Attempts to bridge the physical and virtual interface in a game of networked pong. Using a combination of left & right controllers with a polar contact heartrate monitor to control a pong paddle for a game of networked pong. By holding their breath, jumping up and down or relaxing the player controls the speed at [...]

pot_arduino Originally uploaded by 0×000000. A potentiometer is hooked up to a breadboard, and it’s input is read by the arduino board, which outputs it back out from one of it’s PWM pins. This simulates analog output, and dims the yellow LED u…

click for video

Stream Transcoder As the name says, stream transcoding.. MP3 downsampling is probably the most useful for my purposes. (tags: unmediated streaming radio audio tools itp linux mac windows)…

I finally finished my combination lock yesterday and felt too mortified to show it in class because everyone was displaying their love-o-meters. So here it is. Try to guess how you open the lock. Continue below to see the answer.

Rocio and I (in the absence of Chris Paretti and Kati London) presented our concept of “The Future of the Clock Radio in a Networked World”:

Ultimately we decided to flesh out the “Around the World Clock” from last week’s notes. The clock has now been dubbed “RadiUs.”
We got some good feedback, and Rocio and I both expressed some interest is exploring the project further.

A pdf of the presentation can be found here. Although without the notes we read from it doesn’t really do you much good now does it?

thoughts on this weeks reading from Database as a Genre of New Media by Lev Manovich

The Database Logic

Lev Manovich opens with a fairly agreeable series of statements that read as follows: “Many new media objects do not tell stories; they don’t have beginning or end; in fact, they don’t have any development, thematically, formally or otherwise which would organize their elements into a sequence. Instead, they are collections of individual items, where every item has the same significance as any other.” There are two ways of looking at this statement. The first, is to agree: traditional narrative cannot live and grow contained within the structure of many new media objects. The second, is to take a realistic, albeit relative, approach and assert that this is presicely the place to where story telling has evolved (or devolved).

My interpretation of the carnival classic….

(or maybe it belongs in a low-budget sci-fi film)

The input comes from three thermistors under a brass finger pad that, when touched, change the color of a 6 LED array using a program written in Arduino. My proudest achievement with this project was the glass color orb. It’s a tea-light holder which I inverted and chromed to diffuse the light.

Ultimately, thermistors while easy to use are slow to repond and predictable. If I were to move this design beyond prototype I think it would be fun to try detecting changes in skin conductivity (e.g. lie detector).

code follows

int hotPin = 0; // Analog input pin that the thermistor is attached to
int hotValue = 0; // value read from the thermistor
int hotRead = 0;
int hotChange = 100;
int roomTemp = 100;
int blue1 = 9; // PWM pin that the blue1 BLUE1 is on
int blue2 = 2;
int yellow1 = 3;
int yellow2 = 4;
int red1 = 5;
int red2 = 6;
long randNumber;

void setup() {
// initialize serial communications at 9600 bps:
Serial.begin(9600);
pinMode(hotPin, INPUT);
pinMode(blue1, OUTPUT);
pinMode(blue2, OUTPUT);
pinMode(yellow1, OUTPUT);
pinMode(yellow2, OUTPUT);
pinMode(red1, OUTPUT);
pinMode(red2, OUTPUT);
roomTemp = analogRead(hotPin); // records the ambient room temp
}

