asli sevinc

After presenting at the Crit Group and talking to other people about my project and working on it for a while, I realized that there is something incoherent about it. A lot of people have a hard time imagining the connection between the ladders and the patterns. It’s concerning me too. I’m not sure if I know how it’s going to come together in the end. I’ve been programming the patterns I like the most and it’s taking forever and not really moving towards the way I want them to. I’m struggling with the image I have in my mind. Is there any?

Couple weeks later, I’m starting to panic. In two weeks, we’ll have our midterm reviews and I don’t like what I’ve done so far.

I decided to move away from the patterns for a while now. I want to think more about what could be interesting to manipulate by climbing up and down a ladder, using the physicality of the ladder. I came up with new ideas:

• Using Google street view to:

-walk around cities from around the world

-take snapshots and add my images onto them

-recreating street paths from movie scenes that I are special to me

[Street with a View by Robin Hewlett and Ben Kinsley]

[Google Street Views by John Rafman]

• Choose few buildings and take pictures of each floor from outside (from an elevator or fire escape) and as you climb the ladder, you slowly rise up to the top of the building, creating the feeling of elevation

• Take pictures of the city from each floor of chosen buildings (one including IAC) and climb the ladder to the very top

• Take high resolution pictures of objects (books, chairs,  and try to create the illusion of climbing them, making the audience feel tiny.  [Alice in Wonderland]

It’s a Friday night and all I could think about was go home, think about and work on my Big Screens project. Also I really wanted to write these ideas down and take them out of my head and see what they sound like on paper. And to highlight that I’m slowly turning the panic knob on, aaaaaaa!

I’ll keep updating this post in the coming days and weeks..

From the very beginning, the two Big Challenges I wanted to explore for Big Screens were interactivity and performance. I asked these questions to myself over and over:

• How can you engage the audience in a meaningful interaction without chaos and in a new, original way?
• How can the interaction with the screen, with the images on the screen, with the sound and/or with the performers be fully connected and interesting?
• What will be the role of the performers? Will the crowd be the performers or will there be separate performers that the audience can watch?
• What are the new ways in which I can create physical, non-mobile based interaction tools? Physical computing, sound or camera vision?
• What is going to be my inspiration? What is a content that is close to my heart, yet beautiful and plentiful? What is the content that will keep feeding the work throughout the project and keep adding something fresh to itself, even in the last week before the Big Night?
• How can the piece be abstract and yet, meaningful and interesting to the audience?
• How will the process surpass the night? How will the process of creating this work be more important than the performance night?

• Adi, Filippo and I spent hours brainstorming in the past three weeks. It was extremely helpful for me to process, form and re-form my idea. Even though I’m very nervous about working on my own, I know I’m very excited to see my final piece on the screens and that motivates me a lot.

So here is what I propose:

I want to bring in New York to the screens, by way of using her countless patterns. The patterns on her ground, on her buildings, on her bridges, on her doors, on her trains.. I want to mix and overlay and remix the patterns with each other and create a collage that I will keep feeding all throughout the semester.

There are a few ways I want to create interaction, from which I will have to choose one:

• Place 3 to 5 ladders in front of the screens. They are a reference to fire-escape ladders in New York. Have people from the audience or performers climb the ladders to control, change, warp, manipulate the images on the screen. DREAM: Control sound as well.

* Sensors: Range sensors on top or Force sensors on the steps

• Build 3 to 5 free-standing pulley structures in front of the screens / distributed amongst the crowd. Have people from the audience or performers pull the ropes to control, change, warp, manipulate the images on the screen. DREAM: Control sound as well.

* Sensors: Custom stretch sensors