Abstract
‘Franken Project’ is a touch-interactive project designed to generate an immersive experience based on animated visual and textual elements and sound. As participants engage with the touch interface, they become the creators of an increasingly chaotic multimedia experience. Franken Project’s physical interface comprises nine 3D printed hands that are covered in conductive paint. These hands are connected to the inputs on an MPR 121 capacitive touch sensor, and the data from each hand/sensor is communicated to a Processing sketch via an Arduino microcontroller. When one or more hands are touched, images appear on-screen along with snippets of text from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and COVID-related texts developed using the GPT-2 OpenAI text-generation library. These “monstrous” multimedia texts have been animated using Python and Processing programming languages and can break free from their two-dimensional restraints and move across the screen. Additional interactions with the hands/interface generate various types of movement, including “flocking” textual migrations, shifting stitches and lines of kinetic text, and the panning and amplitude of six soundtracks. This work dramatizes a number of themes from the novel alongside images and sounds taken from the bio/political and cultural chaos associated with (1) our COVID era in the US, (2) the legacy of structural racism in America, and (3) the Trump-era politics that reinvigorated racist, chauvinist, and misogynistic attitudes, which, like a virus, have spread across the American body politic. Eventually, a user loses “control” of the texts and becomes inundated with a cacophony of sensory input.
Presenters
Calvin OlsenStudent, PhD, North Carolina State University, North Carolina, United States Kelsey Dufresne
Student, Phd, North Carolina State University, North Carolina, United States David Rieder
Associate Professor, English/Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media PhD program, North Carolina State University, North Carolina, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Theme
2021 Special Focus - Picture a Pandemic: The Visual Construction of Meaning in Digital Networks
KEYWORDS
Digital Art, Literature, Digital Humanities, Media Studies, Communication, Physical Computing
Digital Media
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