Jeff Lovett A collection of research in process.

APOV Interview with Pelham Johnston

My name is Pelham Johnston, I’m from Columbus Ohio. I go to Ohio State University for Art and Technology. I am a senior hopefully graduating soon and I’m mostly interested in digital video like experimental digital video, robotics sculpture as well as sound environments, noise and working with sound design.

Tell me about that project that you were just working on.

The most recent project I made is called Synesthete and it explores the neurological condition synesthesia in which your brain interprets your senses as other senses, so you can hear colors or you can see sound just to give a few examples. They can be cris-crossed in a bunch of different ways. My piece explores visual to sound synesthesia. I basically use two solar panels and some circuitry to control the pitch and amplify the signal from the solar cells to amplify and create sound from a TV screen. So the sound that you hear directly corresponds to what you see on the TV and it does it live. Then I have another box that use a microphone and an amplifier to convert the sound back into a video signal that sends it into a second TV. It’s all setup across four podiums in a line so you can see live a direct correlation between the four objects.

Go ahead and tell me what interests you about my project and what you experienced today.

What I saw today was basically exactly what I’d hoped to see. I was interested for a while in developing a system to put cameras on the limbs to do a dance performance and then project the images live so you could see the perspective of your limbs and Julie told me about you and you developed a system. I saw the video and it was awesome, it was exactly what I had in mind. So what I’d like to do then is use the video signal or not even necessarily video, but any signal coming from the limbs and convert that into sound live. So the dancer can act as an instrument and control various aspects of the live sound tracking based on their movements. Then find a way to have all of those things meet and be harmonious, you know what determines what, what’s the cause and effect and let the audience see the direct relationship that’s occurring.

Just talk about your actual experience.

Today, wearing the thing, it was an augmented visual reality. I was seeing and I had to learn a new way to move based on the input and it was strange at first but I got the hang of it relatively quickly. What do you want me to describe exactly?

Yeah, describe… Tell me about your experience instead of an analysis of your experience, just, what it was like.

I put on the headset and it was just strange. It was kind of like what I expected but it was more disorienting than I thought. You know. I really liked watching the footage of riding the bike. I thought there was a really nice relationship between… because all the limbs had a task. I thought there was a nice smooth motion of my feet. The fact that the pedals were opposite, you had this like locked in opposing nice smooth motion, and I thought that really utilized it well, the system.

There was a process of experimentation that you went through, movement. You were doing some pushups and things, you lost a camera there, but how did that experience work out?

I definitely reverted back to… I don’t know if I would have done it naturally or… Seeing Julie do it and you kind of talking about it. I was able to use one of my arms as a reference and then move with my other one. But I also found it relatively comfortable to walk around just with my arms free and doing what they’re doing because I had a good enough sense of the environment I think, so I could figure it out, but it took a second. I tried to play around with it a little bit and visually do some interesting things with my movement.

What do you think about the difference between using it as a way to document action or using it as a way to experience action? Because you experimented with both of those, you took it (the goggles) off when you were riding the bike and just recorded it without watching.

Yeah, that was nice because there’s a certain amount of danger of course. I wasn’t comfortable enough yet and I don’t know if I ever could be with just the system as it was with riding and just looking through the augmented version of reality.

How do you feel about recording it vs. experiencing it?

I really like the live experience of it. I had no idea that that’s what you were coming with. I thought that it was, maybe I missed it when I was watching the video, I didn’t know that it was going to be a live feed into your eyes of what you are seeing from the cameras. I thought it was… you record it and you move around or you feed it live and you can view it somewhere else. But to have the rest of the world cut off… I thought it was really interesting and it was nice to let my brain develop this new path way and figure out how to work with it… compromise with it, like what I could do or the restrictions on what I could and couldn’t do. I definitely slowed down. I was moving at a different speed, a more delicate speed because of the comfort level, but I feel like if I had more time I could get a lot more comfortable with it and my abilities would increase.

What direction do you see the project going?

My heart and mind have been set on using it for a dance piece and having this live streaming footage for the audience, or for anyone else to experience what the limbs are experiencing. To really suggest the vocabulary of each limb in space, to know what it’s doing. And then, of course, converting those signals into sound and having it all come together as a whole in this cohesive work… a performance

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