Hydroponica
Pillsbury, Christine
The user enters the circular meditation chamber and is directed to sit by the only light illuminating from the screen highlighting the pillow seat before the interface. Before her is a rear projected blue grid of circles behind an empty vase. The only sound is the flow of water beneath the vase beckoning her to use the resting ladle. As the vase is filled, a digital plant flourishes upon the grid. Quickly growing with every pour, slowly dying with every pause. As the digital plant form interacts with its background music plays; beautiful in the rise and fall of the plant’s life cycle.
Hydroponica is not a traditional screen based experience—the user is simply immersed and interacting freely in their environment—no wires, no suits, no mouse. The second point is the mechanism of input. Pouring water into a vase is not only an intuitive action, but is directly conceptually relevant to the systems output—a living plant. Hydroponica points to a future of creating situational context for a narrative.
Open switches running up the spine of the vase are closed when the conductive water allows electricity to flow. A simple piece of software running on a Basic Stamp converts the switches to numbers and feeds the data to a virtual Java Server running on the MAC G4 OSX. Macromedia Flash interfaces with the Java Server by opening an XML socket. Flash keeps track of whether the water level is rising or falling by simply comparing the current number to the previous one.
Each randomly generated bloom coming into contact with a circle triggers a random single note from a complete octave. By limiting the note database to a single octave I know that the dynamic composition will always work together, thus demonstrating the potential of a controlled random algorithm.
The resulting audio and visual representation is highly dynamic due to the varying layers of small controlled random multiples working together as a composed whole. A delicate juxtaposition of control and chaos within a digital composition allows a participatory audience a unique experience with the object, while still maintaining my authorial intent.
The algorithm strategy for the project starts with the idea that an unpredictable and vast amount of randomness can be generated via the culmination of smaller semi-predictable units embedded within each other—small multiples.
Breakdown of the linear construction of a stem:
– Length = A random number between 1-250
– Curvature Angle = A random number between 1-3
– Curvature Length= Length divided by a random number between 1-4
– Bend Direction (L or R) = A random number between 1-2
– Bloom frequency = A random number between 1-300
A random number between 1 and 2 is hardly dynamic. A random number between 1 and 300 is not that impressive either, in a computational sense. But when these small units are combined, or wrapped up into each other the product is exponential variability. This is an important point allowing for the ability to author or compose a composition that is highly dynamic without total chaos. One of the greatest challenges currently in authoring Interactive Narratives is that the system cannot become so complex that the author cannot write all the threads of the story. This method of controlling randomness using small multiples is a strategy for dealing with the authorial process within unpredictable systems.
