A surveillance feedback loop

In Surveilling the surveiller visitors can sit down on a chair facing two small security monitors. The images on the monitors are live as you approach it. But as soon as you sit down the monitors show a previous visitor sitting in the place where you are sitting. Instead of monitoring the place, you monitor the visitor before you, who in turn is monitoring the visitor before him etc.

The three main actors lead the visitors through several screens. Asking the questions, recording the answers and taking their picture to have a photograph with the actors and the visitor printed out at the end.

Images of everyday life that broach wonderful themes

In the large movement everyday life gets subtitled. The audience sits in a small movie theater and see the outside world as if it were a film. Random passersby play the tragic lead role. The world stops and the lonely individuals engage in a jointed choreography.

A theatre-concept by Dries Verhoeven for Theater Festival Boulevard 2006. In 2009 the show was recreated with new software on new locations.

Sylvain created the software which included the simultaneous recording an playback of the outside world and choreographing unknowing passerby by manipulating the live-images from the world outside the theater.

Currently it has three main features (the free version has only 1): Buttons, Sliders and Multi-Touch. [The slider screen also features buttons and tabs, but i am guessing it is called sliders because these take up most of the screen.]

Anyhow, the multitouch feature is very nice, although it only goes up to 4 fingers (but who needs more) and i had some ghost fingers in there every once in a while. The sliders seem a bit unresponsive still but i am guessing that will be fixed in a next update. But it has never crashed on me so far (which some apps tend to do a lot) and the data seems to arrive almost instant in my patches.

So i can definitly say i will be experimenting with this App alot and might even feature it in the upcoming max/msp course. But most of all: it takes the wind out of my sails for wanting to create an app exactly like this one (but i am still missing some features, so who knows)

De vogels houden u in de gaten

For the Terschelling Oerol-festival Judith Hofland created an audiotour on location about watching and being watched. The visitors were individually guided through the town, woods and dunes of West-Terschelling wearing white headphones.

They got told a story by a little girl about her grandfather, giving directions and assignments along the way. But during the tour one starts to wonder how much is true of the stories told and how real the little girl actually is.

The tour ends in a former communications-building on top of the dune where the visitors are confronted with security footage of themselves shot the village and woods.

Sylvain created the software that collected the footage from the network-cameras in the village and the trees and the interface to select these images and send them to the building up on the dunes. The visitors are then confronted with multiple screens and prints with footage of themselves while walking the tour.

Just as simple as:

lpr -P printername "/path/to/file"

Easy as pie. To configure your printer use CUPS: http://127.0.0.1:631/

update
The most common mistake here is that there is a space in the path to the file. To make sure that it works put this in the messagebox that goes to the aka.shell:

lpr -P printername \"/path/to/file with/spaces\"

This will keep the full path intact instead of splitting it at the space, in which case lpr will never find the file.

move away, leave me alone, step back

ev_lines is a generative interactive video-installation which reacts to a spectator in a stressful way. In 'rest' the screen is black with one line slowly moving across the screen.

As soon as a spectator moves closer the algorithm speeds up, generating more and more lines with increasing speed until the screen is almost fully covered with white lines. As soon as the spectator moves back the system falls back to it’s state of rest with again one line slowly moving across the screen.

The television constantly hums softly and the more stressed the system gets, the louder it hums, up to a loud buzz.

Television, does it influence us or do we influence it?

The In-Sucking Power of the General Excuse is an installation / performance which takes in and processes a live television-signal and outputs new images and sounds. It plays with the narrative and shows the level of abstraction and randomness we have gotten used to.

The performer or user uses a normal remote control to switch channels to generate new images and sounds. Each time the channel changes a new algorithm is triggered. At first the channel will show normally and then gradually the algorithm changes the image and the sound. In some cases this is hardly noticeable, sometimes it is more direct, all depending on the expectations one has of the channel being watched.

Like with regular television, you have no real control on the output. If you don't like what you see and hear you can only change the channel.

Always too late. Always too late.

An interactive video installation addressing the issue of always having to be reachable by phone. In an age where everybody has a cell phone, how frustrating do we find it when we can't reach somebody?

The installation consists of an old telephone and an old television. The television displays security-footage of an empty (office) space, switching between viewpoints every couple of seconds.

Two scenarios:

1. The surveillance shows a person entering the room. He sits down and dials a number. He waits. The old telephone starts ringing. It keeps ringing. "Ring" "Ring" "Ring" The man waits. At the moment a visitor answers the phone the man is tired of waiting so long and hangs up frustrated and leaves the room. The visitor is left with an empty room and a busy-tone.

2. A visitor picks up the phone and dials a random number. Subtitles claim the on-screen telephone is ringing. The visitor waits. Waits. Waits. Gives up. Hangs up. And then a man comes running into the room and picks up the phone. "Hello?" "Hello?" He hangs up and leaves the room again.