Color Drawing Machine 2
This is another color drawing machine -- "interactive" this time. You can draw your own quadrilaterals now and turn background blurring on and off (use the 'B' key).
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February 29, 2008
February 28, 2008
Color Drawing Machine
This is one of my first attempts at a color drawing machine. I was trying to play with little polygons of color that gradually change color and produce a mechanized motion.
February 24, 2008
Mounting Systems
I've also been working on mounting systems this week. After the testing I did with Martha Mason and Wendy Richmond last weekend, I've been trying to improve the mounting system and and the pulley supports so that the rope stays on the pulley. Martha pointed out that a dancer needs vertical space to work in as well as horizontal space. By opening the pulleys into a triangular formation, I was able to give her the vertical space she longed for.
I bought some pulleys from the hardware store and tried mounting them to the Super Clamps. Mounting them was easy, but as I discovered today, the pulleys are not right for my system. They introduce far too much friction and acoustic noise. They really take something away from the quality that the system had before.
I also experimented with ways of mounting the pulleys that allow me to adjust them easily. While I liked the way the pulleys look when they're mounted with the pipe running through them, this will be difficult to construct. For now, I think I'm going to stick with the super clamps.
February 23, 2008
Building a Wooden Pulley (continued)
I want to be able to work with two pulleys simultaneously, so I'm adding the rotary encoder to wooden pulley I started building last week. The PS/2 mice have turned out to be quite a clever hack because each one gives me two rotary encoders and three switch inputs in exchange to two pins on the Arduino. I've started thinking a bit more about multiples -- and while this may be a little premature, I want to work out a bit of the technical end of this before getting too heavily into final fabrication.
I've invested rather heavily in this for the past two days. Perhaps because this is more comfortable for me than other things that need to get done now -- like preparing for the mid-term presentation.
What this does mean, however, is that I have the pieces for a much more modular system. I'm envisioning a hub that I can plug each pulley into using a single CAT-5 cable. This makes the performance setup clean -- and won't require any soldering.
February 15, 2008
Iterations: A Wooden Pulley
Today I worked on fabricating another two pulleys out of wood. I finished drilling well-aligned shaft holes in the side pieces and made new pulleys out of particleboard and plywood. The most time-consuming part of this process was cutting the circles out of with the bandsaw. I remembered that there is a jig for cutting circles, but didn't want to spend time figuring out how to construct it in order to cut six circles. I first started by cutting around the contour of the circle, but ended up just making tangent cuts and then sanding away the excess. I was really trying to have another pulley finished by Saturday so I could test two of them with Wendy and Martha, but that doesn't seem to be realistic at this point. I still have to make the encoder structure.
The completed wooden pulleys:
Building Another PS/2 Connector Breakout Board
I constructed another P2/2 Connector Breakout Board so I can attach another pulley to my performance system. This time, I've annotated the photos in Flickr so the next time I construct one of these I don't have to think how to build it again.
The Week in Review / Request for Feedback
It felt very good to spend much of the day in the shop working with my hands. Much of the week, however, was spent struggling with how to make progress on the materials/form of the rope&pulley and also struggling with what I am producing.
Earlier in the week, I was researching materials. There are two directions I am considering: natural wood (mahogany, maple, walnut, cherry, etc) or recycled parts. The natural wood direction comes from my appreciation for naturally finished wooden instruments: electric and acoustic guitars, pianos, etc. The recycled direction relates more closely with one of the themes of the project which is, in a way, the recycling of musical content and the loop-based music metaphor.
When I got stuck researching, I tried to work a bit with the form. I started with raw sketches and then tried to work material in Google Sketchup.
I spent too much time trying to manipulate the materials in Sketchup, though, and became frustrated. A breakthrough occurred when I realized that I could use foam to quickly work through ideas. My previous prototype was cardboard, which is durable, but not easy to work with quickly.
Pretty in Pink: A photo essay about my process today. Click on the individual pictures for notes.
I made three new prototype shapes today and I'm looking for feedback on them.
February 11, 2008
Cutting New Supports
I'm crafting another rope&pulley system -- this time out of wood to address some of the problems I've observed with the cardboard prototype -- and also to explore materials.
