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baltan session at Holst centre

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Receiving an invitation from Baltan Laboratories to do a workshop with a group of researchers from the Holst Centre was a pleasant surprise for me. It was especially nice since I already knew some of the people there. I’ve received advice and help from Bernard Grundlehner from IMEC on the e-Pressed project. Now I would have the chance to work with a range of researchers, I felt very honoured.

The program would be as follows: in the morning I would show some of the tools from my ‘tools for awareness’ toolbox, in the afternoon we would explore questions around the Hermitage 3.0 concept that I’m working on. The topic for Holst Centre’s monthly High T presentation would be emotion monitoring.

The group
There were 5 researchers from the Holst Centre present: Marc, senior scientist of the integration team; Yvonne, a process development engineer; Marco, a PhD researcher on wearable sensors; Herman, program manager; Juan Diego, development engineer. Also present was Alessandra, a journalist and independent curator.

Toolbox session
For the morning session I chose to present a varied selection of works going back to 2005. I started out with Lovescape. This is a piece of software that allows you to map the things you love and print out the map. It was presented in a museum where people could sit down and work on their map. This is an older piece and didn’t expect to get so much reactions on it from the group. The way in which the work transfers the personal to public was immediately commented upon. This is of course a central issue in my work. Because I’m in complete control of what I share I don’t have a problem with that. But when I asked the group if they would like to create a Lovescape they all declined because of this issue. There were some nice ideas to work with online data to create Lovescapes. The idea of mapping dear things and people can be taken a lot further.

The next work I presented was Collecting silence, a project for which custom hardware has been developed to collect location data, stress level, decibel level and images of silent locations. A website shows the data on a map and a multimedia scrapbook page for every location. Here the discussion centred around data collection and the senses. I use only Galvanic Skin Response as a sensor to detect stress. IMEC in their Body Area Networks uses 4 inputs to detect stress/arousal. Here you see a clear discrepancy between art and science. As an artist you don’t have the means and knowledge to work with sensor technology in that way. Also the portability has to be taken into account. For me the stress level is just indicative of an inner state. But there were some issues with the GRS sensing. Moving also makes you sweat which influences the measurements. Using a protocol can eliminate some of these issues as would combining different sensors. We talked about how to determine the real influence of noise by excluding other senses. Also knowledge and context will influence the way you perceive what you hear and experience. How much does the mind interfere with awareness? It would be nice to set up an experiment to try this out. There is a dead chamber at TNO and as a side step it would be nice to do a measuring there. All were eager to learn about the correlation between silence and stress. I still have to work on an application to visualise that.

The next piece we discussed was Numuseum input and mood_movie. Numuseum input is custom desktop software that asks for my mood, energy level, stress level, state of peacefulness and a comment every two hours. mood_movie shows my mood of the last 28 days in an interactive animation. We talked about how we could make this work mobile and what to do with the large body of data that I collected over the last seven years.

Finally I demonstrated breathing_time a piece that I was still working on at that time. This is a networked wearable with software developed for a performance at the TIK festival. It sends and receives breath flow data from five people at different locations and creates a combined animation with sound in near real time. We talked about the CommonSense platform I used for this work. The researchers were pleased to see that the visuals not only create insight but also make something surprising and artistic from the data.

I think the goal of the workshop – to present a different view on how to use technology in same environments but with a completely different approach, and to be inspired in the interaction – was definitely reached. For me the most valuable insight was realising the difference in viewpoints. As an artist my works are always very personal and individually motivated. I want to discover things about myself and my life. But the scientific point of view is more about how to make this knowledge available for everybody and apply the same method to different or broader questions.

Hermitage 3.0 session
In short the Hermitage 3.0 project is an attempt at making a not only a sustainable, self aware house, but a house that helps its’ inhabitant reach non material goals like relaxation, awareness and wisdom. With the collected data artworks can be created.
As a starting point for the workshop I’d made a list of questions about how to tackle and optimise this project. We didn’t get round to answering all of them but some important issues were looked at.

My first and most pressing questions concerned feasibility. How realistic is the idea of monitoring “everything” to improve quality of life and more specifically mental and inner states? When I asked: “Is this technically possible?” the whole group replied “yes” without hesitation. All the technical knowledge is present to achieve this.

