I talked to Jeff Mann today in regards to the screens we are building with Gordon Brand. Jeff is based in Berlin. He is an artist who developed a lot of work around machines, society, technology – more sculptural machines. He is also a great maestro on max msp/jitter and he has built a pretty dependable patch that creates the video engine for the Chameleon project – from prototype 07 onwards. Today, I discussed whether we can have the one mac-mini running two screens. This is mainly to cater towards the tech budgets limits of the project. For example, I’d like to have 12 projections, but not need to have 12 computers. I might be able to run two copies of the Max patch, with low-resolution video. If that works, is it possible to run two separate copies of the face reader, each with its own camera? Or, can you make one face reader able to accept connections from two clients, and just send the same emotion data to each client? We could have two screens for one machine? It would save a lot of time (installing preparing machines), money, freight, instal.
I am shooting High Definition for all footage – and an aim has been to show the project HD. We have managed to get a mac mini triggering real time HD footage (at this stage 1440 x 900) with the emotion face reading technology (the emotion reading technology is quite processor heavy, but Rana El Kaliouby from MIT Media Lab and Youssef kashef from the American University in Cairo have managed to really lower the CPU, meaning we can still trigger HD footage.
… but getting hold of enough HD video projectors isn’t easy, or cheap. Few galleries have HD projectors. I have two HD monitors to test upon in the studio- but an aim of prototype 08 is to try to break beyond screens and move into more sculptural dimensions. So – can we bring the resolution down ? – between 480 x 360 or 720 x 576 pixels – will we see the break down, will this effect the way we read the image? will it be distracting?. Can the balance of the bluring of the screen balance with the slight pixelation? I have asked Jeff to render two sizes out and see how the processing power is. We then need to get it working with the face tech. By Tuesday. ;).
