We wanted to embody the mask work done by John Galliano.

Concept

The idea is to make a ‘proxy face’. Wearing a headpiece that embodies the presence of the partner with characteristics of the other person. This could be physical traits or personality traits. Essentially we would like a reaction to happen on the partner’s mask when the other partner’s environment changes. The telematic experience would be the transmission of data from one person’s environment to create a reaction on the other’s headpiece. Ideas are to react to darkness (light sensor) and create a noise (through circuit playground) on the partner’s end. Movement (accelerometer) from the other partner could make a different noise for the partner. We would also like to use LEDs to show that a change was recognized.

If possible, de do want to play with the idea of physical movement but not with the servo as it is too big. We still need help fleshing that idea out and being helped with the options for us.

Materials/Technology

Lace/mesh/tulle/gauzy material that can be looked through

Other misc. additions or decor

Circuit Playground – light sensor, sound, LEDs

If possible, items/tech to create movement

Overview

For this project, we ask you to create an active proxy body. We will continue with our investigation of creating a proxy body – this time creating a proxy body that directly interacts with others (people, animals, things, the space). For our definition, active means engaging and exchanging with another in a way that requires direct attention. This active proxy body is a representation of someone or something in a far away place – think avatar, puppet, or remote controlled robot.

You will be paired with a classmate for this project. Each student will physically build the representation of their peer they are paired with. As before, the proxy body will communicate bidirectionally via live transmission of digital data. Each proxy will have capabilities in both sensing and transmitting a local interaction while receiving and performing a remote action. The roles are symmetric, but the proxies do not need to be the same. The representation of your peer, again, does not need to be a literal representation, it could be a constructed, imagined or fictional representation.

The active proxy body can take on many roles and forms. It can be a unique kinetic or tactile communication device. It could take on a supervisory role, a friend role, a role of a monster, a distracting sibling, a pet, a space alien, etc. Its form could be similar to a puppet, a wearable or garment, an abstract textile sculpture, etc. The role and form will play off of each other and contribute to the character of the active proxy body.

Similar to very intentional interactions we may have with another through telephone, mail, video chat, or social media, our active proxy bodies will require our focused attention. Our interactions might be limited by the time availability we have to give that attention.

As before, we are open-minded about solutions to this abstract prompt. But we are especially interested in approaches involving tactile telepresence, possibly as a wearable or garment. We consider sound within this realm, but would discourage traditional visual and verbal telepresence in favor of expressive non-verbal interaction.

Objectives

To create an active representation of another person who is existing remotely from you.

To use the capabilities of live digital data exchange via the Circuit Playground and MQTT systems.

To utilize the pliable qualities of textiles as medium within this project. You are not limited to only using textiles.

Deliverables

Make: Create an Active Proxy Body that is remotely activated using live transmission of digital data back and forth between two locations.

Document: Create a video that shows the story of this Ambient Proxy Body. The images should be clear and easy to comprehend by other’s who do not already know your project.

Write: Create a blog post on the class website to share the video. In the post, write a few paragraphs on the following topics: describe your project (what was it’s intention? what was the resultant experience of it?); tell us what was was successful and unsuccessful in the project; tell us about ideas for the future that are inspired by this project.

Due: Thursday, May 6 at 10:30am

Evaluation

• Tenacity: Are you forging through difficult problems without giving up?
• Execution: Are you crafting with purpose, precision, and attention?
• Experimentation and Inventiveness: Are you discovering/exploring methods outside the obvious and predictable?
• Fulfillment: Did you meet all of the requested supporting criteria (such as providing scans of sketches, categorizing your blog post correctly, documenting your projects, writing reflections, etc.)?

Overview

We have begun this semester with the premise that evoking the feeling of presence using remote digital connections is possible. We have talked about two modes of telematic presence: ambient presence and directly interactive presence, distinguished by a passive or active mode of interaction. This presence we are calling a Proxy Body. A proxy is a temporary replacement for someone who is absent. We are asking you to make an Ambient Proxy Body for your self or another person, in a specific environment. You will be paired with a classmate in order to create this project and perform it.

The proxy body will communicate bidirectionally with a remote proxy via live transmission of digital data. In a sense, each proxy has two distinct purposes, as it is sensing and transmitting a local presence while receiving and performing a remote presence. The roles are symmetric, but the proxies do not necessarily need to be identical.

Each group member is then physically building the representation of their peer. But this does not need to be a literal representation, it could be a constructed, imagined or fictional representation. These choices may also create opportunities for a more general audience to inhabit the device.

