Underwater Swimphony

Assignment:

Create a quick Jitter patch that manipulates video in a creative way. Brainstorm a video sculpture in which a digital video responds to an input of some kind with an emotional output.

My Concept: As a competitive swimmer, I have always been passionate about the competitive swimming experience, either swimming in a pool under the water or just following the astounding Olympic swimmers on my screen. The feeling of being surrounded by bubbles and splashes in a contained body of water while swimming and racing is an unutterable joy for me. For this project, I wanted to translate those joyful experiences into a video sculpture installation.

The Process: At first, I wanted to create a sculpture that reminiscences the pool environment and served as a projection surface, I researched various pool like objects, until a found a styrofoam cooler which I transformed by cutting it, painting it, marking a texture in low relief and added a non-woven backing layer for the projection.

I assembled it all together in a big box positioning the projector underneath at the bottom of the box.

For the video, I scattered the internet searching for underwater clips of swim races then I assembled them all together using Premier. I also collected the indistinct noises that occur at the swim meets.

I decided to incorporate a mini midi controller which allows the user to play the video frames in any order, and to change the brightness, saturation, and edges of the swimmers' video.

Using Max: by using a midi-controller patch, I mapped the video to the 24 keys midi controller and assigned the saturation and brightness to the modulation and bending midi keys.

As a result, the projection is reflected at the bottom of the pool sculpture, and the video changes accordingly to the user's interaction with the midi.