Content

KineTXT

2008

KineTXT is story-telling and text messaging experiment by Novak and myself as *spark. You could say we’re taking the cinematic form but taking the precisely opposite production process: rather than a singular directors vision, the film is an emergent property of that specific audience, in that mood, in that context, at that time. If you put a question such as ‘what do you want’ up on the wall of a bar, and ten people in that bar have the means to reply, and any one of those replies catches the interest and participation of a further ten people, can you create a chain reaction of participatory entertainment? This area is what KineTXT explores.

At the heart of KineTXT is the act of interpretation, receiving short pieces of text from the audience and transforming them into an ongoing narrative that in turn inspires further input from the audience. As such, KineTXT is both an installation - of text messaging infrastructure, display screens, animation and so on - and act of performance - the live ‘herding’ of text messages into a linear flow, the annotation of that flow with handwritten prose developments and illustrations.

Implementing this creative environment for writers and illustrators, we have had a successful run in 2008: KineTXT was a self-commissioned pilot for the after-dark strand of AV Festival, and was hailed as one of the highlights of the whole festival. From this we were commissioned to realise that pilot for the reopening of the Tyneside Cinema, developing the relationship between the texts and debuting a full-screen interactive for the audience - effectively a mini-KineTXT for them to manipulate from which the results are fed to the main canvas. We ran KineTXT at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Arts, programmed into the Thinking Digital conference, and at the Designed and Made gallery to help launch their PRISM exhibition. The year was rounded off by being selected for ImageRadio, a festival of new media in public space in Eindhoven, Netherlands. For this we held a performance with local writers and illustrators as part of the opening gala, with the KineTXT system recording its state and then replaying this throughout the festival incorporating further SMS submissions.

In 2009 we developed the storytelling and visual capability of KineTXT a lot further, giving a writer a graphics tablet so handwriting prose could interpret the story a level further (not a new idea - we had tried with fax rolls and markers for the pilot, but it was just too clunky and got lost in making everything else work nicely), and allowing the illustrators to capture and cut-out their illustrations from the artpad and into the kinetxt animation system itself. With calligraphy and photoshop-colourised characters now in the mix, the visual ante was upped considerably. This was all done as prep at the Mapping Festival in Geneva, where we also had the great privilege to run KineTXT as an facade projection in a housing complex laced with radical history, a theme the local artists we worked with readidly took up.

The video below is from the pilot, in March 2008. Mapping Festival have uploaded an edit of the much-developed KineTXT performance also on video: http://vimeo.com/9598830.

Files

Diary entries

av:ision with kinetxt

up in newcastle to start work proper on the kinetxt project, a collaboration with novak commissioned for the ‘av festival’ as part of the after dark programme. they had a town full of script writers with nothing to do in the evening, novak wanted to combine the interactive possibilities of tools such as quartz composer with vj production and performance techniques. we put those together and proposed an installation space where those in the space can leave their mark and become part of an ongoing conversation: with an audience of authors, we are really hopeful about embracing text entry and display to create a kind of storytelling space.

whats nice about this, is that this is a geniune case of business development money actually making things happen: name approached me for mentoring based on my live cinema and dynamic content programming work, and following three days of quartz composer and other allied things, we were talking in the pub about project ideas enabled by this kind of work, and here is one of those ideas actually commissioned and fitting an audience profile perfectly.

kinetxt: tuesday 4th march, middlesborough, ‘the basement’, 8pm - 12am, free.

kinetxt v0.0000001

system diagram: discussed, ok’d.
wiimote: check. triplehead2go: check. folder of text messages: check. custom qc patch to enable text animation: check.
blend together for kinetxt v0.00000001.

it doesn’t do much, but its a start.

geek desk porn

wiimote with 2 diy ir markers + 2 bullet cameras into uncompressed quicktime stream converters -> laptop running quartz composer with 2 weeks of custom coding -> triplehead2go giving a canvas of 2400x600, 18” wide when projected.

of course, qc won’t accept the two streams simultaneously. vidvox worked it out, apple didn’t for the own tool. tsssck.

kinetxt: tick

a kinetxt self-portrait, with the isight camera on me rather than our bullet cam on graffiti writers. more importantly, this is my contribution to the kinetxt event working, the interactive text messaging display ready to hand over to novak for tuesday’s installation / performance. huzzah!

kinetxt: success via sms

meanwhile in newcastle, it was the kinetxt evening. and according to the photo and text message i got, it all went really well. huzzah, what a relief: definitely an experimental project, and one with a fair amount of risk given the experimental technology and audience participation. can’t wait to hear more and see some real footage…

kinetxt photos

been dragged into facebook to get a peek at the photos, digital politics aside, it’s certainly good when you see the festival director write “this was such an amazing event!”. huzzah!

