Swollenballs
Huberman Sphere which responds to proximity by shrinking, hence also known as the fear sphere
Blog
Assignments
Finally documented the pieces, and who’s going to work on them.
The exhibits page now contains a table showing who’s doing each piece and a link to the descriptive page for the piece . Exhibits we’re saving for later have been moved to the fragments page.
A page has been created for each of the pieces. Each descriptive page links to blogged discussions (assuming people tag their postings according to the piece they’re discussing).
Contributors should be able to edit these pages through Site-Admin=>Manage=>Pages.
So go here to see all the pieces, and people assigned to them
Later that night…
I also managed to get the first version of hell in a handcar running. Just a simple applet, which plays a series of frames from the let’s go to birmingham video, and where the framerate is controlled by the position of the mouse. The higher the mouse position the faster you go.
Don’t know whether this will be able to handle the framerates that I need, so any suggestions as to alternative environments for manipulating and rendering video loaded from files, would be welcome. Processing seems to handle video loaded from cameras much better - the link to the Quicktime library is a bit flakey.
Ideas arising:
- Like the idea of using the webcam to control it - in other words, need two people to act out the handcart movement in order to power it along - could detect height the two people. Saves on having any mechanism at all, and horrible insurance nightmares from having high inertia flywheel, scaffolding bars or any other public dangers
- If I do create some kind of physical mechanism - bicycles or hand pump, wonder if I can use an actual mouse connected to the rotating wheel to control it. Would be a lot easier than a BC-24 board or similar.
Processing does seem like a fairly accessible programming and deployment environment for rapid prototyping, or for those who want to just get down to creating interactive visuals which are fairly simple.
Dumbest processing app
Finished a very dumb little processing app, but my first and quite pleased with how much you can do with so little code.
It’s inlined in the blog if you click ‘more’ below but if this doesn’t work, try here to go direct to the webpage with the embedded applet generated by processing.
Based on what I’ve seen processing can do, I think I might start on hell in a handcar using video support (dynamo, lightbulb, isight, and let’s go to birmingham - I’m sure you can all imagine the arrangement). Then I’ll move on to the pipedreams thing using Sonia.
width="400" height="400">
To view this content, you need to install Java from java.cominteraction via camera
We’ve talked a fair bit about different ways you can use a camera feed to interact with a piece -
PIXEL SNOW is a nice example from Francis Lam (MIT, Media Lab) using Processing, as are the projects at www.setpixel.com.
The new version of Flash (version 8) allows you to embed interactive pieces into webpages which is very cool - if you have a webcam, install the new flash and look here.
lamp-nest
Still working on paper sculptures. This is an idea for lamp-nest. The photo doesn’t give too much detail, but the whole piece is made out of shredded documents. I need to consider some structural moments, like not setting the world on fire . . .
Hippasus of Metapontum
Just saw an interesting installation in Boston at Patricia Doran Graduate Gallery. It was a one-day installation by Jessica Gath.
The only material used was salt.
Collision 8: “El Ocho”
News from Boston: today was an amazing opening of collision 8 “El Ocho”, lots of mad technology, and surface video sculpture stuff. I think Jeff Lieberman and Andy Zimmermann stood out. Would try to come back in a day light and document some of it.
Of course if you are in Boston, stop by. See link above!
Montage
Here are a bunch of fun links related to [Dave’s?] video portrait montage idea.
The idea roughly is to gather an image of the person viewing the artwork, and then generate a matching image out of lots of webcam images taken from around the rest of the gallery. If this could be done in real time, it would create a shifting mass of funky real-time video stuff.
Anyway, here are the links…
http://www.ofb.net/~wtanaka/projects/dcent/ Playful
http://grant.robinson.name/projects/montage-a-google/ Tagging - nice
http://www.stud.uni-hannover.de/~michaelt/juggle/ Dave’s original link
Wind machine
I made an amazing wind generator from really basic things. really quick. most exciting is it’s working and producing electricity. Maybe someone would be interested. picture is coming… 
Here’s the picture: 
Does not look nice but remember:
- it took only two hours to make it
- it’s working
- it’s producing electricity!