Gregory Sporton Research Projects

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This project was the first collaborative project developed with Eastside Projects, the gallery that houses the VRUdio (an HD video editing and sound studio). The intention was to look at ways in which the spirit of Eastside Projects could be transferred to an online platform. It was funded by the Arts Council’s Digital Content Development programme in 2009.

Initially, despite my misgivings, the 3D virtual gallery was set up in Second Life. In some of the VRU’s earlier projects, I had certainly noticed the capacity and intention of the technology to determine the content. It was often a challenge to simply not do what the technology was insisting on the user doing, and I felt this resistance and consequent disrupting of the compulsions of the system was an important feature of how artists can work in the techno space. Nowhere has this theme been more clear than in dealing with Second Life, a deterministic nightmare that promises freedom, but at a cost.

The project stages were firstly get a model up and running, then to have some artists (recruited from Eastside Projects ESP programme as well as my own post-graduate students) play in the space with limited resources over a week. They then would hand over to the next artist and so on.

This work was of great interest to a number of people connected with the gallery, who sense the opportunity of working with technology as an important new phase of creativity. The practical results were, however, somewhat disappointing, though in its current interation we are working with OpenSim, and late hope to port the work to a peer-to-peer 3D network (our money is on Cobalt).

MotivePro began life because we were having so much trouble with Motion Capture systems. We had acquired some Gypsy suits from Animazoo with whom we worked for a bit, but it soon became clear to us that we weren’t getting what we wanted from the equipment. We had experiences with Vicon that were even worse, given that it is essentially a software system that required heavy training and specialist post-production work to do something we didn’t even need: highly accurate movement reproduction (even this I would contest that they are capable of doing: they have certain stuff they are looking for, and as a result don’t actually do their main job quite so well as they like to say)).

As it happened, Jonathan Green was given a fellowship to develop technology ideas about the same time. Together, we did observations at a dance school in order to work out what we really wanted from another system. We thought we needed to give the mover more feedback and to be more engaged with the computer in order to make it worth it.

We applied for further funding from Advantage West Midlands, and have used it to develop the product to prototype and get some consulting advice on the best ways to exploit our ideas. The result is a new motion capture/HCI system that we are awaiting patents for, so our lawyers won’t let us tell you very much more. I gave an invited talk on this at the Monaco Dance Forum in early April 2010.

The real question about motion capture is ‘what do you want to use it for?’ Aside from serious and expensive applications like gaming or sports science, what is it you really want to know from a person moving? Our conclusion is that it can be far more useful to capture the essence of the movement, and for the relationship between mover and computer to be duplex rather than just a data collection exercise.

Image by Dave Perry

This project was initiated because everyone in the VRU at the time felt that we were being too taken by the technical and technology related problems, and being forced by those to develop content that suited. We wanted to change the balance and emphasise the creative content of our work.

It started life when we were given a handful of tablet computers, which we linked up to make a collaborative drawing exercise. This was only partially successful, but showed that we could make constructive interventions with technology to inform or develop a creative practice, like drawing. Our little exercise showed we could move drawing away from being a private practice into a communal one.

We approached the Methods Network at Kings for funding for something more, and they supported our interest in looking for ways where we could make legitimate artistic statements, beyond the clever techno-stuff we were obviously capable of doing.

Matt & Keir ponder where the simple life has gone

One of the results of this was ditdahbit, shown as part of the Methods Network Workshop we hosted in 2007. Led by Matt Gough, the team working on this part of the project were seeking to find the linkages between data and expression, and the moments where one transmogrifies into the other, or alternatively cannot be distinguished. Matt’s blogposts (collected here) are interesting reading on this matter. Further details and resources from this project can be accessed here. Matt’s flow diagram (below) attracted much comment at the time as to how to create structures for this type of work.

We had been mucking around with a Whiteboard technology called e-beam for some time. We had some funding from the Methods Network to do some more intensive workshops on real-time based technologies, and this seemed to fit. It was a simple clamp that could be fitted on a wall, window or screen, but with super software that allowed sharing of drawing material online. This was quite helpful in many ways, but I kept thinking the technology lent itself to more.

Carla Wright, our resident femme fatale, a postgrad student of mine, and a long time VRU collaborator, had been looking at feminist models for technology, especially in the theatre, and we found this remarkable film featuring Loie Fuller, made by the Lumiere Brothers, and hand coloured.

We began experimenting to see if we could use the technologies we had to hand could enable us to do something similar. So Carla, bless her, learned the Fuller dance, and started to master the ability to use the whiteboard pens as extensions of her movement. We found that we could take the e-beam off the wall and turn it perpendicular, creating a different plane for movement (and prduce many more marks).

You can see below us rehearsing this. The screen in the background shows the traces of our movements.

This was an interesting project, the we present at the DRHA Conference at Cambridge in 2008, and I also gave a talk about the ideas behind it at Sheffield the same year. I don’t think we are quite finished with this yet, given the limited time we had for the practical work.

This project was funded by the AHRC under the auspices of the AHRC ICT programme in 2006. The intention, through a series of workshops involving artists and computer scientists, was to establish the kinds of methods artists could develop in order to engage with the opportunities of working with digital technologies. The workshops took place at Ikon, Birmingham.

The main workshop resources developed are here, and include a podcast of Momus’ lecture on the subject.

From the initial workshops, I gave a series of papers in the US and UK about the importance for artists to take on the challenges of new technology, as the transformative processes of their time. Invited papers were given at University of Illinois, the London EVA conference and the National e-Science Centre in Edinburgh. We also used the experiences to give a paper at the Sonic Arts Centre in Belfast, where Keir Williams and I gave a paper live with Jonathan Green in the lab in Birmingham.

It also informed our approach to working with technology, noting for the first time that all too often we were not taking sufficient notice of the properties of the technology, but rather seeking to do old stuff by new means. This was the subject of the journal article I contributed to Digital Humanities Quarterly.