Anamorphism in oF
I am enamored with optical illusions. Specifically, anamorphism has the tendency to captivate and arrest me for moments longer in duration than most others.
The idea behind anamorphism is conditional viewing and perspective. An image is distorted in all other modes besides the one intended. For my Pixel by Pixel class, essentially a class in C++ and openFrameworks, I decided to explore this a bit more.
I created a superficial image, in this case, the cutest thing on planet earth, with some type to vary the image consistency. The image I used was then calibrated for corrected viewing only from the spot I was sitting at. You’ll see that I move the camera, and the image immediately becomes distorted.
I used various methods in openFrameworks to achieve this. Luckily, this road had been paved for me so I didn’t need to do too much original coding. But rest assured, as I develop this to self calibrate and test it with more complex architectural structures, I’ll age a decade physically. This is both what excites and debilitates.
Hair in a Wall
I am truly obsessed with the time piece I presented for my midterm. What originally started out as a somatic time piece exemplifying chrono-biology has turned into comedy; just the way I like it.
I started out prototyping a hair growing out of a box. I blogged about it here. I soon found out that the feeding mechanism was faulty if imprecise. It seemed that the paltry output of a dc motor would not have enough torque to turn the strand of hair (a long piece of heat shrink).
So I tackled this midterm project by first building a new box, as the original intention was to refine and build on the last weekly project I did. I scavenged for parts in the junk bin and soon found what I needed from a thrown away printer. The wheels of the printer paper feeding mechanism had thick rubber bands on them. I thought this would make a great freewheel and motor wheel for my own feeding mechanism. I also wanted to include more interactivity. Perhaps some knobs to control speed or some other function of the hair growth. Half way through plotting and conceiving, I went to sleep one night with my mind racing over how I might “punch” this up. I decided that I did not need to embellish what I already had. The comedy is in its simplicity and any added control should be hidden from the visitor. It would be the only way to make it its own organic system- a stubborn, self sufficient system.
So I decided to scrap the box and have the “strand” of hair erupt from the wall. This involved a slight change of building plans, one that would prevent me from testing out the feeding mechanism, a major problem with the prior version and a lesson I should have tackled first.
Needless to say, all was well besides the feeding mechanism once again. The new hair material was great (some foam tubing purchased at Canal Rubber), the materials used were, on the whole, of better quality and execution than my last prototype, the project in general was more elegant than before. Comments were positive and somewhat prescriptive, suggesting the use of actual hair for a final iteration. I disagree with this suggestion, but will definitely take it into consideration. I think using real hair increases the uncanny quotient, but it does nothing for comedy. On the flip side, while a single “strand” is funny, it would be difficult to recognize as hair. The major downfall was again experienced by the failure of motor, a stronger stepper motor, to assume enough torque or how I adhered the wheel to the stepper axle. I will investigate this over the much needed week break I am currently basking in.
Everyone agreed and liked the comedic aspect of it, something I think saved my presentation from the harsh criticism I expected.
Precision, precision, precision. The keyword for my next iteration. I have already ordered a much more powerful stepper, and I am sure to accurately calculate what sort of wheel I might need to make this thing grow. I will also test the amount of space I need to allocate enough friction for the hair to grow while not stalling out the stepper motor. Wish me luck.
Material Flux Timepiece
In exploring the fluctuations in materials after the effects of water, fire, traffic, or time, I have come to admire the slow effacing of wood, marble, metal, candles, etc. This flux, or creep, is evident in the roads we drive on, the squeaky chairs we sit on, the sidewalk cracks we walk on, shiny plastic of our keyboard (that started out matte). In a city as old as New York, a cursory stroll through one of the boroughs yields countless examples of creep. One of my favorites to notice is the slow sloping of marble stairs. Imagine how much foot traffic has to rub these steps in order for it to just wear away, or someone is wearing some uncomfortable shoes.
This slow process is made most comical by the Pitch Clock, a slow and otherworldly lethargic material, bitumen. It takes about a decade for one drop to fall, and, since 1927, has only let 8 of them free. Do read more about it, utterly fascinating.
