User:Zalán Szakács/4thsemesterassessment
WHAT HAVE I DONE?
Thesis Research
- Diving deep into Media Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing
- Trying to understand the mysterious world of Phantasmagorias
Thesis
- How are media objects interpreted as phantasmagoria in the contemporary context? – Thesis Outline
- Imaginary & Real – Chapter I
Graduation Project
How does the concept relates to the original Phantasmagorias?
- Historical reenactment ↔ historical timeline → current times → Robertson → Schöpfer → Kircher → Antiquity (Roman and Greek times)
- Using the same tools → dark room, light and not showing the machine behind the magic
- Using dark feelings of telling a story
- Both phenomenas were presented in the entertainment environment → using the club context as experimentation field
- Circular spatial setup like at the séances of German magician Johann Georg Schröpfer, not allowing to enter the middle circle for the audience
- Using smoke as a projection display as Edme-Gilles Guyot, Johann Georg Schröpfer and Robertson used it
How does it relates to publishing?
- Publishing = presenting a story to the audience
- New ways of storytelling through creating atmospheres through light and sound
- Storytelling → collective experience from the past
- Rituals were often collective experiences
- The reason of installation controlling the whole environment (whole narrative)
Why is it worth to make it public?
- Using fear and manipulation and mystery to bound people
- Through collective experience the audiences learns about the senses and new body awareness
- We are in the information age → technology (lack of embodiedness) → interaction with screens → individual experience feels too detached to people → important to look → experience that counterpoising this action through a collective embodied actions
How I am going to create it?
- Creating a script (at which moment what is going to happen)
- Using puredate software for creating the visuals that will react to sound
- Creating different audio visual disorientation methods
- Using 4D soundsystem
How can I create a public around it?
- Using the club location as experimentation field → presenting in that context
- Hybrid audience
- Changing the perception
- Experimenting with the space
- Test Event in end of January 2019 → first testing of the first part in front of the audience → questionary about their collective experience → formulating my further concept around the answers
Prototyping
- Learned about circuits
- Setting up an Arduino + Adafruit Neopixel RGB LED strip
- Experiments with lenses and light beams
- Building a circuit for 4 Adafruit Neopixel LED strips
- Building a software setup to connect live MadMapper input to 4 Adafruit Neopixel LED strips
- Experimenting with Jem Compact Hazer Pro (haze machine) + plano convex lenses + 4 Adafruit Neopixel LED strips
- Experimenting with Jem Compact Hazer Pro (haze machine) + opaque acrylic sheets + 4 Adafruit Neopixel LED strips
WHAT HAVE I LEARNED?
- Prototyping
- Basics into Arduino / Processing / MadMapper
- The importance of the right hardware
- Finding a good prototyping working method → Dark Lab in the basement
- Reflects always on the experiments and try to find new solutions
- Trust in failures → gives new ways of critical thinking
- Take time to experience the experiments → look from different angles
- One experiment leads to the next experiment → you can't jump a few steps ahead
- Having discipline for learning new programming languages and hardware
- Thesis
- How to do a theoretical research?
- Where to find trustworthy sources?
- How to use the Harvard annotation method?
- How to stay focussed while writing (switching off the internet)
- How to draw conclusion and compare different opinions
- How to find the core essence of the text
- Concept
- Don't make overambitious plans, that you're not capable to realise due technical, practical and financial issues
- Don't combine too many references together
- Stay sharp to yourself and ask the critical questions
- Finding a good link of combining the research + concept with the prototyping to crystallise the story
- Trust your first intuition during the conceptualisation phase of the project
- Better time planning (calendar) of the project - to do lists
WHAT DID I ACHIEVED FROM MY 1ST + 2ND + 3RD TRIMESTER WISHLIST?
- Graduation project this year → live generated 3D environments
- Creative coding, light - space installations, audiovisual performances delivered from a strong conceptual, technological (software - creative coding) and aesthetic foundation
- Wiki structure to use for documenting the process
- Using raspberry Pi in forms of installations as well
- Creative coding and spatial light design installation
- Developing a deeper understanding of sound visualisation
- Diving into pure data
- The way of thinking in code
WHERE DO I WANT TO GO?
- learning more how to think in code and realise my ideas
- Developing a deeper understanding of sound visualisation
- learning pure data + GEM (Graphics Environment for Multimedia (external plugin))
- creating audiovisual light installations
WHY?
- establishing my own artistic and design practice after finishing at Piet Zwart Institute → focussing on research and creation of audiovisual light installations with a strong focus on technology, critical thinking and aesthetics