Undulating Flux
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It comes in waves - this vibrating, tickling sensation. It dances to the rhythm of the music and takes life in your hands and feet. It rises and falls when she rises and falls; it matches her movements perfectly.
David Resnick’s freshman project in the graduate Arts Computation Engineering program at UC Irvine, Undulating Flux, has caused some waves in the tech world. Literally. Resnick designed a chair that massages someone based on the movements of a dancer holding Wii remotes.
Resnick started out as a music composer writing orchestral pieces by the age of 16 and electronic pieces by the time he was 20. Every piece of music he has written was inspired by images.
In 2001, Resnick was hiking in the Rocky Mountains and came across a waterfall. As he looked at it, music began to play in his mind. He remembers climbing up to the waterfall and feeling like he was climbing up into air. Moments like these inspired Resnick to go into visual performance, which led him to produce for musicians such as Enrique Iglesias and The Flaming Lips.
He would listen to their music and ask himself: "What does this music look like?" In the case of bands like The Flaming Lips, it was whirling images and shapes that pull you in and mesmerize you. The music would dance under Resnick’s interpretation.
But Resnick began to realize that he didn’t have the knowledge he needed to make the technology work the way he wanted it to. Resnick likes to tweak the machines he works with - customizing them and making them his own. He realized he needed to go back to school in order to become more efficient. He found the Arts Computation Engineering program at UC Irvine and fell in love with it. He knew immediately that this was the right program for him.
While in the ACE program, he attended a seminar on embodied cognition - which explores the idea of thinking within the body, as opposed to thinking solely with the brain. In exploring this theory, Resnick came across the concept of “flow state,” which was coined by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Csikszentmihalyi defines flow state as feeling as if you are “in the zone” - the mind and body connecting perfectly so that you can perform at your very best without even thinking about what you are doing.
When Resnick is creating his visual performance art, this is exactly how he feels. He wanted to try and replicate the feeling of being in the zone by expanding upon the idea of putting images to music. He wanted to bring the visualizations to life.
Resnick confesses that he always loved to dance, “I was dancing around the house to 'Thriller' when I was four years old.”
All of these interests inspired his freshman project. Most importantly, he wanted to create something that helped people, and also helped people connect to music and movement the way that he does. Resnick began to study vibrotactile devices - things that vibrate that you can feel. The most common example of this is the Wii remote. If you are playing a boxing game on the Wii, when you get hit, the Wii remote vibrates. The vibration the Wii remote sends lets you know that you have been hit.
Resnick also studied transduction: The concept of energy going from one form to another. With these theories in mind, Resnick began to think about how he could make a vibrotactile device that you could feel as a result of light, sound and movement. He decided the best way to do this was to build a chair that someone could sit on to experience light, sound and movement as a vibrotactile sensation that would give these three elements meaning.
The hope was that this chair could put someone into Csikszentmihalyi's flow state. The person participating wouldn’t just feel vibrations in their hands and feet, they would feel these vibrations connecting their mind and body, creating a pleasurable (maybe even healing) experience.
The chair that Resnick created has two spheres where a person’s hands rest, as well as two footrests. As a person sits in the chair, a “vibrationist” (or dancer) holding two Wii remotes begins to dance to music. As this person dances, you can feel her movements in your hands and feet. Resnick designed the vibrations to be similar to the feeling a cell phone makes when it vibrates, but stronger. The vibrations are powerful and dynamic, but can also be subtle. Resnick says that people were surprised by the intensity of the chair: “Every person who sat in the chair said that it felt a lot stronger and more intense than they thought it would.” After leaving the chair, they could continue to feel the rolling waves of vibrations through their entire body.
When Resnick came up with the idea for this project, he kept in mind that it might seem esoteric. It was important to him that he find something concrete for people to latch onto so the entire concept wouldn’t be completely alien to them. The Wii remote seemed perfect: Many people have used it and those who haven’t, most likely know what it is.
The Wii remote is also very sensitive to movement and has a far range. He could be about 25 feet away from its sensor and it will still read his movement, even if he wasn’t facing the sensor.
“The Wii remotes offered the perfect combination of sensibility, reliability and accessibility,” Resnick said.
Resnick’s exploration in the realm of embodied cognition and flow state has only just begun. One of the areas he is looking into now is neuroplasticity - the idea that a person who is deprived of one sense uses another in its place. For example, at Georgia Tech they recently created a cane for the blind that has built-in sonar. The sonar in the cane gives the person holding it feedback to let him know what is around him; creating a kind of topographic map from his cane.
Resnick is also interested in furthering his work on the therapeutic side, including massage or music therapy. “I would like to combine this immersive sensory environment with vibrotactile feedback, which can be great for the muscles and the mind.”
Since vibrotactile feedback gives a person the ability to get lost in something, Resnick is hoping that Undulating Flux can be used as a healing tool, as well.