The next issue is of course how to research this. The suggestion was to look at similar undertakings, such as Philips’ HomeLab, now ExperienceLab, to do all kinds of research related to my project. Also projects like MARS-500 and Biosphere spring to mind. Inspiration can also be drawn from architects like Phillipe Rahm and artists like Chris Salter.

The costs for a state of the art hermitage were estimated at around 2 million Euros. So how to go about funding it? There are a few options:
- Find a big company interested in ‘the next experience’ like Sony, Nokia or Google. I would be heading the project and work with the researchers.
- Find a university to team up with for research
- Launch the project as an Open Source project and have people from all over the world to contribute both knowledge and data.
It could also be a combinations of those. Start off as Open Source and then get funding as a Kickstarter project. It could also be part of an EU Framework project where you can collaborate with universities, companies and for example media labs from Europe.

Another question was: What techniques for changing the environment will be most suitable for influencing states like mood, relaxation and alertness? Actually this list could be endless. But parameters like smell, light, sound, temperature (air and surface) and body monitoring could all be researched as separate subjects. In the automotive industry there has been a lot of research into local heating. We joked that I could just rent a car to research the influence of temperature. The project itself would show which parameters have the most impact.

For tracking objects and people in the hermitage there are several solutions like RFID for proximity, beacons with triangulation or video tracking.

The afternoon was very valuable to me for looking at ways of solving the uncountable issues that are involved in this ambitious project. Talking to experts has given me confidence in the relevance and feasibility of the project.

High T
The monthly high T presentation was dedicated to emotion monitoring and visualisation. I presented my installation Eden that uses the emotion recognition software FaceReader to transform real time facial expression to landscapes.

A different take on emotion monitoring was provided by Bernard Grundlehner from IMEC. He presented the VALENCE project that uses alpha brainwaves and brain activity detection in the different hemispheres to determine positive and negative emotions and relaxation. The students from St Lucas art academy in Ghent made a game with the headset output.

After the talk I wanted, of course, to try it myself but unfortunately my head is too small for the headset. Bernard tried an older version but that didn’t work very well. I had a nice opportunity to talk to Bernard again. He explained more in depth how the system worked.

Many thanks go to Baltan Laboratories and Holst Centre for this inspiring day.

Alessandra Saviotti has written a nice article about the Baltan Holst workshops in general and this workshop in particular: http://www.digicult.it/news/contamination-and-experimentation-an-art-science-workshop-series

about breathing_time

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For the TIK festival documentation I wrote an article about breathing_time:

Background and concept

Breathing_time was conceived as part of the Time Inventors Kabinet[1] project for which I was an invited artist. The idea behind this project was to use different ecological input for creating new notions of time. Right from the start I had the idea to work with physiological data as input for a new time. Can we make time more personal if it is driven by our own body? Can we change our perceptions of time through growing awareness of the way our body functions? These were thoughts that motivated the work.

The concept of the windclock[2] was a central theme in the TIK project the most obvious physiological data to work with was breathing.

Early on in the project I had the idea of representing this personal data in a direct way using analogue techniques like drawing. I experimented a lot with ink and stains and made a hand driven drawing machine that drew a line of various thicknesses depending on the speed of breathing. I drew inspiration from Japanese calligraphy techniques, especially ensō[3]. While the idea of ink stayed it changed from analogue to digital: an animation with sound to represents the breath flow.

I wanted to work with a group of five people breathing at the same time and explore if becoming aware of someone else’s breathing pattern would influence your own and if we could reach a certain entrainment, our own rhythm. This resulted in two performances performed at the TIK festival.

Hardware

I build a custom device, the breathCatcher, using the JeeLabs RBBB Arduino[4] and the Modern Device Windsensor[5] and USB Bub[6]. The device is cone shaped to capture the breath flow in both directions. The wind sensor is placed in the opening of the cone. The cone should be worn over the nose and mouth. Breathing in and out through the nose is required. A felt ring protects the face from the sharp paper edge. A felt container at the bottom holds and protects the microcontroller. The paper device is connected to a PC by a cable using a USB-to-serial connection.

Sensor platform

For working with the sensor data I used the CommonSense platform[7]. I was sponsored by the Sense-os, the creators of that platform. CommonSense is an advanced online platform with comprehensive API[8] for working with sensor data. After creating an account you can create sensors, five in my case, and upload to and download data from the server. Different queries are possible and basic visualisation is available. That comes in very handy when you are developing.

