Mike McCracken

This weekend, shake off soggy Seattle fall gloom by treating yourself to an artistic double feature - Manifold Motion’s Miscellanea II and Hazard Factory’s Smash Putt. I have contributed to both productions and while they are both very different, they both have bars, arduinos and pneumatics.

Miscellanea is the second showcase of Manifold Motion artists’ work. Both shows involve an impressive breadth of types of work. Mostly performance, but with some visual art and installation as well. The show is an excellent forum for fans (that includes everyone in the company as well) to sample other styles of Manifold Motion’s artists. I am a creator and performer in the big music and dance finale, and created the installation “Untitled Box with Connector”.

Showtimes are Nov 20th @ 8, Nov 21st @ 8 and Nov 22nd @ 7 (Updated from 9, oops)

Canoe Social Club
409 7th Ave S, Seattle, WA 98104

Smash Putt was conceived when Hazard Factory’s Jeremy was traveling across the country and stopped to play a little mini-golf. He saw how many people - and types of people - were enjoying the game, and also saw how much better the game could be made. He also knew that Hazard Factory were the folks to “fix” mini-golf. Six weeks later after many many hours of work by Jeremy, Rusty, Josh and Ben, Smash Putt opened. Many other contributors were involved, including myself - I built the electronic sensing and control systems that work with the saw, drill, ferris wheel, foosball and other mechanisms the guys built. This is an exciting and original take on mini golf.

Open nights the last three weekends of November for 21+ shows, and family friendly Saturday matinees.

Smash Putt Fairway
912 12th ave. Seattle, WA 98122

So please come and enjoy!

April was a very rewarding month. I spent nearly the whole month pushed to just below my breaking point for stress tolerance - and I really enjoyed it. Forced to balance all-out sprinting on projects with planning and self management, the month brought that variety of satisfaction unique to peak productivity.

The projects:

• A very challenging (for me, at least) xylophone and glockenspiel part in the Ginastera Harp concerto with Lake Union Civic Orchestra.
• My first ever interactive visuals performance (for the Hildegard recital).
• Wiring and electronics for an exhibitions company
• And of course, putting up Woolgatherer. Most of my work was pre-performance, building the set, the inverted stilts, developing the narrative, and managing the production (which of course has plenty of performance-time work, as well). Check it out: Seattle Times.

Last night was my friend Memmi’s percussion recital which I helped with. I don’t have any photos or video to put up here yet (I will add something if I encounter it) but I did want to describe some of the stuff I did. It was my first performance doing live video interaction (using Jitter) and it was very fun. There were three musical movements that I did some stuff for and I’ll describe those, but first some background on the subject matter.

The piece was about St. Hildegard von Bingen, a figure Memmi finds inspirational for several reasons. For one, Hildegard’s work was multifaceted - she worked in natural sciences, medicine, music and more. This inspires Memmi (who has been heads down working on her PhD in music for several years now) to be allowed to pursue other interests. I can totally respect that. There is a general attitude in art and science that unless you focus and specialize, you aren’t going to be able to contribute to anything meaningful. There is some underlying truth in a certain respect (certainly specialists can and have contributed significantly), but it forgets the value of of the renaissance man (or woman) who through the diversity of their interests can make connections and contributions that a specialist wouldn’t be able to. Buckminster Fuller even takes the attitude that to specialize is to thwart ones potential as a human.

Another inspirational aspect of Hildegard was her ability to speak out, make her voice heard as much as she did, and survive. Most people (women especially) in her position would be thought to be evil or possessed and be burnt at the stake. She had visions, spoke out against the church (dangerous thing to do in the 12th century) and was generally a bit of a trouble maker, but managed to play her cards just right and be deemed by the pope divinely inspired rather than a witch. Winding up with two monasteries is a far preferable outcome to asserting opinions against church practices than being burnt alive.

Hildegard was also thought to be a synesthete. This is also quite interesting for Memmi as she has colored hearing (sounds are involuntarily associated with colors - correlating by pitch).

Movement one was improvised marimba playing with recorded voice and imagery that progresses through elements (as they were in Hildegard’s time) and colors associated with them that Keely put together. I made a simple patch that made the video sound responsive so that the intensity of sound would bring out the color associated with that period in the piece. By the end (sky / air) we were looking at bright clouds pulsating whitish yellow with the voice and marimba.

The second movement dealt directly with colored hearing. We coded in (as close as we could) Memmi’s colors associated with different pitches. Memmi played the xylosynth sending MIDI commands into my patch, which created dots with color and size reflecting the pitch and intensity of the note. The dots would initially fade away, then overlap and combine to fill in the screen. initially, they revealed a camera feed showing Memmi playing, then after the main transition in the piece they added color on top of the camera feed, bringing the image up to white.

In the third piece, we worked with paintings the Hildegard had done based on her visions, and the recurrence of themes of illumination in Hildegard’s writing. Some think hers is the first documented case of migraines because she writes in detail about being overcome with white light. So I mixed a video of the paintings that Keely made with a camera feed that had Memmi’s mallets color keyed in to create white light that feeds back on itself, the effect being first kind of glowing, sparkling mallets, then as I ramp up the feedback the mallets start leaving cloudy tracers which eventually grow to consume the screen with their light. During this piece Memmi played a composition of Hildegard’s that she arranged for marimba.

The show was interspersed with lectures and chants and was generally very well received, and a lot of fun to do. If I find pictures, I’ll post them. Unfortunately, the camera we borrowed from the UW to record the whole show came with the wrong power adapter and no battery so we didn’t get that, bummer. But there was at least one person snapping photos, so there’s hope!

Several friends have jumped on the 8:36pm bandwagon. Every night (or most nights, or whichever nights they feel like it) at 8:36 in the evening they tweet what they are doing at that very moment. According to bugeats who started the trend, one should do it every day, in order to shame yourself if you tweet “watching tv” day after day, but better yet, to motivate yourself to be doing interesting things with your evening (my paraphrase of his sentiments - accuracy not guaranteed).

I like that it’s a reversal of impetus on the whole twitter phenomenon. Rather than deciding you have something you want to share, you are prompted to share this snapshot in time, however mundane, at this precise moment in the evening when the possibilities of what you could be doing are probably about as varying as they could be at any point in the day. Or, in his words:

Why 8:36pm? For it’s lack of significance / proximity to evening “leisure time.” An impartial sampling of daily life.

Anyway, I like the trend and I hope to see more and more

I recently put together a fun little project using an arduino, headphones and an accellerometer.

When you put on the headphones, you hear a sound that is cycling through a sequence indicating its approach. The sound is somewhere on the left-right axis in the headphones. If the sound is to your left, you have to tilt your head to the left until the sound is centered. If you tilt your head (the paddle) to the right position in time, you hit the ball an continue, the ball’s approach speeding up each time. If you fail to hit the ball a buzzer and light go off to punish you and the game is over.

I am interested in using senses differently and getting people to focus on their senses in novel, interesting and engaging ways.

My first implementation is very rudimentary. My sound generation capabilities are limited to square waves at full volume so there isn’t true panning - just left, right and centered. In addition to real panning, I would like volume control to indicate the ball’s approach rather than the tone sequence I have now. I need to figure out what kind of RC circuit would smooth the PWM output to act like volume control, or use a digital potentiometer.

I also hope to build a transceiver into the game so that it can be multiplayer. Potentially there could be a number of players and it would be like audio hackey sack.

Another thought for extension is to use the other axis on the accelerometer so that one could use forward and backward motion in competitive play. A violent motion forward ’spikes’ the ball at the other player - just like in real ping pong.

I used the Protoshield, which is a handy way to consolidate a small arduino project.

This project was inspired by an exhibit at Disneyland The Exploratorium.

This post is a bit belated, as will the next one be, but I wanted to put up a little about the piece that I put up in the People Doing Strange Things with Electricity show. It’s called Audible Avatar, for lack of a better name.

The installation consists of an overhead camera (with a fish-eye lens) that is connected to a computer running MAX/MSP/Jitter/CV monitoring the video input. The system monitors the input for movement and attaches trackpoints that follow the movement in the video around. This will, to a large degree, give the system handles on people moving through the space. MAX then sends OSC commands that report the position and idleness of the trackpoints to SuperCollider (running warp). SuperCollider is playing back a set of samples, each of which correlates to a trackpoint. But instead of just playing the samples back, it uses the position and idle time data to scrub to a particular position in the sample, pitch shift it, and adjust the volume. As participants move through the space, they are scrubbing and pitch shifting the samples the system has assigned to them. If a trackpoint winds up not attached to someone moving in the space, it’s idleness causes it to fade away and eventually be retired.

Hmm, this embed doesn’t seem to be working for me, but you can see the video here.

The audio samples are contributed into the system by people at a kiosk where you push and hold a doorbell button to record. The button and the recording light interface with the computer using an arduino. The light goes off after ten seconds as that is the maximum recording length. The microphone is connected directly to the computer and the button signal is detected by MAX and relayed to SuperCollider.

I intend to record more audio from it and include that.

With the assignment being to create autonomous art, I wanted to set up a system that would exhibit emergence. I wanted to make a whole bunch of light fearing robots that would become increasingly light adverse the more exposed they were. This would set up a cluster of robots that would churn and move around, as well as congregate around people that would come in to their space and cast a shadow. After it became clear that the cost would be prohibitive, I opted to make a single robot and a simulation of the group.

Here is the robot that I made by lathing aluminum (freehand - with no time for finishing work):

Not shown is its base of two DC motors and a swiveling wheel, and inside were batteries, light sensors (in the holes) and an arduino and h-bridge.

The simulation is available here (pardon the messy auto-generated page). You can pick them up by clicking, or turn off the lights by clicking not on one of them.

It was fun to build and I learned a lot, but the project is admittedly weak on artistic merits. Prof summed it up during the critique with the brutal but fair question, “how is this different from Furby?”. Ouch.

My concept for the next project is better. But you’ll just have to wait.

In my very excellent mechatronics class, our first assignment was to make a piece of site specific art. That was the whole assignment. However, it being a mechatronics class in the dXArts program, it is naturally expected to be systems art incorporating electronic sensing and control apparatuses.

My piece was, in my opinion, based on a very nice concept, but it wasn’t really a systems art concept as it hinged on an emotive aesthetic (which, unfortunately, I basically failed to summon with my final product). I also foolishly didn’t begin the critique with an elaborate explanation of the concepts and intentions of the piece (and disclaimers regarding it’s incompleteness). I will probably continue to make that mistake.

Here is some video of my project at a site that was “close enough” to the site it was designed for.

Several people said it was phallic. I didn’t lob any assertions as to the state of cleanliness in their mind. Many people asked what it was, and apparently “art” was an insufficient answer. One person did say it looked kind of like a tree.

The intended effect was for the audience to think of the sculpture as a plant that is struggling to grow, and for the audience to want it to grow. That empathy would be in conflict with more literal aspects of the sculpture: it is made of garbage, traffic makes it grow. I wanted to create dissonance between an innate sense of care for this seemingly living entity, and repulsion from the ugliness of nearly every aspect of it.

The actual effect was simply a homemade looking unidentifiable thing that goes up and down. Oh well.