Experential Electricae’s Pixy display is gorgeous in the dark. We enter a nearly black room. We get stuck looking at fluttering pixels, at a part of the room they make sense reading a face, on the other side of the room, we just see flickering pixels. It feels like a digital forest.
I love seeing people’s faces when the image reveals itself to them – and they ‘get it’. However, the contagion aspect I was hoping to explore seems to not work. When we look at Pixy, we are more ‘perplexed’ than any thing else. We are trying to work out what is going on – I was hoping the screen may reveal and more visceral bodily response. When I look at it ‘i feel in my head’ more than my body.
The sound track gives us more information about emotion, but there is a disconnect. I wonder with pixy if you need more ambient sound? People think Pixy is a sound spectrograph or something. Some people sit in front of it for ages and don’t see anything. Their face reveals more confusion than anything else. Again, confusion is not something I am exploring for this project.
For Chameleon we introduced a lot more pixels for legibility of image with in Pixy. But other than that, we didn’t experiment much with the hanging of the screen. Maybe we needed four weeks and not two? A lot of building was done, leaving little time to try and work out what else we could do with Pixy to suit the Chameleon content? I know Michael loves to see the faces on Pixy, I sense natacha has enjoyed it too, but there is still a disconnect. I think we needed to shape the display to the project look at the display from all sides. Also, the current interaction of Chameleon demands that you drive it – This definitely doesn’t work for Pixy – in my ultimate pixy we would walk through it, as if entering the body of emotions, and they would be fluttering around it. We see it from all angles.
On Wednesday Helen Sloan came in, as well as Matthew Miller and Micahel Maydon from Fabrica. We look at both iterations of the work. Helen walks into the room with the screens we have built with Gordon from Solent University – she loves they way they have revealed and shown faces – that you can see one side clear and the over more ambiguous. She then walks into pixy and she sees a completely different rendering of the same project. But this one is more
I need to arrive at a decision of how to progress with these iterations.
