Experiments in Communication

This week I was doing a lot of thinking about interactivity, and a lot of research on Jim Campbell. I read an interview of his where he says he makes work to compensate for his inability to express himself through any other means (at least that was what I got out of it). Maybe I was just projecting my thoughts onto his words. (my language project from another class is bleeding into my observations). The automatic door example, which Despina also mentioned in class is a good example for thinking about whether or not a work is interactive or just reactive. Funnily enough, the same topic came up in my games class as well.
A few of these thoughts that I have been having popped up during my game design class. The automatic door example came up (sort of) because we were talking about how we wanted to use some gestural interface as part of our game. Frank (our teacher) said that making someone make a whole gesture to effectively just turn on a switch is not particularly rewarding, or a very rich experience. There has to be a reason for the input to be analog (and also complicated and difficult), as opposed to digital. Campbell's reflection on his work (how the viewer's distance from one of his works created an analogous response) addresses the same problem and explains how he deals with it. This refinement in the response of the "interactive" object is what I am trying to wrap my head around. I imagine it becomes easier with concrete examples. But the fact that I just called it a "response" and not an "interaction" is a tiny bit disconcerting to me. But maybe that's just linguistics.
Anyway, the other thing I was thinking about is the differences between making a statement, asking a question (dialogue), and testing a hypothesis (experiment): are these the differences between art, interactive art and science, respectively?Are the boundaries not clear? I have the feeling that these correspondences don't really work -- interactive art could take the form of a dialogue, a statement or an experiment, I think. But there would have to be dialogue involved somewhere in the process.

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We printed the first circuit board for In Touch. Everyone at ITP was very impressed, which was kind of nice, and the board came out really pretty, especially since the substrate is white(ish).

the process:
after printing (with a laser printer) the traces on glossy paper, press with iron for ~3 minutes, to transfer the toner to the copper clad

soak in (soapy) warm water till the paper peels off on its own

use a sharpie to fill in broken traces, and a dentist's tool (or anything pointy i imagine) to remove excess toner/paper

dip in ferric chloride for a while till only the traces are left. then rinse with water and use acetone to clean the toner off of the copper traces

drill the holes for the components using really small drill bits carefully cause they break easily!

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What do you want to choose? I always am extremely slow in making decisions, so I am making a device that might be somewhat helpful. It is a binary decision-maker, that tries to help you figure out which of 2 options you really want to choose. Cybernetic feedback loops really influenced this project, as it is in itself a feedback loop of sorts.

There are two indicators (LEDs), one for each of the things you are deciding between. (They could be handheld for a "on one hand, on the other hand" metaphor.) The device chooses one of them for you by lighting one of the LEDs up. This choice is random. Then it asks you if you are happy with this decision. You have to indicate "yes"or "no" (possibly with a thumbs up, or thumbs down hand gesture -- I am thinking of this device incorporated in a glove). If you say "no" then the cycle will repeat itself, and if you say "yes" the cycle will end, as you will have found an option you want.

I guess the way the deivce would work is that it would change how you think about the options. Once a decision has been made for you, it's no longer an option, but a given, so you consider all the implications of it more fully and it becomes more real, so it's easier to decide whether it is a good option or not.

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We have a title for our project, as well as a lot of the parts of it working. The xports are finally talking to each other through UDP (turns out it was not that difficult -- we just had to change the settings and make sure we weren't making mistakes). In the configuration settings each of the xports is set to "CC" connect mode (as opposed to D4) and the remote IP and port for each one is the IP and port of the other one. We are using port 10001 for one of our xports and 10002 for the other one. So now we can open two terminal windows, connect to each xport serially, type, and what we typed appears in the other xport's terminal window, jst like magic!

Last week we got the communication protocol part down. We incorporated into our code what our arduino should send once one of the IR sensors senses a touch (which means that its LED has to change color) as well as what it should do should it be sent something serially. Then we tested this through the Arduino window's serial monitor (we only had one xport at the time), and after tweaking our code a bit we were able to make our prototype respond to these messages.

We have sketched out the board on eagle, jut need to play around with the connections a bit because the circuit is somewhat complicated. After we're finished with that, hopefully we can go on to etch the boards and then do a ton of drilling and soldering...

all 32 LEDs that will make up one of the 2 screens

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