void loop() {
hotValue = analogRead(hotPin); // read the pot value
hotRead = (hotValue - roomTemp);
if (hotRead >= 2)
{
if (hotRead <= 3) {
analogWrite(blue1, 10);
digitalWrite(blue2,HIGH);
digitalWrite(yellow1,LOW);
digitalWrite(yellow2,LOW);
digitalWrite(red1,LOW);
digitalWrite(red2,LOW);
}
if (hotRead > 3 && hotRead < 6)
{
analogWrite(blue1, 0);
digitalWrite(blue2,HIGH);
digitalWrite(yellow1,HIGH);
digitalWrite(yellow2,LOW);
digitalWrite(red1,LOW);
digitalWrite(red2,LOW);
}
if (hotRead >= 6 && hotRead < 9)
{
analogWrite(blue1, 0);
digitalWrite(blue2,LOW);
digitalWrite(yellow1,HIGH);
digitalWrite(yellow2,HIGH);
digitalWrite(red1,LOW);
digitalWrite(red2,LOW);
}
if (hotRead >= 9 && hotRead < 12)
{
analogWrite(blue1, 0);
digitalWrite(blue2,LOW);
digitalWrite(yellow1,LOW);
digitalWrite(yellow2,HIGH);
digitalWrite(red1,HIGH);
digitalWrite(red2,LOW);
}
if (hotRead >= 12 && hotRead < 14)
{
analogWrite(blue1, 0);
digitalWrite(blue2,LOW);
digitalWrite(yellow1,LOW);
digitalWrite(yellow2,LOW);
digitalWrite(red1,HIGH);
digitalWrite(red2,HIGH);
}
if (hotRead >= 14)
{
analogWrite(blue1, randNumber);
digitalWrite(blue2,LOW);
digitalWrite(yellow1,LOW);
digitalWrite(yellow2,LOW);
digitalWrite(red1,HIGH);
digitalWrite(red2,HIGH);
}
}
else
{
randNumber = random(1,10);
analogWrite(blue1, randNumber);
digitalWrite(blue2,LOW);
digitalWrite(yellow1,LOW);
digitalWrite(yellow2,LOW);
digitalWrite(red1,LOW);
digitalWrite(red2,LOW);
delay(300);
}
hotChange = analogRead(hotPin);
Serial.println(hotRead);
}

In his essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin has an uncanny ability to foreshadow the discourse concerning mass production in the digital age. Remove his work from the timestamp of his Marxist / Socialist underpinnings and set him up with a word processor and a digicam and we’ve got a relevant op-ed for the New York Times on the lost aura of art in the new millennium.

Indeed, we have reached the pinnacle of his expectation. With digital reproduction it is impossible to distinguish the replica from the original. Does it even make sense to use the term “original” while talking about digital mediums? What of our auras?

I look around me in search of something original that I own. Sadly (though not surprisingly), I can only be sure that a couple paintings and maybe a clay pot are, in fact, unique. Am I bothered? Not really. Am I detached somehow from the analogness of life? I don’t think so. But, how would I know for sure? I’ve never really known any different.

Certainly, digital mediums have changed and disrupted the course of art and communication but have we completely lost touch with what is special about the making of art and about the viewing of it? Of course, there are problems (illegal distribution, intellectual property, digital manipulation (see photos) blah blah) but I’m not so sure that the Ludities have the game cornered just yet. Accessibility is a word that all socialists should love. Digital has done more to make art, literature… knowledge accessible than any other innovation in human history. Now that can only improve our auras.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/14/technology/14photoshop.html?ex=1159416000&en=7a7e43fda1dca3f9&ei=5070

Credit to Hany Farid at Dartmouth for a nice collection of manipulated imagery:

http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/farid/research/digitaltampering/

I thought I’d start with one of the classics.

USA Today really didn’t need to do this. She’s already pretty creepy looking.

And last but not least, The President of the United States…

Part One: Initial Observation

I observed credit card usage for stage one of this project. Stage 1 actually had two phases for me - part one was during my four hour shift at Starbucks. I worked a cash register for a little over two hours, and I counted 37 swipes of credit cards at my register. This occured between 10am and 2pm this morning. This probably accounted for about half of the transactions, which doesn’t seem like as much as I would have expected, but I also have to keep in mind that most of these purchases were for under $5 or $10. Several were for under $1. Later in the day I counted my credit card uses and relevant info. I used my credit card five times - three times at Duane Reade and twice at Famiglia (I got a salad and then decided I also wanted a piece of pizza). All of my purcahses were under $10 and were for either food or household/personal items.

Part Two: In-depth Examination of Credit Cards

The most interesting interaction occured when a woman used a mini-credit card on her keychain to pay for her $3.36 latte. I thought about the swiping technology that has now become such a popular way to pay for things, ranging from a $0.54 coffee refill to my tuition to automatic monthly car payments. Why have credit cards become the only method of payment so many people (including myself) use? I’m so ticked when I buy something at a small deli or store and they either don’t take credit cards or there’s a minimum purchase amount. One issue is safety/insurance. If you loose your cash, it’s gone forever, but if you loose your credit card, you can cancel it and are probably not responsible for fradulent purchases made on your account. Probably the biggest reason I use my credit card is because I earn frequent flier miles with every purchase, so I feel like even though I’m spending money, I’m getting something back. True, it will take me a reaaaaaaally long time to earn enough miles to get a plane ticket when most of my purchases are under $20, but I tell myself that even small purchases add up over time. It’s also a matter of convenience - I don’t get my work paycheck in cash, and it doesn’t magically appear in my wallet, so I actually have to go to the ATM if I want cash, and who has time for that when you can just use a credit card?

