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I’m working on the sound reactive element of Make a bigger splash!

I’ve incorporated two measurement microphones (thanks Dennis!) -one in the atrium with the installation (its actually hanging within the sculpture), and one in the pool itself. These will support the two seperate modes of animating the installation.

In order to design the interaction, I’ve set up a server to receive the audio from the mics and stream it over wi-fi using pds netsend~/netreceive~ objects.

Walking around the building wearing headphones and listening to this, I had one of those revalation moments that make being a techno-artist worthwhile. It was just like I was crawling around inside my own head..

Work on rigging Make a bigger splash! continues at Claremorris leisure centre.

The installation has 35 neon tubes in all, and will feature 2 types of sound-activated animation of the 3D neon drawing.

The structure has to support 200kgs of transformers, and its 8m in the air.

Phew.

I’m testing the control system for Make a bigger splash!

The neon tubes are powered by ‘metalbox’ transformers and ‘neonline’ dimmers.

The dimmerboxes take a 10v analogue control signal from a showtec multi-exchanger, which is a dmx controller for analogue lighting gear.

The dmx signals come from an enttec open dmx ethernet unit, controlled by the artnet protocol via ethernet.

I have written a puredata external to output artnet packets, based on the pd netsend object by Miller Puckette. Open source is great.

And it worked first time I plugged it all together..

‘Make a bigger splash!’, a public art installation by Me (Tim Redfern) and Mark Cullen, is a sound responsive 3d drawing in cold cathode light tubing (neon).

Today we had our first chance to see most of the components of the installation together.

We just received the 2m diameter steel superstructure for the ceiling-mounted piece, which acts as a hanging platform and also accomodates the 35 1-4kv transformers (which pack quite a bit of weight).

Unpacking the components and checking the platform for size we got the first feeling for the actual scale of the piece realised from drawings, exciting!

Next the wiring..

PlayApp is a software library for processing to stream processing sketches to Playhouse, an interactive lighting installation that will turn Liberty Hall into a low-res colour display with sound throughout the Dublin Theatre Festival in October.

PlayApp is a simple class that transmits every frame drawn by the sketch as a UDP packet. There is also a preview sketch that allows you to visualise your sketches as a 30×11 window animation on the building. Optionally, you can also take control of the top ‘marquee’ floor which has 7×5 greyscale pixels in each window, and use sound which will be broadcast on short range FM radio.

PlayApp as it stands can be used to display any kind of procedural graphics/ sound, or to visualise any kind of information from the internet.

We would love to show interactive PlayApp sketches which turn the building into an interactive sequencer or multiuser sketchpad, we are using osc to access the building from networked iphones and we are planning to add a way to get DTMF commands into processing via an asterisk server. However these types of applications will have to be run by special arrangement as they require more setup.

Playhouse will run from September 24th-October 19th.
Sketches and movies that play on the building will be documented with a camera facing the building and will be automatically archived.

Playhouse