1-inch x 3-inch pine stock cut into rough forms to make a new set of pulley supports. I'm going to resize the paper templates I used when I created the cardboard prototype so I can accurately drill and shape these pieces.
February 07, 2008
rope&pulley Tests
Wendy came to ITP today to try out the rope&pulley system. We also shot some videos which better explain the interaction between the user and the system.
Introduction
Here, the rope&pulley is controlling the playback speed, direction, and volume of a sample from Jimi Hendrix's "Red House."
Explanation
Vertical
February 06, 2008
Gesture Drawings
Sketches of people standing up and holding onto poles in the subway
Sketches of Exercise in Coles Athletic Center
Max Patch Revisions
Today I made some revisions to the Max/MSP patches that interface the rope&pulley to the computer. In preparation for the videotaping session I'm doing with Wendy tomorrow, I wanted to make sure that it was easy to switch back and forth between the different patches. When I've done that in the past, I've always run into trouble -- I invariably forget to configure some part of the patch. While cleaning up the patches I found that I could structure things in a way that may make it easier to combine them should the need arise.
I have three different versions of the patch now:
Audio
- rope&pulley controls playback direction (and optionally speed) of user-selectable .wav audio samples.
MIDI
- rope&pulley plays notes on a MIDI synthesizer and can adjust two user-configurable MIDI realtime controller values.
Movie
- rope&pulley scrubs a looped QuickTime movieplays. Scrubbing rate is mapped to the pulley's rotation speed and the scaling of this value can be adjusted from the patch.
February 05, 2008
Gestural Drawing Programs
I've been playing around with the code David Nolan sent us for generating Bezier curves in Processing. I wanted some way to move the Bezier curves around in real time, so I combined David's Bezier code along with customized versions of Daniel Shiffman's interactive selection code and his button class into an interactive bezier drawing program.
Initially I had a bit of a bug which was joining the ends of the curves together:
Next steps:
- Animate
- Make the control points and lines disappear except when they're in use
February 04, 2008
Exercise Equipment Investigation and Observation
I visited the Coles Athletic Center at NYU with Lisa Lurie to observe gestures and get a sense of the haptic feedback that exercise machines provide. While Lisa worked out on the rowing and elliptical machines, I recorded my observations by sketching. I also spent some time working out on the machine to perceive the force feedback it delivered.
General Observations
- When you step into the workout room, all you can hear is the sound of whirring equipment
- The row of elliptical machines looked like a massive multi-cylinder engine as the pistons moved in and out.
Rowing Machine
- Lisa pointed out that the trade-off of energy on the rowing machine is pleasing. In the first half of the cycle, you work to pull the handle to your abdomen. To complete the cycle, you allow the handle to return to its starting point and the machine does the work.
- The rowing machine provides a great deal more resistance than my pulley.
- There is a fan in the rowing machine. Interestingly, the fan spins in only one direction. This may be useful for me. It raises the question of whether the rope&pulley needs to have some sort of inertia. I was thinking about whether to add weights to the pulleys, but another way of approaching this is to make the pulleys behave like bicycle wheels: pulling on the rope adds energy to the system, but the rope won't continue to spin. This may be a tricky mechanism to built.
- The rowing machine works out a bunch of muscle groups. A body takes several different shapes while using the machine from very compressed to fully extended.
- The rowing machine is designed ergonomically for the action it is meant to receive. The handle exits the machine at the height you should be pulling it towards on the abdomen.
- The sound of the rowing machine corresponds to the motion... ZZZzzzZZzzZz z z z ZZZzzzZZzzZz z z z
- There is an expressive quality to the gestures the body makes when exercising on a rowing machine.
Elliptical Machine
- We also tried the elliptical machines
- When using an elliptical machine, the torso is stationary. The arms and legs move and the shoulders twist, but the torso remains in practically the same position.
February 01, 2008
Week 2 Presentation: A Visual Reflection
This evening, I presented by visual reflection to the thesis seminar class and gave a short demo of the current system. Despina asked the class to come up with lists of words that resonated with each of our presentation. The following words were associated with my reflection and demo:
theremin
gestural
expressive
skeletal
movement
tactile
mechanical
playful
delight
contrast (between organic construction and electronic sound)
inventive