Real-Time Media

Real-time media creation has a large impact on how art is and can be created. In our reading and watching of online interviews, we have seen it put to use in various settings; from the creation of an interactive maze to the production of on-the-spot music.

There are several different types of real-time media creation that we have looked at. Algorithmic media involves the use of, you guessed it, algorithms in order to produce thousands of different effects. In fact, most of the media that we’ll look at employ algorithms of some sort. North Pitney, a user of Max/MSP/Jitter, used algorithms to create the brain of his real-world, interactive maze. In this case, the algorithms are a sort of intermediary step between the artist’s work (the maze) and the viewer (the person attempting to walk through the maze). As the maze watches people walking through, it decides for itself when and where to move walls. The algorithms used to give this maze a certain sort of “intelligence,” were created by Pitney, but the maze operates on its own. This means the interaction in this case is almost purely between a machine and a viewer.

This is similar to our own visualizer experiments. In this project we fed the computer different sorts of media (a video and some music), and, after telling the computer how to deal with the data, let it do what it wanted in order to see what results it produced. Those viewing our pieces were not seeing directly how we had created this new visual and auditory display, they were seeing the byproduct of the computer’s understanding of our programming.

The next type of real-media creation, “intermedial,” can also be related to our visualizer experiment. Dick Higgins, in his article regarding intermedia, spoke of the interaction between different types of media and how this interaction provided for a new and fresh sort of art. This is true for our visualizer. While adding music to video is not a new idea by any means, our dealing with the two mediums was slightly different. By taking video that already had audio and then adding our own, we changed the original meaning of both the video and audio, making them our own.

Gestural media is affected by a user’s movements, sounds and the like. The “Messa di Voce” piece we studied is one such example. In this piece, performers interacted with a program by moving, singing, quacking and doing other actions. This caused amazing images and effects to form on the screen behind them. In our own work, we have created similar effects. By making a patch in Max that recognized and reacted to mouse movements, we were able to change the rate, saturation, brightness and such of video clips while simultaneously doing similar actions to sound files. By doing this, the performer or user was able to create effects similar to those in “Messa di Voce.”

User interaction is somewhat similar to gestural media. In interactive media, changes are caused by the actions of the user. For example, in our video compositing projects, users were able to change which video was displayed, or the sizes of videos displayed, or the rate at which videos played by pressing keys or moving the mouse. This interactivity allows the viewer or user to become the artist as opposed to the person who created the original patch.

This sort of media (algorithm based, intermedial, gestural and interactive) is extremely different than traditional art. For example, a traditional video piece is linear. It starts at the beginning and plays through the end. Perhaps it loops. However, the media we have discussed is different in that it is completely unlinear. The user (or performer) decides what video clip or audio clip is displayed, what order they are displayed in, the rate they are played and what effects are put on them. Because of this, the pieces created are much more spontaneous and perhaps more interesting.

Extra fun examples:

Algorithm: Happy Man
Gestural: flOw
Interactive: Mixed Reality Interface
Interactive Hoogerbrugge