Tim Stutts: ITP Project Blog

“Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.” — Baudrillard

What was it that appealed to me about LA initially? When I think back three and a half years ago, the biggest factor was that LA was and continues to be the core of the film industry—a medium that has mass appeal, streaming capability, and the potential to shape the human spirit, arguably more far reaching and influential than any other art form of our time. In my mind this aspect, in addition to a few other hidden gems that surface later, outweighs a great deal of what I find to be negative about this city. Here it is folks. It’s not pretty…

Incessant Driving: The further you drive into LA, the slower you move. Becoming blocked by barricades of honking automobiles and gas stations that read like mile-markers will be a part of your day to day existence. Sure, commuting cuts down on time in a day to do things like eat and sleep and have a life—that’s one part. It also encourages people to work hours beyond rush hour, because beating the traffic means leaving at 2:30 pm, and leaving on time…well, you’d arrive home late anyway.

Smoggy Smog World: I don’t care what the reports say about the LA air being cleaner now than it was in the 40’s. LA is covered in the stuff, like more sun blockage than the atmosphere of Venus. If you don’t think it’s evident from ground level, try taking a trip up to the Getty Museum above the 405. You’d think you were viewing a rather large-scale Crème Brule installation piece, stretching inland all the way to Palm Springs.

Self-Image Crisis: After being bombarded with the anorexic, impossibly beautiful ads and customers of Sunset strip, you will never view a mirror the same way. It’s hard to feel attractive in LA. I’ve seen friends—even non-actors—obsess over it. It’s hard not to stress when your $1700 a month, one bedroom apartment faces Calvin Klein.

Films Fail: Most of films made in LA are terrible, because they become tied up in too many interests. If you haven’t lived there you may not know this, because 90% of these films never leave the city. Instead they bankrupt actors and crew, who quit their day jobs to work on a project that promises deferred payment that never come through. If your goal is to create something wonderful that affects positive social change, then you might want to think about a career in social work instead. The majority of films made in LA fall into three categories: bad horror films, soft-core porno, and combinations of these. A few reputable films do make it out, but you’ll have to Enron your way up the chain to be a part of them, so it becomes a moral paradox either way.

So, how could someone who realizes all this and decided that they want no part if it, still find it in there heart to love LA? Or more importantly, will I ever stop on my bitter rant and arrive at some hint of optimism?

Los Angeles, like any big city has areas both good and bad, on geographical, sociological and psychological levels. Discovering these things takes time. Do yourself a favor by not letting the collective do the thinking part for you. When you wake up in the morning, really ask yourself if you want to spend your life gripping on reality television or writing dialogue for fast food commercials. Your friends who’ve been in the game for a long time may give you a hard time for switching gears, but doing in your heart what you know to be right scores you higher brownie points than allowing yourself to be a part of the brainwashed fan club of people who consciously or even sub-consciously measure success by how many degrees their IMDb profile is from Kevin Bacon.

Leave when you can! Getting out of the city is also key. It will almost guarantee you’ll have those moments where things become crystal clear, maybe even clearer than the air at Mt. Baldy—which you should visit by the way, if you find yourself in one of these ruts. Exploring new parts of the city in search of things you enjoy most, is important too. Seek out restaurants, hiking spots, whatever interests you, and don’t be afraid to get lost. Do this at a time that doesn’t conflict with rush hour. You’ll slowly, but surely build up your own map of the city, and will increase the options of things you can enjoy on a Friday night. And on the rare occasion that it does rain, the day after, plan on being outside to catch a glimpse of pre-Industrial LA. You can look east and see the San Gabriel snow peaks from the Hollywood Hills!

Finding groups of people who embrace the beliefs and morals you had before Los Angeles corrupted you is also a step in the right direction. Try Craigslist groups or even start your own group. You’ll be surprised how many people will come out of the woodwork with similar situations to your own. Also value your friendships and replenish them frequently. For the last year I lived in LA, I attended a social dinner gathering at a friend’s place in Hollywood where I developed relationships with an amazing and diverse group of people.

Lastly, take time out in the day to get into your own headspace and remind yourself that you exist separately from the material objects, governments, and financial institutions that seem to own you. You may deal with the push and pull of outside systems everyday, but you are first and foremost your own person, and the wellbeing of yourself and the ones you love are what matter the most.

View video of program here.

