After playing around with origami as a possible “messing about” activity, I decided that it was too dependent on following a specific set of instructions. Group members would be forced to follow written directions closely, or listen to one speaker demonstrating each fold. Something so based in following directions might not be the best way to stimulate conversation. Plus, origami isn’t nearly messy enough.

Macaroni necklaces share some key traits with the inspiration activity of knitting

• Both are solitary activities that can be performed in the company of others (or cooperatively)
• Both use the only the hands (unless the necklace-maker or knitter is extraordinarily talented with his or her feet)
• Both create some kind of wearable output
• Both can be extremely simple or extraordinarily complex.
• Both have somewhat gendered associations

Making macaroni jewelry should stimulate group conversation because it’s an easy, repetitive activity that won’t be distracting. Like knitting, (and unlike origami), the participants can choose to create a pattern or choose pasta-beads at random. They can also draw inspiration from other group members.

Improving on Knitting?
Greer mentions her annoyance at strangers who pester her with questions about knitting, even though they don’t know how to knit and have no intention of learning.# Although knitting only requires knowing two stitches, if you don’t know them, knitting is closed off. It’s not the type of activity you can pick up easily just by watching. Passers-by could join in a drum circle without much prior bongo experience, but they couldn’t jump into a knitting circle. They could, however, make macaroni necklaces quite easily.

While members of a knitting circle bring their own yarn, patterns, and supplies, the materials for macaroni necklaces are communal, which should lead to more interaction. In fact, the group could make one macaroni necklace, with one person at a time choosing and stringing a bead (it would be tedious, but possible). Knitting simply cannot be done by more than one person.

The goal of this week’s design challenge is to create a “messing about” that opens people up into simultaneous social and analytical thinking. This challenge was based on Ratto’s paper, “Critical Making: Conceptual and Material Studies in Technology and Social Life” in which he discusses the act of “making” as a lubricant for opening up shared social experience and critical thinking.It also spawned from discussions of Greer’s paper “Taking Back the Knit: Creating Communitites via Needlecraft” who promotes the idea of crafts for their socially engaging qualities.

I was attracted to Ratto’s discussion of how “making” brings with it the emotional dimension of learning which tends to be neglected in most positivistic educational methods. He states,

“The importance of affectual relations in meaning-making has also been emphasized in Knorr-Cetina’s work (1997) on the relationship between scientists and the “epistemic objects” with which they work. For us, affect serves as a way to begin to understand the importance of personal investment in linking conceptual understandings of technology’s potential and its problems to everyday experience.”

My work deals with animals, their behavior and performance. Often, I am challenged with the task of thinking of interesting things to do with the ants, or questioning why certain behaviors exist. This is a daunting task, and difficult to pursue in an entirely abstract, mental manner. The same couple of standard facts about ants tend to cycle over and over in my mind, striking me as boring or impractical.

I find most of my successes in digital-biotic design come from direct combinations of abstract research and physical play. For the design project today, I have made a game to explore the “materiality” of ants.

Preparation

First, I went and collected some local, harmless wood-ants from a nearby hiking trail. Next I put the colony under anasthesia in order to paint them with my very own magnetic insect paint. Finally I took some plastic containers and coated them with a non-stick teflon paint (fluon, or “Insect-a-slip”).

Gameplay

The goal of the project is to see what concepts, emotions, and comprehensions arise from the activity.  To play, each person chooses an anteater character which represents a different modality for interacting with the insects. In all, the picker-uppers include: Two types of magnetic grabbers, a sticky-grabber,  warm mammalian hands, and cold, accurate tweezers. There is also a bonus power-up where people can use an insect aspirator to vacuum up the ants.

The game starts by dumping the prepared ants into the arena, and then, in the Hungry Hungry Hippos style, everyone tries to collect as many into her or his own buckets.

Original Design

Combining the user vs designer discussion and the risk vs certainty discussion:
Take an existing digital device (phone, GPS system, laptop, whatever) and re-imagine it in a way where user and design “time” get closer together. You goal is to get “users” to (re)design the object. Your challenge is to provide means for this re-design.

Copy Machines can be more then just a mere productive tools to work with. They have a distinct aesthetic and an own performative aspect to them. Everyone that worked with Copy Machines for a longer time, knows about their rhythmical, peaceful conditioning and there potential to become tools of Zen practice.

However there is one big problem: Copy Machines are usually placed in ugly corners, which are uncomfortable and therefore tend to force their interactor into social isolation. I propose to stage a party centered around two Copy Machines in order to overcome their bad reputation.

By using two Copy Machines at once, it becomes quite a fun and meditative challenge to be as much productive as possible. The goal of the interactor operating this two machines at the same time, the CJ, should be to merge with the electro-mechanical apparatus. His movements become dance, the synchronized sound and light of the machines shell embrace the whole scenery.

By hacking Copy Machines in the first place, the CJ may make sure that the rhythm of movement, sound and light is synchronized with the music and lightning of the party. Therefore a CJ performance is not only a celebration of Sisyphus task in an postindustrial age, but it also stages the gap between work and play. It aims to opens up new perspectives on boring work-benches and provides a breading herd for people to develop more creative and efficient ways to deal with them.

The notion of “messing about” from Papert (1998) and Hawkins (1965) is about embracing unintended effects during crafting as a source of learning and ideation. This helps interactors “overcome the ‘rigid style of work’ typically associated with [electronics]” (Ratto 2011).

Another type of object that we commonly associate with a rigid style of work, especially as adults, is everyday paper. In this case I’m specifically setting my sights on index cards, which for me evoke memories of studying flash cards, browsing library card catalogs, preparing bibliography entries, and generally taking care of schoolwork or business the old fashioned way. For my concept today, I’m be introducing a way to mess about with index cards to, hopefully, help us overcome the rigid style of work typically associated with office/school paper products.

