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Posted by Cefn on 07 January 2006 | 1 Comments
It looks to me as if, (in principle), we could have the following pieces in place for upcoming exhibition dates.
echo
handcar
swollenballs
fridgemagnets
pipedreams
Please let me know if there are others which could credibly be constructed in the remaining time (around 3 to 4 months). I think puppet, springthing and twistedmap are in the balance - progress has been made, but not sure if the final execution of these pieces has been decided.
Initially, a preview exhibition may be requested from contributors to the Ipswich Artists group, as a kind of proof of concept for the use of St. Mary’s as an artist-run space. That might be within the coming 3 to 4 months.
This won’t require so many exhibits as the full blown Curiosity exhibition, which should come around March-April time. However we’ll need to commit to doing both of these round about now.
Please add comments to this post or email me by reply with your views.
Posted in:
Curiosity Shows
Posted by Cefn on 07 January 2006 | 1 Comments
While I’m about buying electronics components I’m picking up bits and pieces to implement a basic version of Dave’s Huberman Sphere of Fear.
Basically I reckon the most flexible configuration needs a moderately powerful stepper motor, an array of transistors to handle the higher voltages to drive the motor, and (yet another) ultrasonic detector, with a microcontroller to control the behaviour.
If the detection ranges are small enough (< 2 metres), it might be possible to use a cheaper analog distance sensor, and a simpler circuit to control it. While this will be cheaper (the analogue Infrared distance detectors are £6 instead of £15 plus for the ultrasonic ones, microcontrollers costs around £25 plus), it involves a lot more mental effort. So I’m going to pick up the components for the more expensive approach. We can re-use these elements easily for some other fun project if they are surplus.
I gather that the physical rigging of the huberman sphere (to stop it jamming) still requires a bit of extra engineering though. Probably a good idea (if the sphere is big enough) to suspend it so that it’s out of reach when it retracts, to stop people messing about. Might be a nice effect anyway to have it untouchable.
Are you still buying the huge one from Hamleys, Dave?
Posted in:
Miscellaneous
Posted by Cefn on 07 January 2006 | 1 Comments
It strikes me that with Dave’s new idea, and a few more sonar devices, we could run the handcar piece off a Basic stamp.
Katya was using a Basic Stamp and a Sonar device to control the light in her Echo piece - people approaching would activate the light sequence and you could see it echoing through the multiple layers of video feedback picture.
For the handcar, we could just have two sonar devices detecting the height of the two people (they would have to stand on footprints to position themselves correctly) and then use this to detect their up and down oscillations (acting out the handcar). Plug the stamp, running appropriate code, into a digital potentiometer and then you can control the speed of the projector!
Posted in:
Miscellaneous
Posted by Cefn on 07 January 2006 | 1 Comments
From the soup of chips and accessories I’ve been looking at for the Basic Stamp from Parallax, I wonder if these accelerometers might give you the system you need to be able to control a puppet or similar without leaving a mac powerbook in the hands of the great british public.
There’s a bunch of modules you can use to extend the stamp, like these.
Also got a PIC from microchip on its way as an alternative platform for experimentation.
Posted in:
Miscellaneous
Posted by Dave on 04 January 2006 | 4 Comments
OK this might sound a bit daft, but if we could convert DVD or MPEG (or whatever) on to cine-film then we could use a relatively cheap projector. Perhaps of use to the handcar?
This is related to Cefn’s home-made projector posting.
Now, this may be a false economy (and I haven’t found anywhere that’ll do this), but I think it could be rather interesting. What do you think?
Cheers,
Dave
Posted in:
Miscellaneous
Posted by Cefn on 02 January 2006 | 0 Comments
Wanted to get to the point that we can experiment with different story and game forms for the pipedreams installation.
So I’ve been constructing an emulator which has text input and output for multiple channels (a text emulator for multiple phone microphones and earpieces) to debug story development across multiple channels, based on solicited responses.
Still trying to structure in my head audio interactions which will permit people’s recorded contributions to be fed meaningfully back into the dynamic piece.
The surrealist game exquisite corpse is quite inspiring as a simple structure, but even more fun is this M�bius Corpse game. I’m sure there are a whole load of possibilities.
If anyone has ideas or wants to experiment with this framework for themselves I can arrange to post the source somewhere when it’s properly debugged.
Should be fairly straightforward to use the interfaces defined, test them on ‘recorded’ text and then seamlessly transfer them to the real audio environment if people have games in mind to try out.
Currently the interfaces lay out as below. A text emulated version of all these interfaces has been built to run inside a Swing frame with text color fading out with age so it’s easy to work out what’s going on. Hopefully it should be easy enough that even non-java programmers could pick it up fairly easily.
Game.java
Channel.java
ChannelRecording.java
InputChannel.java
OutputChannel.java
LiveInputChannel.java
LiveOutputChannel.java
RecordedInputChannel.java
RecordedOutputChannel.java
Posted in:
Miscellaneous
Posted by Cefn on 31 December 2005 | 0 Comments
Getting together the gear to build the pipedreams system.
The plan is based on USB VoIP phones and USB hubs both of which are really cheap these days. I think this should give us as many audio channels out of one computer as we want.
I’ve just placed an order for 3 different VoIP phones to see which are the most effective. Wondering whether it might be nicer just to have phones hanging there, instead of pipes.
It’s much simpler to start with, although maybe later could get on with pipes.
Will need to chain together a bunch of USB hubs to get enough ports.
Going to build the game logic in Java and the audio manipulation on JSyn (which is the library behind Processing’s Sonia library). Nice holiday project.
While rummaging around on geeks.com I found this Linksys Wireless-G WVC54G 802.11g Internet Video Camera which could be useful for projects needing a webcam, serves up an MPEG4 encoded stream from a built-in webserver (doesn’t need a computer) over a WiFi network. But it is kinda expensive.
Posted in:
Miscellaneous
Posted by Dave on 20 December 2005 | 0 Comments
Hi - if you’ve not seen the Powers of Ten movie before - take a look at this.
There’s more to be found at http://www.powersof10.com/ too.
Cheers,
Dave
Posted in:
Miscellaneous
Posted by Dave on 20 December 2005 | 0 Comments
Hi Everyone,
Here’s the first version of my code to read the PowerBook (or iBook) orientation in Flash and Java: www.davidchatting.com/boiling-frogs/motion/. This is the code Craig and I used to for the powerbook puppet.
Please let me know if you try it out.
Cheers,
Dave
Posted in:
Miscellaneous
Posted by Cefn on 15 December 2005 | 0 Comments
Katya and I had some fun with archived video and after effects. I’m sure she won’t mind sharing this preview.
Joint effort finding the clips off archive.org but Katya did the final editing. My version looked crap. ‘Clean’ is still a work in progress, but hope you like this montage presentation of very strange, but genuine archived clips.
If you are reading this on the website, click here to see the movie
Posted in:
Miscellaneous
