I have been using Director for many years now, for a wide variety of projects from Web games to kiosks, and it's a really great platform for developing complex projects quickly. The ability to "get my hands dirty" with Director's scripting language, Lingo, allows me the opportunity to take control of media in a way that's just not feasible with other software, and allows me to use Director in some very unusual ways.

In my research at the University of Plymouth (England), I have been studying the relationship between the human body and its surrounding architecture. As we find ourselves in the dawn of a cyborg era, how can we expect our architecture to alter as we cybernetically enhance our bodies? How will we engage with what we know as space and place?

I spend a lot of my research time and effort creating customized hardware installations as a way of getting information from my body into a computer, and I don't want to waste a second worrying about whether my software can keep up. Director is an ideal prototyping tool that allows me to create a wide variety of multimedia output for my projects.

The MyBorg Suit
I set out to explore and experiment with cyborg systems, linking my body to its surrounding architectural environment. I created a custom hardware system that extended my body's nervous system by adding 16 new "digital nerves" that allowed me to sense changes in my internal body and my external architecture. I wired sensors for temperature, light, tilt, and vibration into the fabric of a jacket, placing the sensors in strategic places on my upper body. This jacket became known as the MyBorg, a wearable, portable, personal diary cyborg, digitally recording my every move. As I navigated through my environment the MyBorg's digital nerves sensed every interaction; vibration sensors on my chest allowed my breathing to be recorded, tilt sensors on my shoulders recognized which direction I was facing, light sensors allowed me to judge proximity to objects, and light sensors on my back enabled me to ascertain if someone was walking up behind me.

All this information wired across my body was then converted into MIDI data via a custom chipboard mounted inside my jacket pocket. I then fed the MIDI data into Director via an Xtra that enabled me to create software patches in Lingo that could assign any one of my sensors to absolutely anything within Director's authoring environment. This removed the need for a keyboard and mouse entirely and led to the development of a new range of projects that could be controlled directly with the body. By combining the MyBorg with Director's ActiveX components on the PC it was possible to patch into applications such as Web browsers, DVD players, and audio mixers. This worked particularly well as it gave a new physicality to a liquid, virtual concept.

By far the most intuitive use for the MyBorg is navigating 3D spaces. Using the MyBorg with Shockwave 3D, it is possible to spin, rotate, tilt, dip, and fly through a virtual architecture as if you were in it yourself. Because of the ability to completely control a 3D scene with Lingo, I could alter any aspect in real time with the movements of my body and my surroundings. It quickly became possible to relate changes in the real-world architecture, such as lights and sounds, to directly manipulate the virtual 3D architecture.

Director was the fast development environment I needed to make prototype 3D environments dynamically generated and controlled by Lingo that could be modified in real time by my movements. This created a unique reactive body architecture in virtual 3D space. Using the real-time 3D mesh features of Director, combined with imaging Lingo, meant that everything was created on the fly, no need for expensive 3D applications or graphics packages. It gave my MyBorg suit total control of every aspect of a virtual environment. This meant that I could spend less time on software development and more time on experimenting and researching the applications of my MyBorg system.

Lacuna
Based on the success of the original MyBorg suit, I set about creating a new architectural experiment that allows very physical architecture to extend itself into the realm of zero physicality, to become a hyperflexible space. Taking it a step further, I used sensors built within the architecture itself, upgrading from 16 digital nerves to thousands of high-tech sensors embedded within the brand new Portland Square building at the University of Plymouth. I was able to use the building as a fully extended sensory body. Data from absolutely every corner of the building, heat, light, movement, color, CO2 levels, humidity, data, telephone calls, wind, rainfall, gases, emergency systems, electronics, Web-site usage, even how far open or closed a window or door is, can be digitally recorded and monitored. I used all of these inputs and more to alter in real time my software art project, called Lacuna. This created a unique representation of the building not in traditional space and time or virtual electronic space, but somewhere between the two.

Lacuna is an active response to the relationship between body and architecture in the cyborg era. Existing in the perceived "gap" between physical volume and electronic volume, Lacuna is customized software that communicates between the visual medium of the screen and a high-resolution electronic skin of real-world architecture. This in turn creates virtual counterpart architecture, enhancing the electronic cybrid dimension of construction.

Turning the architecture of the building into a giant sensory machine was made possible by a complex building management system that converted data taken from the building's sensors into XML. This was then passed on to a Web server that updated three times per second, providing a constant stream of fresh XML data over the Web. I was able to harness the XML and feed it directly into a Shockwave 3D screensaver version of Lacuna that was installed on every machine throughout the building, adding a new level of social interaction to the virtual dimension of the architecture. This allows people to navigate and explore the space around them in ways that are not normally possible with "dumb" buildings.

The visuals and graphics of the Lacuna screensaver are not the product of an expensive 3D program, or Photoshop, or any other graphical program, they are the result of pure XML data and code, an entirely generative piece played out by the interactions within the building itself. In this respect Lacuna can be seen as a "building player" that responds in real time to the data it is fed. This allowed me to keep file sizes low as there was no need to include graphics or animation. They are all generated live by the precise activity of the building at any given moment. This led to a file size of just 175k, small enough to be distributed quickly over the Web and the building's internal network.

Distributing Lacuna as a Web-updateable screensaver challenged traditional notions of interaction; visitors to the University of Plymouth's Portland Square building interact not through the dreary key-press or mouse-click but by their very presence, or lack of presence, and usage of the building is converted into electronic signals. As the occupants of the building turn on lights, open windows, use computers, or even flush the toilet, they change and control the animations on screen, but if they try to touch the keyboard or mouse, the screensaver automatically quits, directly challenging traditional notions of human/computer interaction. This, for the first time, allows visitors to exist simultaneously in the real and the virtual, they are everywhere and nowhere.

Lacuna is in a constant state of flux, and intelligently updates, modifies, and mutates itself many times a second. As a software organism it makes its own decisions, although it is open to interactive influence by opening doors and windows, by adjusting heating, by the weather, by the very human interactions in, on, and around the building.

Lacuna is the first art project in the world to use this data to generate not a representation of a real building in cyberspace, but an electronic counterpart building that allows its inhabitants to fly beyond walls, to exist without physicality and to engage with the digital/spiritual nature of zero physicality. This transient data gathered from the real world is fed into a virtual building, creating light, colors, and shapes in a way that we cannot accomplish in the physical world.

Lacuna has no hard-wired ideas. Nothing in the program can be broken. It is generated entirely by interaction, a feedback loop between the body and digital/real architecture. We become inhabitants of our own software, we are tangled in the machine.

Personal Note
The MyBorg was initialized on May 8, 2003, with a live performance at MLAX, extending the 16 digital nerve endings into audio systems to create a real-time, body-responsive sound mix. I am continuing to develop new applications for cyborg systems. Lacuna is the result of two years of research into the production of cybrid spaces; my 46-page document entitled "Supermodern: Architecture for a Culture Without Boundaries" is available for download from www.stormsky.com.

Next Steps
My next project is to explore the playful relationship between humans and machines by writing and illustrating a number of bedtime stories especially for computers. Described as "stories to shut-down to", work on this project can be seen online at www.onceuponawebsite.com.