Wed Mar 05 21:48:38 Eastern Standard Time 2003
Here are a few bad pics of the Oracle test installation over the past two days:Technology behind the Oracle: (Len pictured)
(Katie's laptop (not part of the oracle), G4 for tracking, Linux PC for visuals, winXP for audio.):
The complex projector hanger (and camera mount) for projecting onto the ground:
(Built in collaboration by Emil Kolompar, Katie Varney and David Kucherepa.)
Thu Feb 20 23:35:51 Eastern Standard Time 2003
I have updated the audio page for the first time in a while. Posted is an mp3 of the audio in its current state, this is a representation of the background audio panning through the samples.
Sat Feb 15 11:21:24 EST 2003
Audio is going well, have a map of the parameters and should be able to put a wav up soon. I made a little documentation video (15MB MPEG4) of the oracle in action. softVNS tracking is going alright, have not tested and the patch is not yet done. Recangular to polar coords from 0-360 degrees is more difficult than I had expected. Working on it longer today though. Still don't have a projection platform nor a test day. Leaving on the 21st to Vancouver and will not have time to do any other work while I'm there. Installation on the 11th of March... It will happen!
Thu Feb 06 21:33:38 Eastern Standard Time 2003
Audio has not changed yet, tweaked the chaos-engine a bit (so each oracle is calculated consecutivly, before there were gaps). Changed the "image-map" in chaos-engine to an actual screenshot of the oracle patch. I finished tweaking my tcl/tk UDP server to archive all the parameters as the system proceeds. Will tackle tracking in softVNS next and put in the tcp/ip stuff for data communication. (currently "presence placeholder" in the patch) Audio should be coming along, looking forward to meeting when len again, some great samples I heard the last meeting.
Wed Jan 22 15:21:27 Eastern Standard Time 2003
Progress on the Oracle is going very well, just was testing some closer-to reality preformance issues. I've automating my current version to start automatically and ran PD with -rt and -nogui flags. This means there is no GUI overhead because the patch is never represented. -rt means that PD is allowed to take all the CPU from the processor. These tests, without the weather module, which is very low CPU anyhow, but including the 10minuite tween from one element to another and the MIDI signals. PD was split into 3 processes and in total was using 96% CPU on my Duron 800. This is really due to the complexity of the patch itself. (I was toying with the idea today of printing out each module to show the whole system. Will be a lot of work so I'm not sure if I will do it. I put some new screenshots in the symbolic system section. (notice how close to my initial rending the quality actually is)
Mon Jan 20 23:09:31 Eastern Standard Time 2003
I just finished the last of the images (not including the now removed hebrew) So I have 570 images in the database, 114 words in 5 different lanuages. I can see the thing in action with the language switching and everything! Meeting Len next saturday about the audio, I sent him my chaos engine and a windows version of the weather parser.
Sun Jan 12 22:00:26 Eastern Standard Time 2003
Parameters and possible audio manifestations:(Created during last meeting with Len, meeting again on the 25th)
Wind Speed
Wind Direction / People Position - Agreement / Conflict (Granular sampling)
Wind gust
Angle of wind / Angle of people 0-1 (total agreement / opposite) harmony (crossmixing discordant samples)
Temp
Humid
Temp
barometer
Elements (4) crossfade between
Water 45
Fire 135
Earth 225
Air 315
38 words / 3 columns (3object-structure / 1action / 2emotion) / 5 lang. (eng, latin, hindi, arabic, chinese)
obj/structure scale/phrase
emotion key/volume
lang inst/tuning
Sun Dec 15 22:35:12 Eastern Standard Time 2002
Well its been too long since I updated this but thats actually because things have been going so well. Len9 is exited to collaborate on the audio protion of the oracle project. The PD patch for the system is actually finished. This does not include the tie in for tracking nor the weather acqusition. The math to calculate the alpha value for all four video clips based on the wind angle was very complex. The only real serious problem is that the video background stops rendering for 500ms while a new set of words/images load. Only two solutions, one is to have the image_loader is a seperate thread, which would mean rewriting a portion of GEM and doing threads in C++... hmmm not high on the feasibility list for me! The other option is to use three video clips to store all the frames, which sucks becayse it would be a 3D dataset folded into a one dimentional timeline, too many offsets... The other problem with using a video clip to store the words is that the words can't be masked the same way, so the background would not show through. So it looks like the choice is between unantialiased text (at only 640x480 resolution, which will look awful) and having the pause. I'm reminded of Arnaud Dejeames "Drawing Icebergs" where the system took a good 2s to make the 200 sql queries and update the screen with the new data... He did not mind it because it was a reference to the technology and process. For that reason maybe I should not worry so much about it. Also the word database is half complete. I have finished English, Arabic, Chinese. Leaving Latin Hindi and Hebrew. Hebrew is being a real pain, I have found a translator but she is so busy I'm not sure if it will ever get done. Keep the faith right? I have 4 months and I'm easy more than half way done. I've given myself a deadline of Dec 22nd to finish a draft of the proposal to show Oracle as part of the Subtle Technologies conference.
