Hand based shadow puppetry was probably the first ever screen based interactive media. Take one pair of hands, a light source and surface to project onto and there you have it!
Tim is right into the whole hand gesture / shadow puppetry thing, performing visuals to accompany my noises at the last Segmentation Fault using a light, a rear projection screen and a roll of gaffer tape [post something on your blog Tim :-p].
I just read about this series of lectures at the MoMA in New York, Laurie Anderson, Michel Gondry, Brian Eno speaking about the mixing of media and music, one each week. I wish I was there!
From the site:
“The mixing of media took off in the late 1960s, as the barriers between artistic disciplines broke down and artists began moving freely between painting, sculpture, photography, film, and video. …
Music is at the forefront of this interdisciplinary experimentation. Musicians led the way in developing new working methods–they were interdisciplinary from the start. The work of Laurie Anderson, Brian Eno, and Michel Gondry evinces their backgrounds in music; Anderson was a teenage violin soloist, Gondry played drums in a rock band, and Eno is a well-known pioneer of electronic music.
Music is infused with a wild, innovative energy that has proven especially invigorating to media art, an art form that thrives on trampling conventional restrictions. The development of media art over the recent decades paralleled the transformation of our musical environment. For Anderson, Eno, and Gondry, music and art are not separate forms. In their art and in their careers, these artists merge the two forms seamlessly. Installations, feature films, performance pieces, and other hybrid projects are imbued with a sensibility that owes much to the artists’ musical background.”
So to do a search for “factory” I take the string “http://www.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?tags=” and add it to the contents of the text box and then add “&format=rss_200″ to the end. This give me the URL of the feed. I then use the “LoadQTListFromXML” command to load it into the movie. The RSS file is structured as below, it has a lot of information for each picture.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/42039133@N00/560315/
<img src="http://www.flickr.com/photos/560315_ac00de7218_m.jpg"
/><br />I’m not sure whether the quotation marks
add to the effect, or detract from it. Fri, 24 Sep 2004 23:05:08 PSTnobody@flickr.com (several_bees)
length="16472" type="image/jpeg" />
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rae/547742/
<img src="http://www.flickr.com/photos/547742_555b39e9fb_m.jpg"
/><br />Watching the precious bottles of Cascade beer get packaged up. Thu, 23 Sep 2004 23:30:10 PSTnobody@flickr.com (Raelene)
length="17794" type="image/jpeg" />
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rae/547738/
<img src="http://www.flickr.com/photos/547738_9b3371cb06_m.jpg"
/><br />Apparently this cat lives at the Cascade factory. It was there the last time
Tony visited. Thu, 23 Sep 2004 23:29:40 PSTnobody@flickr.com (Raelene)
type="image/jpeg" />
If you compare this with the previous XML example you can see some similarities. Where I have the whole list surrounded by the tags, the RSS list is surrounded by and tags. Where I have each clip name surrounded by the tag, the RSS list has each item surrounded by the tags. Within the tag there is more information and it is more structured. For locating the images, the important URLs can be found in the…
Ok I just realised it would have been much easier to find the image details from in the enclosure tag, but I used the description tag. I’ll change this next version. Anyway…
For each item, there is a url for a medium sized jpg image. After some quick snooping around I found that the images are coded with a letter to describe their size. For example here is an image from DocManhattan’s Flickr photostram showing the various sizes and their urls (note the how only the last letters change):
The RSS points to the “m” sized image but what I need is the “t” thumbnail sized version so I remove the last few letters and add “t_d.jpg” to the end.
This post is getting really long so I’ll continue with part 3 soon. Please leave a comment if I need to explain anything more clearly.
Each of the clip names refers to the name of both the thumbnail and its associated video clip. For example, when AKM is read, I add “.jpg” to the end and add a sprite image. When the thumbnail is dragged to one of the layers and released I add “.mov” to the clip’s name and add a child movie to the layer. All of these files are located in the same directory on the hypertext.rmit.edu.au server but could potentially be from any directory on any server.
Loading the Flickr thumbnail images is a little more complicated.
This is the latest version of my interactive networked video project.
