MAX/MSP

In 2010 construction started on the new roof of BC place stadium in Vancouver and I decided to try at an ambitious project of capturing a timelapse animation of over a year and a half's worth of construction. Setting up a webcam at a friend's place across the street from the stadium, I created a simple program in Max/MSP to capture images at a varying intervals, and upload straight to my website.

I also added the ability to change the capture interval remotely, and set a different capture rate for daytime and night time. When the pictures were all taken (550,000 of them) I created a crude application in flash (which never left the prototype phase) that will load certain pictures and play them as a video with an adjustable date range or other features.

I also had ideas to filter out pictures with bad weather so I added code that reads a weather almanac website and adds that information over to the picture database, this information is also relayed over onto the timelapse player to give a sense of the weather at the time of each picture.

The purpose of this project was to create a physical to digital interaction. Our team decided to create a manipulative digital puppet in which the user pulls physical ropes to control the digital version of the puppet. The artistic direction was in a morbid fashion intended to reflect our group's view of the workload of the school at the time. I was in charge of translating the physical actions to digital input, some of the back end Flash work, and constructing the physical rig using parts from a scrap yard. The physical components had their motion tracked by sensors hooked up to a Teleo module (similar to an Arduino) which communicated to the Flash animation displayed on a projection.