My role

I was one of the digital artists in the group and performed the first part. I helped finalize the concept and participated in designing ‘our stage’ among other things but mainly focused on the visual performative aspect starting from nature to the polluted world. I also played a small role in making sure we had projectors during our practice sessions and for the performance.

Performance Day

The max patch I made, which I have discussed in a previous blog, had all the effects I wanted to use. The three folders contain the three different visual aids I needed – nature, pollution, and glitch effects. All these worked well during rehearsal and practice sessions. 

But, twenty minutes before we had to perform, Vizzie (max) crashed thrice. I was able to restart it twice but it continued to crash and by this time the audience had already gathered and we were running a few minutes late.

I was very confused as to why it was crashing now when I’ve been working with this the same way for the past week. I realized then. I did add a new video, rather a large file into one of the folders during the rehearsal before the final performance we had and Vizzie did not like that. I quickly removed that video and reopened the software and added the folders again. The performance finally began. 

The first show we had may have not been our best, lot of nerves and too many errors. I felt I was too worried about moving between visuals that I lost out on the effects and glitches I wanted to add.

Post my part, I was supposed to project garbage floating around onto the ground in a way of directing the audience to the next section. First, the Ipad failed to open, then the Pico projector did not work. Both of these functioned well during rehearsal.

We received some good constructive criticism and encouragement, and we went again.

As Jules said, the second time was much better! I was able to create more effects and make the visuals more chaotic, and thanks to Vibha who at the end of her performance added the sunrise and we synced up, completing the loop. No garbage was projected onto the floor, but that was a lesson learned. 

I like to call the above screengrabs ‘Shades of Shruti’, as I performed the visuals sitting behind screen 1. The shades of the visuals as well as my nervousness are all too clear.

Reflection

This entire experience of collaborating with these talented individuals and creating this performance was a fun journey. I learned Vizzie, though mostly about how it does not work, and how to use a MIDI controller, but mainly working with sound designers. I will miss our design discussions. 

Some of the challenges we did face were synchronizing both audio and video. They need visuals to create the sounds and we as digital designers found it hard to start something from scratch without having a clear brief. I guess that is a learning as well, not always would we have a clear indication of what is needed to begin working on anything. It is also important to stop ideating at some point and begin creating, which we started out later than we should have. Nonetheless, the performance had a narrative, start and end. But definitely has a lot of scope for improvement and additions.

I feel the future of this project can be an extended version where it runs in a continuous loop and even the audience has to move in a circle to view it. Both the visuals and sounds can be more immersive making the audience feel as if they are part of the performance, they could even trigger certain outcomes.

Initially, we had thought of using West Court at ECA to showcase our performance, but we soon changed it to the Atrium in Alison House. The main reason is the already existing truss support that can be used to hang screens and partitions.

Below shows the plan of the atrium, please note it is NOT to scale.

We decided to use the central space and with the help of the truss tie the screens. We weren’t able to establish a clear walk around within the room as planned before, but the audience does move from screen 1 to 2 as they move from my (Shruti) part to Vibha and Yi Xu’s part.

Below shows the stage we designed and the various places we positioned ourselves during the performance.

As seen, the audience enters the atrium and would first notice a black screen in front followed by the screen to the left. This is where part 1 is performed. The audience then moves through the gap and faces screen 2 to the right where the second half is performed. We were able to create an S-shaped movement pattern but a circle or a loop would’ve been more interesting as it would relate to our narrative and the audience would have an entrance/exit.

The digital designers sat behind their respective screens and the sound designers were in the corner of the S-shape. This way they could see both the screens and the audience.

Regarding the speaker setup, we decided to place 1 Mackie SRM450 on the ground tilted up 45 degrees behind each of the 2 screens. This seemed like an obvious choice, since the audience would be staring at each of the screens during the performance. This placement allowed us to have sound emitting only out of the speaker behind screen #1 during the first half of the performance, and then, when it was time for the audience to move to the second viewing area, we panned all of the sound to the speaker behind screen #2. This ushered in the audience effectively and was a creative use of a simple stereo setup.