When we have been separated from another person, we might have mementos that remind us of that person: a photograph, letters, books, clothes. These items can bring up memories of past experiences. If we had shared a space with the person, and they are now elsewhere, we may feel their absence through a lack of their familiar, routinized interactions, such as foot steps, chatter, doors opening and closing, their music playing, their presence in a chair, items moved from place to place because of their use, etc.

We may have very intentional interactions with this same person while they are afar through telephone, mail, video chat, social media. These interactions usually require ours and their focused attention, often mostly limited by the time availability we have to give that attention. Alternatively, a person’s actual general presence is often limited by space as well as time. Presence is a kind of simultaneous co-habitation of, or co-existance within, an environment. So how do we experience their general, ambient presence with us, even if they are afar?

This is the question at the center of the Ambient Proxy Body project.

Brainstorming question: What are the many kinds of relationships we might experience another’s presence within and how?

• at home: roommates, friends, neighbors….
  • how: walking around apartment, seated in chairs….
• at work: boss and employee, co-worker….
  • how: hovering, sitting next to you in office…..
• at play: chess, dance party….
  • how: over a game board, in a crowded space….
• at….?

Brainstorming question: Are there situations where you feel another’s remote presence already?

Brainstorming question: Is there a kind of presence you want to experience of someone who is absent?

Inspirations

Slideshow of Inspiration for Project 1

Objectives

To create an experience of ambient presence of another person who is existing remotely from you.

To use the capabilities of live digital data exchange via the Circuit Playground and MQTT systems.

To utilize the pliable qualities of textiles as medium within this project. You are not limited to only using textiles.

Deliverables

Make: Create an Ambient Proxy Body that is remotely inhabited using live transmission of digital data back and forth between two locations.

Document: Create a video that shows the story of this Ambient Proxy Body. The images should be clear and easy to comprehend by other’s who do not already know your project.

Write: Create a blog post on the class website to share the video. In the post, write a few paragraphs on the following topics: describe your project (what was it’s intention? what was the resultant experience of it?); tell us what was was successful and unsuccessful in the project; tell us about ideas for the future that are inspired by this project.

Due: Tuesday, April 6 at 10:30am

Evaluation

• Tenacity: Are you forging through difficult problems without giving up?
• Execution: Are you crafting with purpose, precision, and attention?
• Experimentation and Inventiveness: Are you discovering/exploring methods outside the obvious and predictable?
• Fulfillment: Did you meet all of the requested supporting criteria (such as providing scans of sketches, categorizing your blog post correctly, documenting your projects, writing reflections, etc.)?

This week we will continue to explore experiences of presence through responsiveness. Eliciting a response is one way we recognize that another being is present. You are to create a presence that responds to interaction.

You are asked to create this presence using a combination of the pneumatics or motor, fabric, your Bluefruit, and a sensor (either home-made or on-board the Bluefruit. You can use any additional elements that you need to make the experience effective.

Approach

This assignment is an opportunity to begin to bring together the many of the elements we have explored in class: presence through responsive materials. The context of where your presence “lives” will greatly affect how we read, experience, and understand the presence. If it lives in the bookcase, beneath your couch, in your dresser, or sitting beside you all offer a different experience. Test out a number of different locations to find one that is surprising, exciting and unusual. Even one location can have many options – on a couch, in a couch, below a couch or beside a couch will all offer different opportunities and readings.

The actions and reactions may be very simple at this time. Consider contrast and rhythm changes. Consider what minimum and maximum actions create the effect of a presence. You will continue to rig this up using alligator clips and mock-up materials – think about what you can do even in this state to bring us as close to what you are imagining as you can.

A few prompts:

• What are the different states of the presence? Does it have an autonomous action and a reactive action?
• How can you create a presence that has ambient awareness?
• Where does this presence live?
• What does it do? Why?
• What is the minimum you must do to create the felt experience of a presence?

Objectives

• Explore how reactions and responses contribute to a feeling of presence.
• Explore extension of the motor or pneumatic movement we can create.
• Explore integration of the different elements we have been using in class.

Materials

You have received a number of materials to build pneumatic structures and also a variety of pieces of fabrics. Use these materials (and any of your own) to create your responsive presence.

Code

The suggested sample sketch is the Ticklish Device example. This uses one soft sensor and one hobby servo to create an autonomous movement and a reactive movement. Once you have decided on the context and structure of your device please consider how this sketch could be extended or adjusted.

Hobby Servo Samples List

1. Actuate a piece of fabric with a pair of tendon lines using your servo and Circuit Playground. You may simply tape the servo down in a temporary mounting.
2. Actuate one of your existing pneumatic actuators using the syringe with the servo motor and Circuit Playground circuit.

