160 LEDs down, 160 to go.

While soldering I’ve been listening to the ITP Thesis Live Stream. It’s been four solid hours of fascinating talks and outstanding work. Tune in for day two tomorrow, which gets underway at noon EDT and in the meantime, view the archives of today’s talks.

Lecturer: Toru Hasegawa, Mark Collins
Syllabus: fabinfo page
Assignments: 3D Printing, CNC Milling
Project: isomotion, motionfault, jtr

agenda | autocad vba

This is a video I made last year. I was interested in looking at people looking at people. What would happen if I were to film people filming people filming people. How many layers of filming can you create before you get a hall of mirrors? Here are my initial findings:

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PARTS
1 x xylophone
8 x mallet
8 x 1381U Voltage Trigger
8 x 2N3904 Transistor
8 x 10k trimpot
8 x 4700uF capacitor
8 x 1.0uF Monolithic capacitor
8 x 1N914 silicon diode
8 x SCC3766 8V Solar Cell
8 x Geared Pager Motor
Each solar panel and pager motor is attached to a Miller solar engine circuit.
The Solar Xylophone was displayed at the ITP [...]

Finally got around to posting my final paper for the Social Facts Class. The title of the paper is:

Creating Connections for Disaster Relief in New Orleans
Looking at Social Software and Community Groups

The paper came out of observing community groups working within the city of New Orleans, research that I have done through the class on the ways that groups maintain effectiveness and translate their activities to online environments and thoughts I have had about facilitating social action through social networking.

Here is the PDF.

It’s thesis week here at ITP. Graduation, the show and thesis presentation all compressed into a two weeks. Last year I was just a spectator, this year it’s on. My thesis class is presenting last, this friday evening, which gives me plenty of time to get nervous and rehash my presentation in [...]

We finished up HaikuNews with the creation of an interface with buttons that pull the content of an RSS feed, compare that content to a list of words arranged by syllable count in our database, and then puts the matching words into an ArrayList. To generate the Haiku, the matching words are randomly chosen and [...]

Idea:“Grass Grows from the Middle” is a musical field which imitates the feeling of moving through stalks of wheat. As the user moves through the field, different music samples are played.

Description:
The first iteration of “Grass Grows…” is a 3′ x 3′ prototype containing 10 5′ high stalks. Each stalk is programmed to play a different starting point in the first movement of Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring.”

Team:
Michael Chladil
Shlomit Lehavi

Exhibitions:
ITP Audio Art Show (April 30, 2007)

Process

Here’s a view of 1/8th of the final assembly with LEDs in place. 280 LEDs to go.

Resting atop the PCB is the CNC machined aluminum board mount, holding in the foreground one of the four DC-DC stepdown converters from short-circuit.com. The board mount is topped by the three conductor commutator assembly, handmade from readily available materials and a few custom laser cut plexiglas spacers. The commutator mates with a set of brushes to deliver +15VDC, GND, and a timing signal from one of a pair of hall effect sensors mounted on the assembly rotating about the vertical axis (each quadrant of each PCB also has its own hall effect sensors to sense rotation about the horizontal axis).

this was in support of President Bush, and VP Cheney being impeached for their “mismanagement” of…well…the entire United States.
i really liked the above image on the site, http://www.a28.org/ because it promotes a positive message.
i found this quote weird, though. “It was a lot of fun and everyone can’t wait for the next one!”
let’s hope the [...]

I found this article on [itvt], which featured an interview with Jumpcut’s Founder, Mike Folgner
http://blog.itvt.com/my_weblog/2007/03/itvt_itv_interv.html
Mike actually worked at OpenTV, which I have never heard of until reading the article.
Interesting fact:
“In 2004, only a small percentage–around 15%–of the regular digital cameras shipped had video-capture capability. In 2005, that rose to something like 50%. And now it’s [...]

For the first bit of what’s shaping up to be a multi-part epic of a summer, I’m going to be working on a project for area/code, which Kevin plucked me for in part because of its spooky similarity to those blasted routers. I start tomorrow, making next week possibly the busiest yet: days at area/code, [...]