On the flip side, credit cards cause confusion more often than cash. It was awkward when this woman handed me her entire keyring instead of just her card, and I had never personally used a mini-credit card before and wasn’t sure if it would work in the Starbucks machine. Of course it did - I don’t know why I wasn’t sure - I mean, what would be the point if you couldn’t use it anywhere you can use a credit card? But still, in the moment, I hesistated. There’s also confusion regarding signing receipts/entering your zip code / pressing “okay” on the screen to approve the purchase, etc. Four people asked me if they needed to sign the receipts this morning, to which I reply that no, you don’t have to sign unless the purchase is over $25. So they were standing there waiting for their receipts, unsure about how to proceed with the interaction. In addition, sometimes credit cards (or credit card machines) don’t work, which causes a problem unlike that posed with dealing with cash. This morning one person’s credit card wouldn’t swipe successfully (which is actually fairly low for a whole morning) and had to be entered by hand. Occasionally, the connection dies and credit cards can’t be approved at all. Sometimes they’re declined, which then results in a potentially embarassing situation when you have to tell the person that his or her credit card was declined. Where am I going with this? Oh yes - credit cards generate a whole new spectrum of social interactions around paying for a product/service.

Waymarkr (tags: itp location python mobile phone photo)…

I’m stuck just north of the 125th street station on the A-train. These are the people I see from here:
(we’ve been stuck about 15 min’s, so far)
Directly across from me, a woman is completely engrossed in people magazine. It seems Jessica Simpson is in love! She’s got her ipod on her lap, ear buds in [...]

After living away from the US for so long, lots of things strike me as interesting every day. One thing I’ve noticed recently is what I’m calling “hollowed-out” retail: retail stores have a limited selection of merchandise, suggesting that customers purchase any unusual items on-line.
This appears to makes economic sense: stock only the most popular [...]

A small strip of copper foil allows any small card, photo, or paper item to take on the role of connector. When placed in the frame, the card closes the circuit and causes the box beneath it to light up. The idea is that any small scrap of paper may be a link [...]

The bulletin board and thumb tacks are a standard system of connectors to be found in any office. The addition of batteries, wire mesh, and LEDs transform this system from physical to electrical.

The the left and right side of the bulletin board are covered with wire mesh which is connected to the power [...]

to be added…

…

NYU Art and Tech group wiki (tags: nyu itp art tech) Binary Revolution Forums -> Old Skool Phreaking (tags: telephone hacking redial phreaking phone telephony forums) Howstuffworks “How Telephones Work” (tags: redial telephony) ztdummy - AussieVoIP Compiling and installing…

The first part of class was spent visiting my classmates’ blogs. I found this exceptionaly helpful, as I was not able to accomplish one of my goals. (To upload an image of the King on my blog) When re-designing my blog I spent a majority of the time in the “Style Sheet” template, and overlooked the Main Index template, which is where I would load an image to appear the border. (Thanks for showing me how to do this, Daniel!)

The second part of class was spent discussing Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media. Personally, I think McLuhan is not an easy read, but it was interesting to read someone’s views on technology from years ago. (1964)

Lastly, we explored image distortion. Some examples were Katie Couric’s 20 pound shave off and the addition/deletion of contestants on a Project Runway ad.

This Saturday I played Manhattan Story Mashup part of the Come out and play festival. I’ve never played a game quite like it. I was skeptical at first but ended up having a lot of fun. In fact, it was way more fun that I expected.The Story Mashup game …

I’ve been working on the css for my itp blog with minimal progress. I find that my limitations are not what I can accomplish technically but my utter lack of visual design skills. I can do a lot with css, but I can’t make my pages look decent. Not sure what to do about that. I have an image that I want to use as a banner/logo, but I think it’s too big and square to work with. Then I tried moving the menu up and putting it in the banner area, thinking that I would use the horizontal space at the top for navigation and logo and leave the sides clear for content, but realized that the length of the menu would probably continue to change based on the entries and categories, so making the menu fit in a block probably wasn’t the best idea. So I’ll probably go back to a vertical menu.

