Github Repo

CPSC-334/final-proj at main · risxyang/CPSC-334

Concept

There are quite a few strands of thought that went into this project:

• I’ve been wanting to create a night-themed installation for a while! I mentioned this to Alana once as we were walking back from the CEID after midnight, and we were appreciating how calm and quiet it was outside. I’ve always wished I could be out and about at night without worrying about my safety. So, after the Module 2 presentations, for which a few people in the class had exploratory / environment-building / digital-world-traversing themes in their projects, I was wondering if I could create a small pocket of the night in which I could freely exist within the beauty of the environment.

• When I was in Beijing during Summer 2019, my friends and I came upon this public park that was lit up really beautifully at night:

  

  I was amazed at how little you had to do (some strong lighting) in order to completely transform the way a space can feel. We told all our friends about it, and they went the next day to try and see it, but the lights turn off after a certain hour, so they missed it, and all they saw was some trees completely shrouded in darkness... so they thought we were making this up! “There was a park full of purple trees! We swear!” Like, It does sound fake.

• I’ve relapsed into bringing in more concepts/terminology from my Animation readings. This is what happens when I take exactly one(1) humanities class in a semester...

  • The sculptural and projected elements are inspired by Hayao Miyazaki’s films!
  • My project references an argument by Thomas Lamarre, from The Anime Machine: that Miyazaki’s films exemplify an “animetic” way of moving through space as opposed to the “cinematic” tendency. All media can exhibit both tendencies. Cinematism, in his view, entails a way of perception that establishes control on the world — a “ballistic” mode of perception that might “align a camera with a projectile that moves through space”; emphasizing one-point-perspective; “a single subject ordering the world into motion” (quoting my Prof. and lecture notes here). Animetism, by constrast, has a “different conception of space,” separating the image into many planes, using movement between surfaces, not privileging a single perspective commanding the world. The distance between these planes is referred to as the animetic interval. What this implies in Miyazaki’s films, some of which are described as environmental epics, is that he envisions a way of living with nature that isn’t just conquering.
  • The motif of flight comes up very often in Miyazaki’s films, as flying machines represent the extreme capacities of humans to create technology that inspires wonder and joy as well as technology that can destroy us all (those same flying machines as carriers of WMDs.).

• In terms of the technical components:

  • I was interested in creating a more elaborate enclosure this time! Looking back at my M3 project, I really liked how the projected image interacted with the physical enclosure, and I wanted to try this effect again... but better!
  • I wanted to combine multiple sensors into a sensor array/matrix/pad, so that I could consider all values together, or in interaction with each other, to increase the possible states that could affect visual output.

Process

Enclosure

I settled on two main enclosed components: 1) the sensorpad, and 2), the forest sculpture. The third component would just be my Raspberry Pi + a Projector hanging out on the ceiling, pointing down towards the sculpture. Ideally I would want some projection-mapping to happen.

I started out by sketching out the enclosures:

I started out very ambitious with the number of photoresistors I thought I could hook up (25? 16?) But I realized that I could only hook up 6 PRs max to ADC1 pins on the ESP32, if I wanted to transmit data over Wifi as well. So I realized that 5 would make an MVP (Corners), and 9 would be the best I could do if I could get 2 ESPs working.

I also thought I might want to use mostly LEDs for the lighting effect. I had the idea of mapping regions on the sensorpad to regions at the base of the sculpture, so if you hovered over the NW sensor then the NW region of the sculpture would light up. But 1) this seemed much too 1:1 for me (even though the interactivity I devised later on was still, pretty much, 1:1) and 2) I was yet unfamiliar with LEDs and was afraid I could not manage this. So! I assumed that projection would comprise most of the lighting effects of this project, and I asked Scott if I could spend my final project course funding on a pocket projector. Unbeknownst to myself then, a few days later I would also manage to figure out LEDs and integrate them into my sculpture...

For starters, here I am trying to figure out dimensions for the sensorpad and the sculpture:

I was using battery packs which are 6” lengthwise, so I resized these enclosures to be able to accommodate them. Small regret: I settled on a 6.5x6.5” base, but I forgot that when you plug things into the battery, the cable takes up some space as well; I should have done 7x7” at least. So space was tight, and this may have contributed to issues down the road, which I will talk about soon.