Installation by Joseph Gray
at Unit B Gallery in San Antonio, Texas

Documentation:
Video
Install Process
Source Media and Software
Finished Installation


The entire digital portion of Light_Paper_Noise was created with Apple software that now comes standard with it's new computers. The computer itself was a 2007 era Mac Mini, which worked great for transportation and ease of installation. The video projector was actually used as it's monitor for the software and image editing, an ancient iMac keyboard and mouse were used as input devices.

All images in the final projection were culled from rather touristy (though architecturally oriented) photos taken in San Antonio during the artists stay there. These are displayed to the right of this text. So, in all "iNess", the photos were retrieved and organized from the camera in iPhoto. These photos were then taken into iMovie and a slide show with simple circle wipe transitions between the images was created.

Quartz Composer was used to create the interactive real-time animation. QC is a visual programming environment for quickly creating interactive or generative visual works and takes great advantage of the Mac hardware, particularly their Open GL focused video cards with shader support. QC is a Developer Tool that comes standard now with all Macs and can be installed from the Mac OS X install disk. All in all this means an easy workflow between applications and near guaranteed stability (no blue screen of death, hopefully) during the course of the installations exhibition dates. The choice to use out-of-the-box software allowed the artist to focus on the work rather than the code that makes the work function.

The patch created in Quartz Composer analyzes audio coming in through an inexpensive microphone. The results are applied to various aspects of the image: their size, rotation, transparency and y postion. The louder the sound in the room the more clear and active the images become. The microphone was such that it blocked most ambient sound (it's meant for on-line voice chatting) and therefore had the delightful effect of requiring the viewer to make rather loud noises in the room in order to see a dramatic affect on the projected imagery. Whistles and claps were the most convenient and effective sounds individual viewers could create in the environment to see an effect, making the opening of the exhibition appropriately like a rodeo in that regard.