Final thoughts on Glastonbury.

Final thoughts on Glastonbury.

Well after taking about a week to recover from the whole experience, I have had chance to reflect on the whole experience. Overall, I felt that the project has been a fantastic process for me and feel privileged to be a part of it all.

Technical Issues.

My apologies to start off with a negative, but two problems did cause me an amount of disappointment. Firstly, the camera mounted on top of the screen. It was rigged without consultation of any of the artists that may have wished to use it. When asking if the camera could be moved, the answer was an uncompromising ‘NO’. The result of this was the framing of the live feed was near impossible to get for one of the pieces that I wanted to run. The other issue with the camera was that, it gave a very dirty signal. As a result, 2 of the pieces of work I wished to show, could not be run as they required a clean, locked off video signal. All of the team both the other artists/developers and technical, tried everything available to try and resolve the issue of the dirty feed, but to little success. In hindsight it would have been useful that the camera was fully tested before being rigged.

My second problem was that of scheduling for testing and running applications live. Both during the scheduled time of set up and final showing of my work, equipment was being rigged and de-rigged on the supporting truss of the screen. This was causing the truss to wobble the camera, thus giving me a very unusable feed from the camera. In both instances I had to wait for some time to test and run the application. We all should have picked up the implications of additional rigging within the production meeting and scheduled time appropriately.

Framing things as art

My own intention of the work I produce is that, it is, framed as art. In the context of showing work to a Glastonbury audience, I felt that any artistic intent was not carried forwards and that the audience viewed the work as a ‘fun’ experience. I’m absolutely fine with this and the lesson learnt (or reiterated) is that, whenever you place work into the public realm, the viewer’s interpretation will not necessarily be that of the artist/developer. The experience belongs to the viewer and the artist becomes the ‘architect’ of that experience.

Other observations revolved about the nature of content of the works and their relationship to the viewer. Not being able to get my other 2 applications running, I find it difficult to guess whether abstracted interaction works in that presentation context, without the support of tele-presence. But is the use of tele-presence enough to get people engaged with the work above a level of ‘ooh wow, it’s me on the screen’. Which could be argued that it is akin to a shop window display of video cameras connected to TVs on your local high street. I’d like to know other people’s opinions on this.

New avenues of exploration.

I found it fascinating seeing other peoples working methods, intentions and techniques. It certainly has opened my eyes to looking at other ways of achieving technical solutions for my own work. Aquil, showed me his work in which he uses Quartz Composer (a nodal based programming environment) to create rich graphical environments. I have a new project already in mind to try and create something using Quartz Composer and the access to open GL that it has. Brendan gave me various pointers and links towards motion tracking and detection within Action Script 3 and how their classes could be implemented. Tarim, well what can I say, his knowledge on all things networked was inspiring. Tarim has invited me to have a look at the Pervasive Media Lab whenever I’m in Bristol. I’m certainly going to take him up on that offer at some point in the future. I liked Joe’s approach, to paraphrase ‘things are just ambiently there’. I also aim to catch up with Paul and Charlotte and have a look at what they’re doing at the University of Salford, whenever I’m next in the North West.

Testing period.

My recommendation for next year would be that there is an application ‘testing day’ at one of the existing Big Screen sites. All of the artists and developers could meet prior to the melee of the festival and see what everyone is presenting. It would also give everyone the chance to chat through and test the technical infrastructure and set up schedule. I think it would be important that a technical representative from the company that provides the hire kit be in attendance on the testing day, along with the production manager and commissioner/ director/ programmer.

My only other suggestion is that the area directly in front of the screen is illuminated, so that the interactive applications could run through the night and reach a quite different audience.

Thank you.

Finally I’d like to say a huge thank you to all involved. I enjoyed it, had fun, learnt from it, and made some new friends. It has shown me new directions and given me new ideas.

Roll Credits….