Dead Alive

Dead Alive: Pre-Composed Video Render

• Animations rendered in Processing, video mapped onto geometry.

• Audio Mix is 5.1 Surround, rendered to 2.0 Stereo here. This is what the audio quality is meant to sound like.

• The pre-composed video that plays inside the installation. This is the source material, not the final piece.

Dead Alive: Video Walkthrough

• A run through of the piece in its current form, shot in my apartment.

• Camera audio used due to frame rate drop/sync issues in Touchdesigner video export.

Setup:

Dark room
Laptop plays back one channel video.
USB joystick on a stand, soft spotlight overhead.
Before anyone touches joystick, ambient 5.1 bed and color blots appearing and disappearing on black.

What happens when someone touches joystick:

Ambient track crossfades into song, corridor appears around them.
First person, locked into forward scroll. Joystick controls camera X/Y, subtly rotates corridor geometry itself. Moving through space/twisting it at the same time.
Buttons 1 and 2 change focal length / aperture size of virtual camera.

Behavior:

Twelve pre-composed video clips map onto surfaces.
Generative geometry spawns inside corridor (rendering engine for this is built, unimplemented in walkthrough).
Gated by song’s runtime, if/then logic participant never sees. Push to wall and camera wraps to the other side. At the end, everything fades. After ten seconds without input, returns to ambient.

What participant knows vs. what system knows:

They can tell they’re steering camera.
May or may not notice movements affect where objects generate, which surfaces video lands on.
Clip order and timeline currently fixed.

Where it goes next:

Recursion:

History of joystick data stored and used to change parameters of subsequent runs: corridor dimensions, scroll speed, clip order, forward scrolling rate. Constraints less fixed, participants gain more agency with subsequent runs.
More of generative video composer rather than fixed video playback arena.
Every run is different yet arrives at the same place.

Audience sensing:

Infrared and presence data. People standing around joystick influence space too.
Thresholds range from nearly imperceptible to obvious.
One person holds controller, community in room authors entire run through of piece.

4-channel video