I teamed up with Yin Ho and Andrea Wolf to represent this phenomenon. We were immediately drawn to actualizing creep through the dripping of a colored liquid on soft wood. It seemed that for our time frame, one week, we could maximize our results with a gentle tweak of our resources. Building our contraption was a fairly straightforward task: a wooden box and shield, an IV drip, food color, and some balsa wood.
Yin proposed we use a light orange as the color, mixing in reds and yellows to achieve our color, which looked like morning urine. I wanted something dark and visible like a deep blue or blue green. I figured we would be able to locate striated, grained color better by having a darker hue. As you can see, the orange turned out magnificent.
After a few hours:
After four days:
As more liquid dropped, the colors began to separate in unexpected ways. The result was a beautiful illustration of time passage.
Antenna Design Workshop: Intervention
At the end of our winter break, I opted to participate in a workshop guided by the heads of the award winning interactive design agency Antenna, Masamichi Udagawa and Sigi Moeslinger. The workshop took place over several cold days in January and involved the creation of an “intervention.”
Interventions, to quote Antenna, “facilitate odd actions and temporary relations amongst. strangers. The presence of these objects in the particular context invites (inter)action and shifts the perception and experience of the various places.”
After a brief introduction into Antenna’s own fieldwork in the area, which includes some hilarious interventions viewable on their website, we broke up into teams. I formed a group with Ania Wagner, Hana Newman, and Michael Lewis. Since our intervention was site-specific user-focused, we thought to investigate our familiar terrain. By folding a coffee run into this, we happened upon this hub of commuter traffic:
This is the site of the Tony Rosenthal kinetic sculpture, The Alamo, occupying a central, quadrilateral space at the intersection of Astor Place and 4th Avenue. We thought to encroach upon this iconic space and create a center for more community involvement and interaction. Now, on to conceptualizing an intervention that fits the space and jibes with our own ideas of what an intervention should produce. Luckily, Hana thought about the workshop over winter break and came to the table with a myriad of ideas. One that caught our attention was a battery powering station that enlisted good, old-fashioned manpower to charge waning batteries. The site would include various alternatives to charging batteries, be them on the phone or on a laptop: stationary bikes, hand cranks, a buoyant floor that produces electricity from users’ jumps, and integrating electricity producing mechanisms into the Alamo, a sculpture that can rotate on its axis. Our preliminary sketches produced this:
Our initial thoughts on the chosen intervention were formulated primarily on its location. Astor place is heavily trafficked by students and young commuters alike. We identified a common problem in today’s wireless environment: battery power. We identified a solution: a charging station. We identified the means, which will undoubtedly detract some people but will empower many others: manpower. The benefits are threefold: health, community, and energy conservation. We envisioned these stations, placed prominently, as areas for casual users to just come by and cycle, crank, or jump for health. This being dense New York City, a place for community gathering, with children and pets alike, is always welcome. The byproduct of engagement at this intervention is the production of electricity, something we use a lot of and conventionally produce through non-renewable methods.
In hindsight, the grandiosity our project assumed should have been a red flag. It’s difficult to produce an effective and thorough presentation on something like this in a matter of a few days. Through some progress meetings with Masa and Sigi, we trimmed our idea to include only stationary bicycles.
Meet the Sandwich Champs! The Human Egg Sandwich Crew!
The genesis of team Human Egg Sandwich:
After a swift clean up of the shop one Sunday night, , my cleaning partner Mindy Tchieu, Marko Manriquez, and Cindy Wong decided to try out the David Chang sweet spot Milk Bar for a quick sugar fix before hitting the sack.
We shot the shit for a bit, talking over our excessively sweet and cloying desserts. Someone mentioned the annual sandwich making competition, and being a fan of team competition, I thought we should form one mega-team and make an awesome sandwich. I am not sure when we started talking about fetuses in a cannibalistic nature, but we thought about how cool it would be…to…eat…babies, in a Swiftian way of course.
The next morning, I put all four of our names on the roster for the People’s Choice Category since our sandwich- made of marzipan, raspberry jam, marshmallows, and banana- was on the whole inedible. It was our best shot.
