IDAT 101 - Part 2 - Intervention

"The Intervention Project requires you to make an intervention
in the context provided by your site. This may extend the first terms project,
manifest itself as a physical intervention, a virtual construction, a
performance, further documentation, a video, etc."

The original plan for my intervention was to enter the train Station with a model based on the human form and what space we consume while moving, I wanted to see how I could effect the movement round the space which I had researched in the earlier segment of the project. being unable to record in the station I had to re-assess my plan.

I then decided that recording in the student union would be a better way to go. So came up with a Recording protocol.

The problem was in order to get accurate reactions from the people in the Student Union the recording would need to be discrete. The powers that be said that the only way I could record inside would be if I got everybodys permission that I recorded before hand. Which would have made the recording inaccurate and would defeat the object of the intervention so it was back to the drawing board.


Working on my original idea of using locational movement as an intervention within the station I came new idea. A train station is a point of a journey, people carry their luggage to and from and without realising it intervene with the people around them. I took this concept and enlarged my environment. My plan was to create my own journey from my house on North hill to the train station, the plan was to carry as many bags as I could handle along a pre-planned path and document it using video. Carrying a larger amount of bags increased my surface area, making people want to avoid me, plus if I am seen carrying a lot of luggage people assume its easier for them to move. The interventions I was aiming to capture were not just me getting people to just change where they walk, but their physical reactions are important to, whether its a head turn, a smile or even something to chat about. I asked a friend to record the footage for me and we documented the journey both to the station and back. This allowed me to to get as many interventions as I could. Here is a map of my path and the positions of the cameras along the way.

The yellow dots symbolise the camera placements on the way to the station, the
blue dots are the placements on the way back and the green dot symbolises the
position of the camera used in both legs of the journey.camera positioning is
very important, it allows you to get the best possible shots for the situations.

I decided to speed up some of the footage to 800% to give an idea of the journey and then kept the important interventions at normal speed. This also means that the interventions are displayed a lot more obviously. Using the song "Miss You - By Trentmoller" it created a good background sound withought distracting from the video footage itself. It alose works really well with both the fast and slow parts of the visualisation. The music itself gives an idea of movement. Here is my outcome;

IDAT 106 - 7 Final outcome

Working with the greenscreen and the sensors I came up with the temperature clock. At first I was looking at the difference in temperature between the outside and the inside of Portland Square. But I saw that the data did not change for the inside temperature. Misfortune and Technical issues gave me the opportunity to reconstruct my visual representation of temperature time. I thought about creating a shape which changes size based on temperature (based on the idea that heat causes stuff to expand) and when the size increases so does the colour temperature. i.e in cold weather small blue shape, in warm weather large shape with colours ranging from blue to red.




Looking at the masking tool on Flash I created a background layer which created the temperature gauge, cold colours in the centre gradually moving out to hotter colours on the outside.

I then created the mask layer which would be the one changing size and therefore displaying the temperature. For this I created a snowflake/flower shape, snowflake would work during the winter and colder months because the light blue colours would symbolise cold (ice) or flower for the warmer months, this would be a lot more colourful ranging from light blue to pink, red and orange.







Below is the outcome of the mask, this shape will resize with the code revealing the different colours.



Then moving on to the coding aspect, I acquired an actionscript 3 parser off a fellow peer. and using the sensors I created an "if" statement to change the size of my mask based on the temperature.

"if (CurrentTemp less than 0){

Resize(9.2); }"

This resized my mask creating the variation in size and colour based on the readings from the sensor (outside temperature). (Resize refers to a function created elsewhere in my code) The next challenge was to created the clock, for this i had to find the code to grab the number of minutes, hours and seconds from the current time I then had to make the code think that the 60th second , 60th minute and the 24th hour was at the top of the screen and 59th second, 59th minute and 23rd hour were at the bottom. Changing the position of my temperature gauges according to the time created my temperature clock.

This represents the temperature at less than 0 degrees:

Has the appearance of a snowflake which is relevant to the temperature.

This represents the temperature at less than 15 and above 10 degrees:

Brighter more vibrant colours increase with the temperature.

This represents the temperature at more than 30 degrees:

Summer temperature, Looks a like a flower now, which relates with the bright vibrant colours of summer months.

Here is a screen shot of my clock after 5 hours:

Looking at the movement within the my piece I thought it needed something else. So i decided to use another sensor number 37 which measures the wind speed. The shapes use now rotate speed relevent to the wind speed. So my final outcome visually represents both wind and temperature in the format of dropping shapes using the basis of a clock.

Here is my visual information display device or temperature clock.

http://mervaka.co.uk/~chris/flower/