On another note, I found movable type’s naming scheme for various page elements to be extremely confusing. Why name something alpha, beta, and delta instead of some meaningful identifiers? Perhaps because the platform is meant to be generic and easily adaptable to any content, but I still found it confusing.

Java ME Open Source Software Looks like a great resource (tags: java j2me mobile opensource phone software) Smartphone Thoughts :: View topic - Cingular MediaNET Settings Cingular MediaNET GPRS Settings (tags: mobile cingular gprs phone) .mactomster Nokia N80 iSync…

15 seconds Originally uploaded by shiffman. This is a picture Dan took of a picture I took (of him) on the Times Square display for Nokia’s storymashup game…..

15 seconds

Originally uploaded by shiffman.

This is a picture Dan took of a picture I took (of him) on the Times Square display for Nokia’s storymashup game..

Here at Ye Olde Nerd Shoppe, we talk a lot about the bleeding edge of technology and how cool recent advances make life better, but we occasionally get so excited about blinky lights and beeping switches that we lose sight of the great inventions that never die.
Case in point, vinyl sales, specifically of 7″ singles, [...]

Manhattan Story Mashup This is what I will be participating in today… Play along online!…

Manhattan Story Mashup

This is what I will be participating in today… Play along online!

I am so happy I have found a framework to work with; openFrameworks. It is a C/C++ library developed at Parsons for interactive art pieces. It integrates several existing open source libraries and provides some wrapper/utility code of its own. It is looking exciting overall. I will try to use this library instead quickdraw and [...]

The Open Prosthetics Project is an open source project dedicated to the sharing and dissemination of knowledge on the construction of artificial limbs. This Wired article by Quinn Norton summarizes it nicely.

During a typical day, what kinds of digital devices act as a means to an end for us? What are they, and how do we use them?These are the questions my group and I considered when beginning our observation project, which is divided into two parts. The fi…

Lab: Analog Input & Output

I am proud to be a pot user. Today I can use a potentiomter to dim and brighten an led. The problem that I was missing for a while was that I wasn’t giving the pot any power. I also discovered that to view the info you print via “Serial.print” or “Serial.println” you have to switch to the Serial Monitor view in the Arduino program. I was wondering why none of my info was showing up!

* Reactions to readings on interacive narrartive for Interactive Video Workshop
“The common click-to-go-forward paradigm for interaction coupled with static graph structure navigation schemes, seems to place the viewer in an adversarial position within the story. Instead of giving the viewer their experience, such a scheme requires that the viewer constantly push the story forward, a [...]

The title of this blog entry comes from the name of a book I read an excerpt from, by James L. Adams. The basic idea was that, we cloud our vision by prejudices that come out of stereotypes that we hold for different kinds of people and situations. Whe…

thoughts on this weeks reading from Film Art Phenomena, by Nicky Hamlyn

II Interactivity

“Seeing is the decisive act, and ultimately it places the maker and the viewer on the same level.”

Sure seeing is decisive, as in it produces a definite result in one’s mind, but as far as placing the maker and the veiwer on the same level, i’m not sure that is any more true than saying, “reading is a decisive act, it places the reader and the writer on the same level,” or, “hearing is a decisive act, it places the hearer and the speaker on the same level.” They say that seeing is beleiving, but this is perhaps no more true than hearing, reading, or dreaming.

On “interactive cultural products:” I suppose this is what makes for good interaction, that the user is able to be a creative as possible, while still being engaged. After all, total creativity, or authorial control in an interaction can be much less engaging than assisted creativity. Especially if the user is not especially creatively inclined or talented. The goal is to make the user look good.

As in the severed heads emample, there may exist a prerequisite of context whereby the user’s engagement is enganced because they know they are meant to be engaged, i.e. they have come to the gallery to see this space. Whether or not this interaction and the things that can be gained from it are more or less than those things that can be gained from a discreet interaction whereby the ’spectator’ may or may not realize they are meant to be engaged.

Hamlyn writes, “…this interactivity is is acheived at the cost of the insight and understanding achieved through contemplation.” Perhaps, but much insight can occur with “static art” after the ’spectator’ leaves the gallery. Much ’static’ art also works on a very visceral level.

