Greetings, all;

Here is some info about a "laser show" I will be doing April 3 online.
One man's struggle to cope with the Covidian Crisis.

Background
Since 2013, Illuminatus Lasers has been a fixture of FoolMoon, an Ann Arbor light festival/art event. We started on the roof of the Mongolian Barbeque, projecting onto a bank building, then moved to an alley projecting onto an apartment building, then into the main area on Washington St. for three years. Last year, we moved with the festival to the Ann Arbor Farmers Market, projecting onto the walls of Kerrytown.

Retrospective gallery here:
https://www.instagram.com/runswithlasers/

We run a combination of laser lumia under the control of my ILDA Award-winning lunchbox interfaces (controlled by the audience), all mixed with Dances With Lasers, an interactive piece where people dance before a Kinect sensor that captures their outlines, which are then sent to our laser projectors, thence to our projection surface, usually the wall of a building. Video of this here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8oI2oLGKOqw

FoolMoon Reimagined
This year, we are part of FoolMoon Reimagined, an online effort necessitated by the current Covidian crisis. The fest runs from 8 to 9pm on April 3, 2020; more info here:
https://wonderfoolproductions.org/foolmoon/

Interactive Lasers the Hard Way
To take part, Illuminatus Director Mike Gould (“I’m not sequestered, I’m an artist in residence”) has set up a laser display in his studio, and will be streaming the show to Facebook Live during the event. To make this interactive, it is set up so that comments to his Facebook page will be cut and pasted into his laser software (Pangolin Beyond) and added to the mix as scrolling text.

Users are encouraged to share their recent experiences (briefly), artistic comments, or random thoughts to the show. To take part, go here:
https://www.facebook.com/Clickamouse

This will probably start this around 7 and run until I get tired, or until Facebook or my network connection crashes.

Crass Technical Details

Here is a shot of the lunchboxen and lasers setup. I am projecting onto a wide seamless paper backdrop, part of my usual photography setup.

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I just spent the last 6 weeks re-designing and upgrading the lunchboxen and projectors, installing servo motors to make them more responsive to the twitching hands of the kids in the audience. I finished this up just in time for FoolMoon, only to have our gig snatched away by the virus. Hence this attempt at virtuality.

Here is another shot of the business end of the projectors. In the middle is a Kvant CM3000 which is running the scrolling text:

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Computers
Here is my workbench, where I usually do all my electronics and optic work - no room for that now. Left to right: PC laptop running Beyond, Beyond workspace on the big monitor, APC 40 for tweaking the scrolling text. On the right is the Mac Pro running the Facebook Live streaming software (OBS). The laptop also monitors Facebook, so I can copy and paste comments into the text scrolling function of Beyond.

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Networking
Here’s where things get dicey: I am out in the boonies of south-central Michigan, surrounded by corn fields and talking to the internet via an ATT cellphone box. This allows me to WiFi from my studio to the cell tower, absorbing all our bandwidth in the process. In order for the laptop to monitor my Facebook comments, I use my iPhone as a hotspot and have the laptop talk to that.

Thus, everything goes through a cell tower; upload via my ATT cell router, download via the same tower via my iPhone. It took me about three days to figure all this out. How this will hold up to the internet traffic for the event remains to be seen. Below shows me wrestling with this.


Webcam
I am using an inexpensive Logitech C615 unit that I bought used on eBay as a backup for our Kinect system. I experimented using my Canon 5D MKII DSLR, hoping for better imagery, but didn’t see any improvement - and as this required three additional pieces of software, I settled on the webcam.

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Software
I am using OBS software, available for free here:
https://obsproject.com

This only required one piece of additional software, and some fiddling to get the sound working, but it works really well. Instructions for this are on their website.

Soundtrack
I’m using music Ken Kozora composed: Music For Lasers. This is a CD I produced for Ken back in 2014 for a piece we did at the Dow Museum of Art and Science in Midland, MI. It is playing in iTunes on my streaming Mac, and mixed into the video via OBS.

Facebook Live
This was recommended to me by our media IT guy Tom Bray, and it works, mostly. Bad news: it looks like crap. Good news: it’s available to all, it’s free, and will get the job done. I spent most of two days trying to get my delicate lumia to show up decently, to no avail. You can sorta see swirling colors in the background, which do nicely frame the text, but that’s about it.

Kinda remarkable that it works at all, so I can’t complain. This was designed by FB to facilitate talking heads, not filmy laser art, so I shouldn’t be surprised. I tried a variety of lenses, camera settings, and such to tweak things up, only to be squashed by FB’s compression algorithms.

A Learning Experience
Summing up, this has been a major learning experience for me. I’m a Mac guy, so learning how to do Win-flavored FB with my left hand while running the Mac with my right was a good lesson in the ambidextrous amphibious. (Amphibious: able to live in two environments.)

And I generally suck at social media, other than consuming it during downtimes. I’m gonna have to get a lot more adept at this as life continues online for the duration. Lotsa fun and learning, but I don’t see a big future for this kind of laser streaming unless FB improves their depressing compression antics.

Check it out on Facebook, and I’ll see you later online.

Stay safe…Mike Gould

In Charge, Illuminatus Lasers
www.mikegouldlaserartist.com
www.illuminatuslasers.com