Seek and run around a lot

So I ran around the entirety of Botany Town Centre on Sunday in search of an oven tray to wire up and tap dance on. This proved to be completely unsuccessful so I ended up calling a few hardware stores who informed me that they only had corrugated sheets of metal. Just as my time was running out, I discovered in a dusty corner of my workplace a large metal board on which I think there were once magnets stuck to. As it has been in our store longer than I have been working there (almost two years), I figured it was alright to borrow. I dug my tap shoes out of an equally dusty corner of my room and started attempts to make sure they all wired up properly. I was very pleased that both creating the animata the programming didn't take as much time (or sanity!) as I thought it would and I have the basic concept of my programming done. Successfully managed to wire up my tap shoes by unscrewing the metal plates and running the wire underneath then up through the hole with the screw. It was then I discovered that the metal plate didn't actually conduct due to a layer of paint. After hunting down some sandpaper and scrubbing at it for an hour, I managed to get it conducting. This was later fixed up with an electric sander which put my manual sanding efforts to shame. After this it was only a matter of tidying up my programming, making final tweaks and attempting to make my mess of wires a little more aesthetically presentable.

Faced a slight problem on morning of presentation when I managed to cut clean through the wire with my tap shoe so a quick reqiring and change in technique made my presentation go relatively smoothly. I enjoyed seeing what others who presented had managed to come up with but wished that there'd been more. As with the first animata project, I liked seeing people's personalities and interests come through in their ideas, music and how people relate to it being a common idea. The first ideas which always came to me around movement were that of dancing as within dance, there is a huge scope for variety of movement. I really liked the presentation which converted the physicality of the movement, in the idea of the strength excerted in lifting weights into an animation of arm wrestling which conveys that strength and physical tension, while also making it varible and interactive.

Was overall very pleased with my outcome for this section of the project, in conception, production and presentation and I thoroughly enjoyed the process. I still feel my concept was a little simple but limited myself to work from the simple upwards depending on time constraint which is what did limit me in the end. Regardless, visual documentation of my final sort of interface and movement is as follows in three videos to give an idea of the relationship between the foot/dance movements and the effect on the skeleton.

Not sure if I jumped the gun a bit on the next part of the project which looks more at the synthesis and relationship of the input fromm the human interface with the visual aesthetic and what it controls on screen as I tried to make these link together in my theme of 'Dancing Dead.' Yet I am still feeling a little overwhelmed by the next part of this project and the short time frame.

For the first time in this course I feel like I've hit my first block of ideas, so far I've always had something come to me which I've run with, developed, modified and refined but always around one initial 'ta-da', lightbulb moment. Have a few sort of ideas at the moment which I need to research into tomorrow in hopes of generating one of them into something real. I think it is as we keep increasing variables that I am starting to lose sight of the big picture and lack a real starting point. Like, at first it was the animata, then it was the animata with programming and HI, then it was the animata with the programming of the wearable HI and now it is all that linked in a cohesive idea and instead of animata, the introduction of video provides a much larger scope for visual representation.

Still feeling quite buzzed about it, just waiting for my lightbulb moment.