M.E.A.T. Surveil

This is my first project with the M.E.A.T. group, 10 days after joining I was pretty lucky to be able to participate in the ideation and assembly of SURVEIL.

Idea

Using computer vision to interpret human gestures and provide an interactive musical environment that is affected by it’s surroundings.

Pitch

In a world where we’re constantly being monitored, this piece calls into question the ways in which camera data can be used to create sounds.

Themes

Very inspired by Atlanta’s increasing surveillance efforts like more cameras, more police, more drones, MORE SURVEILLANCE. It just feels like you’re being watched wherever you go now. Music will contain snippets from news broadcasts about installing cameras and increased surveillance from local news channels.

Execution

This turned out way better than we expected. The interactions people had with SURVEIL were amazing. There’s something beautiful about watching people try to figure out how something works, because SURVEIL was recording and interpreting gestures, people were trying all sorts of things to make sound or weird visuals appear on the screen. This project was a huge success at Guthman, so we were asked to install it at Ferst Center in Georiga Tech for two weeks!

Guthman

Ferst Center

This time around, I rewrote the computer vision scripts because they were originally running on our powerful laptops inside of TouchDesigner. But we needed this to be a hands-free installment where we did not have to leave our laptops next to it for two weeks. So this new and improved SURVEIL ran on 2 Raspberry Pi’s and an iMac that the school provided because we needed it for sound.