Today Me, Lucy and Jenna all came in to uni to work on the project. Jenna worked most of the day on making sure that the program was perfect, while me and Lucy got to work with the decoration side of things. We attached all sorts of recycled materials onto the assembled planks, i also gathered loads of broken computer parts from home that i thought would be useful for the installation. We stayed until around 6 o clock and got almost all of the planks decorated and ready for piezos. We also decided that in order to transport the pieces it would be best to wire everything up at the audio foundation on the day.
I began today with assembling all the planks in groups of 2, that could easily be attached and detached from the main path to help with transportation. This involved placing the planks on the path first and marking the lengths at which i wanted them to be cut in order to provide a good aesthetic, While i was marking the lengths, Lucy was following behind me marking the planks and the angles at which we had set each one so that once they were cut and assembled we could then make sure that they stayed in the locations we had set up previously. I then set to work on the circular saw cutting all the planks to length, and then with the off cuts i held each of the two planks together with a small nail gun. Lucy and Jenna then set about testing where the best place was to stick the piezo mics which they found out was in the centre of the crack between the 2 planks. I then continued to fix all the planks together and by the end of the day our entire construction was finished and all that was left to do was decorate and attach the piezos.
Day 2's Construction went really well, all the angles were cut and pieced together for the main base of the path, we combined the pieces to make 2 separate pieces that meant we could transport the piece more easily to the audio foundation. The fact the Jenna needed the wood afterwards made things slightly more difficult as we had to work out ways of being able to disassemble all the pieces on location while still keeping a sturdy structure. We came up with a number of ideas before finally putting the pieces together including a number of ways in which the piece would support itself, though this became more complicated and we chose to just go with the simple idea of holding everything together with screws.
Feeling the pressure a little bit as we have only got a week left until the exhibition. Me and Lucy have headed up to the 3D labs today to start construction of our installation. We began by planning out the basic shape of our path by laying out the lengths of wood that Jenna had gathered for us. Then i put together a quick checklist of things i needed to do in order to get the path constructed as efficiently as possible.
Below Are some of the pictures we took of the layout.
Today we spent a lot of time further developing our concept, finding an idea that really spoke to us and had the right amount of complexity without being to over the top conceptually. After quite a few different concepts and ideas we finally settled on one main concept. We decided to bring forward the original idea of the nightingale floor where its main purpose was to acknowledge human presence. From this we decided to look at different aspects of human presence, looking at different things like global warming, over population and the steady decline of resources and sustainability. After considering all the places we could go with those ideas we settled with the idea of the effects of human presence on sustainability and the environment.
Today we started the final piece of the Aural terrains project. We have been asked to create either a performance or installation for an exhibition which is going to be held at the audio foundation in 2 weeks time. I was not really keen on the idea of a performance as i felt that an installation would be more interesting to develop and create and we could do something really awesome. Only problem i found with it though was the short amount of time in which we had to put something like that together. I would have much preferred to have gotten to this stage a lot earlier rather than have spent so much time with the other..... less exciting aspects of the aural terrains project. Though i knew it wasnt going to be easy i felt that i had to do my best and try hard to accomplish the task as best i could to make the last few weeks worth it.
Anyway onto the stuff your really after. I had thought about joining into a group with Lucy for a while so i decided to pair up with her and Jenna at first and a few others. This then had to change when Zoe suddenly decided to change the group numbers on us and the group became narrowed down to just Lucy, Jenna and me. I didnt really mind this so much, as both Jenna and Lucy are particularly hard workers and it encouraged me to be the same. Anyway over the first few days we spent quite a while coming up with concepts (with the more interesting ones being noted in our journals) and eventually came up with the idea of creating a modern day Nightingale Floor.
This video here is somebody's construct of a nightingale floor, in the video she has decided to use the floor like an instrument as she dances across it causing the floor to create all sorts of sounds to her movements.
The traditional Nightingale floor was an ancient Japanese security measure against assassins (particularly Ninjas).It is nearly impossible to cross this floor without creating noise due to the clever construction and design of the floor. Basically how it works is when pressure is applied to the planks special pins rub against each other, then the sound bounces around specially crafted urns set underneath the floor to create the sound of birds chirping.
In order to save time, instead of going for a more traditional approach we have decided to use piezo mics as vibration sensors that will be used to create sounds once triggered. This almost makes our floor like a giant piano only we thought that would be to literal so we are still trying to develop the idea further.
