video – CoSiMa

Collective Mobile Mapping @ Montpellier Danse

À l’occasion de l’ouverture de la 36e édition du festival Montpellier Danse, EnsadLab, idscenes et le festival vous conviait à faire l’expérience d’un dispositif interactif collectif et immersif inédit les jeudi 23 juin de 13h à 17h, vendredi 24 et samedi 25 juin de 11h à 17h, salle Béjart Agora (18 Rue Sainte-Ursule, Montpellier).

Montpellier Danse a accueilli, dans la salle Béjart de l’Agora, l’événement Collective Mobile Mapping Montpellier, réunissant les œuvres de Dominique Cunin et Christophe Domino sous forme de sessions alternées et complémentaires. Espace Puissance Espace, de Dominique Cunin, trouve son origine dans la projection immersive du modèle 3D d’un espace architectural sur lui-même.

Les spectateurs sont invités à contrôler collectivement cette grande image à l’aide de leurs smartphones.
Les murs bougent, on entre dans l’épaisseur et l’intimité du bâtiment. Centon Digital est un jeu de sens et de lecture, où le joueur sélectionne des mots ou des séquences de mots qui s’additionnent pour former un texte projeté. Tous les murs deviennent écran, la frontalité d’une projection « classique » disparaît pour laisser la place à une immersion du spectateur dans la projection textuelle, à une interactivité entre les joueurs eux-mêmes et avec la Salle Béjart.

Un projet idscènes, organisé par EnsadLab, le laboratoire de l’École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs—Paris, Grande Image Lab, ESBA TALM-Le Mans et avec le concours de l’Esbama Montpellier.

CoSiMa Sonar Innovation Challenge @ Sonar+D

CoSiMa has participated at the Sonar+D international conference on creativity and technology of the Sonar music festival in Barcelone with a Sonar Innovation Challenge. A team of 5 musicians, designers, and developers – formed over a month before the event – has worked two and a half days on a music application dedicated to a public interacting collaboratively through their smartphones. The web-based application has been developed with the Soundworks framework.

The resulting application is Weather, a performance for a DJ and a public participating through their smartphones. As usual in performances based on the Soundworks framework, participants connect their smartphones to the local CoSiMa Wi-Fi network and visit the web page of the Weather application. Once connected to the application, the participants can play with four gestures to switch between different weather states that are associated to different sound textures and visualizations generated on their mobile devices: (1.) Touching the screen generates the bird chirps of a sunny afternoon, (2.) swaying and tilting the device generates wind, (3.) shaking it softly generates a rain sound and rain drops on the screen, and (4.) shaking it harder generates thunder sounds and lightning on screen.

The sound generated by the participants creates a sound textures distributed over the audience. The current weather states of all clients are collected on the server to generate a weather profile that controls visuals on a public display and environmental sounds on the PA. In addition, the weather profile is interpreted by a DJ playing live electronic music in dialog with the audience’s sound textures.

The five CoSiMa SIC challengers who developed the Weather performance are Matthew Bethancourt, Andrés Ferraro, JP Carrascal, Chaithanya Jade, and Yuli Levtov.

Overexposure / Surexposition v.2

An interactive public installation with smartphones, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, February 2016

Surexposition/Overexposure (v.2) is an interactive work bringing together a public installation and a smart phone application. On an urban square, a large black monolith projects an intense beam of white light into the sky. Visible all over the city, the beam turns off and on, pulsating in way that communicates rigor, a will to communicate, even if we don’t immediately understand the signals it is producing. On one side of the monolith, white dots and dashes scroll past, from the bottom up, marking the installation with their rhythm: each time one reaches the top of the monolith, the light goes off, as if the marks were emptying into the light. On a completely different scale, we see the same marks scrolling across the smartphone screens of the people in attendance, interacting with the work, following the same rhythm. Here, it is the flash of the smartphones that releases light in accordance with the coded language. Returning to the very essence of Morse, the messages are then transformed into a sound composition, broadcast by the installation, as well as by the public’s smartphones. Because these are in fact messages that are being sent—in Morse code, from everyone, to everyone and to the sky—and that we can read thanks to the super-titling that accompanies the marks. Using a smartphone, anyone can send a message, saying what they think and therefore presenting themselves, for a few moments, to everyone, to a community sharing the same time, the same rhythm. And we can take the pulse of an even larger community—on the scale of the city and in real time—through a map of mobile phone network use, projected onto the ground or visualized via smartphone.

From an individual device (smartphone) the size of a hand to a shared format on the scale of the city, a momentary community forms and transforms, sharing a space, a pace, the same data, following a type of communication whose ability to bring together through a sensory experience is more important than the meaning of the messages it transmits or their destination, which is lost in the sky.

(Photos: Samuel Bianchini)

Credits
An Orange/EnsadLab (the laboratory of the École Nnationale supérieure Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, PSL Research University) project under the direction of Samuel Bianchini

in collaboration with Dominique Cunin (EnsadLab), Catherine Ramus (Orange Labs) and Marc Brice (Orange Labs), in the framework of a research partnership with Orange Labs, and Roland Cahen (sound design).