Tue Nov 19 00:22:17 Eastern Standard Time 2002
| Current chaos function manifested in the oracle vocabulary: (Note the repetion) | ||
| explore | journey | seek |
| spiteful | weak | weak |
| slave | slave | slave |
| imagine | imagine | imagine |
| broken | alienated | willful |
| child | child | sister |
Sun Nov 17 19:20:01 Eastern Standard Time 2002
I've scraped the pillow/kneeling idea to do an awfully complex tracking system. This will require another machine, but it does not have to be a $2500 Mac. I found a tracking program called eyesWeb, its free and runs on windows. It does VNS style tracking, but I've not have the opportunity to really test it. It does work though. The oracle's projection will be oriented in such a way that the top points towards North. The system will remain passive until a person(s) gets within a threshold distance from the oracle. At this point the oracle will track those people in the space (by their presence) (if eyesWeb can indeed keep track of multiple points and send out coords seperatly for each. Unless the system can track centers of pressence, in that case it would just send out the average collection position of all the people. Perfect.) This x-y coord data will be converted into polar coords and the angle the people have in relation to the projection will be compared with the angle of the wind direction. If the angle of the people is the same as the angle of the wind this will be interpreted as an agreement with nature. If the people have an angle opposite to the wind then this will correspond to a conflict with nature. This conflict/agreement will be used to seed the initial conditions of the chaos-engine. If also playing with the idea of the conflict/agreement factor effecting the symbolic mix of the four elements, but that may not be sound. I've asked Len if he wants to collaborate with me on the audio, I think this would be the best way to go about it, because I probably will not have time to do it right, and he has the experience to really make it work. I'm currently working on a map of all the chaos parameters and what drives them, will put it in the chaos section and it will stand as the current state of the system. I've put in the y component of a henon attractor as the language selector. There is an image in the chaos-engine section of the distribution of languages. Oh and I've also ported the wx_router.tcl script to commandline, no screenshots yet.
Sun Nov 10 21:01:46 Eastern Standard Time 2002
Been reevaluating the oracle after the thesis presentation. I think that indeed the consciousness's effect on the system should be part of the work. The act of projecting structure into reality needs to be a part of the piece. I think I will use a circuit that Jeff Mann designed to sense subtle changes in the RF feild, should sense the displacment the users have in the space, without a camera and without contact! Tim had some issues with the "oracle" title going too far. In terms of the thing not working as a "real" oracle which tells the future. I think thats too simplistic a view, just because the common use of the word refers to telling the future does not mean I should be bound to it. The oracle is, as every oracle is, a force to guide action. A very different thing than telling the future. Besides who is to say that the system does not know the future. Its a semantically interpretable represenation of the foundation of structure (in my view). I saw Benoit Mandlebrot talk last friday. I asked him what the relationship between chaos math and fractal math is. He said that there is no discontinuity. He also went on to say that he thinks the foundation of fractal patterns in nature are due to chaos (partitial differencial equations in his words). Who knows what this force has to say when it can be interpreted? For me this piece is as much as exploration as it is a scientific visualization, as it is a work of poetry as it is an artwork. Something else Mandlebrot said: Art -> Math -> Science -> Art. This is a cycle here, ideas get passed from one into the other. His argument is that there are countless cultures which create artifacts with the concept of self-similarity. He just took this universal and formalized it.
Mon Nov 04 22:01:46 Eastern Standard Time 2002
I finished the video work today (woo hoo!). Considering I've been working on it for two weeks its nice to finally have out of the way. I put screenshots in the Visual System section. Also did a few more renders of the chaos system in the Chaos Engine section.
Mon Nov 04 00:00:29 Eastern Standard Time 2002
Spent most of this weekend inthe house. Most of the time I was trying to work on the math of the Chaos Engine, I think I've got a model that will choose the words in an interesting way. Take a look at the Chaos Engine page for more details. Above is an image of one of the functions renders. I just now relized that I screwed up the math, I have a 114 words, not a 144^3 cube!!! Arg, so what I need is a 38^3 cube! Rect to Spherical coords worked well, still nice complete paths. Looking forward to more analysis.
Tue Oct 29 19:57:32 Eastern Standard Time 2002
Well It turns out that every time I run the "long term" limit test for rossler*lornez I get a different limit!!! I suppose this should be expected as this thing is supposed to be chaotic! So What am I going to do about it? Well I think the only thing to do would be to use the limits from a few day limit test to scale the values down, say to 500x500x250 and then cap off the limits so that you never get values above 360x360x114. This parameter space is just to choose a word, not a language. I've not figured out how to fit that in, only 6 options, perhaps a very scaled down henon attractor (ikeda?). Something that has been missing off this site is that I started shooting the video of the "elements" I don't have the sound but I knew I had to get on it before it gets too cold! Anyhow I've got footage of air, fire and some earth. Busted a camcorder in the process! ($200 mistake) anyhow all I have is an 8mm tape and no camera, and I'm aiming to shoot the remaing water element tomorrow morning on miniDV. I hope my fire footage turned out... If I'm lucky I may be able to get something captured for the end of day tomorrow. I found the equation to convert 3D rectangular coords into spherical -> as per below. This way the words will weave around one and other in concentric spheres, a much more eligant solution (hence the 360x360x114 space!) I'll have to scan some more images and fill up the "production aspects" pages with material completed.
