toby's blog

from the big revision of the presentation to a write-up that took it in a quite different direction to now: a ground-up re-write. a scholarly work that builds an argument and from the theory offers provocations back to the practice. spoiler: smartphone screens. tl;dr: play your audience not your computers. put out there in a spirit of debate: all crit welcome!

Live Cinema is a contemporary performance practice built around audio-visual media. This essay questions the ‘live’ in Live Cinema, asking what Live Cinema events can tell us about liveness, and what liveness can tell us about the practice. Here’s why:

I’m at a Live Cinema event, but I’m troubled. This is an important moment: my collective has been invited to The School of Cinematic Arts, University of South California; the event is explicitly labelled a Live Cinema one. To my mind, Hollywood might just as well have said ‘hello Live Cinema’! Watching the opening performances, I see an audience rapt. Coming off stage after our performance, big cheers. But this audience… this audience appreciated the content, the staging, but what here was really live? The fact that I was behind a laptop screen pressing buttons? Moreover, I can’t help but feel the audience would have got a better show if we’d played out a recording of our rehearsal, and checked our email instead. Something is wrong here, and having taken on this label of Live Cinema, we owe ourselves and our audience an investigation.

This personal account of the author highlights that Live Cinema is gaining acceptance, is appreciated, but answering what that appreciation is for may not be straightforward. One thing is for sure: as a performance form whose ‘product’ is media and whose ‘draw’ is liveness, it should be an instructive study given an opposition of these two terms has shaped much of the literature on liveness.

for a few fractions of a millimetre here and there, this is pretty much a whole new pcb design. it also meant no magnetically isolated ethernet jacks (the mag in magjack should really be magic instead), which puts you on a path of doing that isolation your own circuitry, and that… that can put you on the path of feature creep.

yep, feature creep it has, and with that more delay. but for a very good end: that ethernet jack can now do more than ethernet…

lying with statistics is oh so easy, intentionally or otherwise. the graph on the previous poster showed… a correlation so great it instantly raised suspicion. rightly so, and so back to the data to make something not only more rigorous but more expressive. turns out it takes waaay longer, not just doing the first thing that comes to mind, and doing it well. ditto for the prose: much butchering of each other, it being a joint effort between saul and i.

celebrations, we are now a two tiered-cake-stand family.

package was waiting for me, opened the box: two assembled pcbs, all looking as they should.

to my utter amazement, the electronics all work out: once the pinouts were updated in the mBed firmware, its talking RS232 to the video processor without drama or debugging. to my double amazement, after a quick primer on SPI and decyphering the oled’s datasheet, a test program incants the screen into life, and some time after that the random pixels of an uninitialised buffer have turned to a pattern of my coding. some image editing and two processing sketches later, i have the byte sequences to display a full screen image and typeset my choice of pixel font. the test program fleshed out and re-rolled as a library, and we have the above sight. given the delays the screen has caused since 2009, its so satisfying having this work as per the data sheet, as per design, out of the box; and not even relying on other people’s voodoo: my library, from scratch.

of course, things are never quite that simple. the electronics check out, but the physical fit requires some rejigging — note to self: order the enclosure in advance next time, no matter how well dimensioned its spec drawing may seem. a millimetre here, and a millimetre there has now forced a complete re-layout of the PCB.

aaaand: the ultimate irony? the physical fit issues weren’t just components hitting case internals. what you can’t see in the photo are 40 jumper wires coming out of the mBed’s socket on the PCB leading to a displaced mBed sat in a prototyping block. for all of the correct design and manufacture, these assemblies are compromised by a square peg (mBed pins) not fitting into a round hole (a quirk of the socket strip i spec’d). tssssch!

away to the wilds of wales for a birthday weekend, car laden with soundsystem and booze. aaah.

it’s been two and a half years since the magic week of going from idea to breaking a working dvi mixer package and the ensuing dreams of getting it out there for everybody. problem is, thats still in dream territory: where’s the manufacturable hardware or website buy-button?