We also placed a Genelec 7060 subwoofer at about the middle-left of the performance space. Since the low frequencies emitted by subwoofers are omnidirectional, we knew it didn’t matter precisely where the subwoofer was located or which direction it faced – we just put it roughly in the center of the room in order to emit an added ‘thump’, and it worked brilliantly!

Mengru and Vibha did some set designing by creating a boundary with plastic waste and even added some small lights which enhanced the stage.

The content  

The videos I gathered were of nature and pollution. I start with a generic sunrise that changes into a bird’s eye view of a forest to the mountains with a beach. I wanted the audience to feel calm and see sites they are familiar with. From here I transitioned to a cityscape. I should’ve added visuals that had more vehicles and people but showed one that was rather a calm city road with a few cars. I then began adding pollution videos and these would crossfade with the nature visuals. In short, I move from nature to cityscape, pollution in the cityscape to pollution in nature. Finally, end with us (the group) looking down a hole and it begins to spiral. This is where my part ends. 

These videos used were stock videos taken from online sources, I would’ve liked to film a few visuals in the city but unfortunately, never had the time. I did ask around for any aesthetic nature videos among my friends and peers but failed to receive any suitable ones. It was also interesting to learn that we use portrait mode to capture moments over landscape these days and that’s mainly due to social media. The links to the videos used are mentioned below.

Choreographing the performance

I start our performance with visuals of nature and pollution, blending them with effects to create an interesting video output. We were introduced to Vizzie (Max) during the course, where this was all possible and it seemed rather straightforward.

Little did I know that running the software would make my laptop sound like it was about to take off.

I started the first patch by adding video players, multiple effects, and loadbang commands for all of them. I did notice a considerable decrease in the speed of my laptop as I was working. The file crashed multiple times and I was starting to question my laptop’s GPU ( which could run Unity, Blender, and Photoshop at the same time!)

It was during our rehearsal on the 27th of March, that Jules pointed out that having too many players with loadbang for all of them is causing the laptop to slow down and crash the software. He told me to simplify it and have a maximum of four players.

So, I restarted, opened a new patch, and began the process again. This time I kept it as simple as possible and had just enough effects. I added movie folders, three exactly, one for nature, one for pollution, and another for glitches and effects. I added three effects so that I can follow consistency through the performance.

Adding a MiDi controller to control the changes/effects has been very useful and with practice, I feel a lot more confident.

What I learned from this experience – start simple, see what the software is capable of, and have fun!

On Thursday, the 16th of march, we met up to test some prototypes. We booked a studio in Alison house, a midi keyboard, and two projectors – short throw and pico to try/test our work, and we heard some sound samples made by Mengru and Owen.
We also used this time to divide the work more specifically based on our strengths and also decided on our narrative.

Overall, it was a good meeting where we found our direction, and now we move into creating our parts for the performance!

We had a group discussion with Jules mainly to discuss: What is a performance? What constitutes a performance? , and What do we showcase? 

 A performance involves live production/show of work – VJ-ing, controlling multiple computers, and automating and synchronizing visual and audio pieces, is what we understood. 

Ideas he shared with us:

1. Having two videos playing where they blend or fold into one another. These can be created using Jitter or Vizzie. 
2. Use of dance mats for interactions. The audience could trigger a change in audio/ video when they step on them. 
3. Augmenting the performance. Producing video clips with partial sound and adding/ altering more live. 

He advised us to build a narrative using collages with sounds and images. We also discussed an idea – moving through land or time– where we could show the effects of pollution using Alice in wonderland as the backdrop. 

He encouraged us to collect sounds from nature, and since we are talking about pollution – sounds of crushing bottles, engine sounds, etc. 

We will start by developing the narrative and moving forward from there!