Undulating Flux
You can download the music for Undulating Flux by saving this file to disk or click “play” below to listen now.
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View my presentation of Undulating Flux at Dorkbot SoCal (video and pics).
Checkout the article about me and my vibrotactile work in Coast Magazine.
Read features on Undulating Flux in Gizmodo and Engadget.
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Undulating Flux by David Resnick
With Vibrationist Nadia Ahmed
Project Advisors: Simon Penny, Beatriz da Costa, Chris Dobrian
With assistance from: Sheron Wray, Tom Jennings, Garnet Hertz, Eric Mesple, Ian Hattwick, Dana Friedman, Domingos Begalli
Presented in an exhibition of graduate work
ACE 2010: Transmissions from Inside
Beall Center for Art + Technology at the University of California, Irvine
May 13 May 20, 2010
Arts Computation Engineering program
University of California, Irvine
Testimonials
“You’ve invented a new medium.” -Simon Penny, professor of Arts and Engineering, founding director of ACE, UC Irvine
“I felt like there was no delay between the dancer’s quick movements and how the chair responded. You could get lost in the multi-sensory experience and at times the chair seemed to anticipate the dancer’s movements instead of react to them.” -Meg Cramer, PhD candidate in Informatics, UC Irvine
“It took me just the first 10 seconds to realize the dancer’s motion and the motor vibrations were perfectly synchronized. It was interesting to experience the way the dancer interpreted the music, which implied to me the potential to share the personal experience of music with multiple people.” -Isshin Oikawa, MFA in Integrated Composition Improvisation and Technology, UC Irvine
Theoretical Background
Undulating Flux is my first-year project in the Arts Computation Engineering program at UC Irvine. The overall goal of Undulating Flux is to bring the participant into what psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi termed a flow state. A flow state is described as a state of being wherein action follows upon action according to an internal logic that seems to need no conscious intervention by the participant. One experiences it as a unified flowing from one moment to the next, in which one is in control of actions, and in which there is little distinction between self and environment, between stimulus and response (Csikszentmihalyi 1975) Another term for this state, now common in both sports and business, is being in the zone.
My hypothesis is that being in a flow state enables a heightened sensory experience for the participant and leaves one in the end feeling expanded and yet present, energized and yet relaxed.
The areas I engage with Undulating Flux are artistic performance, gaming, massage therapy, and sensory assistance. Because this iteration of Undulating Flux was presented in an art gallery, it focuses on artistic performance.
I set out to explore three questions relating to these areas:
1) What does it mean to feel music and movement together?
2) Can haptic sensation facilitate a flow state for the participant and even be therapeutic?
3) What are the potential applications of a feeling-enhancing system?
How It Works
Undulating Flux explores these questions by setting up a transduction chain wherein a vibrationist sends intense music and motion-synced vibrations into the participants body. The participant experiences stimulation of their eyes and ears, as well as a massage-like feeling in the rest of their body. It is through this sensory immersion that Undulating Flux attempts to induce a flow state.
Each wiimote controls one handrest motor and one footrest motor. The position up and down in the pitch plane controls the handrests while the position side to side in the roll plane controls the footrests. I designed the controls in this way so that the vibrations that the participant experiences are a sort of mirror image of the vibrationists movements.
The vibrationist and I worked together to choreograph the vocabulary of the vibrational dance language, which is intended for improvisation. Drawing on influences from Afro-Brazilian, Indian, and flamenco dance, we modified the straight-up moves, which produced chaotic results in the vibrations, and adjusted the wiimote position tracking, so that we could have more precise vibrational controls. The vibration rig became a sort of instrument and the dance became the technique with which to play it.
The technology behind this project centers around the Nintendo Wii remote and the Max programming environment. The wiimote data is streamed into Max wherein parameters are set to control the intensity of each vibrator individually. A Max package called Maxuino is used to send the control data to an Arduino microcontroller, which is connected to the motors.
I composed the music specifically for this project using multiple rhythmic subdivisions and evolving timbres to provide the vibrationist with musical material well-suited for transduction. The driving pulse, jagged staccato strings, and thick slow-moving bass are examples of this. The piece was composed entirely electronically using synthesizers and samplers, with the exception of my throat singing (heard in the intro) which has been filtered to sound more like a synthesizer.
Undulating Flux is a starting point to working with transduction chains and haptic feedback. It only begins to answer the questions I set out to tackle. Future research in the areas of biofeedback, synaesthesia, game technology, philosophy of mind, and Eastern medicine will help inform my work towards developing the efficacy of flow state inducing systems.
