Physical Computing
Max/MSP Controller
Interactive Architecture – Chair
Sound
Hindsight 2012
Asleep All Day
Could It Be
Fill My Ears
7 Songs in 7 Days
Urban Drifts
Visual
Hayward Field
Ravel Day EP Artwork
Sam Horine Website
Postcard Instruction Set
Osmundo Echevarria Documentary
Visual Music
Physical Computing
Max/MSP Controller
For my Physical Computing and Max MSP finals, I made a controller that uses an ADXL 335 Accelerometer and an Arduino board that communicates serially with Max MSP. The Max MSP patch is a simple sequencer that allows for delay on all tracks.
This is a video demonstration of the controller:
Here are reviews of the controller on Engadget and Hack a Day.
Interactive Architecture – Chair
In collaboration with Zane Murray, a Product Designer at Parsons, we developed an interactive architecture prototype of a chair. We envision environments that are not made up of static objects, but fluid and dynamic systems that respond to simple gestures, taking various desired forms. Our prototype is of a chair that could be formed anywhere within a room.
This is a video demonstration of our prototype:
In addition to floors, woven materials made of flexible metal and reusable/recycled components could be embedded with intelligent technology within walls, ceilings, and other surrounding spaces that provide a full feedback loop of true interaction. Here are a number of photos of the prototype:
The programming for this project was done with two Ardweeny chips running an Arduino program that I wrote making use of the Servo library (see comments for code). These chips were placed on to two separate pc boards attached to 10 full-rotation servo motors as well as 2 sensors (Ultrasonic Range Finder – Maxbotix LV-EZ1) and 10 reed switches. The reed switches were placed at the end of each row and magnets were used to consistently calibrate the location of the wheeled carts guiding the nitinol.
Sound
Hindsight 2012
For Hindsight 2012, I made a step toward modern sound composition and made use of theories such as sound collage, chance, and adapted found sound. I read the book dadaism by Dietmar Elger, and I was heavily influenced by a quote by the artist, Kurt Schwitters. Schwitters states, “you know exactly as I do what art is: it is nothing more than a rhythm. But if that is so, I shan’t bother myself with imitation or the soul, but purely and simply produce rhythms with whatever takes my fancy.” It was important for me to convey my beliefs in awareness, our common journey in life, and using rhythm as a constant wave, so with Schwitters statement in mind, I chose this experimental piece to express it. This song was featured on The Mugs album “Here Tomorrow”.
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Asleep All Day
For Asleep All Day, there was a preconceived plan for the entire piece. As opposed to Hindsight 2012 where I did not concern myself with what the final piece would sound like when I started the project, I approached Asleep All Day with the idea that I would have a song at the end of it. I also gave myself specific goals and steps to complete, such as writing and performing a somewhat repetitive, looping song for a vocalist and editing the vocal recordings into a cohesive rhythmic statement (irregardless of lyrical content or sense). Again, process was a key component to the experience. This song was featured on The Mugs album “Here Tomorrow”.
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Could It Be
For Could It Be, I wrote the music first, allowing the instrumentals to become developed before coming up with a lyrical concept. While writing the song, I thought about the difference between people that you know. With some people, you can pick up right where you left off as if no time has passed since last seeing them, but with others, a space grows between. This song was featured on The Mugs album “Ravel Day EP”.
The song was featured as KEXP’s “Song of the Day” and performed it live for Radio New York and NPR. This is also the first time I wrote and performed the lead vocals.
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Fill My Ears
The concept for Fill My Ears comes from my desire to surround myself with sounds, whether people, music, or spaces, that fulfill me as a person. I collaborated with Jeremy Gough to flesh out the lyrical content as well as Nick Moy to provide layers of vocals. I created an extended remix of the song as an outro by dicing up fragments of the vocals to create looping samples. This song will be featured on The Mugs upcoming release.
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7 Songs in 7 Days
The goal of this project was to create and complete one project each day, for seven consecutive days. I defined a set of constraints for the week, and then working with those constraints, created something each day of the week. My constraints were writing a song in a different Major key each day using a tempo from a random number generator.
Here are the songs from each day:
Urban Drifts
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. At the outset, the goal of the project was to use the series of dérives as a probe and information gathering technique to create a set of photographic works and psychogeographic sound maps of cities I explored.
The reason for the project is my interest in exploring the connection between urban landscapes and the emotions and actions of the inhabitants of that urban space and looking to see what new insights technology (primarily GPS tracking) and psychogeographic maps can shed on this relationship.
