STRÄNG

End-of-Sem Project Proposal:

STRÄNG

(Time-Space Warp Simulation)

STRÄNG is a wordplay on Doctor Strange’s name (who bends space and time) which means ‘string’ in Swedish and is also coincidentally related to the string theory about how our reality is shaped.

A superpower simulation that mimics the bending of space and time. There will be a clock mimicked by a running LED strip with RGB bulbs. There will be a one way mirror layer in front of the LED to create an infinity mirror illusion. The mirror will have a circular hole cut in the middle so that people can move their hands inside, and be able to touch a sheet of felt material. The RGB lights will change from blue to red across the rainbow spectrum when they do so (will add sound if time permits), and the running lights will start running at a slower speed.

Aside from that, there will be a servo motor behind a larger sheet of the same felt material away from the mirror that responds to the action by moving the sheet, thus creating the illusion that the participant’s hands are moving the sheet without actually touching the sheet. Whenever the motor moves, the LED lights around the frame of the material sheet will light up as well. In this sense, participants can feel like they are bending both time and space.

Things needed:

LED strip
Wood material for the box (probably will be spray-painted)
(Elastic) Felt material
Frame to hold felt material
Servo-motor (have to fix something on it)
Diffuser frame (borrow from film store)
Ultra-sonic sensors/touch sensors.
Speakers (If time permits)

Stuff to code for:

Code for LED running strip (colours and speed)
Servo motor.
Response between touch sensor in the box and the servo motor on the other side

In the end, we had 2 main codes and used 2 Arduino circuit boards. One was for linking the LEDs and ultrasonic sensor while the other was for linking the flex sensor and servo motors. We shared a lot of the coding workload so it’s hard to be definitive but if we really had to, it would be something like:

Bryan – LEDs

Brendan – Ultrasonic sensors

Me – Servo motors

Challenges faced in the form of advice for future programming students:

#1 Do not go shopping at Sim Lim Tower on a Sunday.

#2 Go to Continental Electronics Pte Ltd #B1-23/24/25 to get WS2811 LED strips which are programmable by Arduino. Those lights are pricey though, 1m for $18 but do it for the project!

#3 If you do not take IM 1 and are deprived of your free Arduino kit, do get wires. Lots of them. Get the male to female connectors too.

#4 Nope, you can’t laser cut glass. Only acrylic mirrors from Artfriend (one costs $26)!

#5 Example codes and libraries are your best friends! We tried coding the running light pattern by ourselves one evening for around 3 hours but still couldn’t figure it out but then I found an example code and it solved like 80% of our problems. Just trust open-source culture.

#6 Yes we have flex sensors that can be borrowed from the film store. If you get the one soldered down you need male to female connectors.

#7 Loose wires were a huge problem for us, we had yet to try hot glue but it’s worth the try! Getting longer wires would probably have helped!

#8 The fabric of the black flag borrowed from the film store is way too tough. We just used Bryan’s old shirt. (We really wanted to use a stretchy material like Spandex initially but that’s too expensive)

Future Developments:

This installation may be small (because we’re on a low budget) but imagine being in a room with a massive infinity mirror where you can change its lighting using gestures! When you raise your hand in, motors move the other side of the room! T r i p p y

On the day of presentation we didn’t include music, but when we set it up the day after in its proper orientation and played music, it really gave the installation the atmosphere it needed!! Really important element for immersion.

Also do give a proper preface to your viewers about your installation! A well-conveyed context isn’t only fluff!!! It gives the installation more meaning and affects the way the participant views the artwork!

It is probably worth the try to place the ultrasonic sensor behind the thin piece of fabric and propped up by some piece of foam instead of placing it directly at the end of the tube since it was easily accessible by the participants and they could have just pulled it out.

P.S.: I just named a picture of the LEDs “strang” + “led” but I realised it literally spells “strangled” oh god

PICS OR IT DIDN’T HAPPEN:

By default, the LED lights are a combination of warm hues. The light gradient is also rotating at a quick and steady pace.

