Dry Erase Composer
21/05/11 12:21
Intro
Dry Erase Composer is an experimental installation that explores multi-user musical composition. Users indirectly manipulate audio loops by using light markers to draw on frames. As users continue to draw, existing works is morphed and removed by their new contributions to create an evolving visual and auditory experience. The use of a commonplace drawing implement (the dry erase marker) makes the piece immediately accessible and inviting.
I have a separate post with pretty detailed instructions, parts lists, and photos for the IR light markers. As such, I don’t talk much about them in this post.
Sculpture Materials
The physical sculpture is constructed out of twelve standard black wooden 8”x10” picture frames.I used thin strips of tape on the edges of the included glass panes to adhere the Roscolux 103 Frost to the glass.
Next the “frosted” glass was placed glass-side-out in the frames and secured using strips of basswood held in place by strips of gaff-tape and hot glue.
I pre-drilled pilot holes in the center of each side of each frame and, after arranging the frames in a rough grid, screwed on thin steel girders to attach them to one-another.
I also attached steel girders with attached lengths of crimped-on aircraft cable (wire rope) to the corners for hanging and tensioning the piece.
Eyebolts were attached to the wall and turnbuckles were attached to those. Lengths of wire rope were put into place for each of the four corners and the whole piece was tipped up, suspended, and tensioned.
I didn’t want the frames to be perfectly straight so I torqued some of them out of alignment at this point.
Next up was setting up the projector, camera, computer, and my workstation for alignment of the projection and camera and troubleshooting of the software.
This is the camera. I didn’t have a visible light filter handy so I am using a hacked apart 1.44” floppy disk instead. I ended up using the floppy for the whole run since it was working fine during testing and I didn’t want to mess with success.
Everything is powered up and I have the extended desktop showing through the projector. I had never used Roscolux 103 frost as an RP material before but it just felt right in my swatchbook so I rolled the dice and ordered it for this project. This is the moment where I realized just how fantastic that decision was. Colors, contrast, and sharpness are about as good as I could possibly hope for with a rear projection setup. R103 will be seeing some future RP use whenever I don’t need a screen larger than 20”x24” (one sheet of gel/diffusion).
Here I’m getting my projection cornerpinned to each frame. The alignment grids are starting to look a little funky since they aren’t getting as many pixels as they want but that is besides the point.
