Project Work Plan: Voice Air Balloon

An artistic motivation for the piece
We are interested in creating an interactive and immersive experience for the user. We want to encourage any user to make sounds and control their experience on the inside, while viewers on the outside get to watch as the balloon with human feet expands, falls, twists, and emanates sound.

The user will crawl into the relaxed balloon (at “rest” the balloon is spinning slowly in one direction for some x distance, and once it reaches x the balloon slows to zero and turns in the opposite direction to negative x) and find a small microphone hanging from the top of the fabric. When the microphone picks up sound from the user, the balloon will be pulled up by a string. When the fabric is fully extended up, the balloon fabric will be released and fall like a parachute. The voice can also control the speed of rotation, and depending on where the balloon is on it’s path of travel, the user may see the balloon slow to 0 and then start spinning the other way.

A narrative description of what the viewer or participant might experience
A rotating curtain-like suspended fabric catches the viewer’s attention – there seems to be a certain rhythm to its twisting, giving it an animate quality. He watches for a minute or so – it twists itself by rotating continually in one direction, before untwisting, and twisting in the other direction, repeating over time but the untwisting seems to be different each time. He decides to move closer to the piece. Someone invites him and his friend to interact with the piece by going under the suspended fabric – his friend dares him to do it. As the fabric’s movement slows, he bends down and crawls under it. On the inside of the fabric, he feels safe. He touches the fabric. He sees a sort of microphone or sound sensor hanging above him. Letting out basic sounds, he slowly increases the amplitude of his voice. The fabric seems to bounce up and down more dramatically when he’s louder, and rotates more quickly when he lets out higher frequency sounds, creating a “ballooning” effect as it continues to rotate clockwise/anticlockwise. His friend talks to him from outside, prompting him to clap and sing, taking a video in the meantime. As the fabric slows down, he pushes himself out, telling his friend to try it as well.

A brief justification how the project relates to the course themes

We are interested in exploring the idea of imprecision in relation to kinetic movement. The piece has a number of inputs and variables that are controlled (rotation, vertical translation) such that it moves mechanically and rhythmically with the application and non-application of forces, but also interacts with “natural” forces like gravity, stretchiness, springiness of materials, such that the performance is never the same.

The material properties of fabric allow it to be manipulated in many ways by the human body, but limiting it to fewer degrees of freedom of a machine could emphasize and further investigate a certain subset of behaviors. The interaction of the participants will further enhance the “animating” of the piece, where fabric interprets the participant’s interaction into a performance.

The machine could learn to maximize the “ballooning” effect (finding the optimal height and velocity of how the suspension point at the top for the corresponding rotational velocity/state), with a handful of accelerometers built into the fabric.

A description of the physical resources required: props, materials, mechanisms, electronics, computation
Fabric – opaque, maybe patterned. Soft, smooth, reflects sound, light – able to “balloon”.
If top-suspended only, include decorations along the fabric to vary the weight.
If rotated from the bottom,
Sound sensor
Rope
Gear / servo motor

We have a few ideas for the mechanics of how the fabric is supported and manipulated.