The Butterfly Machine: Using technology to interpret art through music

[mozfest-bot]

[ ID ] 8477518a-ac4d-40a4-8df6-5685078584cb

[ Submitter's Name ] Cal Hewitt

[ Submitter's Twitter ] @hewitt_cal

[ Space ] youth [ Secondary Space ] digital

[ Format ] demo, learning-lab, fireside

Description

A demonstration/talk/workshop on the Butterfly Machine, an invention using software and the Kinect sensor bar to turn a piece of visual art into an interactive musical experience.

The concept: A composer writes short musical ideas based on their interpretation of sections of, or figures depicted in, an artwork, and associate each with their position using a piece of software to create a project which can be loaded into the machine. A visitor to a gallery or similar, encountering the artwork with the machine installed, is invited to place their hands 'into' the painting, triggering an interactive and unique musical response based on the composer's ideas, and manipulated in real time by the position and motion of their hands.

A prototype of the machine was demonstrated for the first time at the Langton Festival of Music and Health this July, and will be further developed by the time of MozFest.

Agenda

The machine is portable and can be set up in just about any space, so depending on the type of session, either of the following could be possible:

• A talk, featuring demonstrations, about the technology behind the machine, the motivation for its creation and generally mixing art with technology, and the places in which it has been used so far, including a workshop facilitated by the RNIB, working with visually impaired children and using the machine to help them appreciate visual artworks for perhaps the first time, through the medium of a composer's interpretation.
• A workshop in which participants are invited both to try the machine as a user, and to create a musical response to a painting, (both with instruments and other tech!) possibly hacking in other technological ideas which other participants could bring to the table. This could start with a shorter version of the first

  Participants

For a talk, the experience would be similar regardless of how many people attended, but the layout of a workshop-based session could be made flexible to accommodate either a few individuals working on the project, or getting together a larger group to create something collectively

Outcome

The machine is hoped to be featured at the exhibition 'JMW Turner: Adventures in Colour' at the Turner Contemporary, Margate, this autumn. We hope that ideas, both technological and artistic, generated from our conversations at MozFest could be incorporated into the project working with real artworks in the gallery, and there is potential for musical responses recorded during the festival to feature in the gallery installation and be played back on the 'real thing'

[ArtsAward]

@ArtsAward

[EPIKhub]

@ArtsAward I'm accepting this session

[EPIKhub]

Session accepted in the Youth Zone