So Hatti and I have been working away on our processing final. We went to Abc No Rio which is just down the block from me (a cool indie public print shop where I learned how to silk screen) and with hatti's help made my first silk screened work on plexi glass.
Last night I spent most of the night trying to get the loadString to work with flickr, I had no problem getting images from google to work, I have done that before, but finally, thanks to adam, was able to get the images to come from flickr with the proxml library and some xml. yah! We are almost done now.
I still have yet to build a light box, which I am not sure if it will actually happen now or not its last on the list, which sucks but this is life at ITP. Hatti's been hard at work on the Arduino and serial communication for the pulsing LEDs and has finished that up quite nicely.
I've been hard at work trying to also get the curves to generate a random noise effect but so far haven't found anything I am really happy with and most of it still feels very electronic and lacks a true random element which may need a simple algorythm.
We originally wanted to detect a heart rate using a HRM, but with time not on our side we switched to using an ultrasonic sensor to find distances and control the values of text which will be displayed. The text will be 100% at a distance and the alpha will fade as the sensor detects the users as more near, thus the goal is to have the text only somewhat legible from a distance and the closer you get the lighter the text becomes making it sometimes impossible to read the content of the work, I am also playing with the idea of putting images into the fade instead. The goal with that was to suggest the temporallity of humanity, a feeling of unattainablity of our memories or even at the most simple level our consistently failing health (and eye sight).
A timer was put outside the main loop which counts the millis and our images (right now I have in place some old photos from my grandmother) but content is still to be decided... Hatti was able to create a rad jitter effect to suggest an old technology of projecting non-digital film.
This project was originally inspired by the theme of death which has been at the forefront of my life over the last year. My grandfathers sudden death recently and my mothers battle with cancer where death has become a central topic of our long distance phone conversations for months now.
The irony of death is that we all are facing it, it is a universal vulnerablity as a human being, yet its never in the forefront of our thoughts. If it was, and we carried that with us on a day to day basis, how would we live our life differently?