Hello everybody! First of all I would like to thank element14 for your support and belief in this project. I am very eager to get started!
Perhaps I should begin with an introduction. My name is Nadal, and I am a spiritual nomad with a deep love for nature and a hopeful view of technology. I am very passionate about electronic music and how we can utilize sound to elevate our consciousness, and reach new levels of connections with eachother and the world around us. I am also a strong believer in art as a form of rebellion - that art is at the forefront of our cultural evolution, making way for society to shape itself on new ideas and be ever flowering. This project is very related to all of these beliefs, and is an attempt to integrate all these different aspects into a singular entity - tEChnOLOGICAL Communion!
So, for you to get a deeper understanding of what this project is all about, I thought I would share the project application for the challenge!
tEChnOLOGICAL Communion
A trinity between plants, humans and modern technology, unified in consciousness
The concept
Our society has become more and more disconnected from nature over the course of the past millennia. With the inclusion of modern technology into the equation, this lack of connection is posing an enormous threat to our survival as a species. For us to survive (nature will always survive!), we have to adapt to our circumstances. This project is a conceptual art project that aims to induce a conversation and subsequently an integration between these three factors, to manifest a trinity consisting of technology as part of humanity, and humanity as part of nature. Thus, technology, which is at times viewed as the opposite of nature, is part of nature. This realization and expansion of consciousness creates on a primal vibratory level the energetic changes that are required for our survival as a species and our evolution into a brighter future. This project is an addition to this movement of illuminating the Earth.
What is the idea?
The idea is to recieve energetic impulses from plants (electrical or otherwise), while as well recieving other frequencies from the environment, through temperature sensors, humidity sensors, microphones, piezo transducers etc. This information would then be used to generate a soundscape and visual generative art. The array would be joined with a suit which would utilize smart fabrics to recieve input from the wearers movement. Through this, a human can interact with the generative music, to add the aspect of humanity into the constellation. Other inputs that could be utilized for this generative audiovisual artwork would be a beamer (a projector with a 3d camera), to sense the humans position and movements in the room. Also, a brain-computer-interface would be interesting to add to the composition. This, however, is a secondary priority as the wearable suit already contributes with the factor of human movement.
How would I go about to create this?
I would be using the Beaglebone Black together with JACK, SuperCollider and PureData to generate the audiovisual art. This would recieve input from all the various sensors and sources in the room, and from the smart fabrics of the ”music suit”. The music suit would be created through using a wearable electronics platform such as the Arduino Gemma or Adafruit Flora, and using conductive thread to connect smart fabrics with various functions to the microcontroller. The microcontroller would then be connected to the BBB, perhaps through Bluetooth or a cable, and would alter the sounds of the different sources through applying effects, filters etc. to the sounds as the human is moving. This would also be connected to a projector which projects a generative visual artwork upon the different participants in the experiment (the plants, the humans, the elements).
How it relates to the challenge
Vibrations are all around us. This idea expands on the concept of interacting with our environment through sound and natural abstract movement. The suit could also be used to manipulate any other data streams, such as a guitar, or vocals, or anything!
