Ecosystemically designing environments for collective play with gesturally modulated media, textures, and objects

In this workshop, participants will try their hand at a variety of tangible, embodied, and embedded sensing and feedback technologies including vibrotactile instruments, expressive mechatronics, gesturally modulated fields of light, sound, mist; realtime steerable immersive atmospheres. Working through hands-on experience by theme, participants will be introduced to compositional and experimental methodologies. In the second half of the workshop, participants will compose together some simple “ecosystems” using the Synthesis Center’s hardware-software media choreography architecture (sc), in the iStage experimental theater-scale blackbox space.

Steerable Complex Systems

Vibrotactile Interfaces

We introduce methods modeled from living ecosystems to condition the experience of richly mediated responsive environments for enactive experiments: improvisation over artfully prepared conditions.  Working with 

• Dense media ( e.g. via pressure / sound, or optical sensing of deformable materials)
• Dense interaction with gesture and corporeal movement
• Everyday objects as improvised tools, instruments for steering simulation
• Using analog materials within responsive digital media systems.
• Improvised, non-preschematized interaction between people and independently-designed gestural "instruments"

We work hands-on with alternatives to boolean / procedural and stochastic logics thinking ecosystemically in terms of continuous, multivalent state:

• Tangible Interaction with continuous media rather than with objects.
• Augmenting rather than replacing the physical

 We will provide access to large blackbox space with media system, manipulable objects, sensor kits.

References
improvisationalenvironments.weebly.com
https://vimeo.com/synthesiscenter/ema

Brandon Mechtley
Sha Xin Wei

Expressive Mechatronics

 We introduce expressive mechatronics as an artistic, philosophical and engineering practice that uses general themes and material instantiations of robotics as its foundation and foil.  Expressive mechatronics applications are not task oriented.  We treat materials, forms and structures as modes of computation.  Examples range from circuit-bending and puppetry to fluidics "analog computing."

Byron Lahey  (sculpture, media arts and sciences)
Seth Thorn (music, altoglove + spatialized violin)

We introduce approaches to exploring haptic experiences grounded in knowledge and practices from digital musical instrument design and computer music performance.  Themes include:

• Background of prior DMI research
• Exploring mapping strategies using vibrotactile feedback and sound, e.g. using amplitude, spectral spread, noisiness vs brightness
• Exploring movement possibilities using LFO tactile transducers 

Introduces research on audio-haptic experiences and what we might learn through the use of tactile transducers and wearable actuators. In this workshop, we demonstrate novel approaches for exploring audio-haptic composition. Participants will explore haptic design possibilities, considering parameter mapping and actuator placement on bodies, or within objects. 

We will provide:
- customised vibrotactile feedback devices
- laptops
- tactile transducer speakers
- amplifiers
- sound card

​Lauren Hayes

Rhythm and Heat Games

We introduce different ways to mediate temporal patterns (rhythmic textures) via hybrid fields of tangible media meshed with light and sound.   Our motivating question is: How do value-producing socio-technical processes synchronize, blend, diverge, interfere with one another?  Borrowing from Lefebvre, we use rhythm as the hinge.  For our purposes, rhythm can be described as the variation of material = energy + matter + media through different biosocial and physical states.   Understood this way, rhythm is not sonic, it does not have to be regular periodic, indeed it does not have to be unidimensional but textural.

Garrett L Johnson
​Emiddio Vasquez

Synthesis: Steerable Weather from Synthesis Center on Vimeo.

Synthesis @ ASU is an atelier for creating richly mediated environments for sociality and play.  It is also a center sustaining associate research streams, currently including Atmosphere and Place, Improvisational Environments, Rhythmanalysis, Vegetal Experience, and Ontogenesis.

Workshop Leaders / Participants

Brandon Mechtley (Synthesis)
Lauren Hayes (AME, PARIESA)
Jessica Rajko (Dance, AME)
Chris Ziegler (AME, Cosmos kinetic light stage)
Todd Ingalls (AME, Synthesis)
Sha Xin Wei  (AME, Synthesis)

Connor Rawls
Garrett L Johnson
Lyu Yanjun
​Emiddio Vasquez
​Julian Stein