MouseMan Mapping Porsgrunn

This is an image of Dag Jensen, the photographer that has done most of our performance photos, standing in our installation, taking pictures of a picture he took in 2006, with the audience in front of a 6 x 5 meter poster of the photo he took in 2005 of a girl running away from fire. The sequence has a dizzying effect, it reminds me of learning strange new words in college, like mise-en-abyme meaning, “placing into infinity” or “placing into the abyss”.

First of all the two MouseMan projects in Porsgrunn and Madrid are almost opposites, in Madrid it was inside the Altamira Palace, all made of marble, with a cool atmosphere and plenty of time for people to interact.  In Porsgrunn it was inside the popular Folkets Hus, at the end of a 2 hour theatre walk in the city, together with lapskaus (traditional norwegian food) and entertainment. The visitors had become audience and as an audience they where in a theatrical time mode.

We tried making interactive things for Stedsans in 2007 with little success in the field, so we ended up performing the interactivity. With the Tesla Coil in 2008 we dropped the interaction altogether and did a Pythonesque mad professor routine which worked well. This year, because of reproduction and MouseMan being our new project, we went back to full scale interaction. It seems that Stedsans and interaction doesn’t belong together.

But then a challenger appears. Kids. The kind of people that’s not content with sitting politely at the table and listening about the good old days. We made an easy to understand interface, when you move the red circle follows, a 5-year-old could get it, but it was difficult to grasp for the pre-computer generation. The future for MouseMan could be a large 3D version of PacMan.

Using K8055 with Max/MSP

I notice that we’ve got several hits from people searching for the K8055 USB card, probably looking for a way to interface it trough Max/MSP.

When we created our first robot Maxi Wanzl we had the same problem, and I’m sorry to say that we did not find a really good solution. The K8055 however is easy to interface trough C++, Delphi or Visual Basic, so I ended up writing a “driver” in Delphi communicating with Max trough a virtual midi port (i.e. loopBE).

This works but is cumbersome and demands programming skills not possessed by the average Max user, so my conclusion is clear: BUY AN ARDUINO CARD INSTEAD!

• Faster
• More IO’s
• Cheaper
• Easy to interface to Max
• Massive support

But, if anyone reading this actually know a good way of interfacing the K8055 to max, please leave a comment and let us know.

Mapping Madrid – the catalogue

The summer holidays have finished and IED Madrid have made a catalogue of our project. Get it here:

http://iedmadrid.com/area-cultural/publicaciones/

Harder Better Faster Longer

Dear Internet,

We are currently in Porsgrunn at the Stedsans festival updating our MouseMan project. In this small town we have access to more equipment and the infrastructure is of a happy-go-lucky type,  so v2.0 will be better, faster and longer. There is no hacked web camera, but a newly bought IP security camera. Not one projector, two of course. And why not use six par cans with RGB filters instead of buying one expensive IR light.

So the project is upgraded, but and this is why we ask for your help Internet, when we started testing our two projector vertical set-up, we found no solution to spanning the desktop over two monitors with a flash program in full-screen. Our dualhead2go can pivot the screen, we have downloaded Pivot Pro and searched up and down on the net, but still can’t find a solution. There was three entries in forums addressing the same problem, no one has answered yet. Come on Internet, this is relevant for everybody.

How do you put one projector on top of another and get their desktops to function as a whole, just like it is in horizontal set-up?