Experiments

Get User Voice – Full code

This is the code used in the final version of Get User Voice that was presented as part of Tentacular Voice: A Solo Exhibition. Utilising JavaScript to create an interactivity between the frequency value from a computer’s internal microphone and the rotation of a .obj file. Also incorporated is an exported layered animation from Blender that is triggered using the keyboard keys F, G and H.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Animation Reaction to Audio Frequency of Mic Audio 1</title>

.info{
color: #fff;
text-align: center;
position: absolute;
top: 0;
box-sizing: border-box;
width: 100%;
padding: 5px;
}
</style>

</head>

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Research

Exhibition – Potential Space

After much stress over trying to find an exhibition space in order to showcase the work from my Final Project I finally found St Mary’s Guildhall on Lincoln High Street, after getting in touch with them they let me know the space was available on the dates I wanted (6-8 October) and would cost £100 for the three days. I went to look round the space and the lower hall is a good possible space that has a large space in the centre of the room and interesting walls that can be projected onto. Also by using the lower hall it creates an effective flow through from the entrance and makes it easier to keep an eye on this during the opening times of the exhibition. As they entrust the keys with you the space can be open when you want it, allowing me to have an opening event on Thursday 6 October and then just open in the days on Friday 7 and Saturday 8 October.

Initial thoughts are to have the sculptural elements on plinths in the centre of the space and then the projection of the interaction JavaScript animation on one wall and the 3D animation edit on another. There could potentially be space to include some work in progress pieces from Project 1 and Project 2, or these could be placed in the entrance area to lead people into the final work.

The next steps are to confirm the booking of the venue and then promote it, I will need to decide on a name and branding for the show and then send invites out on social media and perhaps the creation of a small brochure to accompany it.

Lower Hall:

Upper Hall:

Experiments

Plastic Tentacles

In exploring the plasticity of the body the physical use of plastics became an interesting route to experiment with as a material. The voice itself is fleshy, viscous, it stretches outwards, it’s textured by the body, it has an elasticity that can take and give shape. Plastic and especially silicone has the ability to communicate these characteristics and here I have experimented in the creation of a tentacle in silicone. To begin I made a mould by using a modelling balloon as a base and copying this shape in paper mache, then the silicone was poured into this mould to form the main structure of the tentacle. For the suckers I created barriers out of modelling clay to pour silicone into that then adhered to the silicone of the main structure. Finally silicone was poured from the tip to drip down over the structure in layers of gradiented colours. Altogether this created a sculpture that was horrific in its viscosity and makes you feel slightly uncomfortable. The colours used (red, yellow, flesh and white) are mixed in different ways to created the different fleshy tones found both inside and outside the body.

I hope to produce four silicone tentacles that can be incorporated with the 3D printed sculpture as a central focal point to the body of work.

Experiments

3D Printed Synthetic Human

As an exploration into the plasticity of the body the creation of a 3D printed sculpture, showing the intensity of the voice as a physical and horrific stress by re-imagining it as a force that moves outwards searching for input from its environment, effectively takes this translation from flesh to plastic. The 3D printed sculpture is of a previous experiment to imagine this intensity by focusing in on the mouth and transforming the tongue, teeth, oral cavity into that of a tentacle reaching out in order to bring the body into the world. By printing this in clear it reduces the body and the voice down to the same level, allowing them to exist without the textures that would normally define them. The scale compared to previous 3D printing experiments is exaggerated, previously this has been to a 1:1 scale with the human face but for this sculpture the scale was increased to further communicate the translation away from the human and towards the synthetic. To print the sculpture at this side meant splitting it into sections, the mouth was printed first and then the tentacle in two parts. The second tentacle that wraps around the front of the face is still being printed after a couple of attempts didn’t work properly. This again will be printed in parts and then assembled around the main structure of the mouth.

Experiments

3D Animation Edit

As a continuation of the experiments in physics simulations and an accompanying piece to a full 3D printed sculpture I created a short edit of an animation using the face and tentacles wrapping round, the face and tentacles linked through the mouth, a tentacle on its own and one with the chain wrapped round. This animation places the camera in the centre with the objects positioned in a circle around it. The camera then utilities close up shots to show you pieces of the object building up through the animation, giving you a framed section out of context and asking you to fill in the blanks. This when placed with the full 3D printed sculpture allows you to go from one to the other to see the full object and explore it from different angles.

The next step with this is to potentially incorporate sound based on the human voice, this will need to sound viscous and fleshy, distorted in a way you encounter it as a substance rather than an object.

