Interactive Electronic Arts

This week I’d like to share my process on how I went about creating my meme remix of good ol’ Walter White and his memorable scenes throughout the Breaking Bad series. My original concept invloved a video series that showed the “transformation” of Walter from season 1 to the series finale. After realizing that anyone who had not seen the show would be furious with my spoiler-ridden project, I chose a more interactive approach. I brainstormed key quotes from the show concernig Walter and put together an interesting collection of snippets that allowed multiple paths to be derived from a primary video-snippet of Walter simply saying “I am”. I used youtube to find mostly all the snippets and edited them all with Camtasia. The short video lengths worked great with the Xbox controller because of the ability to spam the buttons thus creating that “remix feel” as you can see in my demonstration below:

Thankfully the patch was easy to use and I surprisingly found little difficulty in loading my videos into PD (probably due to the fact I edited with Camtasia). Anyway, I had a blast making it and hopefully you all enjoyed my demo in class as well as the lovely video of Walter above.

Here’s my video of my Meme Remix assignment.

What I did for this project was to take just videos from Keyboard Cat and Surprised Kitty, and just the sound from Nyan Cat. I used the base program from the Makey Makey in order to get the keyboard input for the program.

For this assignment I decided to use a Japanese meme, assuming no one else would. Here is the original TV commercial I used.

The commercial shows a high school student who is super motivated to getting into college, but REALLY does not want to study at all. The commercial is supposed to tell you that motivation by itself does not get you into college and you should get tutoring. The way he is shouting and dancing made the commercial a popular meme on the internet among Japanese people. Here is an example of a remix of this meme done by some Japanese person:

Yeah. The dubstep song I decided to use to remix with is Skrillex’s “First Of The Year” and this is the music video for it:

Another remix video that influenced me in using this song is a remix between this and videos of Japanese politicians:

Enough of all the introducing, I will talk about what I’ve done. So when thinking of making a dubstep remix, I figured I should probably cut the song into smaller pieces so that I can playback any part of the song at anytime. But when doing this I needed to focus on making each portion flow smoothly into each other. Luckily (at least for this song), the tempo among the entire song was constant and it was actually fairly easy to cut the song into 10 portions using Audacity. So I brought them into Pure Data and tried out each of the portions. What I found out was very interesting–no matter what order I play each portion, the song seemed to flow quite naturally! Thus, I came to the conclusion that I can automate the dubstep remix by picking a random number between 0 and 9 and choosing the corresponding track portion. Here is the video demonstrating that:

You may notice in the video that while the dubstep is playing, it is sending a bang signal according to the number outputted by the envelope~ object. I used this to automate the banging of the meme video to make the video sync with the  automated dubstep. The only thing I need to do when presenting is just switching the videos (which I could actually automate as well such as getting a random number for each video and a random number for how long to wait between each video switch). Here is the final thing:

Looking at the presentations of my classmates, I really thought it would have been cool using things like game controllers and webcams, but I did not own either and did not have enough time so I just used the keyboard this time. I had a lot of fun doing this remix.

For this project we had to make an interactive “remix” of popular internet memes. Some of my favorite youtube memes are from the youtube channel Schmoyoho. They have a segment of videos that are widely popular where they “songify” stories on the news or other popular youtube memes.

By turning already hilarious videos into songs, they create catchy works of art, and those videos themselves become famous memes. One of their most famous memes is the “Bed Intruder Song”; both the original news story and the version that they auto-tuned into a song are famous, but the Bed Intruder Song alone has over 118,000,00 views, surpassing the original. So you can run and tell that homeboy.

So I picked Schmoyoho’s memes as my material for this assignment. But I wanted to give it a twist: I also decided to do some subliminal messaging in my piece. I focused specifically on fast food.  I sampled from the Schmoyoho memes that had a mention or reference to fast food. My first video meme was the Charles Ramsey “Dead Giveaway” song. Charles Ramsey makes several references to “McDonnalds”, and the way he says it is very comical. But Ramsey is also considered a hero from helping to rescue the 3 women locked in a basement in Ohio. So by Ramsey telling you that he was “Eatin’ my McDonnalds”, he is representing a positive connotation to a hero + fast food. My second video meme was the Dayum Drops songified “Oh my Dayum”. The youtuber Dayum Drops already has a large youtube following based on his ridiculous and over-the-top food reviews. His review of 5 Guys burgers got his review auto-tuned into the song “Oh my Dayum”. It’s another catchy Schmoyoho song, and watching Dayum Drops open that burger wrapper can really make you crave 5  Guys.

