UC Santa Barbara

With a digitally implemented generative system for artistic purposes, controlling a non-trivial number of parameters is one of the difficulties in the process of temporal composition with the system. Unless done manually for every keyframe in the duration of the work, a kind of interface that facilitates the process is necessary. This research proposes an interface for temporal control on parameters of the generative audio-visual system. The proposed interface operates in `state space' formed by a simplex shape of arbitrary dimension with the barycentric coordinate to define the locations inside. Each vertex of simplex represents a reference point in the parameter space of the system. In this manner, regardless of geometric relation between reference points in parameter space, the artist can locate and use any mixed state of the reference states by simple interpolations. This decoupling of the relative coordinate of the states from the specific values of the parameters makes an abstraction for the artist to perform the manual design of the temporal structure efficiently. The state space is a connection between the generative system and the temporal control. With the proposed interface, three artworks are introduced as proof of concepts. Reconstruction is an installation piece, experimenting with virtual geographical shapes. The Reconstruction is a proof of concept that utilizes the state space model for its automatic control, hinting the possibility of a state space model for connection between the generative system and manual composition. Balanced Movement is a fixed length composition, using dynamic equilibrium from the stochastic system as the primary material of the visual. Balanced Movement utilizes state space to define its manual temporal composition. Wavefront is an immersive audio-visual performance using a mathematical abstraction of an ocean wave as visual material. In Wavefront state space is used to spawn entities in performance time dynamically.