Experiments

JavaScript Blender Animation – Mic Input

As part of the next stage in my experiments in JavaScript was to attempt to connect the microphone frequency interaction with the blender animation, originally I had wanted the animation to be triggered by the microphone frequency and after multiple tries at coding this I unfortunately could not figure out how to call the animation based on the frequency value and then render both this and the interaction together. I will continue to look into how this could be connected, but in the meantime I managed to combine both aspects separately. For this I included the microphone interaction of the rotation of the mouth depending on the frequency value with the playing of the different blender animation states. To refine this I kept just the one mouth and split this into two parts that can be rotated separately to give the effect of the mouth moving and attempting to speak. I assigned each part a separate frequency value to trigger its movement, the top part reacts to the mid-range while the bottom the low frequencies. This results in a mouth movement which is quite natural with the bottom jittering much more like its chattering on a low murmur. Coupled with the blender animation the final effect gives the sense of the intensity of the voice (the tentacle) wrapping round and attempting to stop the mouth (the body) from extending itself into the world.

Research

Reflections on Polyculture

On Wednesday 10 August I also went along to Jonathan Trayte’s Polyculture exhibition at The Tetley in Leeds, this exhibition was a pleasant surprise and consisted of garish and visceral sculptures inspired by food and the horrors of the food industry. The initial room of the exhibition immediately hit you with this horror, presenting here a mammoth cucumber sculpture covered with with a thick outer layer like it had been polyfillered in multiple layers before painted in an insipid green. Next to this stood a giant inflatable column, the material of which looked slight like sweet potato but misshapen and discoloured. Littered in between were many concrete sculptures of squash, void of colour and appearing as if decomposing. All of these provided an excellent start to the remainder of the exhibition housed in various adjoining rooms off this. Within these you got the sense more of the inspiration of the horrors of the food industry, where food items are made to look the most pleasing to the eye and seemingly engineered to be pretty over actually tasting nice. One of the rooms I found particularly interesting included what looked like sausages hanging from a round frame, but instead of what we would normally expect these appeared candy pink and encased in a translucent pink latex casting and elongated in form. The effect of these ‘sausages’ was similar to that which I am hoping to achieve with the tentacle output of my project, to appear beautiful yet horrific and give the viewer a supremely visceral and fleshy encounter with the ‘body’.

Research

Reflections on The Body Extended

On Wednesday 10 August I visited The Body Extended: Sculpture and Prosthetics exhibition at Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, this was a relatively small exhibition that centred on how humans have sought to extend and supplement the body through various devices. This included prostheses in the scientific sense, showing examples from history and how bodies which were fragmented through things such as war and reconfigured. Presenting these medical prosthetics as sculptures in their own right transforms how you view them and you begin to see them existing as beautiful objects outside of the horrors of their intended use. The overall layout of the exhibition consisted of three rooms that led on from one another, but this did leave you expecting more and the spaces themselves were quite densely packed together. The flow from historical medical prostheses to contemporary interpretations of extending the body beyond its biological limits was interesting. The change of space and lighting added to this to give the sense of a transition through a way of thinking, the middle room which contained pieces where new materials and new ideas of the body were presented appeared much brighter. The works in this space were the most interesting to me, Louise Bourgeois’ ‘Henriette’ (1985) dominated the room suspended in the middle and firmly the epicentre. Surrounding this were pieces where materiality was the main focus including Rebecca Horn’s ‘Moveable Shoulder Extensions’ (1971) and ‘Finger Gloves’ (1974), these used sculpture in terms of clothing extensions to the body to exaggerate an isolated area in order to evolve its function. These both show the pushing of the body to improve upon an action already possible and also as a tongue-in-cheek comment on our search for these improvements.

The main piece I was drawn to was Matthew Barney’s ‘The Cabinet of Bessie Gilmore’ (1999), this sculpture used materials to evoke the macabre. Salt, nylon, Vivak, prosthetic plastic and epoxy resin in a nylon and acrylic vitrine were used to create the sculpture that consists of a curved clear plastic corset, a rock of salt over which plastic tubing is draped and finally ends in plastic flats for feet. The glass cabinet that houses it gives the effect of an open casket coffin and we’re the voyeur having a good look. These elements all come together to appear equally erotic and horrific as well as medical, cold and clinical. The visual, while giving the sense of the body, didn’t keep the form of it in its tradition sense. The body was disassembled and reassembled to only show the parts it needed to for the mind to fill in the rest. This exclusion of elements and the re-interpretation of their form mimics what I am attempting to achieve in my project, the extension of the body through a new moulded plasticity that is horrific in its revelations of the human body.

Experiments

JavaScript Blender Animation – Multiple

As a next experiment in using Blender animations in JavaScript was to export two levels of animations that can then be switched between through the inclusion of buttons and call actions. Initially I needed to first learn how to set up multiple levels of animations in Blender, achieved through using the dope sheet and the action editor. I created an animation for the wrapping of the tentacle around the mouth and then another that was the tentacle undulating poised for action. Then in JavaScript this meant setting up the two levels with the animation to play on load of the page referred to as [0] and the other as [1], with a crossfade between the two to give a smooth transition.

Experiments

JavaScript Blender Animation – Materials

Further initial experiments with importing a blender armature animation into JavaScript, this time looking at materials and the inclusion of the mouth. The mouth was loaded just as an obj, but interestingly as the tentacle keeps its 3D space you can position the mouth within it. This gives the effect of the tentacle wrapping around the mouth to mimic that which I have experimenting with in the physical output.