Sun Oct 27 21:23:46 Eastern Standard Time 2002
Did a long term test of rossler*lorenz to figure out the bounds of the space: -2.37172 < x < 2.43259,-2.90485 < y < 2.94954, -0.10185 < z < 9.53549. Will deform this geometry into a cube so that the variation for each of the axis of words is the equal. Thinking about using a polar coordinate system because a sphere better fits the attractor data than a cube. This way the corners would not be wasted! Hmmmm but how to do the conversion? two angles (x and y) and one distance (z)? So the words sort of knot onto themselves... fits the concept better anyhow! Did you know that I chose the rossler and lorenz equations because #1 they are both continuous, not sections of attractors, and #2 because they are both based on Navier-Stokes fluid convection equations! (used in weather modeling)
Tue Oct 22 01:06:58 Eastern Daylight Time 2002
Finished preproduction proposal tonight. Today I'm leaning towards having abstract musical audio, rather than language. Modeled the long-term behavior of lorenz*rossler changing the initial conditions and variables, looks like a big blob, very dense coverage of the area.
Mon Oct 07 23:57:07 Eastern Daylight Time 2002
I started plugging some estimates to see the scale of the complexity of this project. There are three sentences split into three words each. Each sentence is in one laguage, but the whole narrative is not in any particular language. In order to calculate how many combinations there are I'm using the formula ((38^3)*6)^3 where there are 38 possible words, in a particular language, one digit in a sentence can grab from. Then once you move onto the other sentences in the narrative you get six times more words to choose from (from each of the 6 languages). This leads us to 35,686,677,872,775,168 combinations. If the oracle calculates a new dataset every second then it will take 1,131,617,131 (about 1 billion) years for the oracle to exhaust all of its possible variations. Please note that because the oracle uses a digital approximation of the chaos math it will eventually repeat itself where the actual mathematics will never do so.
Sun Oct 06 07:32:32 Eastern Daylight Time 2002
Well I've not had time to update this in some time, but stuff is moving. To date I have Latin and Hindi translations done. I had a meeting this weekend about the audio. I had been thinking about the audio as only an emotional tone of the project. Now I think what would work best with the project is that the audio was a musical/auditory reflection of the abstract plot provided by the words. Here are the basics of the system I'm thinking about (which may need to be constrained): Each oracle (the oracle's narrative) will have nine words, devided into three sentances. I've decided that each sentence will be in a single language, but the whole narrative would be in multiple languages. I will compose scores for three sections of the plot - The setting (intro) the climax, and the resolution. [Well just as I wrote this I realized what I had in mind doea not make any sense!] To move on the numeric value of the three words will defined the scales of the Percussion, Melody and Harmony of the score. The weaving of the audio in soe narrative form with the audio is going to be the most challanging part of the project. I'm starting to force myself to figure some of it out with Tim's motioin graphics assignment but not enough time to actually finish it. A question is how to deal with the language contraints? Each language would need its own matrix, so how to choose the matrix? Perhaps another attractor clamped down to 7 possible values? 7, ehat else could be used, weather data would not change often enough to keep the languages moving, perhaps the time component? that way I could tune the speed at which the languages switch, but would they just cycle? I guess we'll have to see. Also I have not done a long term attractor test with lorenz*rossler to see what shape it has. (see chaos)
Wed Sep 18 01:44:50 Eastern Daylight Time 2002
Updating the site based on the development in the 1page proposal. Will probably use the languages Chinese, Greek, English, Hebrew and Perhaps Arabic/Turkish/Sanskrit/Hindi. If you Speak any of these languages I want to hear from you! I'm looking for Translators/Cultural Advisors for the project. I'm proposing this project as a lecture/artwork in the 2003 Subtle Technologies Conference.
Tue Sep 10 07:25:26 Eastern Daylight Time 2002
We had our pre-presentation today, worked quite well, nice to have to explain the concept in some concrete form! The bulk of the feedback was about the accesibility of the imagery/language/symbolism. Must give the viewer a point of entry into the system, I think I'll make up a list of words of a certain theme (love, sex, family, violence, navigation, class) and translate those words into a number of languages. In terms of symbols I'm thinking tarrot card imagary as a starting point, loaded symbols with numeric values and associated words. The worry of the content part of the project is coming back today, I will need about a thousand content elements. Hmmm I gotta start this week!