 Thank you very much. Thank you. Oh, that's quite loud. I tend to project my voice, but... So, yes, as I say, I'm Chris. I'm part of a group at Plymouth University called IDA, and I'm talking about something we did call, this is where we are. Are we on the main screen? Minor technical difficulties. Brilliant. So, brilliant. So, kind of the adjectures of this talk is to say hello, introduced it to me and IDA, down from Plymouth. And I'm going to talk about how the installation came to be, all the technology that's inside it, more focus on the technology and some kind of the things and experiences we learned, especially the big, hard lessons in there. But first a little bit about me. My name's Chris. That's my 3D printed version of me with a nice little top hat. And I'm a lead developer and research assistant at a place called IDA. I'm also an associate lecturer on the digital art and technology course, and I do freelance work as a consulting technologist, which is a name for a job which I completely made up, because I thought it sounded interesting. So, I'll start off with a little bit about IDA. So, we are an open research and design collective, playfully experimenting with data. Now, I could go into the official, here's all the research things we do, and here's all we're funded by, but I could talk about some fun stuff we've done. Some of you may remember or have heard about this in the past. So, here's one thing we've done many years ago. This was something called Slothbot. This is a piece of architecture that's designed to get in your way. So, this had a vision system above it, so it detected when people were walking through, and then when you were walking past after your lecture, you would have this wall in your way. We also do things like put random lift buttons in. So, if you were going in and didn't know which floor you wanted to go to, hit the random lift button, turn up somewhere else as well. We've also given a bunch of Macau apes, a iMac many, many years ago, it's one of the old power G5 ones, and we asked them to write the complete works of Shakespeare. You can download this PDF and you can see they mostly wrote S's on there. But that gives you an idea of what we do. We have a sense of humour, a bit of tongue-in-cheek, but we also do the proper legit research bit. A lot of my work recently is focused on working with arts organisations around data. This is the Cheltenham festivals. This was a little app we built, and we asked people to log where they were visiting at the event. And when those big hotspots were where most of the activity happened, and we sent some Norwegian puppeteers to them to get them excited and going. But most recently, we've been working on this project called Quorum, which is all about sensing from lots of different places, working with a big audience around 3D data, spatial awareness and stuff like that. So one of the example projects from here, this is an immersive vision theatre piece, where we took some DICOM data files of my boss, turned them into polyagonal files and created this immersive interactive experience. And here you can get a 3D internal fly-through of the person who pays my wages, which is a little bit weird. But off the back of that, we were invited by the Tate Modern back in 2015 to take part in their data jam. And here, I'll wait for the... Wait for the dancego. So this was something we were working with the audience, and we were collecting everything people were saying online and then transposing it into a 3D model of London. So here we've got a 3D model ripped off of Google Earth and then a waveform of sentiment deforming as the event is going on. So we build this kind of digital sculpture over the course of the event. So they really liked that, they really enjoyed it and the Tate Collective remembered us and got on to us. And earlier this year, Tate Modern were finishing off their new extension, the Switch House, and they had this empty space in one of the floors called the Tate Exchange which is meant for temporary works of art, workshop space, and they invited us and thought, this is brilliant, we should get you IDAC guys along, you should build something really, really cool and really exciting. And that became, this is where we are. And this is a quick vision, quick walk around the insulation itself and to give you the formal crib notes, the short description, bringing together technology, audio and visuals, this dynamic data-driven artwork asks audiences to consider the data they generate and the algorithms they increasingly influence in their behaviour. This is where we are, offers a glimpse into the future of collectively living, working and being and with and through algorithms. So, yeah, that's the academic instruction, which is kind of really boring and works really well in academic papers and bids, but is less interesting here. What it really is, is a cool digital sculpture and shape. So the thing knows when people are around it and can interact and flash towards it, it knows when you are touching it, it creates sounds and listens to what people are saying about it and the tape modern and then all captured and evolved in this kind of digital aquarium thing. And I'm kind of, over the course of this talk, I'll kind of touch on the various different elements in our technology stack, of which there's quite a lot of stuff in this. And I want to touch on the bottom one there. So when we were designing it, we did a bit of blender, but we used these polydron shapes. So we started physically prototyping our sculpture with these little triangle plane pieces. They're designed for primary schools, but you can get these. They're about 20 quid for a block of them. And we took this model and we created a plan. We thought of all the data it's going to take in and the interactions of the audience. And then we got on our laptops, we started writing and we went to Arts Council England to apply for grants for the arts. And we put lots of effort into it and we got it going. And this is where I could bring my first lesson in. Crunch is horrible. So one of the problems with Arts Council England's grants for the arts is that you don't find out that you've got the money until maybe a couple of months before you need it. So about a month and a half before we were due to install and could say we were going to be there, we actually got the money saying we're going to be