“Orange/EnsadLab” partnership directors: Armelle Pasco, Director of Cultural and Institutional Partnerships, Orange and Emmanuel Mahé, Head of Research, EnsAD

Project Manager (Orange): Abla Benmiloud-Faucher
IT Development (EnsadLab): Dominique Cunin, Oussama Mubarak, Jonathan Tanant
Graphic Design: Alexandre Dechosal (EnsadLab)
Sound Design: Roland Cahen
Sound engine development: Norbert Schnell (Ircam)
Voice samples recorded by choristers from Jazzalam
Lighting, Video Mapping and construction of the installation structure: idscènes
Mobile network data supply: Orange Flux Vision
Mobile network data processing: Cezary Ziemlicki (Orange)
SMS Server Development: Orange Applications for Business
Technical Assistant: Alexandre Saunier (EnsadLab)
Production Assistant: Élodie Tincq

Production: Orange
Executive Production: EnsadLab

The research and development for this work were carried out in association with the research project Cosima (“Collaborative Situated Media”), coordinated by Ircam and sponsored by the Agence nationale de la recherche (ANR) and participate in the development of Mobilizing.js (http://www.mobilizing-js.net), a programming environment for mobile screens, conceived by EnsadLab, aimed at artists and designers.
This version of Surexposition benefits from a partnership with idscènes and Ircam under the aegis of the Cosima project.

Collective Loops @ Forum Workshops

A second version of the Collective Loops installation has been shown during the Ircam Forum Workshops on November 25 and 26, 2015.

The installation features a collaborative version of a step sequencer that uses the visitor’s smartphones to produce sound. The sequencer is graphically represented by a circle of 8 sectors projected on the floor. The sectors light up in a clockwise motion following the beats of the sequence.

When the players connect to the installation through a web page, they choose an available sector, and thus, their step in the loop. The players can control the sounds (i.e. notes in a melody or bass line and percussion sounds) that are played on their smartphone at the corresponding beat of the sequence through a simple graphical interface on their smartphones. The selected sounds are also displayed in the corresponding sector of the circle on the floor.

Positioned around the circle, the players collaborate on creating melodies and rhythm patterns rendered through their smartphones.

The application uses a first complete version of the CoSiMa platform entirely based on web standards.

Design and development :
Ircam: Norbert Schnell, Jean-Philippe Lambert, Benjamin Matuszewski, Sebastien Robaszkiewicz
Orbe: Xavier Boissarie, Florent Dubois, Gregory Cieslik, Tomek Jarolim, Quentin Levigneron
EnsadLab: Samuel Bianchini, Dominique Cunin, Oussama Mubarak, Jonathan Tanant
ID Scènes: Christophe Aubry, Fabrice Auchere
NoDesign: Jean-Louis Frechin, Uroš Petrevski
ESBA TALM: Christophe Domino

CoSiMa @ Abletons’s Loop

Norbert Schnell presented the CoSiMa project at Ableton’s Loop Summit for Music Makers. During the presentation, the audience performed with various CoSiMa prototype applications using their smartphones.

Terminal @ Paris Musique Club

Terminal is an interactive installation that has been created in collaboration with Chloé and the Scale collective for the Paris Musique Club. The installation will be shown from October 24, 2015 to January 31, 2016 at the Gaité Lyrique.

The project transposes the musical elements and mobile interactions of the Chloé ⨉ Ircam concert into the situation of an exhibition.
The installation features a looped 15-minutes 4-channel music track staged in a 7-meters corridor with 21 smartphones aligned along the wall and luminous lines running on the floor.

Similar as in the concert, visitors can connect to the installation with their mobile devices to participate. At given passages of the music track, the participants are invited to play sound with touch and motion interfaces that appear on their mobile device. The graphical animations and sound of their device are echoed by one of the smartphones on the wall.

Every now and then, waves of sound textures appear on the participants’ mobile devices. In addition, visitors can use a wall-mounted tablet to distribute sound textures over the smartphones on the wall. The light on the floor reacts on the music as well as the visitors’ interactions with the tablet.

Murmures Urbains @ Chalon dans la rue 2015

CoSiMa has participated with Murmures Urbains at 2015 edition of the festival Chalon dans la rue from June 24 to 26.

The Orbe collective has presented three experimental scenarios of augmented soundwalks. The participants equipped with a smartphone are invited to experience an augmented audio reality that reacts on their position, trajectory and movement (using GPS, BTLE beacons and motion sensors). Each scenario proposes a different narrative and leads the participants on different possible trajectories through the same district of Chalon-sur-Saône. The trajectories take between 30 minutes and 2 hours depending on the participants’ preference and their engagement with the proposed activities.

The trajectories of all participants have been recorded and visualized on a screen at the arrival point where the team invited the participants to a debriefing of their experience.

