Magic Lantern - “The principle of the Magic lantern fonctions by the heat created from the lightbulb that permits the propeller to rotate in a marching procession image that will animate the body of your lampshade like a cinema screen.“
These are great, I like the simplicity - no motors, just a lightbulb.
Beyond Object is something we could do:
1. Build a small set
2. Film a sequence
3. Spray everything white!
4. Project the sequence back onto the set
Scott McCloud has done a bunch of really cool things - notably he’s the author of Understanding Comics.
Another one of which might be an inspiration for a piece - The Story Machine, “is a random idea-generating device along the lines of various surrealist games and devices. Basically, it’s a big map of symbols that you randomly explore (using a four sided D-4 to move north, south, east and west) while creating stories.“
Some technical and curatorial questions raised by Blue, ICE project manager, in case anyone has useful suggestions.
The project is planning a multimedia (DVD/Flash/HTML) presentation of the digital archive they are collecting - representing the oral memories of local Caribbean people.
They have 25 short videos extracted from 45 minute interviews with local people and want to build this into a navigable interface for touchscreen displays in local libraries/museums. They have to build a DVD of these interviews, navigable according to topic/according to interviewee as part of the project plan, and are looking for DVD authors who quote to complete this work (paid contracting).
She’s also currently trying to decide how this material should best be presented as part of the kiosk displays which are to be distributed to local venues. There are a few practical questions which you might have views on. Can they simply run the DVD in a player, driven by a touchscreen? Is it better to buy PCs, with attached touchscreens? Does the content need to be repurposed for this kind of environment? Wonder if anyone on the curiosity list has experience of this kind of deployment, or would know someone. Your suggestions are welcome.
A projector is available on free loan for any future curious installations, if Martin Russ, Chris Rutherford or some other funky electronics person can fix it.
Does that sound like a deal? It’s just blank when you start it up at the moment, as if some kind of CMOS is not booting it properly. None of the buttons work, but it powers up OK.
Its one of these. I’ve looked at it, but I have no idea whatever what to do about it.
This is a project I started but never finished - I’d love to see it work properly!
I’ve got a Hoberman Sphere which with a length of fishing-wire and pully arrangement you can control it’s size. Using a Lego motor and Mindstorms kit I managed to automate it. I can control the size of the sphere via a Java appplication running on a computer and using a Infrared link. Unfortunately, even with a fair amount of gearing, the motor was never really up to it.
The original idea was to sense when someone came near (by camera, passive-infrared, etc) and contract the sphere, like a hedgehog - hence the sphere of fear! If you stood still it would gradually open-up.
I think to get this working we need to get a more powerful mechanism and a way of controlling it from the computer. It would also need a way of sensing how far the sphere is currently expanded - at the moment it simply runs the motor for as preset time known to be sufficient to open or close it.
Chuck Hoberman has created some brilliant expanding structures.
Below is a summary of requests for bits which people were talking about at the meeting and could blog with references. By my reckoning the main takeaway from the meeting was the following
Although I’ll get round to writing up the minutes eventually, some key events were…
There were a lot of suggestions of things at the meeting which people were going to root out for us and blog up here. I think there was another involving faked broken mirrors in some way, maybe whoever it was could dig it out.
Martin was going to dig out some refs for neural maps which distorted body space according to the density of neurons found at that body part - huge genitals, tiny feet, that kind of thing. Also some stock market representations.
Paul saw something at Edinburgh festival, where countries were swelled according to the media stories which were coming out.
I think Michal had some kind of map thing as well, but didn’t manage to get it down. I’ll blog something up on the Zeitgeist maps if I can find them, and Keith Briggs’ statistician timetables.
Chris, do you want to put some stuff up about your coils and other static effects we could use. There was a bit of discussion of making bulbs glow in microwaves, fluorescent tubes glow by rubbing them on your shirt. Any refs of how to do this SAFELY?
This is the amazing growing ball which Dave showed us. There was some kind of link to a massive one in a museum somewhere. Also a link to buy them cheap would be handy if there might be more than one as part of the exhibit.
Vero - could you post a link to openstudios? CSV make a difference day?
Look forward to seeing your blog entries, and if you don’t know where to start, Click here to blog. Full minutes soon to come.
Met up with a girl called Lee this morning - happened to be in the house. Anyway, she told me she’s here doing a project to record in audio and video the memories of people at the Ipswich Caribbean Association.
The Ice Project - Ipswich Carribbean Experience will generate a load of multimedia files which are intended as an archive for Ipswich. I guess this could be a very interesting source for seeding our pipedreams thingy.
A couple of things came to mind from Dave’s Twisted Map idea. For now, take a look at Keith Briggs timetable stuff
Worth blogging a link to the Boston Cyberarts festival, which inspired us quite a bit to set up the curiosity collective in the first place.
A load of material up there - it ran for more than a fortnight with lots of openings all over the city! There’s also a 25 page list of funky techno art links here.
I guess if we get our act together, it would make sense to imagine visiting and participating one day in the future….
“It’s not too early to start early thinking and planning for 2007! If you are an artist or arts organization interested in participating, or a corporation interested in sponsoring the next Festival, please get in touch with us”
From http://www.bostoncyberarts.org/