by june 2010 there was a v1 and things were looking good. it had taken far longer than seemed necessary… but that turned out to be just the tip of the iceberg. this was a year ago, and this slightly less. so what has been happening? long story short, the software1 had been waiting for hardware that was perpetually “almost” there. if you’re time-constrained, don’t work with someone else who is also time-constrained; doubly so if you’re entirely relying on them. if you don’t have the skills to make you the master of your own destiny, get on with getting them.

getting on with getting them, for the past two months i’ve been working away and what you see above is an extract from my first PCB design, a from-scratch reworking of what a d-fuser PCB needs to be. i’ve just sent it out to be manufactured and all-importantly assembled up (data sheets and making up eagle library parts may no longer scare me, but soldering 0.5mm pitch FFCs does). if it doesn’t work its because of the design, and that i can work with — and now have some guru backup.

all of which means it’s as if it’s may 2010 again: we’re in “pcbs, parts, plans” territory, complete with corresponding announcement: i will be presenting the work-in-progress at dorkbot london #782. the difference is, this time i know the whole widget, its entirely down to me, and i’ve even secured a little start-up funding to expedite this prototyping.

1. including the gift of the tv-one header for any other projects out there, and doing some reverse engineering to get EDID upload functionality that plug’n’play would need. props to vade for the insane undertaking of reworking the original tv-one header to have every rs232 command and resolution under the sun in there, not to mention bootstrapping the QC plug-in itself. ↩
2. if you’re in town, come down! ↩

the best thing you can be asked to after spending a year getting to grips with a phd and producing a document of goodness knows how many words is to take that and boil it down to two sides. thanks to newcastle’s culture lab (any surprise?)for cornering me into this by proposing a workshop on liveness at the premier conference on human factors in computing. and best of all: my position paper has been accepted.

In the literature on liveness there is a surprising paucity of studies that look directly at the character of interactions between audience members. Partly as a consequence of this, technological interventions in the live experience have focussed primarily on enhancing the performers’ ability to project aspects of their ’act’ or on enriching the ‘generic’ audience experience. We argue that the dynamics of the interactions amongst audience members is key to the experience of a live event and that if we attend to this directly new opportunities for technological intervention open up.

…aaaaand, no more test data. we did so much more than can be shown in a still or two here, we even pulled a whole four minute finale piece out of the bag, video edit and all1. most of all, we did it, the audience made it… live!

Carolyn Jones (Cj) @TheWidget - Still buzzing a little after #festivalofideas yesterday. I think the crash will hit hard!
Eithne Harley @EithneHarley - @TheWidget you guys were great. The Brain made #festivalofideas. Hopefully we’ll see you again some where, some time..

https://twitter.com/accenture_irl/status/167637969786765312
https://twitter.com/accenture_irl/status/167601242107940864
https://twitter.com/eithneharley/status/168117994638147585
https://twitter.com/eithneharley/status/168117994638147585
https://twitter.com/eithneharley/status/168454043902017536

1. i’m learning: never has under-promise and over-deliver been so clear in my mind! ↩

after a bout of yet more *spark screenrunner back-end building up — libPusher, ‘event’ document packages that encapsulate the media and graphic template, the all important enqueue new — it was onto what really set this gig apart.

visually, i’d always thought of the rendered output as 2d motion graphics, the made by movie re-working being the canonical example. but here the content wasn’t coming in from the virtual ether, or just signing who was in front of the screen, we were visualising the venue we were in, and it was laid out with yurts, with conversation threads and ideas coming from each of them. we needed a map, we needed a way of collating the ideas… and one-creative-process-later, i was loving the result: animating around a 3d tabletop diorama of post-its and plastic yurt board-game pieces, with polaroid snaps falling down on one side and A4 sheets sellotaped down on the other.

true 3d in quartz composer was a branch out into the unknown for me, and not without its developer terror moments finding out what it was happy with and what it wasn’t. bottom line, while there’s issues a-plenty with qc’s 3d rendering, couple it with sketchup for quick 3d modelling and globs of javascript to handle the data-scape, colour me impressed. it was captivating watching the animation unfold as the live content came in - and a proud moment.