there. So that meant the whole thing had to come together in about six to eight weeks, which was a mammoth task and ended up with lots of late nights and 14-hour days. And if any of you know game development, know this kind of end of the process to get stuff going, or even if in your own processes, you know how hard that can be. So that's one major lesson is try not plan, try and plan never to have a crunch because then it takes a long time to recover from that, causes depression, causes issues. Not to give it a sour note, but it's a key thing to remember. It's a key thing to concern. It's just don't look after your stuff. Look after the people there. So going from something slightly bad to something a bit better. So this is Simon and this is Simon with the model and Simon took the model down to a group called TR2 or Theatre Role 2. This is a massive production space in Plymouth. If you've seen a West End show or a touring theatre show, the likelihood is the sets and the environment and the costumes were manufactured in Plymouth. And we got to hand out in this space for a week before we went up to London. Here's a shot of some guy angle-griding. And there's lots of action shots in here. And they took our little polydron model and created a big skeleton for us. So they laid it out and did a really good job of putting it together for us and helped us create this thing. It ended up three and a half metres high and we could fill it with all these technologies and these screens. And here's me just hugging my laptop for comfort. So one of the things I mentioned earlier, we're using connects in this piece to detect when people are around it and when people are touching it. Simon wrote a bit of software which took the data from those connects and created a 3D environment around the space. So basically a point cloud of where everyone was and then created touch points in that point cloud for the sculpture. So you could walk up and touch it and it would respond like a touchscreen and because everything was in the ceiling and hidden away, you could interact with it and it's not obvious that there's something there. So all that data was being sent to a Raspberry Pi. This one, and this thing is responsible for coordinating the whole system together, collecting all the data from online, coordinating with the various different subsystems, the Unity, the Connect. It handled the lighting and this little thing was under the floorboards in the tape modern itself and I could SSH into it and control the lighting of the sculpture from outside so you can see the red dot out there. I could get on my laptop and control it and it also posted onto Slack. So this is a really useful thing. If you're doing something, make it monitorable as many ways you can or in something that's easy for you to access. So luckily if I need to connect to it and I shugled in to use the host name, it posts its IP straight into Slack for me, really easy. That was all using Node-RED to collect everything. I won't go into too much depth in Node-RED because Lucy Rogers' talk later about hacking robots is all about that and she's also writing a book on it, which is going to be handy for when I'm teaching because I'm just going to give them the book, which would be really handy. Visual programming tools are perfect for this sort of thing, mostly because you want to write as little code as possible so you can focus on other stuff. But it's also really easy to then hand it over to someone else so you can go away and do something. This is another visual programming tool we use. This is Pure Data and it should be playing audio. So Pure Data is a... I think some of the people are using it in the Algorave 10. So Pure Data is a visual programming language for generative sound. And then while it looks like a mess, I can easily tell from the top to the bottom that you can fix it, you can go in, I can easily understand what's going on there. This was triggered by the different emotions and different things we were picking up, what people were touching, and then it was triggering this. What was kind of nice is that they had a big software in the system so you could go and touch it and the thing would start vibrating at you as well. So we go along to the Tate Modern and there we go. This is the GoPro-based timelapse. And it took us about a day to get the initial setup done, to get the frames in, get the screens in as well. And here's one key thing which was really awesome. Get your client involved. So if you're doing it for someone, get them involved in a little bit of coding or a little bit of soldering in this case. This is the Tate Collective. We're using them and this is the Tate staff who are looking after us. Get them involved in bolting something on or doing something with it, because that gives them some ownership and some idea of what you're doing. And it gets them really excited and interested in asking questions and they're keen and wanting to learn and wanting to engage with you. So skip over some more action stuff. It's big enough to get inside and that's Simon stuck in before we locked him in for eternity. Inside was a complete mess of wires. If there are any electricians in the room, you're probably going to start looking at me in horror. There's about 40 or 50 different things that needed power in here. So a mess of kettle leads and DMX wires and XLR. We had lots of custom wiring and things done for us. And one thing to remember in here, if you're doing insulation, your venue is your friend. If you let them know exactly what you want, exactly the stuff you need, they'll provide it for you. They did a fantastic job of hiding the connects for us and providing us everything we needed. Now they gave us an internal network out to use, but no Wi-Fi for the devices. So your venue is your friend, but what they don't know doesn't hurt them. So we put a Wi-Fi router in, but we just hid the SSID and they didn't know and it was fine. Don't tell anyone, although this is being live-streamed. So if someone from the state is watching, sorry, sorry, we broke the network law. But they looked it after us really well and they fed us. But at the end of that first day, we had a bit of a bit of a horror story. We booked them out because of that late running of getting the money. We had to book cheap Airbnb's to stay in. And we got locked out of our Airbnb on the first night. Now the problem