Category: Design

Song rememberer bot

by

I made a bot a while ago called Song Rememberer, which asks if you remember a song. It’s continually remembering songs but can’t quite name them – really just an extension of the sound system in my own head. It asks questions like:

and:

and:

I am one of the only people who follows it, but every day I get to remember an imagined song or two. Occasionally someone replies with an attempt to name the song. You can follow it too at @songrememberer.

The code was made with Kate Compton’s amazing Tracery, and hosted via Cheap Bots Done Quick!. The source code is available here, if you want to make something similar.

ABC

by

A while ago I made a simple website to help teach my daughter to read the alphabet and numbers. It’s very basic, because it had to be intuitive enough for a 2-year-old to click through on a tablet or old mobile phone.

Screenshot of the website abc.olliepalmer.com. A single lowercase 'a' in the middle of a light red page.

It doesn’t do a lot – just presents and reads aloud each letter of the alphabet in order. You can switch between uppercase and lowercase by clicking on the letters, and toggle auto-playing the alphabet. The colour changes with each letter thanks to randomColor by David Merfield, and the font is Manrope by Mikhail Sharanda. The source code is available on Github. I’m sure anyone with a little coding knowledge could improve it.

The audio on the site is the stock Mac voice Fiona, who has a Scottish accent. My daughter now copies Fiona’s pronounciation whenever she reads the alphabet from the website (despite having a fairly English accent the rest of the time).

If there is a small person in your life, here is a site you can safely leave them with. Just go to abc.olliepalmer.com, put your phone/tablet in locked mode, and let them click away.

Broken camera

by

I’ve just been digging around some old hard drives and came across this screenshot from a project I did for Krieder O’Leary back in 2012. It was an experimental camera that moved back and forth along an aluminium track, writing small changes in the space over the top of its existing images. Unfortunately the prototype suffered an electrical malfunction when I installed it in the Tate Britain (entirely my fault) and so it never got a change to take slow pictures of people moving around space.

It’s funny how ideas ricochet around inside one’s own head, morphing over time and through practice – nine years later, I’m mid-way through a project that collates audio in a similar way, with an almost identical tendency to fail at the critical moment.

All the Worlds

by

All the Worlds

About

Through the use of a special headset, a member of the public is transported into a parallel cinematic world, where the familiar urban landscape, people and landmarks still seem to be there, but are now part of an immersive film plot. The player become a central figure in a dramatic story – but what is real and what is not? And who is pulling the strings?

Three parallel filmic worlds exist simultaneously.

Posters for the three worlds featured in the All the Worlds project: Death Wears a Red Tie, Eyes for You, and Steamship Frankietown

Immersive reality theatrical experience; live. Project in development.

Sign up for updates on this project (find out when we’re testing, etc).

Performance / testing

Tryday
V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media
Rotterdam, NL
10 April 2020
Cancelled due to Coronavirus lockdowns, to be rescheduled soon.

Year

  • 2019-21

Credits

Concept

Writing

Design, technology

Commissioning

NaNoGenMo 2019: Directory Directory

by

I decided to participate in NaNoGenMo (National Novel Generation Month) this year with a project called Directory Directory – an online directory of fictional companies, all located within the Alphaville-Zulutown region. It’s organised like an old phone book, by service type, and each company has a name, slogan, address, and phone number.

Some day in the future I’ll update the directory to have more information, and use more advanced grammar, and maybe even be printable. But the project was a nice excuse to learn some new things (the Tracery library for python is fun to play with; it’s also the first time I’ve built a workflow to build a whole generative website).

Some services
Companies offering Anemic Sling services

You can see the project at directory.olliepalmer.com, and play with the code that wrote it at GitHub. Enjoy!

Des’ree Bot

by

This week, I made a silly Twitter bot. It was mostly an attempt to make a tutorial about making Twitter bots using Dreamhost servers, but ended up being a bot who periodically tweets lines from Des’ree’s 1998 hit Life.

The bot itself is inspired by the africa by totobot, which simply tweets a random line from the song every few minutes. It is actually so irritating that I’ve stopped following it myself, as I found my days permeated by twee earworms about preferring toast to ghosts, or the desire to fly around the world in a beautiful balloon. 

The codebase is on Github – you can use it to build bots yourself if you use Dreamhost, or adapt the code slightly if you use another host (or have your own server). 

You can also follow the bot at @life_by_desree, if you dare.

Hundred Thousand Billion Poems

by

I am sure it’s been done before, possibly hundreds of billions of times, but as a small coding exercise whilst writing my PhD I wrote a little piece of code which renders random iterations of Raymond Queneau’s Hundred Thousand Billion Poems on a web page. I re-found it whilst working on another project. Here it is:

See the Pen A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems by Ollie Palmer (@olliepalmer) on CodePen.

