An exciting step forward over in Bob King's media lab in Workplace West III today on the UNCSA campus. Ever since ARTStemmers traveled over to Duke University's data visualization and adjacent "sound" lab last August, multiple among us have spoken often of how we might be able to experiment with something like this. Thanks in particular to Bob and Jason Romney, who have met and consulted together a couple of times, a little package of inexpensive equipment was purchased recently--a little software (QLab?), some MIDI cables, some motion capture switches, MIDI board, etc. Today, Bob, Jason, and Dean Wilcox came together to try a first setup and were kind enough to invite me to watch (truth be told--we watched Jason work, with no small degree of awe; best thing is--Jason's a great and patient teacher, so he was able to explain the basic organization of switches, cables, input data, etc.) Long story short--within an hour and half, we had motion sensors feeding data into a computer, and even triggering different sorts of events each time the switch was triggered!
The opportunities for pedagogy and serious play (is there a difference?!) are endless. For Jason, this isn't fancy technology. For me (I won't speak for the others) it's cutting edge and imagination-capturing. The idea of turning human MOTION into DATA and DATA into an EVENT/S . . . that is stunning to me. Do I have a firm idea of what to DO with this? Nope. And we all left the room today saying, "Now we just have to figure out what to do." What could be better?
I know one idea we all agreed on: once we've figured the technology out a little better and do some experiments with it here, we'd love taking the setup over to Reynolds and collaborating w/ our ARTStem colleagues and their students.
Some pix! Enjoy, especially, the sheet of numbers. That's the legacy of Jason teaching us about "bites" and "bits" . . .