with that is that we had spent 300 quid on the hotel and had about four hours sleep and all our stuff was in the Airbnb. So we had to come to the Tate Modern in our sweaty, horrible clothes for the next day and just felt horrible. So if you're paying for someone to do something and they're doing a lot of work, make sure you take the stress out of them. So make sure you provide things for them and give them a place to sleep that they can rely on. Luckily it got unlocked and was all sorted and fined later on. But I don't know. There's something to keep in mind. The screens around it there were all... Let's start again. The screens around the sculpture, there are I think 14, no, 14, 30 LED screens. These are about 60 x 60 pixels RGB. And these are the same sorts of screens you would see on a Glastonbury stage or a festival stage. Big grids of LEDs all networked together and going through to controller box. The controller box has some software which you plug into which lets you map those screens to the video feed you give it. So you give it an HDMI feed. This is the feed from the Mac Pro. So this is just taking the video feed straight out of the image and then it's looking for blocks in that image to apply and send to the screen. Now because we had this aquarium effect inside Tiwa with these boys and these boys were reacting and behaving based on what people were saying online. Now they were moving around this sculpture in 3D. So our Unity coder Cameron, we slightly melted his brain by asking him to figure out where all those screens are in Unity, apply them to the 3D sculpture and then map those screens into the 2D visual that was then going out to the controller box. So it took him two days to do it. He was broken by the end of it, but he did an amazing job. So when you touched it, the voids would float towards you and they would float around the sculpture towards you. So you could put your hand on it, walk around the sculpture, walk around the edges as well and it would track you and follow you. And that worked really, really well. Apart from a few glugs in the OSC library, it was amazing moments when people were watching and realising that this thing was 3D and was something inside it, something there as well. As I was saying earlier, it was listening to what people were saying online. This was done using the IBM Watson APIs. Really interesting trends in machine learning and sentiment analysis and tone stuff, even vision systems. As APIs, as services, which you can just pay for rather than having lots of hardware, we were using this to influence the behaviour of the sculpture. So when it was angry, it had different sounds when it was positive or when it was neutral. This all comes out as different. So tone analysis expands beyond sentiment analysis by looking at all these different emotions or characteristics about the person. You can find some really interesting detailed analysis and data in that and that's based on millions of corpuses and millions of trained data in there. And the Watson API just gives you easy access to it. It was responding to things that was happening during the day. So when we were developing it and installing it, there was a protest outside and our sculpture got angry and started responding to what people were saying and blurting and shouting at us. So which is a bit of a strange and weird experience. But so this sculpture, we wanted to make it totally interactive. So any kind of way you could touch or stroke or even talk to it as well. So one of the other elements I built was a chatbot. That was on Microsoft's bot framework. And there was just bits of Node.js, Heroku, and you could... This is still online, so it's tibba.me and click the talk button. You can talk to the sculpture. Now this was mostly used in the space by the interpreters. In an art gallery interpreters are the people who stand next to something and tell you what you're supposed to feel and think about the thing. Really massively important in a populist modern art gallery like the Tate Modern is people will come in and have no idea what they're looking at until someone explains it to them. So this thing here, it knows about love, it knows what's the meaning of life. It has lots of different responses. So going back to getting people involved, we had our Tate Collectives and our Tate staff all writing responses for this. You can tell which ones I put because they're the war games references in there. So if you ask it if you would like to play a game, it suggests global thermonuclear war. And one of the big... I had a big heated argument, again with my boss, who we flew through earlier in the stage, about, is this thing going to swear at you? I had to explain to him, say, no, it's going to be fine. No one's going to get offended. I've got full control over this. But I tend to worry. I tend to freak out a little bit if I don't know what's going on. And I always feel like if I leave something, I may come back to something on fire. But really, we did enough. It would be fine. I could just chill out and relax. So nothing broke apart from some of the robot stuff, which I'll get back to later. Nothing I was responsible for broke. Apart from, we were running on Windows 8. And if you know for the last few months, Microsoft really wants you to upgrade to Windows 10. So we got into the space one morning and over the front of the screen, lovely Windows 10 upgrade logo. So that's another thing to... I love photos of public screens that have broken or besodded, and that was our version of it as well. I was talking about robots as well. So alongside the main sculpture, there was these smaller little robots which looked like they broke off. These are just Arduino's inside and a bunch of motors and a big mobile phone battery. They started being really intelligent, and we were going to track and figure out where they were in the space. But actually, they ended up being really dumb. So they're just looking for some heat sources and they're going to that heat source and then flashing and engaging you. But that's another thing to remember, is that it's all just a show. This isn't a really expensive, like, perfectly accurate technology. We don't need to know exactly what they are. We're not Amazon. If something wanders off or tries to go down the stairs, we just go and pick it up and go, oh, you shouldn't have done that. You need to behave