The code is available on CodePen and Github.

Scriptych

by

Scriptych

About

A couple attempt to communicate from afar using an interface which translates their movements into words.

Structured across three micro-acts, Scriptych takes precision in choreography to an extreme, embedding sensors on dancers which measure their movements and control both the music and the words spoken aloud, in real time. The couples’ communication becomes increasingly fragmented as the piece develops, posing questions about the location of meaning in messages and movements, and the impossibility of communicating true intent.

3 x 3-minute choreographed sequences for 2 dancers.
Custom computer interface with machine-learnt three-dimensional word database.

Process

Ina, the French Audiovisual Institute, made a video about the collaboration between myself and Simon Valastro below. More information about this project can be found in Chapter 2 of my PhD thesis.

Pavillon Neuflize OBC / INA #9 Scriptych / Ollie Palmer – Simon Valastro – VA from Institut national audiovisuel on Vimeo.

Photo © copyright Justine Emard / Pavillon 2016.

Prints

A limited number of signed prints of this performance are available for purchase. Please get in touch for details.

Performance

La Rumeur des Naufrages
Opera Garnier, Paris
18 June 2016

Film screenings

Arctic Moving Image and Film Festival
Harstad, Norway
October 2017

Architecture Film Festival London
Institute of Contemporary Arts / Oxo Bargehouse
June 2017

Film | Making | Space
Royal Academy, London
February 2017

Credits

Concept, script

  • Ollie Palmer
  • Simon Valastro

Choreography

  • Simon Valastro

Design, technology

  • Ollie Palmer

Dancers

  • Eve Grinsztajn
  • Mathieu Contat

Thanks

  • Thanks to the Opera National de Paris
  • Director Stéphane Lissner
  • Dance director Benjamin Millepied

Commissioning

  • Project realised under the Pavillon Neuflize OBC programme 2015-16 (research lab of the Palais de Tokyo), during its collaboration with the Opera National de Paris, the Institut national de l’audiovisuel and the Groupe de recherches musicales (INA – GRM).

Details

  • Performance: 2016
  • Film: 2019
  • Performance, film, technology

24fps Psycho

by

24fps Psycho

About

A performance visually remixing and reinterpreting Alfred Hitchcock’s classic Psycho (1960).

Working with footage from the Institute National Audiovisuel (France), the Prelinger Archives (USA) and my own material, I have built software to analyse the visual and audio content of each frame in Psycho. The frames are then compared to a database of archival footage, and replaced with ‘matching’ stills and video clips.

The rate of frame-replacement varies according to the volume of the film’s iconic soundtrack – so that the audial freneticism is reflected on the screen. The result is a mesmerising, chaotic experience, and a reworking of a highly memorable film.

This is part of an ongoing body of work examining the technology of cinema.

Process

L’Institut National de l’Audiovisuel made a short film about the making of 24fps Psycho:

Pavillon Neuflize OBC / INA #2 Taking “Psycho” to Pieces from Institut national audiovisuel on Vimeo.

More information about this project can be found in Chapter 3 of my PhD thesis.

Public performance

Do Disturb Festival
Palais de Tokyo
9 + 10 April 2016 (full performance)

Lundi du Pavillon
Palais de Tokyo
18 April 2016 (short performance and talk)

Credits

Footage provided for experimental purposes by L’Institut National de l’Audiovisuel
Made during my residency at Pavillon Neuflize OBC, the Research Lab of the Palais de Tokyo 2015-16

86400

by

86400

About

A real-time film composed of images that show up in a Google Image Search for the exact time at that moment (e.g. 11:41:14). The film plays in real-time, and takes a full day to watch.

Images do not necessarily bear a relationship to each other, besides a similar metadata tag. Thus, it is the audience who read meaning into the assemblage of images, creating stories and hypotheses about the images.

The images were gathered using the Google Image Search API, using masked IP addresses so that a search would appear to be from a random global location. As an unconnected string of images, the film forms a visceral snapshot of the US-indexed internet in late 2015.

This piece is a digital homage to Christian Marcklay’s The Clock (2010).

Video: ten minutes of 86400, at 22:00:00

Viewer version

A limited edition of ten specially-made film viewers is available to purchase (they also function as clocks); please contact me for details

Process

More information about the development of this project can be found in Chapter 3 of my PhD thesis.

Public display

Do Disturb Festival
Palais de Tokyo
8-10 April 2016

AIADO Hallway Gallery
School of the Art Institute Chicago
27 March – 6 April 2017

Publications

Film as resonance
4 minute excerpt from 86400 published by Film + Place + Architecture, 2017

Credits

Made during my residency at Pavillon, the Research Lab of the Palais de Tokyo