For the first bit of what’s shaping up to be a multi-part epic of a summer, I’m going to be working on a project for area/code, which Kevin plucked me for in part because of its spooky similarity to those blasted routers. I start tomorrow, making next week possibly the busiest yet: days at area/code, nights fluffing up Social Bomb for the show.

For those of you who haven’t been following along with the in-person presentations, here’s a little clip of video that was shot about a month and a half ago, showing the ultraORB concept in action. This is a demo and concept test with 4 single-color LEDs — the version due to be presented this coming week will have a total of 320 tri-color LEDs under microprocessor control to create a truly three dimensional persistence of vision display.

I don’t care what the critics say, I like the new Bloc Party album. Maybe it’s the reference to Less Than Zero in the first track: Song for Clay (Disappear Here) but I think the entire thing is a damn good listen. Also in other news of things that are badly reviewed but I seem [...]

Just under 100 hours to go until the first display of the ultraORB at my thesis presentation, Thursday, May 3 at 8:40pm. There is still a lot to do, but things are moving forward. 16 microcontrollers are interfacing with 128MB of onboard flash memory and my laptop through 8 dual-channel USB interfaces. Now it’s on to wrapping up a few loose ends and then soldering the 320 RGB LEDs. Then on to the first spin. Stay tuned…

PopTop Portfolio

Designey by Tim McNerney. “PopTop Portfolio (PTP) is a digital showcase of an artist’s work.” It’s like a real photographer’s book because there’s no keyboard or mouse.

Camera for K

“‘Camera for K’ is a photographic interface that maximizes independency of a physically handicapped person who uses a wheelchair and cannot operate the interface of a camera.” This is one of the most moving projects, as well as Pollie Barden’s iN-BaGs. There’s a better photo demonstrating this project in the link I provided. I really like how this project gives such creative freedom to this individual who is physically constrained. Younghyun Chung’s presentation is really good because you get a sense how successful this project is by just looking at the results of his user testing.

Happy Feedback Machine

This device was designed by Anh Nguyen. It really, really works. My favorite of the switches is the set of bumper ones. It kind of feels like a cross between sending a morse-code message (speed) and pushing an elevator button several times. I came out of one of my classes feeling like a zombie, and this machine was a tactile paradise.

Catch a glimpse of the bumper switches in the right hand corner of this image:

Other super cool projects:

Social Bomb, a game that teaches you how to gain social capital.

Pollie Barden’s iN-BaGs, “an exploration of personal expression through assistive technology.”

Today from 5 - 9pm my Audio Art class will be showing all of our final projects in the Skirball Center for New Media Studies on the 9th Floor of 721 Broadway. It’ll be my first chance to show my Solar Xylophone in its completed state and there will also be lots of other great [...]

I made it to oregon this afternoon in one piece. The mountains still have snow on them, enough I think I could probably hike up a few and ski.. the season is late this year. The snow is still good, I can see even from 15,000 feet above them.

I feel out of place, just like I always have, I’m not sure why I always expect this time to be different. I considered driving up to Smith just now to sit under the stars and hear the clipping of carbiners in the canyons at night but 2 hours of sleep suggest better things to be doing.

I know what you’re probably thinking, I used to be so good at this lack of stability. Moving every 6 months for 10 years will do that to you. I was looking for a reason to stay, I just never found one, so I kept drifting. But we always don’t say what we really want to say the most: I’ve found my reason to stay.

*Movie

Social Bomb was mentioned in a recent CNet article on ITP!
One project in the works is from a team led by first-year student Adam Simon. Called “People Rank,” or “Social Bomb,” it is a system designed to automatically measure social reputation and popularity through a game.
Essentially, players wear a small gadget, and then the technology [...]

Gear Compositions is a series of 5 self contained, wooden gear systems that are manually operated by individual hand cranks. Users move around the suspended piece choosing to either operate the gear systems from one side or observe them in motion on the other.

gear interaction.mov

CONSTRUCTION
This piece is hand made entirely of wood. The gears were designed using SketchUp and Illustrator and laser cut at NYU’s Advanced Media Studio.

