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Project Proposal:
Our team project will take the form of a video-wall. The projection screen will essentially become aware of how many viewers are watching it. For every viewer that enters the room, the video feed will sub-divide itself, and provide the new viewer with a personalized window to watch the video. The audio portion of the segment will also increment by one each time a person enters the room. The result will be a conflict in the audio and video signals that each viewer is receiving. For every new viewer that enters the room, the message of the video clip will become harder and harder to discover. Each time a person leaves the room, the screen will lose a sub-division, and one of the audio tracks will be removed, thereby reducing the audio and visual noise within the room.
The content of the video and audio is a collage of news reports and interviews, taken from the morning of the tragic space shuttle accident. We felt that this type of explicit content helped to strengthen our message.
The room will be equipped with motion sensors at its entrance to detect the comings and goings of audience participants. The interactive installation will be driven with Max and Jitter software patches we will design.
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Our project hopes to communicate the difficulties that arise in situations of mass communication. In mass communication, it is virtually impossible to guarantee that the audience/receiver will decode the message in the way that the sender intended. Our installation tries to mimic the frustration of providing clarity in mass communication. The clarity of communication is affected by the viewer’s relationship with other viewers in the room. This is a more explicit substitute for how our relationship with others and our individual experiences in the world tend to color any message we receive and decode from external sources, such as mass media.
Post-Project Analysis
Interactive Design Successes & Complications:
In order to raise issues involving mass communication and the receiving of mixed messages, our team decided to use the visual form of television news media. The original intention was to capture a wide variety of news segments that were covering issues similar to one another. These news segments would then be stitched into a montage in the hopes that they could all be seen as interchangeable pieces of communication - that is, anyone of them could be substituted for another due to the generic nature of their coverage and content.
In a weird twist of fate, on the weekend we planned to capture our source material, the disaster of the space shuttle Columbia occurred, and all the TV channels were covering and broadcasting their version of the story. The footage we captured all came during the first few hours after the disaster, so there seemed to be an extra dose of tension and excitement in the pieces of the news communication. This news footage then became the visual form we used to communicate our intended experience.
The layered audio tracks in combination with the over stimulation of the visuals seemed to work well in the creation of an overwhelming and confusing communication experience, which was emphasised even greater within the small space of the room. The over stimulation of the experience also successfully created a sense of the “spectacle” of mass media.
The interaction of the overall experience, although not technically
perfect seemed to be a good first choice considering our timeframe.
In addition, the interactive nature of our design provided a lot of
inspiration for other similar ideas.
Technical Implementation Successes & Complications:
Unfortunately, once we began working on the programming component of
our installation, we discovered that we were unable to correctly buffer
more than one video file, so this prevented us from being able to re-start
each video clip as someone new entered the room. However, we found
a way of restarting the audio track each time someone else came in,
which turned out to be a success.
We were able to successfully manage to come up with a Max patch to
track user movements in and out of a one door room using Far Reach
sensors. But, the sensors and I-cube proved to be a problem in terms
of sensitivity and the application we were using them for. It would
have been nice to use another sort of tracking method.
Analysis of User Experience:
We noticed
that users seemed to want to get into the room as quick as possible,
however they did not want to stay that long. This was most likely
due to the overwhelming nature of our video and audio samples.
We don’t think the interactive mechanism was all that apparent
to the users, that is, it might not have been clear to them that they
were the cause of more iterations of the audio and visual elements
in the room. The problem with the sensors not working correctly may
have caused the users to be unaware of the movie clip and sound file
being increased and decreased.
Considerations
for Future Iterations/Project Development:
In
the future, it would be nice to try and find a more effective way of
tracking how many people are in the room. If this was possible, we
may then be able to alter the video and audio more dramatically. It may
also be a nice addition to the project if
we were able to display the video on a much larger scale.