities and is plagued by ghosts. Her mind is like a live Twitter feed that “picks up people” …but without technology. She creates an avatar, an exaggerated alter ego that goes viral on the Internet and makes her a minor celebrity. People stop her on the street. They want something, and she isn’t sure what it is. Anxiety exponentially increases her paranormal sensitivities, and a ghost from the past emerges from the noise.

I was thinking about the way we live in analog and virtual worlds simultaneously – how we live an augmented reality through social networks and online connections that merge with our life in the physical world. It’s ordinary – but fantastic. A TV remote, social networks, ATM machines – they’re like pedestrian spoonbending. With telepresent agency – our bodies extend beyond their edges. Our boundaries blur. I was also thinking about how this landscape has turned us all into performers grasping for attention in a sea of market share. Everything becomes a popularity contest. How many likes for your cat video? Here’s a clip from the premiere.

Making Lucid Possession involved creating a complex intranet – an engine of linked technologies with many elements that included the production of LED costumes and robotic screens. The expansion of my technical vocabulary combined with further experiments with embodied interface inspired me to focus more closely on some of the possibilities these elements presented.

Building Lucid’s robotic screen: from sketches, to construction, to the projection of Bean’s Avatar. The arms and legs are selectable video loops scrubbed in real time. The head uses a neural net and vocal analysis to lip synch live to a performer. The robotic screen is controlled by motion sensing onstage or by OSC on an iPad.

The costumes were constructed with LEDs. This was before the current explosion of Raspberry Pis and micro controllers, conductive thread and flexible electronics for wearables. We had a guy with a soldering gun running around after our actors during the film shoot. In 5 years there’s been enormous advances in wearable technologies and the availability for easy use is everywhere. Karen Young: Costume design, Leif Krinkle: technology and controls.

I began thinking about the explosion of technologized wearables. It seemed to be dominated on many fronts by the fusion of narcissism and commodification. A new installation project started to percolate. The first sketch:

THE DRESS THAT EATS SOULS: An Interactive Robotic Dress Installation

progress, n. a forward movement: an advance: a continuation: an advance to something better or higher in development: a gain in proficiency: a course: a passage from place to place: a procession: a journey of state: a circuit. – v.i. progress, to go forward: to make progress: to go on, continue: to go in progress, travel in state: to go.Chambers 20th Century Dictionary

Xenophanes: “The gods did not reveal to men all things in the beginning, but men through their own search find in the course of time that which is better.”

Or not:

The Dress has a 14′ layered scrim skirt that acts as a projection screen and a cinemascope rear projection screen that hangs overhead. The robotics of the bodice and skirt are controlled by a kinect gaming interface. As a viewer standing in front of the Dress moves, the Dress mirrors their movement. It behaves as if you are wearing it. The Dress speaks to you. It’s rather chilly – like a lizard. It’s the combined human agendas that drive technology. The installation cycles between the Dress speaking and POV experiences on the overhead screen and skirt that put you inside the minds of the people who have worn the Dress as it evolved – 200 years of the human body shaped, molded and colonized by technology. Viewer head movement navigates the cinema space.

So I’ve started to build and script it. Brooklyn Research is working on the Robotics. Rene Steinke, the novelist, is working with me on the voices. Tommy Martinez is programming. Paul Geluso is designing the spatialized sound. Ben Light is prototyping and constructing elements of the Dress design. Leif Krinkle is technical director. Karen Young is helping with costume construction. Andy Dintenfass and Art Jones are shooting the video material with me. And many thanks to students from Parsons Design and Technology for their labor and brainstorming. Here’s some of the prototyping and building process:

First: lots of testing and discarding elements to discover the best way forward. Finally: building the robotic screen system. Robotics building and testing is going on at Brooklyn Research. The first Kinect test with Johnny Lu. Then the more evolved version – a serious robot!

We’re simultaneously building the skirt and bodice elements, testing media and programming navigation on a small mockup of the installation at the studio. This video shows Tommy using the kinect. The white cube in the first section shows how the Kinect sees and tracks his head movement. The second section shows how he navigates between 5 video streams with head motion.

Stay tuned for further developments as The Dress That Eats Souls evolves!