I received a lot of help from Sense-os with connecting to the API and querying the database. All data is exchanged in JSON format which is very particular about quotes, which made it hard to work with.

For them the challenge lay in the near real time service of sending and receiving five times ten data points per second. I was advised to use a cable instead of Wifi to ensure minimal data loss.

Software

I wrote custom software, drawingBreath, in Processing[9]. I used some native Java and a few extra libraries and classes.[10] This software performs all the connections with the CommonSense API. It uses several timers to keep the tasks of sending and receiving data separated.

For 60 seconds the software calibrates all five devices so as to be able to detect the direction of the breath flow. Using the temperature sensor was very useful for that purpose.

After the breath flow has been calibrated the animation starts. Each of the five participants is represented by a ‘brush tip’ which will start to draw a circle. Going counter clockwise in red represents breathing in, the blue dot moving clockwise represents breathing out. The radius of the circle is determined by the strength of the breath flow as is the size of the tip and its’ colour intensity. In between breaths the drawing clears to start again.

Other software used in, and in aid of this project was Csound, Skype, Dropbox (view below) and NTP[11]. The latter was very important as the timestamp for every breath data point should be the same.

Adding sound

My friend Richard van Bemmelen, a musician and programmer kindly offered to help me add sound to the animation. My idea was to create a bamboo wind chime with our breaths. Creating a sound only when the breath status changed from in to out or vice versa. Richard is an advanced user of Csound[12] and wanted to use that program. As bamboo already exists as an Opcode[13] we could quickly start. The sound produced by Csound wasn’t the rattle of sticks but a far more beautiful flute-like sight. The pitch depends on the value of the breath flow data. To make everything work on all the participants’ PCs Csound had to be installed. A custom .csd file which defines the settings for the synthesizer is placed in that folder. To make starting of the sound part easy Richard created a batch file that would start Csound and make it wait for messages from Processing. For communicating with Csound the oscP5 library[14] was used in Processing. A message with the breath value was send whenever the breath status changed.

The performances

breathing_time was a networked performance. I’ve selected five people from different nationalities to partake in the experiment. With that I wanted to underline the universal character of breathing. From five different locations these five people would create sound and visuals using only their breath. Because of the drawingBreath software all participants saw the same animation and heard the same sounds. This output could act as feedback for them. I was in Brussels performing for an audience that saw and heard the same things as the participants.

One thing that took a lot more effort then anticipated was preparing the participants for the actual performances. To test the server and different versions of the software we had planned four test sessions at the start. But first all software had to be installed on the different computers. Right at the beginning I had to move everybody to the Windows platform as running the Processing application made on a Windows PC on a Mac appeared to be a hassle. Also the drivers for the USB Bub were absent for the Mac.

Having equipped two participants with my old laptops we could start testing. The Sense-os server did a very good job. The main problem was instructing everybody and making sure that the software and Csound updates were put in the right folders. I used Dropbox[15] to supply updates and manuals but even that was hard for some people. Through Skype I gave live instructions and could answer questions of all participants at the same time. After a good final rehearsal it was time for the real thing.

The performances started with each participant introducing him/herself in a pre-recorded sound file in both their mother tongue and English. At exactly 19:00 hours everybody would start their drawingBreath program and calibration started as the introductions continued.

Our assignment for the performances was: relax and breath naturally. Try to detect your own breath circle and see if you can leave some time between each breath. If this moment of in between breaths would coincide the screen would be cleared and we would have reached some sort of communal breathing.

The most important thing I learned from the performances is that breathing is a very personal thing that isn’t easily manipulated. This shows very well from the CommonSense logs where you can see the breathing pattern almost as a signature.[16] Our breathing gaps didn’t coincide but the different movements of the breath flows was interesting to watch.

I also realised that although the performances went reasonably well this is just the beginning. There are so many things that could be improved for which I just lacked the time. Enthusiastic reactions have brought to me new ideas of working with the concept. I’m considering creating an online community to improve the hard- and software. To breath together online and explore the idea of creating a communal “breathing time” further.