As the participant’s hand reaches deeper into the tube, the distance sensed by the ultrasonic sensor decreases and this changes the hues of the light to cooler hues and slows down the pace of the light rotation.

When the participant’s hand reaches all the way to the end of the tube, the lights change completely to a bluish hue with purple light rotating.

Here is a video of a demonstration done by our participant Jacob in the video below!

As the participant’s hand reaches the end of the tube to touch the cloth material at the end of it, they can push even further to bend the flex sensor. This changes the resistance read by the sensor and thus triggers the 3 servo motors coded for in the same program.

[Immersion] SENSORAMA Presentation

Group members:
Yue Ling, Hazel, Tanya, Joseph

Artist Selection: teamLab

For my Final Research Hyperessay, I am stoked to find out more about teamLab, an artist collaborative group based in Japan that currently is having one of their exhibitions Future World in Singapore! Since I’m taking Viscomm and Programming, I find their works really relevant and hope to learn more about their design philosophy.

Experimental Fashun

– The Premise –

———-

|| Using the social broadcasting platform of Facebook live, my group decided to do an interactive project called ‘Experimental Fashun’ (‘Fashion’ stylised as ‘Fashun’). We split our group of four into pairs whereby one person will be the ‘interviewer’ and the other will the ‘model’. The model’s homework is to select 5 pieces of apparel for a number of sections, namely: tops, bottoms, dresses, accessories and shoes. She will then write down a vague adjective describing the clothing. The ‘interviewer’ will have to engage and collect responses from members of the public from different parts of Singapore to participate in our project. The audience member will have to help the ‘model’ to select pieces of clothing to form their own unique combination. Since the descriptors are rather vague, it mirrors the unpredictable quality of online shopping, whereby we trust frequently vague descriptors and pick from cheap websites like Lazada or Ezbuy. From the selected combinations, we will then photograph proper photos of the whole outfits, pair them in categories of the stereotypes of the different parts of Singapore, and post them on Instagram and add the #experimentalfashun so that users of Instagram can vote for their favourite combinations.

Link to video: https://www.dropbox.com/s/dscw9ljl2ncnhpk/main_FINAL.mp4?dl=0

For this project, our interviewers Bala and Felicia headed down to the following places respectively:

Bala – Sim Lim Square, Bugis Street

Felicia: Bras Basah Shopping Complex, Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA), Singapore Management University (SMU) and Lasalle College of the Arts

while Farzana and I were the models camping at home. We waited prepared sets of clothings to show the strangers that were interviewed what they looked like. After the outfits were chosen, we had to take pictures of the full outfit for the Instagram feed.

– Wardrobe Selections –

———-

Tops: cat, skeleton, checkered, tea, floral

‘

Outerwear: thin (black), hipster weeb(the purple one), woolen, mint,thick

Dresses: checkered, CNY, pleated, floral, zebra

Accessories: Soft toy, ukelele, cap, beanie, glasses

Bottoms: navy (skirt), oriental, striped, PJs, oriental

– The Experience –

———-

During the execution of the Facebook live with Bala, I initially tried to make the clothing in the list as crazy as possible so that the participants would have some pretty crazy descriptors to choose from. However, what we didn’t expect is for them to take the task so seriously! A lot of them were really squinting at the descriptors, trying to clarify and asking for more details so that they could make the most suitable outfit to go for an actual party. This was a lot more significant at Bugis Street where there more more fashionable young people hanging around on a Sunday evening.

Also, we initially intended to put on the outfit immediately after the participant had chosen the outfit, but after we interviewed the first person in Sim Lim Square, we had an awkward moment where the person had to wait for me to change, which probably took about 2 minutes, but there was still a certain social tension that existed even over the Third Space, which was really interesting to observe.

Bala was frantically trying to occupy the stranger while temporarily went off-screen to change.