back in newcastle for kinetxt[v2]

or strictly speaking, as of this-photo, gateshead. they’re finally about to knock down the iconic ‘get carter’ car park and rooftop restaurant-that-never-was. loving the irony of seeing a derelict shop front ‘well worth it’ just above the ‘danger - demolition site’ sign.
yesterday was a non-stop afternoon at the tyneside cinema’s open house reopening event, demonstrating kinetxt to hundreds of people exploring the venue. some good usability testing, not to mention some last minute fixes to the new kinetxt engine and brand spanking new client. best of all though, was seeing all sorts of people ‘get it’, from kids to grannies alike.

kinetxt[v2] » tyneside & baltic

the two nights of kinetxt[v2] - first as part of the opening gala for the renovated and extended tyneside cinema, and the next night at the baltic centre for contemporary art as part of the thinking digital conference. this is the setup at the baltic, with client macbooks kindly lent by the tyneside cinema.

kinetxt[v2] » “he’s drawing it”

…also at the baltic, needless to say.

kinetxt[v2] » what do you want?

kinetxt in action: no storytelling at this point, but the audience starting to feed the event into the installation. i’m looking forward to seeing what our photographer for the two evenings comes up with.

eindhoven » mink’s stylish chauffeur services

picked up in style from the airport by the lovely and talented olga mink, co-curator of imageradio which will be featuring kinetxt this year. sitting in this car, it feels like you’re in a ship.

eindhoven » kinetxt reconnaissance

checking venues for the kinetxt installation. this is eindhoven’s town archive, far from a musty building it rings with cool modernity - the only file boxes in sight form the design for the fascia.

eindhoven » kinetxt creatives

…explaining the kinetxt idea to local creatives, hopefully we can gather a group of people to really take the storytelling and content-for-the-context beyond where we’ve had it before.

kinetxt at imageradio » the week starts

kinetxt has been curated to be part of imageradio: new media in public space, taking place in eindhoven from thursday to sunday next week. so back in the uk for just one day, its off to the netherlands to try and pull it together over there.
check the website for lots of interesting work:
http://www.imageradio.nl/content/blogcategory/24/55/

imageradio » hour interview announced

eek, slightly daunting: an hour interview to highlight how “the artist’s work” relates to the theme. and there’s me still not entirely comfortable with the idea of myself as an artist…

imageradio » lampcam innovation

two anglepoise lamps on the desk, smart and suitably adjustable, but light only seems to be coming out of one of them…

imageradio » kinetxt starts

6pm: kinetxt is go. and the other innovation: its recording itself, so it can spend the rest of its time at the imageradio exhibition iterating through the opening night’s perfomance.

imageradio » kinetxt tour

with imageradio’s opening speeches over, we see crowds come through

imageradio » kinetxt creatives

the creative hub. props to all involved: you can see the energy.

kinetxt handwriting dev

a little sneak peek of a quartz composer plug-in in development: spk-calligraphy, a set of patches for recording and playing back 2d strokes. the basic patch is equivalent to the kineme GL line structure patch, but draws the line as if it were a chisel nib at 45° and with a flow fade-out. the other two are what is going to enable a big part of the next kinetxt development: handwriting to go alongside the rendered text.

mapping'09 » kinetxt › meet the artists

after arriving at this year’s mapping festival and having the plan-the-week meeting with andrew, its the next day and we’re meeting the artists. mapping have curated seemingly a dream-team for us, which really fits the idea we proposed of emphasising the idea of a ‘band’ coming together to tell a story. we’ve always run kinetxt as a longer-form audience-led event/environment, and for this performance we’ve brought it down to 45 minutes and we’re really hoping to somehow create the equivalent of a band performance, but instead of guitars and drums, we have illustrators, a poet, and a backing setup of me, andrew and james of novak, and lots of laptops with lots of custom code and things hanging off them.

introducing the band -

  • heike fiedler, a ‘realtime poet’
  • thomas perrodin, an illustrator and comic-strip artist
  • themes.ch, aka thomas and mathias, already well versed in live illustration as projections, and photographed above checking out our in-development calligraphy set-up.

and as a footnote, preceeding that meeting with andrew came two tweets from me: “writing lists a week before a performance is always scary” and “realising its much less than a week to the performance: even scarier”