Collective Sound Check @ Paris Face Cachée

On February 6th, 7th and 8th, La Ville de Paris and the À Suivre association organized the 4th edition of Paris Face Cachée, which aims at proposing original and off-the-wall ways to discover the city. The CoSiMa team led the workshops Expérimentations sonores held at IRCAM on February 7th.

Three groups of 24 participants could test the latest web applications we developed. The audience first tried a few soundscapes (Birds and Monks) to get familiar with the sound-motion interactions on their smartphones, and to learn how to listen to each other while individually contributing to a collective sonic environment.

In the second part of the workshop, we proposed the participants to take part in the Drops collective smartphone performance. While the soundscapes also work as standalone web applications (i.e. they do not technically require other people to play with), Drops is inherently designed for a group of players, where the technology directly supports the social interaction. The players can play a limited number of sound drops that vary in pitch depending on the touch position. The sound drops are automatically echoed by the smartphones of other players before coming back to the player, creating a fading loop of long echoes until they vanish. The collective performance is accompanied by a synchronized soundscape on ambient loudspeakers.

The performance is strongly inspired by the mobile application Bloom by Brian Eno and and Peter Chilvers.

Below are a few pictures from the event.

Overexposure / Surexposition @ Fête des Lumières

An interactive public installation with smartphones, Fête des Lumières, Lyon, décembre 2014

Overexposure is an interactive work bringing together a public installation and a smart phone application. On an urban square, a large black monolith projects an intense beam of white light into the sky. Visible all over the city, the beam turns off and on, pulsating in way that communicates rigor, a will to communicate, even if we don’t immediately understand the signals it is producing. On one side of the monolith, white dots and dashes scroll past, from the bottom up, marking the installation with their rhythm: each time one reaches the top of the monolith, the light goes off, as if the marks were emptying into the light. On a completely different scale, we see the same marks scrolling across the smartphone screens of the people in attendance, interacting with the work, following the same rhythm. Here, it is the flash of the smartphones that releases light in accordance with the coded language. Because these are in fact messages that are being sent—in Morse code, from everyone, to everyone and to the sky—and that we can read thanks to the super-titling that accompanies the marks. Using a smartphone, anyone can send a message, saying what they think and therefore presenting themselves, for a few moments, to everyone, to a community sharing the same time, the same rhythm. And we can take the pulse of an even larger community—on the scale of the city and in real time—through a map of mobile phone network use, which can be visualized on one side of the monolith or via smartphone.

(Photos: Samuel Bianchini)

Credits
An Orange/EnsadLab project

A project under the direction of Samuel Bianchini (EnsadLab), in collaboration with Dominique Cunin (EnsadLab), Catherine Ramus (Orange Labs/Sense), and Marc Brice (Orange Labs/Openserv), in the framework of a research partnership with Orange Labs

“Orange/EnsadLab” partnership directors: Armelle Pasco, Director of Cultural and Institutional Partnerships, Orange and Emmanuel Mahé, Head of Research, EnsAD

Project Manager (Orange): Abla Benmiloud-Faucher
IT Development (EnsadLab): Dominique Cunin, Oussama Mubarak, Jonathan Tanant, and Sylvie Tissot
Mobile network data supply: Orange Fluxvision
Mobile network data processing: Cezary Ziemlicki and Zbigniew Smoreda (Orange)
SMS Server Development: Orange Applications for Business
Graphic Design: Alexandre Dechosal (EnsadLab)
In situ installation (artistic and engineering collaboration): Alexandre Saunier (EnsadLab)
Lighting and construction of the installation structure: Sky Light
Wireless network deployment coordination: Christophe Such (Orange)
Communication: Nadine Castellani, Karine Duckit Claudia Mangel (Orange), Nathalie Battais-Foucher (EnsAD)
Mediation: Nadjah Djadli (Orange)
Project previsualization: Christophe Pornay
Assistant: Élodie Tincq
Message moderators: Élodie Tincq, Marion Flament, Charlotte Gautier

Production: Orange
Executive Production: EnsadLab

Research and development for this work was carried out in connection with the research project Cosima (“Collaborative Situated Media”), with the support of the French National Research Agency (ANR), and participates in the development of Mobilizing.js, a programming environment for mobile screens developed by EnsadLab for artists and designers

CoSC: WWRY:R

We Will Rock You: Reloaded

This mobile web application has been developed in the context of Collective Sound Checks with the Studio 13/16 at the Centre Pompidou.

This application allows a group of players to perform Queen’s song “We Will Rock You” with a set of simple instruments and to create their own versions of the song. The players can choose between drums, voice solo, choirs, Freddy Mercury’s voice fill-ins (‘sing it’), a guitar power chord, and the final guitar riff.

While most of the instruments trigger segments of the original recordings when striking with the device in the air, the power chord and guitar riff resynthesize guitar sounds through granular synthesis.

The application has been published here (requires a mobile device under iOS 6 or later, or Android 4.2 or later with Chrome 35 or later).