This project was influenced by Blast Theory’s principles of integrating the physical and virtual world together through the use of new technology and inviting audience participation that would influence the outcome of the project, with an element of an immersive narrative. In our project, we set our premise as a fashion showdown modelled after RuPaul’s Drag Race or Project Runway, but incorporating digital elements! Not only did we empower the random participants to be designers themselves, we also involved the Instagram public to pick their favourite outfit to win the fashion show by posting polls

Experimental Fashun was influenced by the concepts of the dynamics of social interaction over the Third Space through social broadcasting, DIWO, and Digital Identity.

Inspired by our Telestroll project, we utilised the medium of Facebook Live to carry out an interview-style social broadcast with members of the public. We explored the concept of DIWO by getting them to make our fashion decisions for us. This links to how we allow others to alter our Digital Identity as well, since clothes are probably the most representative subject of appearance, or how you present yourself to others. Personally, I felt like this project really got me out of my comfort zone as well because I usually do not post a lot of Outfit-of-the-day (OOTD) posts on Instagram or Facebook since I’m not really into fashion myself, and my usual style is super stay-home casual.

By putting on wacky outfits and posting them onto our public Instagram page, I felt like I was allowing my digital image to be altered, and it probably is easier to believe that I’m comfortable putting on weird clothing while I was actually really kind of anxious at the thought of wearing them out in public, especially when we had to shoot the photos of the OOTDs, but I thought that after this experience, I’ve gotten pretty numb to any judgement.

Interestingly enough, we also unintentionally experienced the glitches in human behaviour and technology that we learned would eventually surface when we trapped ourselves in the Third Space for long enough, through the works of Annie Abrahams. The main point is that things would never go the way we intended for them to, for example, with that long awkward waiting time I mentioned above, as well as moments when connection was bad as we moved to different locations so it impaired the communication of the interviewer and model during the Facebook live. In the aspect of human-technology relationships, we also explored the mismatch in expectations in online shopping where you might put your trust in a supplier who you have never bought before, purely based on the pictures and descriptions that they provide, and so the products that you purchase may not end up as what you expected, since you never once inspected the product physically beforehand.

Online shopping websites such as Ezbuy, Lazada and Wish often offer cheap clothing with clickbait product names (just look at the amount of adjectives in there). We don’t ever know if they actually will fit us, we just see if they look good on the models, and have our perceptions swayed by reviews by other people.

In conclusion, a lot of negotiation was needed to overcome issues, from the conceiving of the idea, to the execution of it, to dealing with unintended glitches. Our outcome for the project also divulged interesting results; we found out that the older demographic preferred brighter colours compared to the younger demographic, and that people in different parts of Singapore had different attitudes towards fashion. We had involved others into our project, be it as a designer who came up with all the wacky combinations, or fashion director who got to say ‘ay’ or ‘nay’ to the outfits, and successfully executed our online fashion project, Experimental Fashun!

Summarize by stating how your final project explored the idea of the social and how you designed an interactive experience that included both artist and viewers.

#02: \\TELE-STROLL// (micro-project)

(Had to post this as a video because I was having trouble embedding the live video into my post!)

Posted by Yue Ling Tan on Tuesday, 23 January 2018

So Francesca and I were paired up for our first micro-project and we decided to do a “Journey to the East/West” video!
Our live performance is a juxtaposition between where we live in Singapore (and we ACTUALLY do stay at opposite sides of the country), and it serves the purpose to show that even if we are physically located at different parts of the country, our living habits and environment around us are extremely similar. Our brainchild showcases the both of us having a stroll around our neighbourhood on a boring Sunday and learning about each other’s living spaces.

The process of making this live performance was memorable, and I believe the both of us were quite taken aback by the level of difficulty this task poses. When planning for the performance, we decided to focus on the types of actions we could include that could utilise and include interactivity within the realm of the ‘Third Space’. After collating our ideas, we came up with the mini storyline that is our brainchild. Initially, we assumed that it would be fairly simple to carry out the live but it was only after various takes and practice that we were finally able to complete the performance successfully, which, rather than just a simple live broadcast, was more alike to a performance on stage and made this micro-project a very peculiar experience. Coordination between both parties had to be practised to be more refined and it took a lot of communication to include the appropriate elements and to execute them at the right timings, bringing social art to the next level.