Week 1: September 10-16

First week of my graduating year at Concordia. I spent the better part of my summer in the Sensorium Lab at the University of Calgary, working on interactive artworks. I developed a capacitive distance sensor based on the Theremin. The sensor is a modification of a traditional heterodyning theremin, designed to produce pulse-width modulation data for interfacing with Arduino microcontrollers.

I developed these sensors using Fritzing, an open-source PCB layout program, and etched boards using the university's printmaking & photography facilities. I put together a manual for etching boards, available here. (warning: huge file). I'm interested in continuing my research in capacitive sensing in CART 360, utilizing it in some tangible projects.

This week I started working with Ian Cameron, creating a dance pad style interface, constructed affordably using laser pointers and photocells. Progress will be posted to this blog.

CART 360 is my first computation art class & I am looking forward to expanding my technical knowledge of physical computing.

Week 2: September 17 - 23

Things are taking shape for the new semester. Starting to think about the kind of work I'll be producing. I've posted my past physical computing work to my site, and I hope others will do the same, so that we can get a sense for potential collaborations and shared interests.

Last week's multimeter scavenger hunt yielded an interesting result: my bicycle's front spokes, hub and skewer are all electrically connected. I recalled a childhood DIY activity: placing a card between the spokes of my front wheel, so that its revolutions were amplified like a motorcycle's engine.

If one were to use a conductive material as a playing card and attach it to the bicycle's hub/skewer, a functioning switch would be created. Turn the wheel, and you've got a square wave oscillator, turning on and off at the rate of the wheel's rotation.

Considering this effect, my immediate idea was to create an electronic version of the "playing card motorcycle", connecting the switch to a speaker as in this schematic. The speaker's output would represent the speed at which the wheel turns, rising in pitch as the speed increases. A sort of audible spedometer.

The above schematic could also be used with an LED, providing a PWM style effect, brightening the light as the wheel spins faster.

These ideas may serve well as indications of the functioning of the switch, but I'm interested in taking the concept in a different direction.

The spokes on the wheel, as they pass by the card, can be considered to represent a fraction of the time it takes for the wheel to make a full revolution. If there are 100 spokes, the strike of one spoke represents 1/100th of the time it takes to rotate the entire wheel. This translates well into a musical paradigm, where bars of a score are segmented into 1/8th notes, 1/16th notes, and so on. These units represent the rhythm and timing of a piece of music.

My idea is to turn the bicycle wheel into a drum machine. I will segment a playing card into four conductive pads. Contact made on each pad will trigger a respective drum sound. To turn the spokes into musical notation, I will insulate certain areas with electrical tape, preventing them from touching the conductors on the card. Spokes that touch certain conductors will trigger the respective drum sound, via the arduino.

My discovered material is the Peltier Element.

Week 3: September 24-30

BUSY WEEK

Going to Toronto on Saturday to set up for Nuit Blanche. Been working hard on finishing up the dance pad project. One of the hardest parts was building it so that it could be broken down and transported. Lots of frustrations involving wiring. Everything seems to be in order for now, fingers crossed. Here's a video of the installation.

Also have been working away at the Switch project. Working with the Adafruit Wave Shield has been really interesting. The sound quality isn't amazing, but it opens up a lot of potential for creating embedded & mobile audio projects.

Documentation of my project can be seen here.

Week 4: October 1-7

This week I'm travelling to Toronto for the Nuit Blanche festival, and then on to Calgary to set up a show at TRUCK. Here's a diary of my week:

Saturday:
I deliberately sleep in, knowing I'll be up until 8 in the morning on Sunday. Nuit Blanche runs from 7 to 7, so I plan to arrive in Toronto at 4.

I arrive in Toronto to realize the venue for our event has been re-assigned (due to a bogus liability issue at the other, more central venue) to the Deleon White gallery, miles away from any other Nuit Blanche activities. This might serve as a blessing in disguise though, as our piece took about 4 hours longer to set up than expected.

Lots of issues with sensors becoming uncalibrated, interfaces being knocked out of alignment. I start to think it could possibly have been disastrous in a larger-volume setting. I manage to babysit the piece for most of the night, making sure everything was working well. A 10 year old kid breakdanced in the middle of it, that was fun.

At around 2am, Ian and I ventured out of the gallery and took the unusually long cab ride downtown. I managed to see a Bill Viola video playing on an advertising Jumbotron, a Jeff Koons inflatable silver bunny in the middle of Eaton centre, a lake of alcohol, a game of Monopoly played with real money, a plaza converted into a giant kinesthetic instrument, and a massive text matrix suspended between the city hall towers. Some pretty spectacular stuff.

The late late crowd was filtering into our gallery when I got back, so I battled exhaustion and made sure that went well. Around 6am I tore down, packed up and booked it to the airport to fly to Calgary.

Sunday:
Is for sleeping. Work starts tomorrow.

