The Final Project

Just like a clock every living person lives by a certain rhythm. This rhythm controls our sleep, energy and lots of other essential things. It is called the circadian rhyhtm.

With time the clock ages. The gearwheels get rusty and the clock can no longer show the right time. In other words it loses it rhythm. Just like the aged clock the aged humanbeing to loses track of its own rhythm.

This disturbance in rhythm causes in many cases insomnia. About 40% of the people older than 65 suffer from insomnia. This means that they have trouble going to sleep or staying asleep for a longer time. Their sleep gets very fragmented. Because of this they have to compensate their loss of sleep from the night during the day. They form their own irregular rhythm.

To illustrate this problem we are using a building in an urban presentation. The building we are using is the huge tower at Medborgarplatsen, Södermalm, Stockholm, Sweden, as our building. We chose this building because of its location, near a public square where lots of people pass by every day, because it’s well known, because its populated, it is not a fancy office building it is an actual building where people live and because its huge and hard to miss.

Each window in this building will represent a human life. The windows will all have a light blinking in it. These blinkings symbolizes their sleep and awake time, that is their own personal rhythm. The majority of the windows will be blinking with the same rhythm and some will blink with their own rhythm. The windows that blink off-rhythm symbolize the ones that suffer from insomnia. When looking at the building you will see a big main rhythm and many smaller rhytms with a distortion that are trying to catch up with this main rhythm. The windows showing the smaller rhythms represent insomnia and insomnia represents ageing...

Pictures of the exhibition

Here you can download some of the pictures of the exhibition taken by Alexander Busnynkl and Alexander Biledt. Thanks again.

The paper of "The wall of cells"

The wall of cells

Peter Börjeson
Ludvig Elblaus
David Emilsson
Alexander Forsén
Olov Sundström

Ageing is a continuous process, it happens all the time to everyone and to everything. It’s a constant state of change. The process of human ageing is invisible; you can see the traces of ageing but not the change itself. Every cell is programmed to live a certain amount of time and every second, we lose 6500 skin cells.
How do you show ageing in numbers and in what ways is it measurable? We translated the number of cells that die in the human body to measures in meters, square meters, cubic meters and time. We built a clock that measures time in terms of cell loss, but we wanted to have a more comprehensible visual model for the figures.
The installation we made is a real-time visualization of the loss of skin cells. Every bright white dot on the screen represents the actual area of dead skin cells that the visitors produce during the exhibition in scale.
The music is controlled by the patterns produced by the animation. The factors that influence the sound are the coordinates where the pixels are drawn in the two-dimensional space and the amount of surface covered by the white pixels. The y-value of the coordinate determines the pitch of the notes sent to the synthesizer software and the x-value determines the timbre of the instruments used. The amount of pixels determines how many instruments will be used to
perform the music.
The music is then constructed by using the latest pitches and building phrases and chords of that material, so essentially the pixels that are being lit create the music.

You can download the PDF here.

Video of the Exhibit

All projects didn't make it to the video for various reasons (the "missing glove" for example).

If you have additional footage, I wouldn't mind re-doing the editing of this video to include it.

Please upload your video clips to Loborits for example and email me the link so I can re-edit this video to include it.

Final Exhibit

Dust of Modernity

Here's also a link (pdf) to the sheet explaining our project

The Final Project

The Dorian Gray Mirror

Mikaela Kurtson Bellman Anna Kvernplassen Cecilia Thorsén Mattias Larsson Joakim Lööv

In The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, Dorian Gray stays young and fresh while his portrait grows aged and corrupt. The portrait ages in his stead. Our version of the Dorian Gray Mirror will let you see yourself through old eyes.

The final project

The most common eye disease caused by ageing is cataract. Cataract is a increase of opacity in the lense of the eye. As the lense gets less opaque, you loose contrast and your vision gets blurred. The light that enters an eye with cataract will disperse, and as a result you get halo effects around light sources. Yet another consequence is that you easily get blinded by bright light.

A natural part of ageing is that the lense turns yellow, and will thus act as a yellow filter. The brain compensates for this so you will never notice that your vision has become more yellow, but as a result you will loose valuable color information.

Our Dorian Gray Mirror acts as an aged eye with cataract.You will notice the lack of contrast and yellow image, since there is no brain to balance the image, as well as the blurred impression.

Background

In our first assignment we discussed money as a human companion through the ages. We considered both the appearence and the value of money.

Our second presentation was more spot on. We compared the ageing of a simple rubber band to the lense of the eye. We then focused on the aging of the eye, which led us to our final project.

The Final Project

Where’s my glove?

“I’ve lost my glove. My absolute favorite one. The red biker glove. Where is it? What have I been doing today? I went and had a cup of coffee at Café Bristol. I did my grocery shopping for the week. Oh, and I have been on the subway. I know I have taken my gloves off. Where could I have dropped it? I just can’t seem to remember in which order I have been to all these places. “

The episodic memory is part of the long term memory and this is where we store memories of events and episodes. When recollecting memories of episodic sort they flash before our eyes as video clips. As we grow older our memory starts to deteriorate, primarily in the episodic memory. As a result of this, elderly experience difficulty in placing memories in chronological order. Sometimes certain parts of a memory get lost, for instance a person’s face might get blurry. Other times the different parts of a memory cannot be seen as a whole, they are shattered into separate images.

The installation represents this reduced capacity of the episodic memory and it visualises how we recall a course of events and try to make sense out of them.

Enjoy.

FINAL PROJECT LINK

This is a link to our final project:

http://web.comhem.se/arrebarre/original_typewriterFX.mov

Group 2: Dust of Modernity

A screw in the wall away from done..

All I have to do now is to put a screw in the wall to hang our model.. Done!

I will also be showing a slideshow next to the model showing our progression..

The stick of joy is no longer jolly with joy

Our idéa with the joystick is complete. We programmed it to "repair" the video and restore the pixels that are missing, so the user can control the music/video experience with the stick...

of joy

Unfortunately the joystick we bought isn't compatible with macintosh, despite the fact that the fabricator states that it should.. Sooo, we're forced to go with a PC. We also got a fancy sheet for the installation, so we got everything we need for great success.

Memories

Forever young

Our workstation!