MOODPROJECT:information


	First things first: Questionnaire I am currently gathering research for my Final Major Project into interactive mood and would be very grateful if you could find a few minutes to fill in the short questionnaire on the home page. The form asks no personal questions (you can leave out your first name if desired) or records any personal identifiable information. It simply seeks your opinions on colours, sounds, age and profession, and how they might intertwine. This information will help in the production of a digitally interactive visual mood environment that will be exhibited at The Arts University College at Bournemouth (Formally the Arts Institute at Bournemouth), Bristol and London over summer 2006. This environment will form the basis of a live experiment into the demographics of mood at these exhibition venues and will automatically construct an online visual result here over June/July 2006. www.MOODPROJECT.com How do people feel when coming to and viewing an exhibition? Even to a bar or club? Traditional artists convey their chosen mood to canvas or sculpture for others to view and become engaged in that mood. The viewer has no control of what they see, the work is there to view in a typically un-interactive medium. What if the viewers could produce their own artwork for exhibition? With the use of colour, motion, composition and audio, moodproject is a fully automatic interactive graphical environment that responds to a users input through video tracking of their body expressions/language. For example, if the user is deemed to be happy and energetic, a certain value will be assigned and stored for later use. moodproject is a fully marketable finished package that will work as a self-contained mood environment installation with these added key points: •The ability to plot all users ‘mood data’ throughout the exhibition of the project. •Use of this data to automatically produce a one piece art page visual to be automatically published at a set time and date on the internet. The main part of the project is the automated plotting of user’s mood throughout the day/week of an exhibition to form a database of each user’s mood at a particular time, remember that mood by body motion recognition and perform some kind of response to the collected data. Adding to this, extra data will be collected throughout the exhibition with the use of a simple online survey form situated near the mood visual program. Data from both these areas will be used later to construct the final automatic online artwork and the data bar charts based on what data was collected throughout the exhibition. For example, if the user was male, age 33 and worked as a lawyer; three separate values would be recorded for the final visual. moodproject is a physical and virtual installation that will consist of: •A large white backlit screen. •A webcam. •A data projector linked to a PC/MAC to display visuals on a large screen – possibly shaped to add more depth. •Surround sound audio with x4 speakers with x1 subwoofer. •An online presence for the project – including server space, domain name and logos/colour themes. •A survey form on a separate computer •A method of storing data collected from the exhibition users •A way of extracting collected data and automatically compiling it in an attractive visual medium Feel free to explore moodproject.com, you will need the login details to enter the research area, so drop moodproject an email via the contact page for this or any other enquiry; sponsorship welcome! Bear in mind that the information on the results pages, including the moodproject barcode, is only temporary until the visual result counter reaches 00:00:00:000 and takes you to the visual result artwork! Once this happens, the exhibition of moodproject has come to a close and all the data required has been collected and analysed. From data comes art Three separate functions initiate from the collected data: 1/ A bar chart is constantly automatically updated every 20 minutes with the information from the exhibition mood survey, user count and user mood. 2/ At a set time and date the information is used to automatically construct a visual art piece online at www.moodproject.com 3/ Three parts of a constructed code 128b barcode are drawn together to assign a moodcode for that particular exhibition. These three parts are formed by, 1st, inputting the start date and location on the program initiation, 2nd, analysing the peak data collected throughout the exhibition and 3rd, the date the program was last closed down, or end date. Research I will need to know which elements are suitable to convey a particular mood or feeling. Possible avenues include: Colour/art therapy, alternative healing (e.g. colour crystals, aura & iris readings), past & present ‘mood’ artists or artists that paint a definitive emotion (e.g. Francis Bacon who uses angry/aggressive painting) scientific research into colours and form and all the library resources. Adding to this, I will also have to explore the best technologies and software that will help me achieve this goal. I now have a fairly good grounding in macromedia director and can see the potential – with some coding work – for this software to be the best choice. I will also need a reliable way to record the user information to be used at a later date. First ideas on this would be adding and saving to text files from director to a server folder or setting up an online database to record the data for easy extraction. The latter appeals to me as I would like to learn the skills required to use online databases effectively. Public surveys on viability and coverage / usage Utilising the online database, I will also construct a research questionnaire to be carried out in the early stages of the project. This will incorporate certain questions on gender, profession, age and what colours and sounds each participant associates with these. This will form the basis for the visual result, as it will need to reflect a semi-recognisable visual that will reflect the users of the installation over the exhibition. Interview: •Anthony Rowe on installations, exhibitions and user responses. •Other persons in mood / emotion field (e.g. psychiatrist) or others completing a similar project. Exhibitions / venues VideoForum - technologies and software Design museum, Tate modern Artists / designers in a similar field, e.g. the works of Rothko. Research and progress will be recorded into an interactive research webpage (scrap page) that will become part of my final presentation. Evaluation Exhibition, digital questionnaire and user response plotting By providing a link, after the final demographic ‘art’ visual has been created, to an online feedback form will provide a simple form of evaluation for the project. This could involve questions on what the user thinks the visual result means (like an art critic evaluating a hung canvas art piece) to general questions about the project and its design. The data collected throughout the exhibition will prove valuable in the evaluation of the project. I hope to set up a test scenario of the project to analysis use of the installation and collect this data for the evaluation unit.