The day of competition, we had culled our ingredients and began to prep by, well, making babies! This involved hours of rolling out marzipan, dying it, molding it, and detailing it. We even made some mashed banana/raspberry jam guts to fill out the inside.
With ten or so minutes left until judging, our sandwiches were quite popular!
Then, for the proverbial “cherry on top”, Mindy of all people suggested we roll out some more guts covered marzipan to add an umbilical cord. And thus our baby became a champion.
Here’s a little snapshot of the team sans Cindy, who kinda distanced herself from the group once she came to her senses.
We won our category and the most votes overall! Stellar job teammates! Thanks to Jonathan for the wonderful photos!
Debuting: Intellipods!
So, I’d rather use this time not to dive deep into what living art is, because one could make a case for and infinite number of applications and examples of what living art is. Besides, we are still grappling with that definition and somehow I feel we, by the end of the semester, will not have settled on anything. It is with relief then that I am temporarily sidelining this topic, saving it for my final thoughts on the class and on living, or generative, art.
Our assignment for last week was to create a finite state machine. For those of you not in the know, let me explain and exemplify precisely what a finite state machine is. Almost everything. More clearly, it’s “a model of behavior composed of a finite number of states, transitions between those states, and actions,” so states Wikipedia. Basically, if you can graph or chart something out in which every possible state and actions leading into those states is accounted for, it’s a finite state machine. Ice, an ATM machine, a door even, I am sure you get the picture.
It was apparent from the get go that I’d be stuck in a seemingly limitless ocean of possibilities. I swam in that ocean for a few days before spotting three islands named Shahar Zaks, Adib Dada, and Tamar Ziv.
Together, since we were four, we decided to conceive of four separate machines that all interacted with each other on distinct levels, each having its own personality, much as we each have our own personality…well, except for Adib.
Needs More Time – a somatic time piece
This past week, for the class Time, our assignment was to create a time piece based on or measuring one of the various bodily cycles: digestion, hair growth, skin renewal, menstruation, etc.
As always, my viscera nudged me into a clean concept suffused with humor. I immediately thought of a nondescript box with one long, heavy flagellum rising out of the top, flopping over from its weight, and slowly inching forward in conjunction to one’s own rate of growth. It’s hair.
Time. Throwing Up Theory. Oooof!
So, it has so been assigned that I somewhat loosely expound on Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity and how it relates to time. Trying to boil this material down to a simplified essence a five year old would be able to understand proved to be most difficult. For one, my knowledge of the subject, even after rereading various entries (and other simplified abstracts deemed more “accessible”) is still shaky, but that which i can glean form the text is utterly fascinating.
The generic definition and entry for general relativity includes this statement in some manifestation: the observed gravitational attraction between masses results from the warping of space and time by those masses.
Basically, matter causes space and time to curve and that a uniform gravity feels much the same as a uniform acceleration. For the sake of this class, Time, let’s focus on the time aspect of general relativity called gravitational time dilation.
Gravitational time dilation is a product of this curvature of space and time and, in essence, appears to slow down or “dilate” it. In the presence of massive gravity associated with a massive object, like a black hole, time dilation becomes more apparent than with traditional bodies experienced throughout the universe. I found a decent hypothetical example of this in action, though, I am not sure how anyone would ever be able to observe such a thing beyond computer generation: an observer far from a black hole would observe time passing extremely slowly for an astronaut falling through the hole’s boundary and would actually never quite see the astronaut fall in. As far as what the astronaut would be feeling, well, I guess we can’t ask him now can we.
But actually, the astronaut would probably think that time was passing normally. But to him, if he could see his observer, it might seem as if he/she were moving pretty darn fast or time was passing much more quickly.
However, within each persons frame of reference, they are in perfect agreement with the clock. If thirty minutes has passed on the clock, each person has aged thirty minutes.
The difference is exposed when the clocks are compared by separate observers. And that is THE FINAL WORD on general relativity and time.
Computational Media Final: ALPHABET SOUP!
Talk about a labor of love. I think out of all the projects I did over the course of this semester, this one was my favorite. It turned out to be the closest to my original conception. Admittedly, I put a decent amount of work into it, perhaps not as much as I would have liked to but, considering the amount of time physical computation takes up, I’d say I did an ok job.
