While I was in Taiwan, I did a bit of research in regards to outdoor solar devices that are built to withstand extreme weather conditions. Taiwan experiences significant rainfall, as well as typhoons, floods, and earthquakes, and since we are designing for heavy flood areas in Africa, I felt this was a good area to do research.
Below is a device that controls the power supply for the surrounding shops. The solar panels on top of the housing powers the back-up battery if there is a power grid failure.
For Physical Computing 2, we are setting up an Aduino to receive serial data from the computer and send it to a 3 digit display (Kingbright BC56-12) through a BCD to 7 segment driver (HEF4543). At this point, I have the Arduino receiving and sending single digits to the driver.
I am currently using a bit mask to shift through each of the digits sent serially to to the Arduino. Here is a link to my code that displays a single digit serially (code).
As part of the introduction to the class Design for the Majority with Ben Bacon and Ji Ping Chang, we watched a speech that Lily Yeh gave as keynote speaker at the Bioneers Conference. It is an unbelievable speech that I am still in a daze from.
Lily Yeh discusses her organization, Barefoot Artists, the importance and power of art in the healing of people, and her experiences with the abandoned lots of Philadelphia and villages devastated by genocide in Rwanda. It is highly recommended viewing. Unbelievably inspirational.
I’m currently going through the reading for my Visual Music Studio class, and I investigated a few of the early films referenced in the reading. Two of my favorites were Opus I (1921) by Walter Ruttmann and An Optical Poem (1937) by Oskar Fischinger.
After watching Busby Berkely’s Dames (1934), I immediately thought of Michel Gondry’s music video for The Chemical Brother’s song Let Forever Be (1999).
I knew of Harry Smith because of his folk music compilations, but I was floored after watching his Early Abstraction pieces. The film exercises from the Whitney brothers were not only advances in visual music but point toward the many possibilities of electronic music.
I enjoyed seeing John and James Whitney’s innovations in automated processes with hand drawings, with a massive jump from their early experiments to pieces such as Yantra and Lapis. Stan Brakhage’s The Dante Quartet (1987) illustrates his abilities in rhythm, pacing, and mixing of colors and movement that “creates an almost hallucineogenic world, a realm somewhere beyond nameable things”.
Reference
Wiseman, Ari, Judith Zilczer, Kerry Brougher, and Jeremy Strick. Visual Music: Synaesthesia in Art and Music Since 1900. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2005.
With a focus on the experiential, my work is concerned with providing situations based in sound. In my work, I address the modern phenomena of ubiquitous information, human interaction, differing environments, the shrinking of physical public space that has become unavailable and less visible, and the consequences of people’s actions becoming more and more severe. My work also is concerned with sound creation as process that enlightens, heals, and informs the environment of its own condition. These themes are applied to an array of different experience-based research projects, musical works, and physical objects.
Early projects, such as Hindsight 2012, a modern sound collage based in rhythm, Asleep All Day, an exercise in repetition and editing, and Ravel Day EP Artwork, an experiment in visual public displays and packaging, are examples of work that address my approach to collaboration, the affect urban environments have on its inhabitants, and a process that allows for new themes to emerge.
The work Max/MSP Controller is the first in a sequence of open-source prototypes that use physical objects to illustrate the relationship of sound and movement. The on-going project Urban Drifts is a series of research–driven bicycle rides through urban spaces that make use of the Situationist International concept of the dérive and tracks the course of the rides using GPS technology. The project uses the series of dérives as an information gathering technique to create a set of photographic works and psychogeographic sound maps of cities I explore. Viewing each location as a chord or intersection of experiences, I’m interested in pursuing the connection between space, environment, experience, and sound. The most recent set was done in New York City, and I am currently making plans to do additional rides in other cities in the future.
We were asked to create a mind map of two questions for the first Design and Education assignment. The questions were: What does education mean to you?, and What does design mean to you?
For Visual Music Studio, the first assignment for the visual artists was to choose one piece of music from three options and create an original 2D image response/translation/interpretation to the chosen piece of music (no moving-image pieces).
I chose Steve Reich’s “Octet”, which you can listen to here:
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
While listening to the piece, I wrote down keywords that came to mind and made an initial sketch (see scanned sketch below). Using my initial notes, I created a collage using construction paper and a few magazines I had around the apartment. I searched out the color scheme I had seen while listening to Reich’s piece (blue, silver, and white) and cut small square pieces.
I felt that each tone had a square aspect that rotated around a central theme. I looked to provide the illusion of rotation upon itself as well as an equal layered distribution of the instruments. I created an underlying layer of small squares that continuously rotated under the center theme that had a slower and less frantic aspect.
The color scheme related to the emotional characteristics I felt the piece had. The repetitive nature of the fast moving elements created a cool and calming aspect and provided a bed for the large fluid main theme.
For Visual Music Studio, the first assignment for the visual artists was to choose one piece of music from three options and create an original 2D image response/translation/interpretation to the chosen piece of music (no moving-image pieces).
I chose Steve Reich’s “Octet”, which you can listen to here:
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
While listening to the piece, I wrote down keywords that came to mind and made an initial sketch (see scanned sketch below). Using my initial notes, I created a collage using construction paper and a few magazines I had around the apartment. I searched out the color scheme I had seen while listening to Reich’s piece (blue, silver, and white) and cut small square pieces.
I felt that each tone had a square aspect that rotated around a central theme. I looked to provide the illusion of rotation upon itself as well as an equal layered distribution of the instruments. I created an underlying layer of small squares that continuously rotated under the center theme that had a slower and less frantic aspect.
The color scheme related to the emotional characteristics I felt the piece had. The repetitive nature of the fast moving elements created a cool and calming aspect and provided a bed for the large fluid main theme.
One of my favorites when it comes to physical computing and it’s application to music, Einsturzende Neubauten changed the way I thought about music. Here is a portion of 1/2 Mensch (1986), a film made by Japanese director Sogo Ishii during Neubauten’s tour of Japan.
Here is a great interview on their approach and methods:
