I then, in a moment of cheeziness (which I felt allowed to have, as it was my birthday) I requested that my friend who was DJing put on Kraftwerk. Autobahn, naturally. For maybe a minute and a half I was basking in the perfectness of careening along the listing to a song I love driving on its namesake. It was about that long before we hit traffic and came to a dead stop. For the next two hours we were in painfully slow stop and go traffic, utterly obligerating my romantic ideals of the autobahn, to an ironic soundtrack.

The experience, however, was a very good one. When we first hit the traffic I popped the door open and touched the famed highway with my hand. The irony of the situation was glorious, and I completely appreciated it. It was an excellent birthday treat.

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

We’ve released this with an experimental ability for anyone with an account to make edits to the data. This should make my wife Keely very happy, since the poor categorizations of dance performances have bugged her.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There’s about an 18% chance that it will happen, because there are a lot of logistics to work out: how will I power it, how will I get down there, what will I use to get four channels of audio out of supercollider (and will my old laptop support it) and what will I use to get button signals into MAX (hey, a really cheap solution might just be a disassembled mouse!), how will I keep the whole thing 30 feet off the ground?

Whether or not I go, it is good to be focusing like this on it, as I still plan on bringing it to robodock.

This is not a new concept. In Grunch of Giants, Buckminster Fuller speaks of an army of invisible giants girding the planet earth. More recently, the movie “The Corporation” does a psychological analysis on the corporations (which is legally a person), determining it (/ them) to be psychopathic. (Obviously it’s a blanket statement toward a type of entity, but the point is well made.)

But Bucky and the makers of The Corporation are intelligent people at liberty to call out a horrendous (and steadily growing over recent decades) flaw in our system. Politicians don’t have this liberty. There are too many organizations that are too powerful that provide too much support (or crippling blows) to any politician that stands a chance.

I’ve been a long time Edwards supporter because I see him as the most viable candidate who has actually brought up issues that subvert the standard corporate-placation that is typical of most candidates. Remember in 2004 (before he was on the Kerry ticket, of course) when he said in a debate that we need to break down the wall of money around Washington? Beautiful. But with this, and especially if Gore stands by this (which he might almost have enough credibility to do… maybe?) he is my new hero.

Freakonomics points out that his statement does not sound like something that a presidential candidate (or someone thinking of becoming one) would say, but the sentiment may be describing the biggest thing wrong with America today (beyond just environmentally: socially, culturally and in other ways as well). Capitalism (which helped this country become as great as it is, and certainly has plenty more value to offer) has run amok at the expense of democracy and many other ideals that are also responsible for the greatness our country has achieved.