So once I had my videos picked out, I decided that I wanted to contrast the Schmoyoho videos by putting them next to the originals. Then I trimmed the clips I wanted in Corel Video Editor to different bits where either Charles Ramsey or Dayum Drops was referencing fast food. I used a text object to display a flashing message at the top stating “Eat fast food – now”. I then trimmed a sound loop and had it play in the background to tie everything together.

I used the patch to connect a controller as input so that you could scratch the videos and enjoy watching Dayum Drops unwrap that 5 Guys burger again and again and again.

[watch the video below]

I connected a ps3 controller to my computer (to use as the controller) via a USB charging cable. I had to use MotioninJoy to properly detect the ps3 controller to serve as input. Interestingly enough, with MotioninJoy I could tell the computer to use the ps3 controller as an X-Box 360 controller. This worked so that the inputs were detected to be the same as the patch we had done in class; which had been set up for an X-Box 360 controller.

In PureData I used “send” and “receive” objects to direct inputs from the ps3 controller to the patch that controlled the video memes. In the video meme patch, I had to strip the audio from the videos, and load it in separately for each video. I had to use .wav files for the audio and .avi files for the video. Avi files were the only things that worked at all for video! I spent so much time figuring that out. Even .mp4 and .mov files wouldn’t play in PureData for me.

But it all came together (magically and after much PureData struggling). My piece represents the influence of fast food in our culture through the medium of internet video memes.

Hey everyone,

I decided to write about the artwork created by Deborah Aschheim, the woman who came in to class the other day. I just want to start off by saying that I thought her ideas were incredible, and I envied how she was able to look at such an abstract idea and visualize it in a potentially even more abstract way. Her work in Fuller, for example, doesn’t look like anything much without any context. It looks like a bunch of lights strung up with screens in random spots, but looking at it now with more insight, the beauty of the piece stands out. The look of neurons and nodes is a cool aspect of her art and is shown in everything she does.

The building collective memory of Nixon project was also very nifty because it was an expanding project which started from a few drawn pictures. The idea of a piece growing with more community input is another very awesome trait which Deborah uses in her work.

In all, I really liked her work and am excited to see some other pieces of art she has created.

After doing some brief research on interactive public artworks, I came across two artists; one named Joe O’Connell, and the other named Blessing Hancock. These two work together in a partnership to create art where interactivity plays a huge role. Taken from their website; “Joe is a technologist with an interest in living systems; Blessing is a sculptor with an interest in machines”. 

Together, along with 14 other skilled workers at their Creative Machines Inc. location in Tucson, Arizona, Joe and Blessing have created numerous works of art. Annually, they have raked in roughly $1.1 million from their clients throughout the world.

One work of art that really caught my eye was their piece titled “Heart Beacon”. Standing tall with the dimensions of 9′ x 9′ x 18′, this piece of art is displayed at the Emergency Coordination Center in Portland, Oregon.

“Heart Beacon is an interactive enclosure of light, color and sound that senses and artistically displays the heartbeats of visitors who lay their hands on the piece. This highly interactive sculpture takes the literal and metaphoric ‘pulse’ of the Portland community. The sculpture takes inspiration from the life-saving mission of the Emergency Coordination Center.”

The most successful part of this piece is that the concept really engages the viewer into the work. Depending on their pulse, the color of the structure will physically change. This would make the viewer/user feel as though they are having a direct impact on what they are seeing. I am interested in seeing how the structure will react with multiple people touching it at once. At night, this must present a beautiful view.

Something that might add in a big way to this sculpture would be if it would emit sounds that would correlate to the color that is projected. I feel as though this would heavily add to the atmosphere and mood around the work, and the impact on the viewer. This sound would have to only be audible from inside the sculpture, as you would not want to pollute the entire surrounding area with sound.

I wish that there were pieces of interactive work like this around in Massachusetts/ the North East. It would bring life to communities, and possibly inspire others to see what is capable of art with todays technology.

-Dan Driggs

source: http://www.jbpublicart.com/ 

When Deborah Aschheim came to our class, her presentation was very interesting. She is very obviously a passionate person, who is willing to stick to what she wants. I have a friend who worked on the project in Fuller so I was aware of the artwork, but actually having the artist explain what she was going for gave me a whole new perspective on the meaning of the piece. I can appreciate the ‘Memory Space’ much better now.

I’d like to use this blog post to reflect on our guest speaker Deborah Aschheim and the work she presented. First I would like to say that Deborah’s passion and dedication for her work really presented itself well. She gave me a great understanding of what it’s like to immerse yourself completely  in your work and career. I aspire to be that dedicated to my career one day.