Monday:
Today is shopping day. I'm on a pretty tight budget, but luckily plants are going out of season so I snag some on the cheap. I manage to steal a table from the garbage at the U of C, and the technicians there help me bore some holes in it for planters.

Calgary is big box heaven [big box hell?], so I wind up in various Ronas, Wal Marts, Canadian Tires and Home Depots picking up CFL light bulbs, wire, sockets, plugs, power bars. I know I am forgetting something...

I get to the U of C at around 10 PM to start working on my wiring, when I realize I left one of the bags I paid for at Home Depot. That's it for today.

Tuesday:
I wake up from nightmares about Home Depot, drive there, and find myself in a Home Depot nightmare. Spend another hour re-shopping for all the stuff I left behind. Finally I get to the TRUCK space and drop off my freshly painted table and all of my supplies. Feel like I'm getting a fever.

A friend and I run cables in the space for a couple hours, which is an oddly soothing activity. The installation is taking shape, though apparently it looks a lot like a grow op.

Wednesday:
Back on the hardware store circuit today, now looking for hoses and fittings for my pump. It's not garden season, so outdoor fountain items are in short supply. I'm pretty sure I wound up in every Home Depot in the city today. Finally I found some hose fittings that would work for me. I got back to the gallery in the evening and installed them in a fervour.

A couple oversights lead to a gallery flooded with dirty water: I cable tied my hose's openings to the respective plants, rather haphazardly. The hose was uneven, and water refused to flow beyond the first opening, where it gushed through. To worsen things, I placed my water supply bucket above my plants. This caused a siphoning effect. When I went to disconnect my pump, the water kept on flowing. Soon my planters were overflowing, and water is spilling everywhere. Luckily I haven't moved any computers into the space yet.

I mop it all up and call it a night.

Thursday:
I've had a chance to think things through a bit. I limit the flow of water out of the first few openings with some pen lids. I find a shorter plinth to put my water bucket on. Things are flowing nicely.

I spend the rest of the day setting up 6 relays, to trigger the banks of lights and the pump.

Week 5: October 8-14

Still in Calgary setting up my show. Here's a continuation of my install diary:

Friday:
I bring in my computer today. It will be living in the space for the next couple months, acting as the brain for the project. I spend a bit of time writing some Ruby code that analyzes Twitter's XML feed for new posts. Luckily the space has free no-strings-attached internet access, so no headaches there.

I put a soil moisture sensor in one of the pots. It's two galvanized nails, placed an inch apart in soil. I also mount a photocell on the wall to track the light levels empirically.

Hook up my relays and sensors to the computer via an Arduino and Firmata. Things seem to be going well, until I try to run all the relays at once. The digital pins don't supply enough current to drive all the relays at the same time. I rip it up and start again, this time using a ULN2003 darlington array to drive the relays. Works like a charm.

Saturday:
I was invited to give a workshop at the University of Calgary Art Department on making and controlling relays. I had everyone bring in an AC powered device of their choice. We set up relays the same way I did for my piece, by splitting a dollar store extension cable, running the neutral wire across the switching pins of the relay. Then we soldered breadboard wire to the control pins. I had everyone come up and show me their connections before I globbed a lot of hot glue on the pins to insulate and secure them. Lots of first time solderers in the workshop, and they all did a great job.

I handed out breadboards and a few components to the participants and briefly went through a bit of theory of electronics (and breadboarding technique). We constructed a LM324-based comparator circuit, with a photocell as the sensor. I took it slow when I went through the assembly of the circuit, and remarkably, everyone nailed it. Chaos ensued as people hooked up their TVs, halloween ornaments, radios, projectors, fans, etc.

I went back to the gallery after the workshop to plug in the pump. I left it unplugged, since my plants were soggy and definitely didn't need any more water. Unceremoniously, the piece is completed.

Sunday:
Documentation, documentation, documentation. Took some nice fisheyed photographs of the piece, as well as plenty of video footage. Filled up the water bucket and said goodbye to the gallery. My exhibit will be running for 2 months. Hopefully nothing explodes.

I've put the documentation of my piece in the portfolio of work section of my site. Please contribute to the #garden!

The shape shifting material I am interested in is the balloon. That is to say, a pocket of non-porous material that can contain a fluid - specifically, air. Using an air compressor and electronically controlled valves, one could control the shape and size of a balloon-like object. I am interested in using something like liquid latex to create specific shapes.

Week 6: October 15-21

My IMCA 499 class will find me at Tehching Hsieh's artist talk at DHC on Thursday evening, so no CART 360 news this week.

Tehching Hsieh is a Taiwanese performance artist known for his year long endurance works. Hsieh spent entire years of his life committed to specific performative rules and situations. In his earliest one year performance, he spent an entire year in a cage, without speaking - or even making eye contact - with another soul.

His most well known piece found him spending an entire year without going indoors. Call it a post-modern display of life-as-art - or, with our CART 360 projects in mind, we could call it a game being made of the act of passing time.