and listen to me. You just kind of play and perform with the thing because your audience, the people going through the space, don't know that it's not dumb. Don't know that it's not smart. They don't know that you're only created something that you're just playing around with. And of course it... Now, it survived the private view. It survived the adults, but kids loved jumping on them and pushing them about. They flocked to it and they slightly broke the spindles in our motors. So unfortunately, it didn't survive the whole thing. Some people came round and tried to offer us money for them as art pieces, so I think Lee got offered the engineer who worked on them, about £2,000 for one of them. I don't know why he didn't take them up on there. I certainly would have. And kind of installing it, it's a big hassle. It's lots of work, many hours, lots of trips to Leon. Leon's amazing. We don't have it down in Plymouth. All these things in London you have access to. It's amazing. But at the end of the week, when everything's done, all the technology's there and the public are out, the interpreter's there, you can just sit back and enjoy it. So Lee decided to have a kip. On the press day, we had quite a few people round. We had a nice ride up in Ars Technica. In that space, we also had other artists and other people using that space. We had some dancers walking around and leading a public dance through it. But all the public were giving instructions on little radio-controlled headphones. So they were listening to something. They were listening to instructions to go up, touch and play with it. While everyone else who weren't listening was just looking in amazement. So they incorporated our bit into their... our sculpture into their work. And that was really fun to see. It really worked helping people bring people through the space, into our area and enjoying and interacting with our piece. As I was saying earlier, with the tracking, the kids again run up to it and just whack on it. Adults love it because it's one of the few things that was in the Tate Modern that was truly interactive. There was something you could go and play with, not just stand and look at and try and understand. It was something you could just walk up to and mess around. And there was lots of great examples of little tiny moments and things that happened that was just amazing to watch. As a creator of something, it's a lovely feeling to see someone use your thing that you've built. If you're an app creator or if you've done something, it's nice to see someone on the tube using your app or accessing your website. And this was just that again. And there's some lovely moments where it tracked people perfectly and that created a really great response in our audience. Although obviously we're telling people to walk up and touch stuff, we had an extra screen to one side which just had an explainer video. And of course, because everything they've seen before in that space they could touch and play around with, the kids especially just walked up and started touching the screen. They were thinking something that was happening because it was an animation on there. But this lovely, expensive screen that the Tate Modern got in, especially for us, had lots of smear marks and it was lovely, it was great to see that. And of course we had an online response when that chatbot had some perfect moments where it was responding what love was, I think in this case. Love is the discovery of ourselves and others and the delight of recognition. And then that generates people excitement, people online, and just lovely to be in that part, be in that scene and enjoy what's happening despite all the stress and difficulty of putting it together. And then last, get into the last few minutes, three more minutes. Cool. So other events during that time, there was the private view and I've never felt more out of place. Private view of the Tate Modern, lots of people in very expensive suits drinking lots of wine. Various celebrities and things, especially our favourite was seeing John Snow put on a poncho while he was going out to get on his bicycle and a colleague of mine being offered a cigarette by Tracy Emin. Just this weird, like, oh God, there are all these people about and I'm just in my T-shirt and jeans, I'm really sweaty and I'm covered in sawdust and you're all really nicely dressed. But we're all drinking wine so it doesn't really matter anyway. So private view of the Tate Modern was expensive and over the weekend we had a couple of performances. Adam, who has been in the Algorithm tent this week, was using our sculpture as a VJing surface. Our Tate Collective and a couple of our academics were using the sound system as an instrument so we had a little TouchOSC application which was sending data into the system to override it and let people engage and interact. Now sadly, sounds great, can you go see it? Unfortunately it's not there anymore. It was only there for the three days and we kind of need to now look for the next source of funding, the next source of money to really improve it. I'd bring it here, but everything in there has been borrowed, begged and steeled to put together and it's not waterproof although this weekend it's been fine, it's not been raining. Was it raining last night? Possibly. But this would be something we'd love to take about. We've had some interest in touring it to places. The difficulty is because it's all come together at the end. No-one's really planned where to take it next and what's the next steps for it. So at the moment it's flat-packed in an office at the university and in about six months' time I'm expecting to have some triangles in my bedroom that I'm going to have to find a space for. But hopefully fingers crossed we can show it, we can take it more places, hopefully bring it to EMF camp 2018 and let you all enjoy it. To end, despite all the stress, despite all the worry and those enjoyments, I got this picture a couple of days after I'd slept for about three days once I got back to Plymouth. This is Rebecca from The Tanks, this is her baby who's just sitting underneath enjoying watching the boys go past him and that made my day on that. That is everything from me. I think I've run out of time for questions, I'll be round later, come and grab me, I'll be in the karaoke tent later, definitely belting stuff out. And thank you very much.