The body has surprising ability to express itself. Something that we often struggle to translate into our interaction with computational systems. We are regularly limited to conventional mouse and keyboard “interaction” but digital artists and designers have been pioneering latest interfaces for almost a half century in an attempt to bridge our physical and digital environments.

With increasingly powerful computation, even a modest laptop can do sophisticated gesture, speech and object recognition. With open source communities like Processing, the code and libraries to engage with these technologies and techniques allows us to explore and innovate without the requirement for computer science degrees.

Harnessing the expressive quality of human behaviour you would build a processing sketch which explores the process of drawing, sculpting, carving, generating and growing digital artefacts. Words which you might regard as as starting points for developing ideas are gravity, collisions, performance, chaos, evolution, fluids, networks, exchange, illusion, play and complexity.

How you capture the expressive quality of human behaviour is up to you but a good place to start is video or point cloud (kinect) analysis. Sound is also an choice but be warned, doing anything more than essential frequency and volume analysis takes considerable work. Whatever you select to do, it is best to separate out the challenges of the project into small component parts and then accumulate them later. If you are building something which will use gravity and colour tracking, gain an understanding of these things separately before bringing them together.

Video Structure

This must roughly be in 3 equal parts over the 3 minutes.
1. Context
2. Development
3. Final Piece.

Context must demonstrate that you have researched artists, designers, architects, performers etc that have used the expressive potential of our bodies to interact with digital systems particularly in playful and performative situations. It is also valid for you to comprise references for less computational inspirations if for ex you were inspired by Piet Mondrian painting or an Alfred Hitchcock film. Development must show how your work progressed. Start recording the development of your code immediately and document any interaction tests you may have done with public, friends, family etc. Finally present the current state of the project.