CONCEPTS
Simplicity belies complexity. Themes of communication, relationships, role reversals and invisible spaces inform the content of Gear Compositions. Gears are inherently rigid and exact. They operate and shape interior of mechanisms, assisting the output of energy. The gears in this system take on an organic, poetic, and narrative quality. They operate for no particular purpose, designed for thought rather than goal. Ideas to consider with this piece include: What is the front and what is the back? What does it mean to make things move? What does it mean that the person controlling the operation can not see the output, and the person observing the output can not control the operation (or at least not without some degree of awkwardness)? Does anyone get a perspective of the big picture?

gear details.mov

FUTURE DEVELOPMENT
Mechanically, I am very pleased with the user interaction in this piece. I struggled for a long time with whether or not the gears should be human powered, weight powered, or motorized. Although I certainly will address other forms of power in future pieces, it is significant that in this particular piece people must be present in order for it to move. The required interaction of people enhances concepts involving the operations of human relationships — the speakers and the spoken to, to the active and the passive.

Aesthetically, I would like to dig further into the blocks of wood, dive into that hidden space, creating a gear system that truly belongs inside. There should be sense that the gears were chiseled out, that they are the wood they embody.

Social Bomb was mentioned in a recent CNet article on ITP!

One project in the works is from a team led by first-year student Adam Simon. Called “People Rank,” or “Social Bomb,” it is a system designed to automatically measure social reputation and popularity through a game.

Essentially, players wear a small gadget, and then the technology measures people’s reputations and popularity by how they interact with others and to whom they talk. The more they talk to people, the more their score goes up, and vice versa. But the system can also detract a user’s points based on the popularity of the person he is talking to.

It ran on the front page of News.com last Tuesday. I’m a bit embarrassed about somehow being pegged the leader of the group - Scott Varland and Mike Dory have put as much, if not more, work into the project as I have.

We should have more announcements about Social Bomb soon, leading up to playing a public game at the ITP Spring Show on May 8 & 9.

Quickie… Check out this new service that lets you send greetings spelled out by buildings in the shape of letters found using Google Maps.
Here’s my message to the world.

The Slinky Metronome is now fully operational. I gave a presentation and demonstration of it in Mechanisms on Thursday. The Slinky Metronome is a Sociable Object. It keeps a steady beat, based upon the period of the Slinky spring, and broadcasts that beat out via 802.15.4 radio to the entire ITP floor. Electronic musical instruments, [...]

The Slinky Metronome is now fully operational. I gave a presentation and demonstration of it in Mechanisms on Thursday. The Slinky Metronome is a Sociable Object. It keeps a steady beat, based upon the period of the Slinky spring, and broadcasts that beat out via 802.15.4 radio to the entire ITP floor. Electronic musical instruments, dynamic artworks and kinetic sculptures can all pick up the broadcast beat and synchronize with each other for an orchestrated performance. The Slinky Metronome is human-operated, so the beat it broadcasts is rooted in tangible physical interactions. Now that it’s working, the next step is to collaborate and share sample code with a few instrument and kinetic projects. This is a project I’m looking forward to exploring more in the fall.

Digging the lip dubbing movement going on over at vimeo :: my favs - Lip Dub - Flagpole Sitta by Harvey Danger and Jakob Lodwick’s classic

following the excellent lo-fi Grizzly bear’s video another push in the direction of dirt style music videos Neon Bible live in an elevator. (thanks bumblebee)

Denis Darzacq :: La chute :: beautiful photo series (thanks scott)

Eric Beug and I will be performing live audio and video in Room 447 for the the Live Image Processing show at ITP on Saturday around 9pm.  We will be debuting a new kickass Max MSP / Jitter patch, as well as the sleek and sexy Malleable Electronic Lawn interface.  Awesome!

A couple of days ago, i was around time square area to run some errand, then ran into a series of Reebok’s promotional Ads “I am what I am”. It seemed pretty obvious that they are setting up a strategy to go against Adidas’s “Impossible is Nothing” catch phrase, but the images of ‘ordinary’ people [...]

documentation is here.
and code is here.

Uniting old and new, this salvaged magic lantern from the 1870’s has been fitted with a zoetrope-like device imprinted with the letters of the alphabet. The lantern logs into it’s own email account, retrieves new content, and spins out the viewer’s emails or text-messages one letter at a time, projecting them across the room.
Part apparition, [...]