For each dérive, I would choose an initial direction and then allow the local surroundings, such as the architecture, the sounds, the smells and the overall feel of the space to guide where I went next. I would drop my usual motives for movement and action (such as heading to school) and let myself “be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters.”
To create the sound maps, I built a patch in Max MSP that applied the GPS data I collected during these rides to sound; making use of the latitude, longitude, elevation, speed, and duration, the midi output program I created expressed these many elements in successive tones. I considered my various latitude and longitude positions (or intersecting points) as chords, assigning a note to each value. The speed at which I was moving altered how quickly the notes (or chords of latitude/longitude) were played in succession, and the length of time I was in an area of space affects how long the notes were held.
Here are samples of photos that were taken during this derive series:
Here is a video demonstrations of a dérive used in the program:
For more information about this project, please check out the full description here.
Visual
Hayward Field
The following photo was taken from the backstretch (around the 175m mark) of Hayward Field in Eugene, OR, and to me it shows the reason why this track stadium is known around the world. The fans. For all of those great performances, there have always been hungry track and field fans in the stands to take it in.
Character, a San Francisco-based design firm, used my photo in the Nike ad campaign for the Prefontaine Classic. Below are some examples of where my photo ended up:
Ravel Day EP
In the Ravel Day EP Artwork project, my concept was to interact with the public in a visual way and use a central theme for multiple installations to provide people with a sense of recognition when they saw them. The end result was a photo series of street art that we put up in neighborhoods in Brooklyn, with each photo being a unique representation of the surroundings. Drawing inspiration from Sam Horine and Elbow Toe, I collaborated with Brett Tieman who produced the paste-ups and graffiti that I photographed.
I underwent video-assisted thoracic surgery mid-way through this project, and I was able to explore the neighborhoods of our street art installations more thoroughly on my recovery walks. In seeing these areas as part of the project, I expanded the approach of taking photos to include the neighborhood and city areas that contained our street art paste-ups.
While resting at home and recovering from surgery, I was also able to see the full scope of the pictures (which were done with a Polaroid camera) and decided to create an online photo set that documented the full series and illustrate the wider spectrum the photo project had become. We ended up with something that moved beyond the original goal; seeing fragments of the project on the streets where they live, obtaining a version of the source photo, and viewing the collection of photos online, listeners could better identify with and contextualize the music. They could be reminded of a larger story. In the end I felt that in accepting new ideas, the end result of the packaging better informed the listener of the music it contained.
You can see the full set of polaroids that were included in the Ravel Day EP packaging here. To read more about the project, you can go to my portfolio website or The Mugs website.
Sam Horine Website
I designed the website for the Brooklyn photographer, Sam Horine. We discussed features that he wanted to have in his site (side scroll) as well as tone and overall mood of the website. We went through an initial test, and then finalized a design that provided him the ability to continually update the site with new photographs and maintain the look of the website.
Postcard Instruction Set
As part of a group project for Interface Major Studio, Minhao Yu and I developed an instruction set for the users of Bryant Park. Through research and observation, we determined the location within the park to carry out our project and created a self-addressed postcard that requested the individual to respond to a series of questions as well as draw a personal logo.
We prepared 4 sets of 25 colored postcard questionnaires, and when I handed the postcards to the individual or group, I did not let them know what it was that I was handing them.
The affordances of the object (the question, the address and stamped postcard) would indicate to the person what we wanted them to do, which was to fill out the questionnaire and mail it back to us.
Out of the 100 postcards that we handed out to visitors/commuters of the park, 25 were mailed back to us. The responses varied in tone and effort, but all postcards returned shed more light on the people who visit Bryant Park.
The challenges to the project involved the complete physical transformation of the park from summer venue to winter skating rink. These changes, as well as the affects on the visitors of the park, all made for an amazing learning experience in research, ethnography, experience design, and instruction sets.
Osmundo Echevarria Documentary
This is a documentary I did in callaboration with Ashley Ahn about Osmundo Echevarria, a decorative painter whose studio is in Long Island City, Queens. Ashley and I both directed, produced, and edited the piece, and I did the music and photography.
Visual Music
Original public domain source material: D.O.A. (1950)
Through the manipulation of public domain film and sound composition, I was investigating the meaning and use of gesture as it relates to human interaction. By using film from the late 1940′s and early 1950′s, which often times contain exaggerated movements from the actors to express a point, the element of memory and nostalgia become ways of describing these gestures.
Using a simple storyboard drawn by Mark Lev and the interaction between a man and woman from the film D.O.A. (1950), I wanted to represent a progression of emotions, from happy/content, introducing instability, in to full-blown psychosis, and ending with a sustained calm.