I’ve been making and showing interactive artworks seriously for a decade now, and there have been some incredible technical advances in that time. Namely, the Microsoft Kinect has made it possible to replace expensive, heavy and difficult to engineer rigs with a small package costing a few hundred dollars. It's great, and a lot of ink has been spilled about how it's revolutionary.
But as with any new technology, the early examples of artwork made with it are often dominated by what amount to demos: Here's a technology! It does this! Aren't I talented?
Anyone who has seen me speak about art or art making has probably heard my canned speech: the art experience must trump the technical experience. I therefore make a concerted effort to hide the guts of my artwork. Body scale is ideal. Invisible technology is best. The Kinect feels like a natural fit, but there's a lot of folks getting a lot of attention by building demos on an absurdly huge scale. I'm not opposed to this (spectacle is fun!) but as both an artist and audience member I am frustrated by the way the current conversation around interactive technologies is being dominated by the folks with the biggest budgets and the best programming chops, whether what they're saying with the technology is interesting or not.
So there are two needs here: I personally need to upgrade my "tooling" as an artist. At the same time, I'm frustrated that there aren't more artistic voices taking advantage of the current crop of interactive technologies. I'm addressing both for purely selfish reasons: I need new raw material to work with, and I want it to be done in a vibrant environment - so I want you with me.
I've settled on creating native applications for the OSX platform. Be prepared for a batch of custom aps. When practical I will be publishing my tools for other folks to use.
The first of these tools is SinK (SINLAB Kinector) which represents the first stab at a free and solid bit of middleware to interface the Kinect. The goal is to have something that costs (you) nothing and works instantly, out of the box, with zero configuration or setup. For myself, this will form the backbone of interactive installations which can be distributed to shows in a non-brittle fashion.
In addition, I hope to expand the SinK project to include the ability to stitch multiple Kinects together to increase their effective range, but this is work in progress.
I'm going to post the tool for public use soon, but here's a teaser:
And the tool being used to interface with Processing:
