inkscapes

An interactive drawing performance designed for the 120 by 11 feet video wall at the InterActive Corps (IAC) building in New York.

Collaborators:
Concept: DI Shin
Sound design
: Phan Visutyothapibal, Tony Lim
Documentation: Marta Augé, Mónica Bate, Luisa Pereira
Technical help: Dan Shiffman, James George
Press: Creators Project / FastCo.Design / The Verge / étapes

The content of the installation is dynamic and different every time it runs: three artists create it live, by drawing on an iPad that scales their sketches to the unexpected magnitude of the giant screen. The narrative is guided through the dialog between performers and the system itself, which evolves and transforms the drawings over time.

Four custom applications run at the same time to control every step of the process. The app on the iPads is built in OpenFrameworks. It reads the drawings and sends TCP messages to a central laptop over a local wireless network.

A control panel application built in Processing acts as a middleman between the wireless and the ethernet networks. It runs on a laptop, monitoring the iPads and forwarding their messages to the server that controls the screens. It also enables some extra features, like recording and playing back the performances.

The MPE Server runs on one of the three Mac towers that control the screens. It’s part of the Most Pixels Ever library by Daniel Shiffman and synchronizes the three parts of the screen. One instance of the master OF application runs on each of these machines, reading messages from the server and turning them in real time into high resolution graphics for the video wall. In the end, the project has a global resolution of 11520 x 580 pixels, distributed along 568 LED screens.

more photos on Flickr