jleblanc: softness of things

12.5.06: Final Work:
Can be found here

11.28.06: Bad pictures of paintings:

diagrams to ideas.


bird.


egg.


head.

11.20.06: The Resonance of Execution:
Resonance

11.15.06: Materials and my final:
I love the process and feel of concrete and plaster. Making molds and then mixing the substance, then pouring it in. It's very zen, to watch this liquid go into a solid anti-shape you've made for it, and then deconstructing the mold afterwards to get the object back out.
For this project I was interested in embedding LEDs (red and green, though red is best) into the plaster. I then gauged and scrapped away at the surface of the plaster till the faint glow of the LED appeared through the plaster's surface. I find the effect kind of magical.
So I think I am going to pursue working with plaster and LEDs for my final. I might incorporate qprox sensors into the material to give it life.
I want to focus on a specific set of materials: plaster, water, red LEDs, toothpicks, wooden chopsticks, foamcore, vaseline (to coat the forms), and wood.
Erosion...

Polish down the exsisting red block and encase in wood as a display piece.
Collect materials: Ask tikva about foam core. See where I can buy something like 15lbs. of plaster.
buckets for mixing. Toothpicks.

11.7.06: Interface:
The assignment is to create an actual interface. Meaning it should involve physical interactions. Still thinking about what I will do for this.
Perhaps using water in some way. I mean it would be interesting to actually create the ISCO project on a small scale.

10.31.06: Transforming Space
Dance scares me for alot of reasons, most of which I will not get into here.

However, what I find very interesting about it in the context of this assignment is that it is about imposing the will of your physical presence on the space around you.
I won't pretend that I can choreograph anything, but I will also not pretend that I am about to just go into a space and move my body. I need a little bit more structure than that.
What if I dance with my eyes entirely closed, or I am blindfolded? It does a few things, it helps isolate me from other people and thus perhaps make me more comfortable in doing it. It also begs other people to help me and keep me from falling and hurting myself. If I am doing a jig then others must help me navigate the peace.
What if I have cards that say things like:

"jig"
"twirl"
"leap"
"little ball"
"roll around"
"hug"

And I hold them up at random but I cannot see them but they are the instructions for what I am supposed to do.
Or alternatively I hold up cards like:

"clap"
"stomp"
"whistle"
"pound"
"snap"
"sing"
"hum"

And these provide the soundtrack for my piece by encouraging the audience to do those things.
Or what if I stumble around and pass out these cards to people whenever I encounter them in my wanderings?

What If then at some points I say:

"I am dizzy"
"I am lost"
"I am tired"
"I am hot"

10.24.06: The Body:
Experiments with drawing the body.

10.10.06: Energy:
In conjunction with sustainability class, I am interested in using multiple sources of energy in physcomp projects. However, the first step is always understanding what kind of power you are getting from a given source. You can use a multi-meter for that, but it only works if you are there. I wanted to create a volt meter using the arduino that could continously measure voltage and output it serially. This could be used with RF or a datalogger to keep track of things like voltage on a solar panel.
Below is the arduino code for the sensor. Pictures soon!
analog_read1 analog_read2
Pictures: pic1 pic2

10.3.06: Networks:
I did a project with Jury Hahn, Katie London and Joo-Youn Paek on Networks. Or perhaps more accurately I should say that we agreed as a group that the idea of networks was heavy and confusing to us...More soon.
Pictures: pic1

9.27.06: Connector:
Having worked on the drum gloves (MegaTap 3000 to those in the know), I well understood the fragility of thin wire. The problem with the MegaTap's fingers was that a heavy wire was cumbersome and inflexible, while thin wrapping wire broke easily. So I was interested in a connector line that was tough but very flexible. Hence using conductive fabric. I used it, encased in a non-conductive fabric, to create a flexible connector to an LED.
Pictures: pic1

9.19.06: Module:
In creating modules I had a few ideas. One of them was to create modular poetry in a physical form by taking a poem and slicing between the lines and then rolling up the paper so that the whole thing looked like a squid. By twirling the "squid" and looking at the overlaping the lines of texts different poems were created and could be generated dynamically by rotating the moving the squid.
Pictures: pic1

9.12.06: Creation:
For this first assignment I worked on a few paintings. One of the things I thought of after I create two not so hot paintings, was that by combining them, I created another work that I though exceeded the two individually. You could call it something like modular painting.
Pictures: pic1 pic2 pic3 pic4