I got my Arduino board and my new book “30 Arduino projects for the Evil Genius”. My husband (Juan Manuel) and I have been looking into the projects of the book and we have been attracted to one specific one: The Lie Detector. (I’ll tell you why in a little bit)
While trying to decide what artists to research in order to write the research paper I came up with several issues. On one hand I was researching interactive movies online. There are several very impressive and well functioning examples of this kind of organic movie making: out of my window, Ro.Me, the ergodic cinema Project.
However, I wanted to accentuate the ORGANIC aspect in my project. I don’t want the act of choosing what scene follows next to be made by a rational decision but rather by your body and your feelings. In that sense I started to look into artists working with sensors and installations. In this area I also found incredible examples and artists like Nathaniel Stern, or Camille Utterback but I realized that usually when artists use sensors is more to create visual effects but not so much to tell stories. I want to tell stories. And I am already developing the scenes of my stories, so I need an interactive platform that allows the scenes to flow with the spectators interaction.
From talking to people who have worked with sensors before they all advice me that the key to make them work well, is to keep it simple. It is better to have 1 variable only, instead of complex algorythms that will most probably fail in real life, specially because videos weight too much and makes the processing slow. So with that advice in mind, I thought I can use the lie detector sensor to trigger only one thing: the animations. I am using hand drawn animation in every scene, so there will be only two options, wether you see the scene with animation or without it. Every scene may start with a question and the spectator has to give an answer. “The lie detector uses an effect known as galvanic skin response. As a person becomes nervous – for example when telling a lie- their skin resistance decreases.” So if the lie detector detects nervousness the spectator doesn’t see the animation, if not, s/he does see it. The order of the scenes can also be triggered by the lie detector. The spectator may pick one scene randomly but maybe the lie detector reads the spectators nervousness during the scene and if it reads “true” will go to certain scene and if it reads “false” to other… and so one.
It’s just an idea… I’ll be doing experiments with the lie detector soon and post results!!!
artistic research in sacred plants 