Plenum at Lumiere Durham

Project: Plenum

12 December 2011 | Plenum | Field | OSC | Lumiere | Simeon Nelson | Durham | Rob Godman

This short video shows Plenum projected onto St. Oswald’s church as part of the Lumiere Durham festival. This was the third outing for the piece this year, the first two being at Skyway (Toruń, Poland) and Valgus (Tallinn, Estonia), associated with Lux Scientia.

As mentioned in an earlier blog entry, This version of Plenum dispenses with the (rather fragile) Processing plugin for graphics and instead uses Field’s own antialiased scenegraph renderer. Having something resolution-independent with a virtual camera and the ability to render onto a foldable frame buffer surface was a great help when it came to calibrating for the Tallinn town hall. (We aren’t doing projection mapping, and have no intention of being drawn into that area until a convincing, coherent creative process presents itself.)

The overall timeline arc - the disintegration of a matrix into gravitationally orbiting and escaping bodies - is much the same as the version developed for Skyway in 2010, but the current version also employs a complex, dynamic set of mutation functions which change the sizes of the points according to geometric formulae, resulting in visual artifacts (rings, bars) overlaying the disintegration of the basic pattern.

As before, the Field system transmits musical cues and control signals via OSC to a synthesis system designed and programmed by Rob Godman.

(The cryptic diagram above is Field’s sequencing canvas for Plenum, showing the various elements of the piece along a timeline.)


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