Hamlyn continues, “If anything, the activity of interaction renders contemplative consideration of what one has done impossible.” Impossible? I’m not so sure about this. I tend to relise more profound things about systems when I am involved within them, when I experience them, as well as taking an objective stance. I do however agree with the possibility that “being able to rearrange elements within a work in any way that one wants, one is effectively talks to one self,” but that does not necessitate that meaning “drain away.” Comparing as Hamlyn does interactivity to traditional “non-interactive” painting he states, “…the rectangular form of a painting can seem limiting and arbitrary…until we realise that most good paintings use those rectilinear boundaries as compositional boundaries to energise and focus the picture.” I am interested in how this notion then translated to the letterbox of film and video. Veiwing a film in a theatre is certainly a different experience than viewing that same film at home on your television or even on your iPod while riding the train. And film is certainly a different medium than television. I will argue however that the rectilinear form of film and television is be limiting and arbitrary, simply because it must conform to the absolute homogeny of the television and film aspect ratio. With a few exception such as IMAX, and some projection techniques, the compositional nature of television’s 4:3 aspect ration is a direct result of how we have always made TV’s. This is beginning to change with the gradual increase in the 16:9 aspect ratio, but I would argue that in terms of compositional innovation and experimentation on a widespread basis, television is era’s behind painting. Television’s constraints, in this way, do not become “(inter)active elements in the compostition” in the same way as Hamlyn thinks of them as doing so for painting.

“The spectator is not wholly absorbed, to the point of self-forgetting…but becomes a tentative self-conscious intervener…” This is why interactive art is very hard. And yes, not all interactive art needs to be narrative, in fact none of it does, but as we are thinking about interactive art within the context of video, narration seems hard for me to avoid in some way, even if it is expressionistic. Empathy causes self-forgetting. There is no empathy without connection. Narration is the easiest form of connection. Everyone loves a good story.

In “Two Sides to Every Story,” Hamlyn goes on to describe Michael Snow’s film of the same name in which the same story is essentially told in two different ways and projected back to back so that a viewer is unable to view both simultaneously. This inevitably took place in a gallery. The infrastructure of movie theatre obviously dictate exclusion for this kind of content, and so it refrains from the mainstream and becomes “art” in a gallery. What if this weren’t the case? I can almost picture Snow knowing his film would never be screened in a conventional theatre to large audiences and so that affects the working content. But what if a mainstream film could work in this way. You have to see the movie twice. Once on one side, once on the other. Less interactive? More engaging? Hamlyn goes on to state, “…we could never, in principal, experience all of it. The most we cojld ever experience would be less than half of a version of a whole thing.” I would add to that, “at one time,” and also say that while this may be true, it seems that the piece is giving us double the experience to begin with.

Release of tension.
This may be the single most important element in entertainment, and one might argue engagement. A satisfying experience, tension release.

The piece is fucking called “ARBITRARY LOGIC.” The idea that it “challenges this drive” of mastery and completion of a system in any active way is in the mind of the Hamlyn, as I see it.

Thoughts about Jensen’s ‘Interactive Room 12′:
If no one know’s you’re doing conceptual art, the art can’t mean anything. Art does not exist without an audience. In speaking about ‘Interactive Room 12′ Jensen states, “only very few members of the audience even knew they were interacting.” Yes, in an interactive work of art, change is somehow initiated by the viewer. But for it to be meaningful art, *someone* has to know about it. If it’s the viewers of the viewers, that’s still valid. In this piece, because the feedback from the interaction is so gradual and subtle it fails to work. It falls below the case-specific threshold of knowledge of self-awareness of a viewer within a work of art. To negate this is to claim also that *all* art is interactive. My presence, by body heat, breath and vibration of movement all affect the object of art in some miniscule way. Is this interactivity? In the simplest example, If I push a button labled “shut off in 3,000 years” and in 3,000 years, a light above an “interactive painting” shuts off, is this interactivity, or does interactivity require the user to know and experience tangible evidence in some way of the change they have affected on a thing?
If art happens in a forrest sort of thing…

It seems that Hamlyn was with us the whole time when he states of both video games *and* much interactive art, “what has the participant really gained?” This, he argues is due to the fact that the viewer, and the subject, essentially remain unchanged.

This feels like this is all to say something, to come to some sort of conclusion or argument on interactive art, but I will refrain from doing so, as I don’t see it in any way valid.