Hand Sewing Samples List

You will need 2 pieces of your muslin fabric cut at 6″x6″. For each technique below, make one full row. Follow along the video demonstrating six hand sewing techniques.

1. Hand Sewing Introduction Demonstration – video by Natalya Pinchuk (basting stitch, tiny running stitch, backstitch, overcast, blanket, appliqué)

Deliverables

• Upload a post with the following:
  • video of your two hobby servo samples
  • images of your six hand sewing samples
  • a few sentences about your approach and experience in the post.

This week we will explore creating pneumatic animation. For this assignment you are to create three pneumatic-and-fabric test pieces that you animate to express three unique emotive states. Allow yourself to play with the pneumatics, fabrics, form, and qualities of movement find an interesting emotive states.

A few prompts:

• Make something and try animating it – what are the emotions being expressed? Does it have one state of emotion or does it change over time?
• How do your fabric or other material choice affect the feeling of the emotive expression? If you changed the materials, how does that change what is expressed?
• Where does this expressive object / creature live? Do the movements and/or emotions read differently in various contexts?
• Try to make one of them breath or sigh – how does this affect it’s emotional quality?

Materials

You have received a number of materials to build pneumatic structures and also a variety of pieces of fabrics. Use these materials (and any of your own) to create your test pieces. Keep in mind that you will need to reuse your syringes and may need to reuse your tubing for future projects. Be very careful and aware when using the hot soldering iron.

Approach

This assignment is very materials based. You are called upon to be inventive and open as you create your pneumatic objects. You may have one idea you begin with while you are constructing the pneumatic portion and then once it is made, you may realize it is very different than what you expected – allow yourself to be open to what it is sharing with you about itself. Materials are expressive; lean on the emotive quality of materials rather than using something like a drawn face to express emotion. Lastly, we encourage you to embrace the test pieces as objects / creatures that are unknown to you. Rather than trying a replica of something you are already familiar with or have seen before ( such as cat, soda can, or rubber duck) focus on conjuring emotive states through the objects’ movement, tempo, evolution, or presence.

Heart of the Assignment

You and a partner will create a telematic experience using your Circuit Playground Bluefruit microcontroller and the MQTT Bridge app you have installed on your computer. Additionally, you can use any built-in Bluefruit sensors and emitters as well as any other physical materials (such as fabric) to create your telematic experience.

Bluefruit built-in sensors:

• Touch Sensor (Capacitance Sensor)
• Tilt, Tap, or Shake Sensor (Accelerometer)
• Temperature Sensor
• Light Sensor
• Sound Volume Sensor
• Push Buttons

Bluefruit built-in emitters:

• Multicolor LEDs (NeoPixels)
• mini speaker

Longer Explanation of Assignment

This week we will explore using the Bluefruit microcontroller and MQTT telemetry to create a telematic experience with a partner. Previously, we used human action to express a remote presence, but this time the electronic media will radically limit the types of possible expression. The central questions we’ll explore are as follows:

• Does the experience convey the perception of a remote human consciousness?
• Does the experience provide awareness of a remote location?
• Does the experience convey intent to a remote location?

Your experiment might not address every one of these questions, as each emphasizes a somewhat different set of assumptions.

Technical Resources: The Medium

The Bluefruit microcontroller natively provides audio and light output. It includes several types of ambient sensing: touch, tilt, shake, sound, and temperature. It also includes pushbuttons, although we’d prefer they not be center of the experience. For this assignment, we’d like you to stick with the onboard sensing and outputs; we’ll work with servomotors later. The touch sensing can be extended by using the clip leads to connect the specific input pads to small pieces of foil or conductive fabric.

The Bluefruit will need to remain connected to a laptop or desktop computer to connect to the MQTT server. The data transmission itself will be a modest telemetry stream, typically limited to around 20 messages per second, each with a few numbers.

Sensing: Social and Physical Context

A central question will be choosing a physical and social context to provide meaning for the limited expressions of the medium. So for example, placing a touch-sensitive pad on your bedroom pillow would give its activation a human meaning based on location and time.

Sometimes this is viewed as a user-interface problem. We are accustomed to deliberate gestures such as pushing a button causing a specific effect; in the specific information context of a switch, a single bit can carry a lot of meaning.

We’d like you to consider more generally how the placement of sensors can respond to both deliberate and unconscious intent. An accelerometer on a refrigerator door, a sound sensor in the bathroom, a touch sensor on a doormat, each of these creates meaning depending on the specific location, time, social ritual, and prior specific knowledge of the individuals in the environment.

Output: Color, Rhythm, and Sound

The same physical and social context will frame the interpretation of the outputs transmitted from the remote location. The LEDs can create color, pattern, and rhythm. They can be used as a display, discreetly placed, illuminate an object, or be diffused through fabric. The sound can create pitch, pattern, and rhythm. It can be subtle, melodic, or annoying.

