DisKinect

DisKinect began at an Art Hack Weekend at Eyebeam in New York in August 2011. The other four on the team were coworkers who already knew each other. I was the only artist, and my job was to give the thing a story and a concept.

The idea was that the digital copies of ourselves that large tech companies build pull our strings, emotionally and psychologically, and they do it for profit. Technology puts a distance between you and yourself. A hacked Kinect read the pose of whoever stood in front of it, and a four-foot puppet, hung on strings in mid-air, moved to match.

The puppet

I believe the puppet was my idea, and I made it. The skeleton is hollow aluminium tube with metal joints. The white shell is vacuum-formed plastic: I sculpted the forms in clay, built a vacuum-forming machine, heated the plastic sheet and pulled it down over the molds. It has no face.

Three pencil sketches of jointed puppet figures side by side: a plain figure, a robotic one and a female one, each with ball joints and hanging limbs. — Puppet sketches, September 2011.

Richard Mai built the mechanics that worked its strings. The software was written in C++ with Cinder and drove the motors through an Arduino and custom electronics. Photographs from 29 September 2011 show the puppet finished, standing on a white plinth against brick and black cloth.

The finished white puppet standing against an old brick wall, its smooth vacuum-formed limbs joined at the knees, hips and shoulders. — Finished, 29 September 2011.

The white puppet suspended from strings in a dark room, its arms hanging, its feet just above a wooden base. — Suspended, as it was shown, October 2011.

Shown

The Creators Project, the arts programme run by Intel and Vice, showed DisKinect in DUMBO, Brooklyn, in mid-October 2011. It worked the whole time, and nothing broke.

It was quick to respond. Move your left arm and its left arm started moving at once. But it took longer than you did to arrive at the pose, so people held their poses, sometimes for a long time, waiting for the puppet to catch up. It was generally doing what you did, in the uncanny valley. We later made a time-lapse from the Kinect’s own colour camera, a kind of stop motion of that disconnect, and a kaleidoscope remixed from the hundreds of people who stood in front of it.

Time-lapse from the Kinect's colour camera, 2011.

Kaleidoscope, remixed from the visitors in DUMBO, 2011.

What it holds

DisKinect was one of my first major projects involving code. On RSNBRG, the year before, a mentor built the app and I stayed at a distance from the development. Here I learned Cinder, and it got me into openFrameworks.

The team: James Donovan, puppet artist and technician. Mario Gonzalez and Guojian Wu, Kinect and C++ developers. Richard Mai, puppet mechanics and technician. Ahmad Saeed, producer, electronics and Arduino developer.

Photographs, 2011

A visitor seen from behind, moving the spotlit puppet.

The puppet on its plinth from below, strings taut.

A visitor gesturing in a red-lit hall, long shadows.

The puppet mid-kick, one leg swinging up.

The unstrung puppet collapsed on the studio floor.

Close detail of the torso, hips and aluminium linkages.

The white puppet on its plinth against black cloth.

The full figure hanging against an old brick wall.

The puppet in dim warm light at the event.

The puppet slumped in a concrete corner of the studio.

The puppet above its plinth, seen from below.

A dark gallery with the single spotlit puppet.

A visitor in silhouette facing the puppet.