The Pitch

A graphical time-based display of statistics updated in real-time, which will dramatically give meaning to the Iraqi civilian death count, while respectfully acknowledging the over 48,000 deaths individually.

Description

Joseph Stalin said “One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic.” Iraqi Death toll Shuffle will give emotional weight and meaning to the civilian death count in Iraq, a number which, on its own, is sufficiently large to be just a statistic. We will do this through a deceptively simple time-based visual presentation based on frequently updated statistics from iraqbodycount.org . When the program is launched from the web, it will display the death count in numerals. It will also begin counting up from zero using small red icons of human bodies. As the number of bodies approaches 100, it becomes increasingly apparent that together they form the shape of a skull. When the count of red bodies reaches 100, the count begins again but a single white skull, representing 100 civilian deaths, is added to the display. The red body cycle repeats over and over again and white skulls are added to the display until the most recent total of Iraqi civilian deaths is reached (Currently around 50,000). As the count begins, users will be invited to guess how long it will take at the end of the count, and their guesses will be compared to the actual time elapsed (several hours). It is our expectation that when implemented on the web, users will allow the program to run in the foreground or background until it is complete.

In the context of the ITP show, guests who only view the display once near the beginning of the count would get a sense of scale from the size of the frame to be filled. Ideally guests would see the display more than once, possibly on the way in and out, and get a sense of change over time.

Personal Statement

When we began developing the Iraqi death count shuffle we had a number of goals. The first was to create a new way of meaningfully depicting large statistics. The method we developed of graphically displaying large numbers over time can easily be adapted to the depiction of many different types of large statistics, including figures related to national budgets, resource consumption, demographic change, national jellybean consumption, etc.

Second by choosing the Iraqi civilian death count as our demonstration statistic, we hope to raise the quality of debate about the Iraqi war, by providing meaningful, accurate information in an easily understandable manner.

Finally we are interested in exploring and promoting discussion of notions of objectivity, politicization and propaganda in relationship to statistics. By dramatically presenting the Iraqi civilian death count are we politicizing this statistic in a biased manner? Already we have triggered surprisingly vigorous debate among our classmates. It has been argued that any depiction of Iraqi civilian deaths is likely to increase opposition to the war and that by making these numbers more meaningful, we are biased to the political left. On the other hand, it has been suggested that by basing our display on statistics for Iraqi civilian deaths which exclude possibly large numbers of unverifiable deaths we are biased towards the right. Perhaps by basing our display on the most rigorously verified statistic available and avoiding inflammatory graphics in favor of simple and accurate iconography, we are letting viewers come to their own conclusions about the implication of the statistic and being as unbiased as possible. On the other hand it has been suggested that by using simple video game like graphics we are dehumanizing victims of war and distancing the audience from the reality of death.

Audience

This project is intended to be distributed over the Internet. It is our hope that will be viewed by voters and decision-makers and that will inform the debate on the Iraq conflict. Our intention is to present useful data accurately and without bias.

User Scenario

We hope that users will view “Iraqi Death Toll Shuffle” over the Internet. We intend to construct a website to support it. Users will be able to either run our program directly from the website or download it as an applet. We also hope to gather data on people’s guesses as to how long the count will take.

References

www.iraqbodycount.org

Graphics and Concept: Dave Gordon
Programming: Tim Stutts
Special Thanks: Shawn Van Every

HeartPeggio is an apparatus worn on the body that measures heart rate and generates a sequence of tones. White noise “ticks” occur at regular intervals to determine a goal rate. The user relies on biofeedback or exercise to align their “active rate” with the goal rate.

When I originally approached Raphael Zollinger about working on a final project for Advanced Microcontrollers, we were interested in the idea of using information from body and having that data represented as sound. We did some research and discovered the work of artist / medical technologist, Atau Tanaka, who had relied on neural information and various body sensors to trigger and manipulate sound. This led us to a discussion about fitness equipment, particular treadmill devices that track the heart rate. We decided to design a piece of hardware that coaxes the user into a “Zen” state via positive incentives for a more relaxed heart rate, as opposed to the reward mechanisms for pumping as hard as you can, found in the modern gymnasium.

As far as the actual sonic content, it was initially decided by myself, to use two low tones, tuned within 10 Hertz of each other, and have the frequency of these tones be function of goal—or ideal—rate and active—or current—rate. As the user’s heart approaches a state of calm, the two tones would align, resulting in an out-of-tune fluctuating effect that can only be resolved through a concentrated biofeedback that would move the tones to unison—an idea influenced by the drone in Indian Music.

