Nicolas Romano

Over the past 50 years, juggling has shared a relationship with the development of computer technology. Two paths emerged: one demonstrating the mechanisms of autonomous machinery in robotics research, and the other generating motion graphics for the film & TV and early home computing industries. Triple-I, the CGI company that made graphics for the 1982 film Tron, used juggling as a means to demo early forms of virtual body animation through the technique of motion capture. Their 1981 animation, 'Adam Powers, The Juggler', heralded a new cultural imagination of simulated human intelligence as early conceptualizations of artificial intelligence.

Art Durinski, Triple-I's Art Director for these productions, shared that:

"The creation of Adam Powers is an important step on the road to artificial intelligence. When the day of artificial intelligence dawns, machines will 'think' for themselves, and a human may be able to type into a computer such simple instructions as 'juggle 12 clubs,' while Adam Powers figures out the rest."

In today's landscape of prompted video generation, this early imagination of artificial intelligence has been fulfilled. However, it has come at the expense of the bodily knowledge required to perform such a prompt physically. Techno-juggling demonstrates how simple computer vision models can be used to enliven tactile experience and motor coordination through a sensation and community oriented interface design research process.

Techno-juggling uses color-tracking-based object detection to independently maintain the real-time positions of mini-tennis balls as they are juggled on an adjustable, inclined flatscreen TV. Through this design research, I intentionally explored the use of a polarizing lens camera filter to keep the computer vision complexity at the level of color-tracking. Since the tennis balls move in the same plane as the angled television juggling surface, the system filters out its polarized animations to avoid the Droste effect and a noisy video input source. It also contends with the challenge of cultivating grip gestures that avoid hand occlusions between the camera and ball.

By using object tracking instead of the more common body and hand skeleton computer vision models, the player can engage with their own patterned juggling gestures through ball motion. These movements are rendered as both virtual juggling props and source points for geometric visuals via a custom live-coding interface. Players may switch between juggling and modifying code on a laptop and MIDI to experimentally devise colorful, kinetic compositions through this combination of juggling, programming, and imagination.

The inclined table includes walled bumpers, providing a beginner-friendly space to learn juggling while preserving the practice's sensibilities and capacity for diverse patterned movement. The live-coding interface introduces a syntax for creating narratives, jokes, and geometric visualizations through mathematically controlled manipulations of commonly communicated digital media objects including videos, gifs, and images. Overall, this installation seeks to contribute to communities of technology inclined jugglers that cultivate tactile, performative relations with computer vision.