Week 7: October 22-28

Working on the Sense project this week. Our chosen material is milk, and our game involves keeping a milk culture alive. My task has been to wire up a peltier element to a polarity-switching relay, to heat and cool the keffir culture relative to the gameplay.

Documentation of our project can be seen here.

Week 8: October 29-November 4

This week we are embroidering a vector illustration onto fabric. The illustration I've prepared is a hamburger. The EMF file can be downloaded here.

Here are some of the things I've been thinking about this week:

EMF Jamming: The practice of broadcasting noise into certain frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum, rendering technologies such as cell phones, bluetooth, wifi and radio useless. I'm interested in using these technologies to remove advertisements from public spaces. Projects that successfully jam radio and cellphone frequencies range from being very simple to quite complex.

Pneumatics/inflatables: An interesting way of making work kinetic is to use compressed air to inflate/deflate sealed chambers. I'm interested in the kind of system used here to create kinetic artworks.

Data Scraping: I'm interested in using information pulled off of the internet as a determinant in time based work. Data scraping algorithms could serve to be useful to extract relevant information from constantly updated websites.

Jean Baudrillard: a quote:
Media images never fall silent: images and messages must follow one upon the other without interruption. But silence is exactly that - a blip in the circuitry, that minor catastrophe, that slip which, on television for instance, becomes highly meaningful - a break laden now with anxiety, now with jubilation, which confirms the fact that all this communication is basically nothing but a rigid script, an uninterrupted fiction designed to free us not only from the void of the television screen but equally from the void of our own mental screen, whose images we wait on with the same fascination. One day the image of a person sitting watching a television screen voided by a technicians' strike will be seen as the perfect epitome of the anthropological reality of the twentieth century.
from After the Orgy

Week 9: November 5 - 11

Tangled wires are a good metaphor for this work week. A few long nights and a handful of burnt-out transistors later, my communicate project is ready.

Check out the documentation on my portfolio page.

Week 10: November 12 - 18

My project proposal can be seen here.

Some thoughts on our readings for the week:

Entertaining the notion of sensor webs and granular computing comes with ease, to the student of tangible media. Using the tools we are currently exploring (sensors, microprocessors and wireless mesh networks), we could be producing DIY mesh networks and sensor automata similar to the ones discussed in Declan Butler’s article. Present deployment of such systems, however, reeks of the threat of disposable computers and technological waste. I am wary to accept Butler’s arguments without any explicit mention of the environmental impact of such research projects, as they expand and take less expensive, more voluminous forms. As their projects become larger, I should hope organizations such as the OOI (Ocean Observatories Initiative) remain accountable to their research goals, and do not allow their granular devices to become disposable.

Rob van Kranenburg’s article raises some interesting issues regarding the panoptical qualities of media. David Brin’s “city of trust” – in which all citizens can view any part of the city at any time – has a familiar ring, harkening back to Jane Jacobs’ book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, wherein she advises that the safest city blocks are those with the most diverse uses. The more eyes there are on the street, the less likely dangerous or criminal activity will come to fruition. Perhaps the technospheric version of this “diverse street” effect is that the more all-seeing and all-knowing devices are present, the safer we will become. The difference, however, is that on the safely diverse city block, the eyes on the street are familiar to each other, and look out for each other based on their familiarity or neighborliness. Such relationships do not arise as often on a horizontal scheme such as the technosphere. Indifferent eyes are more likely to glaze over a dangerous or invasive incident.

Indifference is born of unfamiliarity, and the only opportunities at which indifference becomes transcendent are events wherein the other becomes a spectacle. Through technology’s indifferent mediation, we are more likely to become spectators than interventionists. Which is where the notion of privacy supersedes any notion of safety in a panoptical gaze. Furthermore, when the panoptical gaze becomes commodity, a person and their actions become a product to be sold. Such phenomena are seen in the use of “the latest people-tracking technology,” as Sean Dodson lays out, “thoughtfully supplied by American giants like IBM, Honeywell and General Electric.” The city of trust, then, becomes commutable to the city of control in one swoop, as the neighborly eye is mediated by the machinery of capital.

I found van Kranenburg’s observations on the ubiquity of data particularly resonant. When everything can be considered data, but only few are in control of data – institutors of data, that is – then control is distributed to everything that could be data, though may not necessarily be part of any system of control. Van Kranenburg expresses that the lack of authorial voice in new media is a “massive hegemonic move,” a sentiment to which I absolutely agree. When our media falls out of our control, it finds itself laying prostrate before the institutors of media – those who determine, regulate and mediate our access to communications. It is the issue of access that prevents lofty ideas such as ubiquitous computing from resonating at all, in a time where locative media and mobile technologies are only available to a select few.

Week 11: November 19 - 25

Making progress on the final project this week. I have created a small radio jammer circuit consisting of a single transistor (with various resistors/capacitors/inductors). The circuit is half of a radio transmitter circuit - rather than modulating audio, the transmitter broadcasts a carrier signal at the frequency of my choosing. Within a certain range, this circuit should overpower commercial radio stations.