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.
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!
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.
Mediated Intimacy Final Project: The Vulcan Mind Meld
If you have been reading my blog regularly (besides Mr. Whey Protein and Mrs. Ringtones, my two loyal spamming followers) you may have noticed or not, the heavy tendency to post on two of my four classes, Physical Computation and Computational Media. My reticence about one of my other classes, Mediated Intimacy, is due in part because that blogging was not required protocol for the class and because it is primarily a seminar class with little physical output. The subjects we cover are so incisive and omni-relevant that the pressure to blog them was/is incredibly difficult. I am ruing that choice to not blog about them because we covered some amazing artists’, authors’, and scientists’ work associated with, well, mediating intimacy. I promise to write more about it later! But for now, let me focus on our final project in three parts:
1. Dream up a future technology of intimacy and connection over distance. Write a User’s Manual to accompany it including a drawing with parts labeled, a detailed description of how it is used, warnings, etc.
2. Write a story about a person or people who are using your technology. You will need to express the invented ‘physics’ of the world in which your invention exists. In other words, where you rely on new general capacities available in the future world, you will need to describe those things, in order to situate your invention. The point here is to think through and express what the technology might do from an emotional and social perspective, based on what you know about existing technologies and ideas about intimacy, as well as your ability to imagine consequences of not-yet-possible devices.
3. Present your invention, its context, its function, and its potential or known emotional and social effects on users.
This final was a pure joy to execute. In conceiving of ideas, I cheated myself out of dreaming up a whole new world for this product and focused really on something that I new and that I could construct easily, but still was humorous and cohesive. I came up with, borrowing from Star Trek, the Vulcan Mind Meld.
I had worked on a presentation a week prior and used the mask that you see in the photos for this project; a decent example of cross-curricular projects. I spent most of the time working on the MANUAL and designing the packaging. I actually searched everywhere for some cheap plastic encasing besides the stupid plastic I ended up using. No big deal as prototyping was not required for this assignment. The project went over well! I often tell people that since I hate to present, my main objective is not necessarily to inform or engage but to make people laugh. I could be in the wrong business!
Physical Computation Mid-Term
For our midterm, I teamed up with Lucas and David to create a project that defies all conventional notions of the possible: A chic and sexy time traveling radio!
She is quite stunning if I do say so myself.
Lucas contributing.
David fine “tuning” the knobs.
For more on the process and to access videos of the process, click below. Also check out Lucas’s blog for his interpretation.
Hot or Not? Gertrude Never Made it to the Party.
I built this beauty for her debut at the ITP Haunted House on the Thursday before Halloween. She never quite made it though.
Video Throw Up #2 featuring Serial Communication and Two Pots!
This weeks lab started off a little subdued, but finished strong. We inch closer and closer towards controlling objects on the screen, which, for the diversionary type, means VIDEO GAMES! Ok, for the interactive designer, it means something less pointed. I partnered with Lucas to make this lab happen, and you will here is clear and cogent explanations of what is exactly transpiring.
Without further ado:
Of course I’m serial.
Another successful lab, this time dealing with serial communication between a micro-controller (my cheap Seeeduino board) and Processing. The outcome is surprisingly game-like, though I admit I did not tweak the screen elements as much as I should have, but I did alter the background color and give it a nice serial dependent, gray scale gradient. I’m sure to fool around with this a little more.
Lucas’s Story.
Not much to say here. Just a warning if you ever happen to encounter Lucas riding a bike on the street.
Phys. Computation Lab: Variable Resistors/My Fantasy Device!!
This week’s lab was much easier to execute than the previous week’s. I owe it all to the PComp help session hosted by the gracious residents of ITP. Sometimes I get a little lost in class, a result of a particularly early and long day on the floor. Thus, the action of Rory opening his mouth to speak acts more like a soporific than anything I should pay attention to. I am working on getting caffeinated before class so that I can remain perky and attentive. I had no problems with this assignment, as previously mentioned, though I did have problems taking it to the next level. This means I will once again be present in PComp lab this week. Not sure how to hook up a photo cell. And I have stupid questions like, when should I result to soldering? or why am I doing what I am doing? Well, that last one has more cosmological implications that I cannot cover here.
MicroController! Variable Resistors! from Jason Aston on Vimeo.
I also had (wanted?) to make a sketch of my “fantasy device.” It’s totally G-Rated so click more and check it out!