As the title says, I was working on a fun emulation of alphabet soup. I thought of the idea for my midterm. I wanted something I could play with, that would be modular, additive, and equally trying for my coding level. For the midterm, I was not happy at all at the way I executed the sketch. I knew, from the get go, that I would probably have to turn the letters into a particle array out of a particle system. However, I did not want to jump into that so fast. So I figured that I would cheat it, as we always do, and use characters from a font and initialize an array out of those. I didn’t realize how ornery letters created in this way could be. There was a lot of jittering in movement and poor rendering. I could not make the letters move freely, nor could I program interactivity with them. So I decided to make them move within their own spheres. It still didn’t look great but I had a midterm at least.
Pretty ugly. So with the final, I kept the same idea. Only this time I devoted a lot more time to creating the particle system I so desired. I admit that I scouted around for some example code and took little snippets from a few places. One problem with that is making everything fluid and referential. It took me a good while to map out all of the steps in pseudo-code, mark it up, annotate, and try, debug, try, debug. I consulted with residents a few times who taught me how to cheat with success. I met with Shiffman when I really needed some help, who also taught me to cheat, for now. And surprisingly, I came up with solutions of my own, which was one of the more amazing feelings. This is the fruit of those labors and I am damn proud!
The applet is a bit squirrelly, and I think it’s messing up some of the interactivity (Yes! You can play with the letters and move them around and shoot them across the screen!). But if you keep pressing around, you’ll eventually pick up a letter. I will try and diagnose and fix it, but for now, deal with the annoyance.
Physical Computation Final! ThumpCities
So last time I updated, I had displayed the rough schematics for how the newly christened ThumpCities worked. Nothing changed in that department. But with some testing, we came to the conclusion that piezo’s can suck.
Piezo’s make for unruly sensors. Depending upon the application, you may or may not need to temper the voltage output and as a result, the reading. But having the analog values of these sensors results in simply too erratic a value to work with, so taming them is an advantage and proves to be very useful. The circuit we had at the time was a 5.1V Zener diode and a 1MΩ resistor. The Zener diode caps the output at a fixed value no matter what the voltage output of the piezo is. The resistor further tamed the reading.
Unfortunately when we tried this circuit, the readings in Max were still unpredictable and very noisy, setting off masks at unexpected times-activate and deactivate and possibly activate again. Even with thresholds given in Max, we wanted to finesse the the sensory output so we wouldn’t have to worry about overly erratic and possibly debilitating readings.
So to further minimize the unpredictability and smooth out the readings, we added a Schottky diode to make the readings more positive, and added a capacitor with the resistor to create a RC cell that further filters the spiking signal by storing up extra voltage.
Thus, our switch becomes smoother and we have mitigated the piezo aftershock, thus allowing us to fire our masks with each bang.
This is what the final circuit looked like when we had it down.
Here is what the circuit looks like for those of you who actually know how to read electronics. For those who do not, no worries, I can barely do it.
I cleaned the circuit up a bit and trimmed the components.
This is the setup in its entirety!
The visual part of our project actually proved to be equally as difficult. We struggled to decide how our video, appropriately titled Endless Cities by D-fuse, should be revealed: in bits, pixels, lines. Since each drum would control a portion of the screen, we felt it necessary to research the hotspots of the video and determine the design subsequently. Adib handled most of this with the following cogent assessment of our undertaking.
But the true villain in this whole scenario was MAX/Jitter. I do say that something learned from this experience is that having no prior knowledge of a specific program (that is executed in a totally different way than any program I have ever used) is a significant handicap when it comes to keeping a time schedule. We consistently ran into walls throughout the duration of this project. It’s no one’s fault, for not even some experts could really answer our questions. More than anything, they helped us cheat what we actually wanted to do- which was just a fading of a mask after its materialized. How hard is that?
We have not given up on the project, for Adib, Lucas, and I are heavily invested in making this a great performance piece, especially with a more experienced drummer, since that was who it was designed for. I estimate it would take a while before we get back to it, but I think we are all steeped in performance of some kind, so it may sit in the recess of our minds for now.
