Hi,
I am looking for advice for documenting a generative video/sound project. Any thoughts or examples of well documented projects would be very appreciated!
I have a piece that is a part of a group show at a small artist run gallery. The video is being projected; the sound requires headphones; the video and sound are generative and responsive to content coming in through a web cam.
Also, do you include project code as a part of the overall project documentation?
Thanks!
r
It depends from the target audience. When it’s a artist and visual audience, no.
When you expect people to learn a small bit about generative art, include code.
You can imagine 3 concrete persons, Anna, Tom and Tina of different age and provenience and think about them and write for them.
thank you.
still wondering tho about visually documenting visual, interactive, sound based work…
I have no experience with this
Whenever possible it is a good idea to make code available as part of project documentation–but this depends on your goals.
Site photos and live video of the installation are very helpful for communicating about a project – including for future installations. Also helpful is an installation diagram depicting the components and their arrangement (headphones, camera, field of view, speakers, projector, surface, computer). If people’s appearance / location / behavior in the space is affecting the webcam, it might be helpful if those clips showed a few representative live interactions with the piece reacting.
A brief selection of directly generated screenshots / video clips / audio clips can also be helpful to characterize the range of audiovisual outputs apart from the particulars of the setup. In some cases longer recordings of the direct audio-visual output can become a non-interactive version of the work, suitable for display in other ways (like static installations, presentations, or highlight reels) in different ways than photos and videos of the installed space, and keeps material available in some form even if specific code / hardware stops working. Getting both gives you more options–again depending on your goals.
Very broad question but could you do a diagram of this?
Eg your sketch with its output and the interactive part with an arrow to it and a symbol for sound and an arrow to your sketch
This is a generic answer. When you write what happens in your sketch, we could be more specific. Eg when there comes a high note in (sound with high frequency) you display a red circle you would symbolize this in a diagram?
Jeremy, thank you for this reply! Sorry I am only noticing it now. Very helpful thoughts—thanks!