Synexperience by Carrie Firman... and some interactive leads

Carrie Firman is a synesthetic graphic designer. 'Synexperience' is project work from her MFA in Visual Studies at the University of Buffalo. There are some fascinating insights into the synaesthetic experience here and her expression of them is unique, communicative and compelling.

This first piece contains Flash based interactive examples of her synaesthetic visual reactions to everyday sounds.

And here she uses those flash examples to create an interactive installation using sensors to trigger audio and projections of her sound-to-visual experiences.




I had previously come across Processing myself (bookmarked on Delicious on June 15)  its an open source programming language and environment for people who want to create images, animations and interactions. Its' free to download but I haven't looked at it fully yet. I've also come across the 'Arduino Microcontroller'  which seems to be the type of thing that can make an interactive installation happen.
Audrey and Shelaghs' suggestions involving viewer interaction and viewer setting off sensors/switches etc requires sensors that can convert to a computational language so the computer can respond to the trigger and that is what this Audrino kit does it seems. Its' open source also - but I feel like I would need a helpful 'tech-head' to get this notion off the ground... I'm getting that technology overwhelm again!
There was a presentation on it in a Dublin conference I was unable to get to recently.... "Connect everyday objects to the Internet" Jeffery Roe, TOG Hackerspace, Dublin - (by the way if anyone knows a "helpful tech head" - or where to find one - I'd really appreciate it!)

This next piece is another Flash based interactive piece based on her changing calendar, from college to holidays, with a period of confinement due to a broken leg.

Finally, here are some photographs she created that resembled some of her personal photoisms. (They demonstrate similarities to Kluvers 'Form Constants' - see the previous post)

Taxonomy of Perception - Form Constants

In the last 2 weeks I have encountered multiple references in my research to Heinrich Kluver, who in 1926, undertook experiments where he catagorised the visual effects produced by mescaline. He discovered that mescaline produces recurring geometric patterns in different users. He called these patterns 'form constants' and categorized four types: 
lattices (including honeycombs, checkerboards and triangles), cobwebs, tunnels and spirals. He compared the subjective visual experiences of synaesthesia, hallucination and physical/psychological stress (e.g. fever, migrane). Form Constants are still being used to  investigate commonalities among the unique experiences of synaesthetes. 
These Form Constants give us  a taxonomy of perception, and provide commonalities for us to identify in the type of shapes, spatial arrangements, depictions of movements and aesthetics in art be it painting, photography, video or 3d artforms.
                           
I'm not sure yet whethter this is something I may draw upon in my own work but felt the need to post on it  - to filter it, as previously unposted discoverings on fractals have been diluted in their relevance as I failed to comment on them properly here on my blog. (Fractals are rough geometric shapes that when split into parts each part is a reduced size copy of the whole, a property called self-similarity. They are often considered to be infinitely complex. Natural objects that are fractal are snowflakes, some vegetables eg. cauliflower/broccoli, ferns.

An Eyeful of Sound

Samantha Moore is a film maker who makes animated documentaries. 'An Eyeful of Sound' is her award winning film about synaesthesia, and is a wonderful expression of the synaesthetic experience - the best I feel I have unearthed in the research to date. This film took her and her team 3 years to complete, I take comfort in that and smile at the innocence I had in my initial ambitions for the REV module... bless!
Enjoy this animated work and the amazing descriptions from the synaesthetic women involved. (One aspect that is absent from this film that I hope to include in my (post REV) motion piece is the element of viewer interaction).

I was reminded in viewing and listening to this film of a snippet from Dr Richard Cytowics' Llibrary of Congress presentation....
"People often say 'Wow, isn't it confusing to see all this extra stuff - doesn't it drive them crazy?
And I say - well no more than a blind person saying to you - Gee, everywhere you look you're always SEEING something, doesn't it bother you having to see everything ALL the time?"

That aside just makes me smile. Its the texture of our reality, and synaesthetes have a different texture.

RABBIT HOLE

I have totally disappeared down a rabbit hole of research and idea generation in the last couple of weeks. Good in one way, but I've not posted anything and feel stretched to capture it all now in my blog post catch ups. So in an attempt to just get some of my efforts up on my blog, here is a small exploration of expressing grapheme colour synaesthesia. I will post some sketches and doodles, some image and typographic developments, and some idea and concept developments over the next few days. As always my delicious account is active and for anyone interested checking out my REV and Synaesthesia  tabs reveals some the digging I've been up to. I will try to improve on keeping you posted!

In this visual I am juxtaposing the letters and words as we see them with added element of colour perception on the right  - removing the letterforms and paring back the perception to just the colours. For someone with this form of syanesthesia the colours are as indicitive of the letters, as the form of the letters themselves. There are just an integral part of how they perceive them.