Absence makes the heart grow fonder they say. Well it helped with this project, fundamentally where I wanted to go was right for me. I wasn’t doing art for other peoples sake it was something I wanted to explore play with, the fact that I can get inspiration and enjoyment out of what others do doesn’t mean that just because my stuff is completely different its wrong. I’ve know for a long time i want to express ideas not stories.
So I just needed to rethink rather than scrap my project.
The whole creating the immersive space wasn’t practical for this project (It will happen later even if I have to build my own space)
So what I’m left with is lights from vibrations (sound).
I temporarily disconnected the Arduino and its array of mics, for testing purposes and started playing with the idea of light from sound. I set up a flash project just sampling my laptop mic (for easy testing) and started seeing what I could get from it measuring levels, tracking spikes intensitivity of activity etc.
displaying this data and graphing its trends, all to see what I had to play with.
Late one night after a big session of playing something odd happened I started to spend more time watching and playing with what I created than tweaking it, something changed and it caught my interest, I found myself calling out whistling tapping or just sitting watching for extended periods, even with no input it would occasionally pop, tweet or buzz seemingly all of its own accord.
I had created some thing that sparked a new interest my system, a system that was designed to listento the out side world was quite effective inlistening to itself.
Now the project made sense again, instead of starting big the first step should not be awareness of its surroundings but awareness of its self,and this is what I seemed to have , it listened to its own output its fan and inner workings.
This also made sense for my own journey the embrionic first steps down an exciting path, should be made with an embryonic themed project.