Antique Hack Project: The Typewriter

For video sculpture, our new assignment is to take an antique and hack into it using some for of user interaction + video (projection or on screen). I am working with Yoni and Ioni once again, and if this goes well, we plan on continuing this for our final.

Our working title is “Futile Type.” Essentially, it is an experiential video installation that challenges the typewriter as an efficient means of textual communication. Each click of the keyboard corresponds to a blotch of ink in the video.

Concept

The piece started out as a silly notion. Let’s mimic the arm of the typewriter that types letters on paper with Yoni’s actual arm. However, the notion of a typewriter is heavily loaded with nostalgia and other connotations. It’s impossible for us not to read more into it. In my personal experience, I’ve never relied on a typewriter as a means of textual communication (I was born in 1989). My grandparents have an electric typewriter in their office that they seldom use. Instead, for me, the typewriter is a nostalgic piece of metal that is reminiscent of another era which I have no connection to. It sounds like an office, it’s the white noise in the background of “Mad Men” it’s the metaphor of hypersensitive writers – it’s a tool, perhaps, to brainstorm, to help you come up with ideas, I do not doubt that it changes the way you write, that it might bring more meaning to your words. But for me, it is also futile. This is a strong argument. Maybe it’s not a very good one. Either way, the person facing you in the video is a mad writer that cannot seem to get his words out on paper. Instead, frustrated, he types on his forehead in a frenzy.

Video

Here’s the highest threshold for the video, it’s Yoni going crazy and reaching some other higher state of consciousness (or something).

Aesthetic

For projection purposes, we set Yoni up in front of a black background and played with a multicolored piece of plexi (I don’t know what it’s called… we used it in Lip Synch as well). We wanted to experiment with lighting much like Henri-Georges Clouzot’s famous unfinished film, “L’enfer.” I also wanted to take a stab at overlapping videos and working with multiplications to make it trippier, I guess.

Code

As we progress with the piece, these are likely to change. But here’s what we have developed so far:

Max/MSP Jitter Code:

Arduino Code:

long lasthit = millis();
long lastup = -100;
long vidlength = 10 * 1000;
const int maxvids = 17;
char msg[maxvids] = {’0′,’1′,’2′,’3′,’4′,’5′,’6′,’7′,’8′,’9′,’:',’;',’<','=','>‘,’?'};
int counter = 0;
void setup() {
pinMode(2, INPUT); // set the switch pin to be an input
//pinMode(3, OUTPUT); // set the yellow LED pin to be an output
Serial.begin(9600);
}

void loop() {
long time = millis();
// read the switch input:
if (digitalRead(2) == HIGH) {
long hit = millis();
if (time-lasthit > 50){
if (counter < maxvids){
Serial.print(msg[counter]);
counter += 1;
lastup = time;
}
}
lasthit = time;
}
if (counter > 0 && time-lastup >= vidlength){
lastup = time;
counter = 0;
Serial.print(msg[counter]);
}
}