Deborah also gave me a complete understanding of the artwork found along the staircase of Fuller. The inspiration used for that art was nothing like anything I  had heard of before. She dissected her memories piece by piece and used every little fragment as a link in a chain, causing each chain to culminate into one general memory. I found it very fascinating that this work of art that I had previously only glanced at a few times represented such an important piece of someones life. I would also like to accommodate Deborah on her efficiency  of materials used to create the entire project. Her use of Bed Bath & Beyond bath pillows and her quoted “alcoholic” ice cubes gave the piece a simplistic feel as well as a very workable budget.

I am very glad to have been able to meet her and learn about her work ethics as well as her morals. She seemed to be able to communicate to students on a level most professors aren’t capable of reaching and she did it very well. Her extensive interest in human memories sparked an interest of my own.

Hey everyone!

This week I wanted to talk about the presentation we had last Thursday. Deborah Aschheim is the artist that created the sculptures that are displayed going down the stairs in Fuller. I found her work to be very fascinating and unique. Never before had I looked at memory as inspiration for an art piece. Deborah was very passionate about her work; I can tell that she is a very dedicated artist. Her descriptions of her piece made me look deeper into the themes and find beauty in something as simple as President Nixon. Deborah inspired me to look at things in another dimension.

When Deborah first began her presentation about her art with memory I was quite confused. How can you turn memory into art? I could understand taking a memory and using it as an inspiration but Deborah dissected the concept of memory. Her work focused on every sense that was retrieved in the moment of the memory. Was there a song playing? Did the house smell like a homemade meal? Was my polyester  sweater itchy around the collar?  Each detail of Deborah’s memory then became a node in a model of hundreds of them. This form of art is a new concept to me and has given me a greater respect for artists.

I found Deborah’s presentation to be extremely interesting. Is he inspired me to not look at things in the manner they are used. I am hoping to look at the next project with Deborah’s mindset and really surprise you all with something great.

I was very intrigued by the guest artist Deborah Aschheim who came to class on Thursday.

I remembered her from a couple of years ago when she had come to WPI to commission an art piece in Fuller Labs. I had never really understood what her work was exactly, so it was interesting to get the chance to talk with her and have her tell us her perspective.  The piece was inspired from Deborah’s fascination with memories.

In class, she explained to us about her interest in Cognitive Psychology, and how humans have the ability to create memories from nothing, and that memory is still something that we don’t fully understand.  She told us about this “artificial” memory she had had from a photograph of her from when she was little. By remembering the photograph, she made up a memory from when she was IN the photograph—when in fact, she was too young at the time to have remembered it at all.

Deborah beginning her art piece on the stairs of Fuller Labs

That is when Deborah got the idea to make these sculptures, one of which is the same sculpture in Fuller Labs.  The piece is composed of different segments, and each main segment has a little display that is playing some sort of video.  Some of the parts of the sculpture were connected to video-feeds, as if the walls in Fuller Labs could see and make memories.  Other video clips were taken from various places throughout the building, and played on the screens.  Some of these videos were direct screen capture that was recorded from a PC in Fuller that someone had been using.  Others were scenes from a classroom.  The piece gives you many different flavors of what the building that is “Fuller Labs” has to offer.

Just so you can really understand, I’ve included a close-up photo below of how Deborah’s little video “hubs” looked. You can see some of the different video clips that these devices were constantly playing.

A section of the piece in Fuller. Each “hub” has a mini screen inside that each play a different video clip. These are supposed to be “living memories”.

One of the main things I found so interesting about Deborah, is that right away she told us she had a “Nixon obsession”. I wasn’t sure exactly what this meant at first, but she explained that she had grown up in the era of President Richard Nixon. And when she was young, the political turmoil of that time had had quite an effect on her.  She was fascinated by the Watergate Scandal, the violent acts against the Ohio students at Kent State, and the event of the only president in American history to ever resign.  Deborah shared with us how she would constantly draw scenes from old photographs from these times, as if tracing the images would somehow allow her to eventually make sense of this.

I truly loved this about Deborah. You can get a feel for her innate sense of curiosity; which is crucial in an artist.  I could relate to her looking at public figures and wanting to understand who they really are. What do they think like?  What was crossing Nixon’s mind when he had to announce his resignation? It’s easy to forget how those who are famous are still people, and honestly, are not all that different from us. Wanting to understand them on a personal level, where you could justify their thoughts and actions, is an interesting, complex, and yet understandable vendetta.

On Deborah’s website she has a section on “Involuntary Memories”, which are about her Nixon fascination. I enjoyed going through these and reading through the different stories and images, so I’ve attached a link to it here.

http://www.deborahaschheim.com/collections/view/346