Waves heading for Essex coast
It’s Thursday morning, and the calm before the storm. Waves, out latest kinetic light installation, opens in Southend, Essex on Monday night, and given all the rigmarole of putting on one of these events, today marks the last full day that I’ll have to tweak the software. It’s another piece written entirely in Max/MSP/Jitter, and an opportunity to put some of the development work that’s been going on behind the scenes into practice. Specifically, looking back at ‘Flock’ and ‘The Hive’, I’ve come to the conclusion that the most engaging types of projected environment are those where there is a more fluid interaction between bodies in the space, and the imagery they create. If the light just responds to you in the same way, whatever you do, it quickly becomes predictable: if you can introduce virtual physical environments that the lights appear to inhabit, you can open up a whole new level of discovery and engagement for the participants.
In the past, I’ve used newtonian physics, some elements of magentic behaviour, and very basic fluid dynamics to create models for these environments, but on a large scale, the processing required to run these simluations at a good resolution becomes pretty intense. Fortunately, for the brave, Jitter allows you to use the power of the graphics card to take the strain off the computer’s main processor. Graphics cards and their GPUs, pushed forward in development by the demands of the gaming and scientific industries, have leaped ahead of CPUs in terms of speed when dealing with large blocks of data. In ‘Waves’, I’ve begun to harness this power to create much more detailed simulations, and, I hope, more engaging environments for the participants. The proof of the pudding, as they say, is in the projection onto 100 sq. m of pavement in Southend. We’ll see what happens…