First interactive digital installation — accepting failure

I wrote a while back about how I was delving into figuring out arduinos, their coding and combining them with voice recognition to create an installation. The idea was to hook up a VR to an arduino and the arduino to processing to play an animation everytime someone used specific words.

Well, I managed to write the codes and create the animation BUT I misunderstood one key fact. The hardware I was using was designed to recognize only one voice. So now my interactive digital installation is missing the interactive part since it won’t interact with anyone but me! What a bummer. Now I’m looking into alternatives like perhaps using a motion sensor?

In any case, I worked on this piece for MONTHS and just the process of accepting its failure was a huge one.

Creating art is sometimes so nerve-wrecking. You put your all and everything into it and and you HAVE NO IDEA if it will come out the way you imagined/ whether all your hardwork will literally be wasted. Like that too-true quote from ‘Art and Fear’ :

“There’s generally no good reason why others should care about most of any one artist’s work. The function of the overwhelming majority of your artwork is simply to teach you how to make the small fraction of your artwork that soars.”

and also:

“One of the basic and difficult lessons every artists must learn is that even the failed pieces are essential.”

Anyway, it took me a while to come to terms with my failure enough to contemplate giving it another go. Meanwhile, I might as well share the animation I made that was supposed to play when people started talking. It’s a single painting created in stop motion multiple times with a slightly different end each time it plays.

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