For my final project proposal, I want to determine what the artistic value is in showing the life-cycle of the pair of robots. To test this, I want to try setting up the robots that we have, but backlight them such that their shadows overlap. For now, we can manually try fading the lights between the robots with the DMX panel of the UI from earlier. To avoid the work of setting this up, we could just film the shadows of the robots and use video editing to fade them together.

Right now, I want to show how these pairs of robots grow over time as their forms change, but I’m not sure what artistic question this would answer (or ask.) Ultimately, I think the piece would be artistically similar to our first demo, but with a bit more continuity and focus. For now, I think the artistic inquiry would be to ask the question of how form affects the relationships between the robots in each pair, and how it evolves as the robot pairs evolve.

The most unresolved visual element is the fading between performances. Should the robots sync up during these transitions? Can they even sync up if they have drastically different forms? Testing this out would be pretty easy and answer this question pretty quickly. Aside from that, we would maybe want to create more continuity between the different animations, which is logistically way more challenging than anything else in this project.

Technically, the most difficult part of this proposal is synchronizing the performances to the lights. I don’t think that would be too hard, since we can either use the dispatch tool that was tested out a bit before our first demo. For the lights, we could just use the DMX box. This performance would not require any additional hardware outside of the DMX setup, but we could modify or add additional robot pairs if we want.