Specifications

drawingBreath software (Processing & Java), breathCatcher hardware (Arduino RBBB, Modern Device Wind sensor, USB Bub, USB cable, paper, felt, elastic band), sensor platform (CommonSense API), sound (Csound & Processing)

Credits

Concept, design, development & programming: Danielle Roberts

Sound: Richard van Bemmelen

CommonSense API: Sense-os

Participants: Adriana Osorio Castrillon, Lorenzo Brandli, Mieke van den Hende, Tomoko Baba

Location: Imal, Brussels

Also made possible by OKNO

Blog: http://www.numuseum.nl/blog/category/breathing_time/


[1] http://timeinventorskabinet.org/

[2] http://www.timeinventorskabinet.org/wiki/doku.php/windclocks

[3] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ensō

[4] http://jeelabs.com/products/rbbb

[5] http://shop.moderndevice.com/products/wind-sensor

[6] http://jeelabs.com/products/usb-bub

[7] http://www.sense-os.nl/commonsense

[8] http://www.sense-os.nl/api-console

[9] http://processing.org/

[10] Processing serial and net, guicomponents GTimer class, org.json and Java.net.URL and URLConnection classes

[11] http://www.meinberg.de/english/sw/index.htm

[12] http://www.csounds.com/

[13] http://www.csounds.com/manual/html/bamboo.html

[14] http://www.sojamo.de/libraries/oscP5/

[15] www.dropbox.com

[16] http://www.numuseum.nl/blog/2012/05/11/performance-11-5/

Is it Art?

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Last Tuesday evening we had a meeting about our concept and design with AnnaMariaCornelia. While we ate our pizzas and drank our (free) wine we discussed the current state of wearable design. AnnaMariaCornelia was very firm in her conviction that my project isn’t art. I was a little shocked at first because working on this project really makes me feel like an artist again after so many months of webdesigning… 
But maybe this project is just really me. I work on it from an artists perspective and that gives me a great sense of freedom. But at the same time the project allows me to indulge in design, data visualization, programming, developing, science, ecology, writing, data, webdesign and fabrics to name but a few issues that this piece encompasses. I suppose that in that sense I’m a very modern artist (if any) because the borders between disciplines are blurring. Projects like AQAb give room to all my interests. Subjects that already play a part in my life can be presented in piece. So working on it makes me whole and I don’t care what people call it.

Edit 19/10/09

This discussion reminds me of a remark Laura Beloff made during her presentation at the I-machine exhibition in Oldenburg, Germany. She’s researching conceptual wearables. She said there weren’t many around. Most wearables are either functional or fashionable but hardly any of them work from a concept. She’s done a nice job with her project Empty space.

High visibility coat for dogs

High visibility coat for dogs

When we discussed my design, and I don’t remember how it came about, we started talking about a small vest for a child for example. Being a great dog lover I immediately said:”To have one for a dog, that would be fun.” Well, that idea has stuck and now I think I’ll make a cute little vest for a dog to wear. As it happens I bought another sensor which is a general gas sensor. Closer akin to a dogs nose, probably. So the dog will wear that sensor, close to the ground. It will be interesting to see what the differences are. I want the sensor to work only when the dog lifts it head (to smell) so I’ll use an accelerometer to see if the head is tilted. The visuals on it’s vest will show the boss the air quality at dog nose height.

Art Pollution Kit

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Michal Kindernay and Gívan Belá performing

Michal Kindernay and Gívan Belá performing

Last night I went to Brussels to watch the performance with the Art Pollution Kit. This is a project by Michal Kindernay and Gívan Belá (Guy van Bellen.) They are making a cheap or DIY kit for measuring different kinds of environmental values. The prototype they showed last night measured temperature, light, humidity and noise. They will be extending it with other sensors like the gas sensors I’m using.
The prototype itself was very basic but what I found very interesting was their thinking about pollution. They asked themselves what is pollution in an image, in sound? They found that the degradation of the colour spectrum is an equivalent for visual pollution. Michal has been busy with visualising pollution in a very direct way: by changing the actual pixels of the image of the location where the pollution is. The image is being polluted by the data. Twenty-four hours of  data can be displayed in the image which changes over time. When there’s no pollution you get a perfectly clear picture. So the visual and environmental data are merged into one image which is very powerful. In the performance the same data was used to generate sound. This way the kit can be used as an instrument. The plan is to distribute the kits to artists at different locations, gather all the data and work with the data from the networked kits.

Michal also showed me some other visualisations of (noise) pollution he’s working on. It involves real time erasing of unwanted object (like cars) from camera recordings. That way you get a completely clean street view. The streets only gets filmed when there’re no cars which shockingly meant only a couple of minutes of recording during hours of filming. We share the same irritations and fascinations and might work together in the future.