Click on the image to load Vidget 3 in Quicktime Player. (It is quite small but very processor intensive - especially as it first loads)
This version is a mix between the my first vidget which featured a text based interface for mixing up to three video clips on top of eachother, and my Quicktime Flickr photo viewer which let you search for and view images based on a search word.
The interface has been redesigned and now features a grid of 25 draggable images which represent video clips. These may be dragged and dropped onto three coloured ‘layers’. The blue layer is the uppermost with green below and red at the bottom. Each of these layers has a number of ‘graphics modes’. Like Photoshop layers, these may be combined in a number of modes, ranging from fully transparent to fully opaque. Each of these layers also has a number of playback controls which allow the user to play the clip faster or slower, forwards or backwards and step through frame by frame.
To the right of the three colour layers and their controls is a small white text field. This allows the user to search for images from Flickr. The ten most recent pictures tagged with the search word entered are loaded as thumbnails below. These thumbnails may be dragged and dropped onto any of the layers and combined with other moving and still images.
I have resized the output movie area so that everything fits on one screen.
Behind the scenes, the vidget has also been greatly updated. Rather than being limited to a set number of video clips determined at the time of authoring, this version dynamically loads all content including thumbnails. The names of these files are drawn from an XML file. This file may be updated with a simple text editor to add or delete more clips. The movie automatically loads the first 25 thumbnails from the XML list as it initially loads but may load the next 25, and the following 25 via the 1, 2 and 3 buttons at the top right of the controls.
At the moment the whole movie pauses whenever thumbnails are loaded, either via a Flickr search or by skipping to the next 25 thumbnails of video clips. I am working on ways around this.
The LiveStage Pro source files may be downloaded here: vidget3.zip
Sorry, my del.icio.us post was a little full of TLA (three letter acronyms).
I’ll try to explain a little bit more clearly.
Steve Harrington writes:
“I don’t get what is significant about RSS let alone RSS feeds or RSS feeds of bookmarks. Couuld you give an example and why you see this is cool -i.e. what does it help you accomplish fasterbetterqucker?”
OK, RSS was originally developed as a way of syndicating news headlines, summaries and the like. For example a news site like slashdot.org or news.bbc.co.uk may put out an rss feed of its current (latest) stories. This is like a stripped down version of the regular html version: no ads, no styles, nothing fancy, just the information. Rather than being formated like a normal html page with tags for bold, italics, etc. an RSS (or the competing format ATOM) feed will be formatted in XML with more general, database like tags like item, link, and description. This format is readable by a special news reading program and some newer web browsers (the next version of Apple’s Safari for example). So with an RSS feed and a program to read it, a user can get all the headlines and summaries very quickly and see if their favourite news site has been updated.
This format is also designed for computer-to-computer rather than computer-to-user communication and so is relatively easy to parse or interpret with a fairly simple program (much easier than HTML). So if I use del.icio.us to make an RSS feed of the URLs to video clips rather than web pages, I can make a simple program that takes these URLs and displays the associated video.
When you post a link to del.icio.us you can assign ‘tags’ to it. By tag I do not mean a piece of code, but rather a keyword. So say I linked to a clip of a monkey on a skateboard I could tag it ‘monkey’, ’skateboard’, ’silly’, ‘video’, etc. What is cool is that del.icio.us will generate an RSS feed for each of these tags so I could search for all links tagged ‘monkey’ by username and it will return an RSS formatted list.
For an example of how this could work, see my Quicktime Flickr photo viewer. It takes a word you type in and reads an RSS feed of images tagged with that word from the Flickr photo sharing site. It then takes these images and displays them as thumbnails. The same sort of thing could be applied to video content.
I had a quick play with del.icio.us today. It’s like a public bookmarks list, they call it ’social bookmarks’. Its also like a stripped down blog engine with two key features that I think are very cool.
1. It generates RSS feeds of bookmarks.
2. Each entry can be ‘tagged’ and categorised - mmm, metadata
1+2 = It can generate RSS feeds for each tag.
So I was thinking, what if rather than linking to web pages I link to video files. And what if rather than giving a text description, I include a reference to a jpeg thumbnail. Now I could theoretically link to any piece of video I find or generate on the web and find it by searching for its tag. This would work just like my flickr viewer except for video/sound/anything.
