The installation is up and running along with the selection of years feature, thus making the bulk of the programming work FINALLY COMPLETE. The only thing left to do is to put the floor decal. As many visitors were expected each day over the long weekend there hasn't been a chance to place floor decals down, but hopefully they will find the opportunity to do it sometime soon (as some visitors and children don't seem to read the instructions on the corner of projection on how to interact with it, and instead just run amok in front of it, not knowing what is going on).
I feel lucky that we have got a powerful computer for the installation. I could not even test the Year features on my mac as it was painfully slow to run anything at all. A fast PC really makes all the difference as it works magically smoothly onsite at MBS.
I think the reason why it was finally possible to do this within two weeks is that the equipment is so easily available (kinects can be bought at the 24 hour Challenger store even!), the device does not even need to be hacked apart physically, and the documentation online for kinect and as3kinect is excellent (although you will need to sift out the white noise of random discussions and blogs also discussing similar problems and errors encountered while building it). Although... I did work overnight in the kitchen for a few days in order to program and test it...
Fascinating work Debbie. I had a look at the Singapore Psychogeographical Society too and was equally angered and interested in whats happening/happened in the city.
ReplyDeleteWill keep reading. You have so many other blogs!
Hello Alex,
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comment!
Yes I have the crazy habit of creating new blogs for each new project I embark on, so unfortunately, there seem to be almost too many of them now. These days I mostly just keep to updating Documentations and my blog.
I see you also take photos of city things and write about them! Love it! I think cities are nothing without the lives and stories in them.
Its funny you should say that. I am reading Psychogeography by Merlin Coverley and he is talking about how De Certeau saw the walkers and the individuals as the ones who create the history of the city through their own stories, not the developers up in their skyscrapers. We must keep looking and writing!
ReplyDeletehaha yes. De Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life is worth a read, he has a chapter on Walking the City; it even makes mention of punctuation marks like the ellipsis in a story . . . like the pattern of walking where one ends up skipping some bits between.
ReplyDeletelast year i was writing something on the idea of recovering histories and narratives like in a mystery (in singapore sometimes we don't have much history to go by, even detailed research at archives may not turn up more information sometimes). maybe you might find this document of interest - psychogeoforensics toolkit
(although, secretly, my goal would be to one day write...
A NOVEL!)
This is inspiring stuff Debbie. I like the idea of adopting different roles or characters, it means you can endlessly view the city in different ways.
DeleteDid you write this for a purpose? Was it published?
Yes, me too, a novel has always been making me restless. fiction was my first love, but I like the way that creative writing can be applied to psychogeography, as you say, in creating your own histories and narratives. I enjoy coming up with mini stories that might have happened/could happen in the spaces I photograph. I'm slowly putting together a book of them, but its proving difficult to finish.
Good to meet someone out there in this weird and wonderful field!