Introduction
YABBA is created by María Jerez together with a team of dancers, performers and artists. It is an instalation and a performance of about 60 mins long. The instalacion is a big space full of coloring textures that changes, evolves and moves.
In words of the own artist:
Yabba is a cosmos with its own order, its own rhythm and its own systems in movement that invites you to enter a new logic. A hybrid of different technologies, an amalgam of entities in constant transformation in time, that produce other things in their own coexistence and in the encounter with those who observe them. Things that transpose images, concepts, ideas, emotions that occur precisely at that moment of encounter with the entities of that deformed and changing cosmos. A kind of world that is everything and nothing, is full and empty, that takes all forms but does not yet have any. Yabba is right there, changing. It paints its own colours, it changes its shapes, it unfolds its materiality… This state of constant transformation proposes an attentive look: a look that pays attention from the inability to name what it looks at.Yabba is accompanied by Lanoche, a musical project by Ángela de la Serna, a mix of experimental electronics, ambient, deep house and atmospheric slow techno.
Technical Development
The intalation is made by different elements that moves by 220AC motor fans. There is also smoke machines and a big LED light. The technical work focused on the controlling system of such elements. The work had also to include a GUI for composing different scores for the installation to work some hours in the exposition.
GUI form scores
The interface was made in OpenFrameWorks using a Timeline class. The GUI allows to have classic GUI elements such sliders, buttons, checkboxes, and so. But the main part of the GUI application is that you can have graphic channels where you can configurate an envelope curve. The curve is mainly defined by keyframes. The set of curves in the different channels can be conceived as a movement score.
The oF application executes the score of hte intallation reading the different points in each envelope curve for each channel and sending the normalized values to a Serial Port via Serial protocol. And external Arduino reads serial values and send them to different actuators.
240AC motor control
The installation has 240AC motors. For controlling their velocity a dimmer for inductive loads is used. The dimmer is made by a tristor an opticoupler gate and a programated PIC. This PIC reads serial values that Arduino sends and makes the dimmer control for each dimmer channel.
Smoke machine and light control
The somke machine is controlled by DMX-512 protocol. For that a MAX432 integrated circuit is used.
Finally, the big LED light is controled by a digital resistor implemented in the MCP4131 integrated circuit. This digital resistor can easily be controled by an Arduino.
Therefore, in the Aduino side there is a Serial reader, a DMX writer, a Serial writer (for motor dimmers) and a digital resistor control.
