For an upcoming show one of the many problems that I'll need to solve is how to work with multiple machines and multiple operating systems over a network. My current plan for addressing the needs of this production will be to use one machine to drive the interactive media, and then to client two computers for cued media playback. This will allow me to distribute the media playback over several machines while driving the whole system from a single machine. My current plan is to use one Mac Pro to work with live data while slaving two Windows' 7 PCs for traditionally cued media playback. The Mac Pro will drive a Barco, while the PC's each drive a Sanyo projector each. This should give me the best of both worlds in some respects. Distributed playback, similar to WatchOut's approach to media playback, while also allowing for more complex visual manipulation of live-captured video.

In the ever growing list of tools that I'm experimenting with Derivative's TouchDesigner is a tool that time and again keeps coming up as something that's worth learning, experimenting with, and developing competencies around it's work flow. TD is a nodal environmental called a network. Inside of the network nodes can be directly connected by by exporting parameters.

In thinking about how to meet the objectives that I had for this piece, one of my central questions was how to make sure that I could move through three cued scenes – either with manual or automatic triggers. I knew that I had three different aesthetic environments that I wanted to move through. I explored several different options, and the one that ultimately made sense to me given my current level of proficiency (at this point I had only been programming in Touch for a total of three weeks) in TouchDesigner was to use a cross fading approach. Here's what the whole network looks like:

There are always large questions to answer when thinking about creating an interactive work: Who is it for? What does it look likes? What are you trying to communicate? How much instruction do you provide, how little instruction do you provide? And on and on. As I started to think about how this piece was going to work as an installation rather than as a performance apparatus, I started by thinking about what kind of data I could use to drive the visual elements of this work. One of the sensors that I knew I could easily incorporate into my current sculptural configuration was a an iPod Touch. The Touch has an on-board gyroscope and accelerometer. After a conversation with my adviser (Jake Pinholster) we decided that this would be a direction of exploration worth pulling apart, and from there I went back to TouchDesigner to start thinking about how I wanted to incorporate live data into the piece I was making.

Holy challenges Batman. It seems like I'm constantly being humbled by the learning curve of graduate school. This spring one of ASU's productions is Charles Mee's Soot and Spit.

One of the benefits of working with TouchDesigner is the ability to work in 3D. 3D objects are in the family of operators called SOPs – Surface Operators. One of the aesthetic directions that I wanted to explore was the feeling of looking into a long box. The world inside of this box would be characterized by examining artifacts as either particles or waves with a vaguely dual-slit kind of suggestion. With that as a starting point I headed into making the container for these worlds of particles and waves.

Ultimately I don't know how practical this method is, but at the moment it feels like a victory. Creating a time based trigger in TouchDesigner can be accomplished a ton of ways, the method I'm using uses the following CHOPS: LFO, Constant, Count, Trigger.

The set to the same sample rate as the project will cross 0 once per second. The constant indicates the rate at which you wish to count. Count will use the input from the LFO and the Constant to count at the rate specified by the constant every time the LFO crosses 0. This is attached to a trigger CHOP. The trigger's threshold can e set to to the time (in seconds) appropriate for the transition. Bang. A time based triggering method using four CHOPs.

Rough. This whole business is rough.

One of the courses I'm talking this semester is a Media Design course. ASU structures it's courses into three classifications, A, B, and C Sessions. A Sessions course run during the frist half of the semester (the first quarter), B Session courses run the second half the of the semester (the second quarter), and C Session courses run the full length of the semester. The course is a B session course, and is just getting ramped up. The first project is structured around the need that designers frequently face in building assets that are in specific to known period of time. Copy art is one of the many skills that a good media designer needs tucked up his/her sleeve, and this assignment makes a strong case for learning that process.

Media design is an interesting beast in the theatre. Designers are called upon to create digital scenery, interactive installations, abstract imagery, immersive environments, ghost like apparitions, and a whole litany of other illusions or optical candy. The media designer is part system engineer, part installation specialist, and part content creator. This kind of design straddles a very unique part of the theatrical experience as it sits somewhere between the concrete and the ephemeral. We're often asked to create site specific work that relates to the geometry and architecture of the play, and at the same time challenged to explore what can be expressed through sound and light.