SPK-Calligraphy v1.2

…and now having used it in anger, here we have

  • Added bounds feature, to give you all the sizing information you need to block out your calligraphy renderers.
  • Fixed a crashing bug triggered by sending a clear all lines signal mid-stroke
  • Added an advanced example derived from KineTXT development. Use space to send chunks of calligraphy to the screen, as if you were writing on a horizontal scroll.

mapping'09 » kinetxt › the themes are set

one of the ideas of kinetxt is starting off from a blank sheet of paper, story unwritten, and the way I see it one way of increasing the quality or interest in the resultant performance is using the context of the performance as catalyst or reference for whatever emerges. so mapping gave us a great hand in programming us as an outdoor projection in the courtyard of îlot 13, a place with lots of history and spirit. we were projecting on the back walls of one of the blocks, which instantly gives ideas of x-ray views through to the people living there, and the whole complex is a kind of utopia, being a former squat that came to an agreement with the city council, and instead of the standard cycle of demolition and profiteering redevelopment seen world-over, an association was formed to develop the block in the interests of its inhabitants. and what a wonderful job they’ve done, it is quite the urban oasis, both smart and informal.

and so we met there, talked through the history, looked at the wall we were to project on, doodled themes we could explore and so on, captured a little by the photo above.

mapping'09 » kinetxt › kitchen coding

its the day of the performance, and we set kinetxt up in one of the communal rooms of îlot 13 to rehearse.

we do a few ten minute tries, which really give some hope that this could go really well. my favourite memory is seeing one of these start with the outline of an island, and the performance takes the form of a kind of evolving map of utopia. that, and seeing the difference one of the innovations for this performance makes, the ‘cut-outs’ which allow the illustrators to draw characters and tweaked-through-photoshop-whatevers into kinetxt. having pen drawings cut-out and then soft-shadowed with vibrant colours, composited into the kinetxt canvas really opens things visually.

though, of course, it can’t always be rehearsal: kitchen coding called.

mapping'09 » kinetxt › tiger cut-outs

and here is the kinetxt cut-out submitter app, one button to make the tethered camera shoot and load it into photoshop, and the other to drop the photoshopped image onto for submission to the kinetxt canvas.

i was really happy having created it the night before, a few delays and furrowed brows but essentially a few hours work to make just what i wanted. this was, however, until i saw the artist’s laptop it was to sit on, which didn’t quite look right. "ah… its running tiger. and this is written using leopard obj-c grammar and frameworks. ‹expletive›”. cue legacy re-write on the morning of performance.

mapping'09 » kinetxt › white on black

from rehearsal to the performance proper. one of the challenges for us of projecting onto a building rather than a cinematic screen is that you don’t have the clear frame for your ‘canvas’, rather you’re just lighting up bits of a facade: type in the void. this gives a problem for making an art-pad the backdrop of your canvas: you don’t want a bright white rectangle somewhere on your building, you want the lit pen-strokes floating in the wider surface. so here we are for one part of the performance proper with our illustrators experimenting with black paper and tipp-ex (correction fluid) type pens.

mapping'09 » kinetxt › the performance, part one

after three days of prep, the performance. to quote the internet:

“It is a beautiful project and one that brings together three local illustrators and a poet for the festival performance. Despite some last minute technical difficulties - including rain forcing the start time forward by almost two hours, the show delivers with some moments of true beauty and the six busily active artists and live soundtrack make for an absorbing spectacle.” - lucy benson

lucy wrote that for friend sean healy’s skynoise blog and publication back in oz. so not exactly impartial, but on the flip side that should be in print!

mapping'09 » kinetxt › the performance, part two

that was the positive, here’s the negative. well, it was an outdoor performance, and it rained. which sucks, and its a shame that because of rain cover the audience couldn’t crowd around us performing it, seeing the creative hub and being able to join in with our text clients and general heckling to do this idea or that. but that is life.

what i feel is the real shame, is that despite the promise seen in rehearsal the performance didn’t pick up on the storytelling thread, which is perhaps one of the consequences of having to start earlier. this was to allow the other (truly open-air) act the chance to perform once the rain had passed, and it meant we started in sudden chaos rather than well briefed order, and with me dealing with an unpaired wii-mote that refused to play nice.

similarly because of the earlier start, we didn’t get a slot to properly tweak the canvas to the wall either, so the text was too small for the amount of relief texture we were projecting onto, and our texts weren’t exactly aligned with the wall edge… and so on, its easy to get hyper-critical about these things when you’ve so much time invested in it. i should say that the tech backing was fantastic - shout out to fanny - with the projectors being a dream to use, so bright, crisp and colour accurate.

however, the image quality speaks for itself, so i should stop whining and wait to see it objectively through the footage shot by the mapping documentation team.