Since my last post I few things have happened that have made this project more of a tangible thing. We gathered at the site with John Pratt from Beam to scout for projection spots. With a bit of luck we found what seems to be the perfect spot. It is an empty second floor, in one of the office buildings opposite Cameron Offices. The organisation that occupies the offices below will allow us to project from there and have access to their power outlets. So with a spot from which to project from settled, we can now have a better understanding on how the projections should behave. Yesterday, we experimented with the lab projector and the Keystone library to get an idea of how it works. Using it seems like a pretty straight forward task yet it aids at achieving complex results with projection fitting. Two steps in the right direction.
I feel my abilities and confidence with code are rising, due in part to an intensive for another unit and having to submit Processing sketches for it. While there is still a long way to go with code, now I can think of this project in more practical terms. I’ve decided to harvest the tweets about Canberra and Belconnen myself and make a small database of that. I’ll do this in small intervals during the day so as to get an idea on how the mood changes as the day goes by. And be able to have different tweets reflecting that. I decided on this in part because of what I wrote in my previous post about some tweets working better than others. So twitter and the city speaking through it are still main concepts only it won’t be in real time. While experimenting with the projector yesterday it was said that high contrast is what will work best. So now deciding what colour the typography should be is not an issue because I’m thinking it will be within a grey-scale. Yet decisions about what typography to use still have to be made. So in a few words, there will be a text file with the harvested tweets, Processing will read each line at a certain time interval and change the typography each time, it prints it on the screen while aggregating some type of movement it.
Below is the side of the façade we are projecting to.