Approaches and Expectations

This exercise is primarily about thinking through the possibilities of telematic experience within a highly limited medium. The emphasis is on considering the overall context and how it affects the interpretation of a telematic expression.

It should be possible to achieve a result using only the sample code demonstrated during class. That said, we’ll try to form pairs in which at least one person has some programming experience so you have more opportunity to modify the code or write new functionality. We recognize that we aren’t providing detailed programming instruction, so the expectations of technical innovation are kept very open.

We encourage considering an approach centering on ambient awareness rather than a transactional or conversational session. I.e., how could you create a system where you were subliminally aware of another person’s activity in a way that created a sense of community? We recognize that you might not want to keep your laptop plugged into your Bluefruit for a week, but perhaps the scenario could be tested for an interval without the focussed attention of a conversation.

Next week we will begin working with microcontrollers that we will program with lines of instruction (code). This next assignment will offer some preparation for thinking through instructions and telematics.

For this exercise, we would like you to experiment with a partner in creating a telematic experience for another person for 30 minutes. You will do this exercise twice.

Each student will write a score for their project partner to actuate/perform for an audience member. (The audience member can be someone in the performer’s quarantine pod.) Before creating the scores, discuss your boundaries and give consent for what is okay in regards to the kinds of instructions given.

After the telematic experience, briefly interview your friend who volunteered to participate. Then we’d like you (just students in the course, not volunteers) to jointly write a blog post describing and documenting the two telematic experiences.

An example of one score for your classmate-partner could be:

• You will be a microcontroller creating an ambient telematic experience for 30 minutes. During the 30 minutes:
  • Find a location in the same room as your volunteer friend for whom this activity is being created.
  • Every three minutes I will send you a text with a random word.
  • Respond to my text in three ways: 1) Text me the first word association you think of in response to my word 2) Create a shape with your full body and a piece of fabric that expresses your associated word and hold that shape until you receive a new word.
  • At the end of the 30 minutes, create a drawing of each pose you created.

Be creative within the boundaries set up by you and your collaborator.

Objectives

• Explore telematics through the creation and enactment of a score.
• Explore what the role of the microcontroller will be in telematic projects.

Prompts

Here are some suggested approaches:

• Ambient, non-directed presence. Can you identify a context in which passively transmitting and receiving would create a sense of connection?
• Tele-action. Can you choose roles and a task in which one person directs another to accomplish a goal? Is there a task for which the roles could be symmetric?
• Respons-ible: Can your project subtly respond to the actions of your volunteer without “breaking the frame”?
• How can fabric be creatively used in this exercise?

Tools

1. Video: Zoom, FaceTime, etc.
2. Text: text messages, email
3. Tactile: alerts, notifications

We are still exploring the essence of remote presence and action. For this exercise, we would like you to experiment with a partner in creating a telematic experience. Afterward, we’d like you jointly to write a blog post describing and documenting the experience.

We recommend using smartphones for this exercise on account of their portability and personal nature. If this is not feasible, then computer-based communication is also workable.

Objectives

• Use an existing telecommunication system to create a social link between two locations.

Prompts

This is meant to be a fun creative exercise, so the requirements are open to leave a lot of room for interpretation.

Here are some suggested approaches:

• Ambient, non-directed presence. Can you identify a context in which passively transmitting and receiving would create a sense of connection?
• Tele-action. Can you choose roles and a task in which one person directs another to accomplish a goal? Is there a task for which the roles could be symmetric?
• Long-duration presence. Arguably, many people already use text messages to create long-running ever-present conversations. Can you define a set of rules for when to send or respond which create an awareness without feeling intrusive?

Tools

1. Video: Zoom, FaceTime, etc.
2. Text: text messages, email
3. Tactile: alerts, notifications

In class Brainstorming: collaborative brainstorming slideshow

In the first phase of the course we will be reviewing readings and video related to the major course themes: telepresence, presence, absence, and the proxy body.

For this assignment, please locate documentation of an existing project related to the course themes. This might include telematics, kinetic textile wearables or sculpture, or tactile textile experiences. Please write a short blog post with a very brief abstract of the project in a sentence or two, followed by your own analytic reflections. Please clearly identify your sources, either by directly linking site URLs or by providing a full citation to published literature. If it includes video, please embed that directly in your post.

Prompts

1. Ideally, the projects should come from outside our own campus community.
2. Telepresence has not often involved textiles, so you may interpret the subject generously. I.e., this could include a kinetic fabric artwork with potential for remote communication, or a provocative implementation of remote presence.