I've moved everything over from phedhex.blogspot.com to this site, www.phedhex.com/blog. This Wordpress blog software is pretty flippin' sweet - it did most the work for me. I'll still have to categorize my posts, fix the broken images (my blogger account won't let me hotlink em), and design and build a theme for this site. At any rate, welcome to the new home.
I have a thing for 3d glasses. Here's a pic from a blog entry of long ago:
When I made this photo sometime in February, I thought it'd be fun to make a 3d dance video.
In order to make a 3d movie, what you do is you take two camcorders and you separate the lenses about eyewidth apart. You film a scene with both lenses simultaneously, and you get some video editing software to filter it through to make a moving 3d image.
So sometime back in July I did just that. I borrowed a friend's camcorder and filmed me freestyling. The dancing ain't my best, but the 3d effect came out pretty good.
Just FYI, to really get a sense of what's going on here, you'll need to get yourself a free pair of stereoscopic 3d glasses from rainbowsymphony.com. I'm not exactly sure why they're givin em out for free, but heck, I'll take.
[youtube]7hw5fPjX2Ts[/youtube]
PS. If you want a better version of this video, get a hold of me (hwang.al at gmail dot com) and I'll email you the .avi so you can fullscreen it. It turns out that it looks way cooler when it's bigger.
Dancers dance in a 3d medium - we weren't meant for video. It's the difference between a painting and a sculpture. Some forms translate well, liquid and tuts, while other forms don't, miming, digitz.
Forms translate differently because the natural inspiration behind them translate differently. For liquid you have the sine wave, for tuts you have ancient Egyptian wall paintings.
My inspiration for miming is the everyday 3d objects that I encounter. I need real space in order to create real things, and I want to assume that anybody watching has access to that real space. When I digit, I'm building 3d contours like a digital wireframe, or I'm traveling across space like a centipede. These are volumetric, and they don't flatten as nicely as, say tuts.
So this video succeeds in adding weight and texture to my body - and the digitz and miming render nicely.
Thanks for everyone for bearing w/ the dry spell of blog entries (even though most of you reading this are probably geeky enough to be plugged into the RSS). At any rate, back in March I was featured as a dance teacher in Cao Fei's opening at Lombard-Freid. Other than the ritual of free wine and cheese that is the "Chelsea Art Opening," I got to watch myself in a video teaching old Chinese people how to dance hip hop. There was even some footage of me doin some breaking of my own.
I thought that would be the last I'd hear from them, but sometime last month they sent me a media packet. Not only does it include two large prints of me gettin jiggy w/ it, it also includes a sticker sheet, with two stickers of me - one of me pulling a handplant, and another of me teaching an old Chinese guy how to raise the roof.
Have a looksee:
Here's one of those large prints:
And the other...
This is the sticker sheet. That's right, I'm on a sticker:
Here's that first print, but in sticker form:
And, the best for last:
In dance news, I'm scheduled to work with Morgan Murphey, a friend and in a piece where I dance in my underwear. Rehearsals start as soon as MMurph gets back to the city in the first week of September. I'M GONNA BE A DANCER MOMMA!!!
In digital news, I bought www.phedhex.com, where I've set up a Wiki to document all my digital work.
Also, I plan to move up outa this blogspot joint and into a phedhex.com hosted Wordpress blog. For a casual reader, this doesn't mean much (except that you'll go to www.phedhex.com/blog), but for a geek RSS reader, you can subscribe only to Movement posts, only Digital posts, or if you wish, you can continue to feed into all work. I should expect to have that up in maybe a week.
Till next time...
You know how they make greeting cards so that you don't have to come up with the words yourself? Someone should do that for bloggers who don't let the world know what they're up to. So, I'm quitting my day job to persue this Wiremap thing full-time. I'm also really busy writing an application for Eyebeam's residency program. It's due on Monday.
I promise: in a couple of weeks I'll update you on everything, including the acquisition of www.phedhex.com, dance work with a friend from college, the media packet from Cao Fei (my very own hip hop sticker), dancing in the light of a projector, an anaglyph dance video, and perhaps the most exciting development of all, mirage, a water version of wiremap.
Tune in sometime in the next couple of weeks, because I'm damn excited to get back in the groove.
I've been so busy lately that I missed that hack247.co.uk mentioned me in their website. Here's the link, and here's the excerpt: Although a bit of a mouthful, The Real 3D Cyberspacial Globe is an impressive custom 3D Display It works by projecting directly onto the suspended wires, allowing the user to create 3D objects on a real 3D space. This is made all the more impressive by the fact that it is a DIY effort….. To find out more visit the constructors website at http://phedhex.blogspot.com/
Thanks guys.
So Dan Selman wrote some code and named the program Voxra. It looks like it's coming along really well, and it also seems promising that this implementation will be pluggable from outside sources. He also has some experience with 3d music visualization with OpenGL, so he may be able to apply some of that experience to this project. So on my end of things, I've been hacking away and a proposal concept to take to Mark Bolas. It's called Mirage - a Wiremap composed of drops of water. There are a few awesome advantages to water. Firstly, I'd be able to drop water at varying depths, compared to the wire's fixed depth. This will give a fuller rendering effect.
Second, and I feel more importantly, a viewer would be able to walk into a rendered volume. They'd be able to physically interact with cyberspace... sort of. The effect would be a little quantum. As soon as you touched the rendered volume, your hand would interfere with the signal and be an intersecting surface. What I mean is, if you put your hand into a floating globe, a chunk of the globe would disappear and show up on your hand as a projected image. By involving a human body, 3d reverts back to 2d.
I figured that the proposal would require some media along with it, so I've hacked out a wiremap applet that works with gravity and falling water. It can be seen here. It uses the old engine that I had. In order to get a good feel of what it would look like on a big scale, I made the acceleration due to gravity 10 inches/second^2. This projected image would be correct if the image hits a water wiremap of 16 meters.
I'm trying to do it on a smaller scale, but when things get small, acceleration due to gravity gets relatively big. Even fast computers can't really keep up and the drops of projected light start to chop, which means the lighting will be spotty. I'm not sure if this means that the rendered volume will chop in and out of existence, or if it means that it won't exist. I'll have to do more testing.
I have my eyes out for 8' x 4' x 5/8" plywood to build that new wiremap. I believe I'm resolved to string or yarn. I think I'll be needing 512 washers, 256 meters of string, and a whole lot of time.
I've been trying to go to Lincoln Center with my new projector, but I tell myself I've been busy. I think I'm getting pretty tired of that excuse.
*****
In news completely unrelated to wiremap, I've been playing around with standing / dancing in front of a projected iTunes Visualizer. From the point of view of a lighting designer, the effects are goddamn stunning. I plan on uploading something onto YouTube really soon.
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