Technology weekend!

Following on from my last post, this weekend was spent in the lodge at Saltwell park, Gateshead continuing preparations for Enchanted parks 2011. I was providing support for some of the artists on this years event, as well as being involved in our own installation as Filament, to read the back story follow this link “Enchanted Buttons‘.

Saturday was spent bringing together the different elements for the install, which finally we had in the same place for the first time. Rigging the buttons to the vvvv patch worked first time and with a little bit of tinkering sending dmx commands to trigger the Swisson worked third time, rather satisfying. A few mods need to be made to make the buttons fit the plinths but everything was coming together, just the LED dimmer for the button lights to install, install the sound card and program the lighting sequences which were looked after by Neil & Steve.

MultiMinded & Bloom were another project I gave a bit of advice to and provided some equipment to for their piece. Their installation involved timed synchronised video, and lighting comprising of 2 projected screens as well as immersive lighting in the trees, linking the screens together. At-least thats what had been described and I’m hoping to see it when I get home this weekend. After a few exchanges of emails about the best way to realise this I suggested using vvvv or Quartz Composer, a week later I got a mail from Martin Davies of Bloom Studio letting me know the decision to go with vvvv and a link to a video of the patch. I was impressed, good quick work in a short space of time.

Finally I was lending a hand to Lucy Walters who is doing Fine Art at Newcastle University and presenting a 3 screen synchronised video piece at this years event. We spent the sunday getting the footage from Lucy’s PC onto my Mac mini triple screen playback rig. Something I hadn’t encountered for a while was trouble getting large files (over 3gb) from a PC to a Mac. There was a weirdness in trying to write the file to any mac formatted memory stick/hard drive from the PC ,and the only way to get it over, was on a windows formatted hard drive and read this drive on the mac, now how exciting was that! Anyway, once that was sorted we tested the setup on a triple monitor setup, and then setup Lucy’s custom picture-frame rear projection screens. Everything worked as expected and was automatically played back from a simple custom Quartz patch on startup. Ms Walters looking rather happy, or a little stir crazy with here piece set up in the lodge  🙂

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