Welcome to "Musicus Planetarius," the thesis project by Jason Beckham, a graduate student in SIUC’s interactive multimedia program.

By using each visitor’s movements to trigger sights and sounds, Beckham is making multimedia interactive in a true physical sense. Participants are not sitting at a keyboard responding to what's on a computer screen; they are creating art by using technology that they aren't even aware of.

"I wanted to make it as artistic as possible," Beckham says of his installation. "As they explore the space, the 'composers' can learn how to control what appears on the screens and what notes are played."

What visitors see is the 10-foot-wide heptagram and the television screens that come to life. What they don't see is the technology that makes the art possible.

First, Beckham used the University's Very Nervous System, a complex system of hardware and software originated by artist David Rokeby in 1991, to relay the information. A black-and-white surveillance camera looks for movement within certain regions of a grid, Beckham says, and then the system signals the computer to play the music and video associated with that region. That is how the movement becomes music.

The software allows Beckham to modify the parameters and sensitivity of what the camera sees within the grid.

The number seven plays a key role in the installation. "The heptagram is a mystical symbol," Beckham says, "and seven is a mystical number," even in its everyday use as the number of days of the week.

He correlated a musical note to each ray of the heptagram, aligning the notes according to ancient Greek music theory. Music was very important to that culture, Beckham says, and a certain note corresponded to each god or planet—Sun, Moon, Venus, Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. (Beckham did add a final "do" triggered by stepping into the center of the heptagram so that visitors’ "compositions" would use the eight-note scale that they are accustomed to in Western music.)

The planetary symbols and images in the accompanying videos are "familiar," Beckham says, "but not in this context." 

He made use of artistic works such as Leonardo da Vinci's "Proportion of Man," of natural items such as pinecones, sand dollars, and sunflowers, and of images that evoke science and math, such as solar systems and the double helix of DNA.

Beckham spent a year on the project, including doing the research and writing a paper about his work. Each video took at least two weeks to produce. Constructing and testing the installation and adjusting the sound to get particular effects also were time-consuming tasks. 

WSIU-TV let him set up the piece in its studios and use its high-definition television sets.

Beckham says this kind of art gives people the chance for a "contemplative encounter with the subject matter through music and video." 

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