Day One!

Phill Tew and I arrived at Istanbul Bilgi University this morning for the very first day of me and my shadow, the 2011 commission project for MADE (Mobility for Digital Arts in Europe). There’s more general information on the project in the About section

This is the first of four residencies for the project, hosted (this time) by boDig. We’ll be working here for the next couple of weeks, and have been given a very nice dance studio to work in at the school of Performing Arts at the university (see pictures above and below).

The main aim of this first residency is to get together a rough working prototype of one of the four portal installations that will make up the final project.  This means we don’t need to worry about the telepresence aspect of the project (yet!), but can focus on basic coding, Kinect interactivity and the look and feel of the user experience.

This week we’re getting going on the code, along with some rudimentary imagery and sounds (next week we’ll get working with some users in the space – professional dancers and performing arts/music students).  Phill has a rough code base together already, adapted from the code he developed for the Danceroom Spectroscopy project he’s been working on (me too, to a lesser extent).  Currently it can do all the Kinect basics – background calibration and separation of foreground (players) and background.  We’ve also got basic skeleton tracking going.

For the first few days we’ll be developing the code, primarily focusing on the visual and sonic elements of the installation. More on this soon..