In theory this worked out well, but when I began experimenting in Max/MSP, Raphael pointed out that it was hard to distinguish separate tones, let alone difficult for the untrained ear to determine which tone represented the goal rate and active rate.

I then turned to the idea of phasing, in reference to a method developed by composers Steve Reich and Terry Riley, where similar or identical phrases of music or sound are played at the same time, with one moving slightly faster than the other. The resulting effect is unsettling, however meditative, once the ear has adjusted to this non-classical division of tempo. The effect can be accomplished with either live musicians—in the case of Reich’s “Drumming”—or tape—Reich’s “Come Out.”

I conducted similar experiments in Max/MSP, this time having the goal and active rates triggering melodic arpeggios. Initially both phrases were in the same harmonic range, but again I faced the problem of the ear being able to distinguish the significance of each. I tried placing the two passages an octave apart, changing the timbre of each, and even having the top passage move twice the tempo of the bottom. Though pleasing to the ear, none of these approaches conveyed clearly distinguishable goal and active rates. It wasn’t until later that I determined that the most effective approach was having the goal rate represented with a sharp envelope of white noise and active rate, a four note arpeggio, with clearly distinguished tones created through FM synthesis.

Throughout this whole process, Raphael had been researching heart rate sensors. We found some promising experiments that had been conducted at ITP, one that even used a clothespin combined with an IR sensor that measured light passed through the finger; developed by Tom Igoe. In the end, due to reliability issues, we determined to actually buy a sensor and hack it. We traveled to a couple medical equipment stores in town, and settled on a Polar sensor at Paragon Sports. Through experiments conducted with Gary Schoeber, we determined that the radio frequency coming from the sensor via wireless transmitter to received, was much too low to work with, without having to construct a specialized coil that receive the frequency. We returned the polar sensor.

Meanwhile I entertained the idea of being able to run the project on an iPod running Linux and Pure-Data software—a visual programming language similar to Max—but my iPod didn’t support the package and crashed each time I tried to load it. We decided that it would be best use our own hardware for obtaining data, in conjunction with a laptop computer to actually generate the sound.

While Raphael began the process of programming the Arduino, and designing and building the remaining hardware, I got to work on a Max patch that would receive a signal from the Arduino using the serial object. When we ran into issues having the Arduino send a string of integers to Max, due to limited byte size, I proposed having all of the information contained in a single integer that would range from 0-255. The Steps below explain the conversion method I devised, that involves cooperation on the part of both Arduino and Max. I essentially take variables for goal rate, active rate, goal rate on/off, and all rates on/off can confine them to different ranges.

- Arduino generates variable for goal rate and active rate and converts them to delays milliseconds and then assigns them to variables.

- The maximum and minimum useful value for goal rate and active rate are 300 – 1500 milliseconds (roughly 40 – 200 bpm).

- Goal rate variable is divided by 10 and then subtracted by – 29. This confines it to a range of 1-121.

- Active rate variable is divided by 10 and then added to 100. This confines it to a range of 130-250.

- Active rates that exceed the allowable rates—falling into the upper extremity of 122-129 or lower extremity of 251-255. This rate doesn’t normally occur unless your finger leaves the sensor, in which case the active rate shoots way up, and the Max receives a message to stop both goal rate and active rate sounds.

- A message of 0 is sent periodically by default through the serial object, which mutes the goal rate. Once this button is pressed the goal rate is active and heard by the user.

The resulting confinement of data helped make HeartPeggio a success! Please see the attached Max patch below.

BOOLEAN is a program which uses a webcamera to generate music. It was written in Processing using the Ess library.

The webcamera image is filtered, creating a black and white image. The image is divided into 12 rows and 16 columns, creating 192 boxes. A balloon floats over each box. The balloons rate of inflation depends on the amount of dark pixels in its box. When the balloon reaches a maximum size it pops, triggering a percussive sample. A new balloon of a different color takes the place of the popped balloon.

Each row is associated with a different note. BOOLEAN scans through each column from left to right. The size of each balloon determines the amplitude of the note being played. Different colored balloons produce different sounds; teal balloons produce no sound, pink balloons produce a triangle wave, and orange balloons produce a square wave.

Like the Theremin, BOOLEAN is a musical instrument which does not need to be touched in order to be played.

Click here to download a beta version of the software.

View video of program here.