High Park Branches - installation interaction playback - 03 - continuous tones

High Park Branches
I have previously posted a number of videos featuring 3D models of branches that I have found laying on the ground in High Park (Toronto, Canada). What you see and hear in this video is a playback of interaction with the installation that I have developed within which these branches (and a few more that I have not made videos of) are actors. This installation was developed for the show 'what' - a self-curated exhibition presented at Back Lane Studios (in Toronto) during the month of April in 2024. The set up includes a projection screen, two speakers on either side, and a sensor (Kinect) below the screen. As participants draw closer to the installation, winds pick up in a virtual environment that cause the branches to fly around randomly as you see in the video. The collisions of the branches trigger samples that serve to form a spontaneously generated audio composition. This is the second audio 'set' consisting of continuous tones. Whereas the 'branch strikes' video contained audio generated by samples, this one is done by playing synths directly in Supercollider - real-time synthesis. A lot of adjustments had to be made to the parameters and thresholds in the installation software in order for these sounds to sound right. I am busy working on many other collections of sound material. You can think of this as an audio-visual artwork generator driven by audience interaction. Future videos and albums will feature these different compositions - coming soon! The resulting visuals are then made into prints and paintings, found here:
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The installation software was written by me in C++ using OpenFrameworks, the models were created in Blender, and the audio is generated in Supercollider. This is the next iteration of the same software used for last year's 'Custom Catastrophe' work presented as part of Nuit Blanche North in Huntsville, Ontario. Details on this project can be found here:
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At the end of the video you can see the second screen that only I can see during events and shows. This contains all of the diagnostic information drawn from the sensor in action. The central image is a depth-of-field point cloud captured by the Kinect - this sensor is designed to read depths. The upper right red rectangle with black pixels in it is an abstracted (and very simplified) view of the point cloud data and the teal rectangle below that is the core of the processing in this work. It represents the input of the depth data into a system driven by self-organizing criticality. It is a non-linear process that exhibits emergent behaviour characterized broadly by a rice pile (note - not a sand pile). Activity accumulates in each cell of the grid and when it reaches a threshold value, it 'spills' over into neighbouring cells. During each frame of the animation each black pixel represents a spill in action and triggers forces to act on any of the branches in the environment.
Exploring non-linear dynamic systems in my artwork has long been an ambition so it is very satisfying to now start to see this realized. I am just getting started with this aspect and still have much to learn. Expect to see much more in this direction in the future. Ultimately I am looking for insights into psyche, living presence, consciousness, through the exploration of emergent phenomena in computational artwork - such as what you see here.
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