Project 4 - Conceptual Statement

Jobs:

Me - CAD Design
Jason - Fabrication
Ryan - Fabrication
Jared - Programming

Our main idea for this project was to use the stars in the night sky captured over a large period of time. The stars would then be spend up considerably to show the movement of the stars of the night sky, thus revealing the rotation of the earth. Once this is achieved we will use the stars rotation to create a soundtrack by running the footage through a Max patch programmed to pick up the stars through the colour difference, the height of the stars in the night sky as they cross a certain point determines the pitch of the note that is played effectively creating music from the stars.

The main inspiration of this idea came from this video here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdDbjFqbU74&feature=fvsr found on youtube that showed some photography done by a man that did a time lapse of the stars but made trails from them and created quite a cool piece of art. We added to this of course with our concept of a musical visualisation but also looked into the ideas behind what we were seeing in the footage. While watching the footage we realised that the main focus is the sky, but when you consider that the camera is left in one place all night to capture this footage the focus becomes about the rotation of the earth and the star trails just a pretty effect that happens because of this. We wanted the stars themselves to mean more in our visualisation so we made them a crucial part of the audio visualisation creating a soundtrack purely based on the stars movement.

We put a lot of thought into the design of our apparatus, not only the physical design process but also on the technical side of the build. Leaving a camera out in the night for 13 hours exposes the camera to a lot of complications, for example condensation, dew and lense fog so the device needed to be able to protect the camera from the elements for the duration of each shoot. We did a lot of research into the cause of condensation and the probability of lens fog in order to achieve a clean shoot, but when it came down to it we really relied on the weather in terms of a clear sky.

This idea basically was developed using Jared's skill with Max MSP but also with our interests of which music was one we could all strongly agree on. As far as the apparatus we settled on the shape of an observatory because it was both relevant to our concept but also because it solved a lot of our practical issues also.