the singapore river as a psychogeographical faultline

ROLLING ROLLING ROLLING

we're rolling-in to the substation gallery tomorrow morning. more updates soon.

What a great address this Google "Street View" spot has...

One small thing I noticed recently was that Google Street View also includes the underground expressway tunnels as well. Even the ones that go under the Singapore River. So, that qualifies as a street too?

today me and dominic succeeded in approximately aligning the camera/projection/fiducial setup with the visual response in my flex swf. i've switched to using CS5 Flash Builder because I eventually want to publish it as an Air app. so far its been sweet using reactivision with TUIO AS3 library.

we are using a 3.6mm lens for the PS3 Eye and the projector is at a resolution of 1024 x 768 x 96hertz. apparently hertz refers to the refresh rate and when i set it higher than 120 hertz it says out of range. this is all gobbledygook to me too but what i know is that when i stare at the back of the projector and shake my head (oh the migraine!), for a split second i see the light dividing itself into bright bands of red, green, and blue...

The View from Cavenagh Bridge

Yesterday Keshav and Jared kindly helped me shoot a timelapse of the River, which we are going to edit down into a small introductory video for the exhibition. Coincidentally, in trying to find the words to articulate the tone I wanted to go for, I discovered the "Blue Hour". Apparently the French have already thought of a word for it (ah! they think of everything!) - with the expression "l'heure bleue", referring to the blue part of twilight, between darkness and daylight.

I've seen the phrase "Blue Hour" thrown around in photography forums such as like skyscrapercity, but bizarrely, for quite some time I always thought it was some internationally francised club that happened to set up shop at locations with magnificient aerial views of different urban cities. I was led to this mistaken conclusion because of the odd way in which it is sometimes spoken about - as if the Blue Hour is actually a physical space and not a time of day.

"Yeah, I was there at the Blue Hour yesterday, it was really cool."



my "blue hour" moodboard

a. ferris wheel scene, chris yeo's in the house of straw, 2010
b. photo i took at dawn, 2007
c. gaspar noe's enter the void, 2009

Dominic and Edward have been helping me with the projector mounts and testing the setup for the table. while studying mechanical engineering, Edward previously built other things with aluminum profiles, so he recommended using these aluminum bits to build the mount instead of wood (as it would help conduct the heat away from the projector better!)

despite its complex appearance, (well, to construction noobs like me) it's actually a rather simple and modular system to build with, along with other parts (gussets, glass/mirror mounts, hinges, etc). plus it has the benefit of being lightweight and easily adjustable for height/length...



one thing is that you MUST remember to do in advance is to: TAPPING THE SCREWS. and what is this mystical tapping business? this refers to the process of creating a thread for the screw to go into. according to Edward you can do it by hand, but of course it is always ideal if you can just get the supplier to thread it on the spot. saves you from the heart attack of suddenly having to google for hardware stores in the city area...

I downloaded the TUIO AS3 Library, ran the demo file for fiducials successfully, and checked it with a trace. ClassID is the fiducial marker number, SessionID is the Movieclip instance number. x and y are the onscreen coordinates. a is the rotation. capital-letter X Y A refer to the velocity at which the variables have changed.





Current setup:
+ TUIO AS3 Library with LCConnector
+ UDP FlashLC Bridge
+ reacTIVision
+ In-built Macbook Pro iSight

while looking for card stands, i saw a muji-lego collaboration involving a special muji hole puncher and lego bricks, used to make little toy paper characters.



you can make the same type of card stand with any 5mm hole puncher - in my case i am using an "Eyelet Punch PU-101" - a standard eyelet/hole puncher used mostly with rivets (bought a long time ago from Popular). i tested out a homemade version with some of dominic's lego bricks. it works just as expected, but i may or may not use this method of a cardstand for the "psychogeographical game" in the end...

the bricks are incidentally "Red & White & WOW!" yesterday i watched the National Day Parade while sketching the canvas. as i was standing in the sketch area which represented the bay, NDP telecast showed a panoramic shot of the fireworks lighting up the entire bay area.



also in the process of hunting for stray lego bricks, i realised we had given away all my lego but i did find my TOMY toy parts instead. here is an instant tableaux from the box of NATIVE AMERICAN CHEMICAL DISASTER PLAYSET:

Have been preparing a huge canvas map for the last few days. After staring at this monstrosity occupying most of the living room floor for the last few days, this morning all of the Ding family realised that they had dreamt about the huge canvas the night before:

Mother dreamt that she woke up in the morning and saw that I had completed my entire painting in full colour! During the night!

I dreamt that I had subdivided the canvas into 6 parts and had painted for hours, only to discover that I had only finished 3 parts but inexplicably now had 4 more parts to go?

My father dreamt that I had accidentally made a horrifying and gigantic hole in the canvas and he was trying to figure out how to piece and patch canvases back together...

Now you know where I get my grandiose and yet paranoid tendencies from, respectively.