My concern of our group’s size was addressed today. Two of our CS members: Estelle (from Design of Information), and James (from my Multimedia/Hypertext class) left the group for other projects. In return we inherited an art major, Ryan, who will add his expertise to the team.

Ryan has already got us thinking into a new direction — perhaps integrating seasons or time of day into the storm. I think the idea we have now is too static and more reliant upon a technology demonstration rather than an art piece.

Hopefully Ryan will add more expertise to our group.

Today we selected our final project teams. I chose the Thunder Strike project simple because I think it has the most promise for creative and technologically impressive project. Currently our group consists of five people, Greg, Bobby, Estelle, and James — all of whom are CS majors…this may be a problem in the future, especially because I had imagined this project with three people, instead of five.

“Of a Luminous Soul,” represents a fusion between light and sound. The idea (put simply) is to use a light to sound converter to convert light waves into sound and write software to write (and sing) lyrics to sync with the music generated.

The presentation “Of a Luminous Soul” will begin with participants holding various colored flashlights, lava lamps, and other luminous objects to interface with the light to sound converter. The participants will then act as band shining the flashlights and other luminous objects at various intervals to compose a song.

Using the information of the song generated a program (custom written for this project) will be used to generate lyrics based on the beat, tempo, and pitch of the music generated. The lyrics will then be song by either text-to-speech (with perhaps modifications to make it more musical) or via pre-recorded words (since in theory only a limited number of words would be needed for a demonstration).

The software can generate (using the sound data) visualization, so that this completes a cycle: the light generates sound, and the sound generates light.
The software would also record the song being generated, so that after the song is generated, the musician(s) can play the song back (and then sell it to music labels for millions of dollars).

what the piece is about
The piece is titled Tao, and likewise, it is about the concept of Tao. The word “Tao” is derived from a concept in “Taoism” and “Confucianism.” The Tao symbol is translated from Chinese to literally mean way, path, or route.

what technology it uses
The piece uses an HTML page as the container for an Adobe Flash object. The HTML page includes a few lines of JavaScript to automatically resize the browser window to fill the entire screen. The HTML page is set to be hex color #00000 or black and the page uses JavaScript to focus the Operating System on this window.

The artwork uses Adobe Flash 6 (as identified in the source code) for its display. The flash is used as a container for two lower resolution movies. The movies themselves house the majority of the art work including the driving car video, the stars overlay, the color changes, and the 3D figure that is overlaid is embedded with the video. The 3D figure, the color change of the video, and the stars were likely overlaid in a video post-production tool like Adobe After Effects. Adobe Flash is used to control different view of the moving car, restart the video, and control the gradual reading of the text.

what content
The piece (as seen in figure 1) begins with two neighboring videos displayed side by side. The word “TAO” appears atop the videos, which slowly fades as the video progresses. The video on the left is displayed in a sepia color, while the video on the right is displayed with a lime tint. The videos take you on a journey through a road near a water reservoir, this represents the direct translation of “Tao,” of way, path or route. On the right video, stars appear (as seen in the screenshot of figure one) above the cars journey. On both videos a 3D object is blown through space to obscure the audience’s view. The clouds appear ominously in the window of the car. Additionally, an atmospheric, almost mystical sound is played throughout the presentation that slowly fades at the artwork ends.

A brief poem “earth blown out to stars * stars blown down to earth by fast cars * baghdad and addresses of the invisible,” is slowly revealed below the videos. The phrase “earth blown out to stars” means that millions of miles away from earth, amongst the stars, earth would be seen as a very tiny spec (if visible at all). The phrase “stars blown down to earth by fast cars” means that when you are driving in a car the stars become blurred and obscure. Meanwhile, the phrase “baghdad and addresses of the invisible” represents places and people that we forget about, like those in Baghdad. Even tough we hear about in the new every day, we never fully understand life in Iraq.

how audiences encounter/experience it
Audiences experience the artwork via a web browser on virtually any personal computer with speakers and the Adobe Flash plug in installed. The work is accessible from the eliterature.org collection via:
http://collection.eliterature.org/1/works/strasser_sondheim__tao/index.html.

my experience of the piece
I personally found the piece very intriguing. The “Tao” concepts alone are very interesting from a cultural perspective, but this work does an excellent job of capturing the “Tao” concept via visual and audio communication.

I especially enjoyed (after watching the piece many times) that I constantly found new things about the piece that I had missed. For example, the first time I watched the piece I missed the stars, which were layered on top of the video. I also missed the small black lines, which appear atop the video randomly three times, to add to the mystique.

I also enjoyed the entrance to the piece. When you first navigate to the work of art, all that is displayed is the word “TAO” in capital letters with the authors’ names displayed in small print below it (as seen in figure 2). I enjoyed this because it is simplistic and keeps the user guessing what will happen when you actually click the word “TAO.”

sources
The Work:
http://collection.eliterature.org/1/works/strasser_sondheim__tao/index.html

Other Electronic Literature:
http://collection.eliterature.org/1/
http://www.cddc.vt.edu/journals/newriver/strickland/vniverse/index.html
http://www.ifarchive.org/

General Information on Tao:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tao