“Compose the Space” - Art Installation

The “Compose the Space” project was pitched to SFU as part of their SFU Student-Community Engagement competition. Being an SFU graduate myself and while working with Marc St Pierre, an SFU student it was suggested that we put in an entry for this competition. A third artist, Karen Cancino was part of the core team as well. After going through a few concepts, we settled on an idea of putting a large playable piano mat as an art installation in a community space.

After making it to the final round, we needed to create a presentation for a panel of judges. Part of our presentation was showing exactly what the installation would be, so I decided visualization and graphics were needed.

We choose civic plaza outside of the surrey public library as the location for the installation and came up with two very rough concept sketches.

After some photography, 3d work, and composting our concept graphic became this as one of the slides for our presentation.

Fast forward and we won some funds to go ahead with the project.

A ddr style rhythm game was created for the installation for the participants to play as a way to get them to initially interact (the piano could also be played as a standalone piano). An artist, Louisa Lin helped is with the graphics and we featured a few local artist's music for the game. Since the running hardware was limited, one challenge was getting the game's timing to run smoothly to be able to match the beats to music as that was key to being able to play the game. It was written in java, using the processing framework.

Building and testing various parts of the installation. To help with this part, enlisted the help of another member, Doug Chan from MakerCube. We ended up learning a lot of painting of all things.

The installation was planned to be set up once a week for the month of september alongside meetups held at the library by MakerCube (that we were also a part of).

We also had a pre-opening/soft opening run for SFU's Community Engagement center, the Surrey City Center library staff, and artists who contributed music to the game.