There’s another theory that we need to account for, however: in writing about knitting for her MA Thesis, Betsy Greer (2004) highlights how, “A space for conversation opens up somehow, with this simple act.” Greer’s words immediately before that statement better explains the meaning:

We don’t just need to rethink our relationship to paper supplies. We need a conversation starter.

There are so many ways to design and decorate your Facecards

I’m pleased to report that while working on these crafts, within a period of only a few hours I had nearly a half dozen classmates stop to talk and ask me what I was up to. After I finished crafting, and just had them sitting around on my desk, I still drew in an unusual amount of attention and discussion with acquaintances that I ordinarily only speak with at most a few times each semester.

I arrived at this concept after discarding a multiplayer electronic game idea – for fear that competition would get in the way of casual conversation – and a stairstep paper folding maze I made multiple prototypes for. Inspired by Greer’s ideas, I was searching for a solution that fit as many of these criteria as possible from the domain of hobbyist knitting:

• Non-competitive. There’s no winner or loser. People of varying skill can all participate together without anyone feeling shut down by it.

• Range for skill. More experienced participants are able to challenge themselves, while people newer to the activity are able to still complete projects and achieve output meaningful to other people. This also means that someone practicing the skill has room to improve at it, achieving new and different results with time.

• One artifact produced per individual, ready to be saved or gifted. This untangling from one another’s production makes it easier for the group to be flexible, welcoming in new members at any time and experience level. Everyone can be at different phases on projects of different complexity. This also works better for fitting the task into everyday life, since participants can miss or come late to a meeting and not be “behind” thereafter. This quality reduces stress and logistical overhead.

• Conversation enabler while making. The craft needs to occupy enough of each maker’s attention to take pressure off the intensity of eye contact or meeting just to talk, while leaving enough attention free to engage in full and meaningful conversation with others.

• Conversation starter when done. Like the knitting needles hanging out of Greer’s handbag, the craft needs to be something which can spark conversation with others even when it’s not being actively done.

• The goal of each artifact can be made open or kept personal. Everyone’s producing a unique artifact, which they are welcome to either share details of with the group (ex. “Oh, this is for my nephew Jacob”) or keep those intentions to themselves (“Today I’m making a scarf”). The separation between artifact and who it is being made for is left ambiguous, in a way that say, writing letters or making gift cards, would easily reveal.

• Not pretentious. These artifacts make no claim to be high art, or aren’t concerned with conceptual and theoretical posturing. They get made primarily because they are enjoyable or relaxing to make, and they get saved or shared primarily because everyday people like the results.

• Within anyone’s price range. This isn’t an activity just for people with major financial means. It’s an activity for anyone and everyone.

In the mid-1990’s, I learned basic paper pop-up craft from Paul Jackon’s The Pop-Up Book: Step-by-Step Instructions for Creating Over 100 Original Paper Projects. One of the simplest designs included, which produced appealing and playful output from comparatively little effort or skill, was a frog face that opens and closes its eyes and mouth as a page is folded or unfolded. Since this is so simple to learn and do, and creates room for skilled customization through painting or more advanced cutting, it seemed to me a suitable craft to adapt and elaborate upon.

I’ve incorporated watercolor paints as the decoration method of choice, in part because for many of us it evokes elementary art class, which was one of our first and few courses in life where freely socializing while working with our hands was the norm. As a minor modification to the folding, I added side flaps, which makes it easier to open and close the mouth to play with the artifact like a puppet. I changed the plans from full-size pages to index cards because they’re stronger than regular paper–so they hold up better to the watercolors–plus they’re small enough to be easily stored, and it’s possible to buy hundreds of them for only a few dollars. Since this cutting pattern is simple enough to work with scissors, no X-Acto blade is really needed, conceivably hundreds of these can be made for only $5-$10 spent on watercolors and index cards.

Lastly, because the final artifacts lay flat when finished, it would be trivial to scan these, at which point they could be e-mailed as patterns, shared via a database, or textured to a 3D model in-browser (for previewing customization ideas by others… or even for mapping on a character within a game). People could share their Facecard Friend designs not only with the people around them, but with the whole world, creating a potential audience for those interested in taking Facecard crafting to the next level.

For more information, here are my two one-sided pages:

Guide: Text Page

Guide: Images Page

This “messing about” works to make abstract concepts of philosophy more comprehensible through a material connection to a pet rock. The act of making the rock and of taking the rock should open new perspectives on the philosophical figure and the ideas this figure develops. The constructed object is a medium between the intellectual and the playful, the material and the digital. The maker should assemble the pet rock as an embodiment of the forthcoming theoretical reflections saved in digital space and tagged to this object.

This digital message can be a YouTube video, a twitter account, a blog, a facebook page, or any sort of social media channel traditionally associated with a living person who walks and breathes. This messing about complicates the rigid notion of personal profiles online, by repurposing these spaces as a forum for dialog between an anonymous conduit for a lofty or inaccessible figure and a recipient of a childish physical object.

Attaching a QR code to the object will provide a hyperlink to the rock’s “soul” in digital space. The maker of this hybrid object can explore different perspectives by producing digital artifacts as if he were the philosopher. The recipient can exploit the methods of two-way communication built into social networks in order to communicate with the figure embodied by his found rock.

Making the rock might prompt questions such as:

1. Who will care for my rock?
2. What does my rock stand for?
3. How will my rock be received?

These questions refer to the physical object being made, but metaphorically extend to the human figure it represents. For example

1. Who will care for this figure?
2. What does this figure stand for?
3. How will this character be received?

The recipient of the rock might ask, “How is this rock meaningful in my life?” to which he can begin to find the answer exploring the digital information matched with this crafted object.

Welcome back!

The first design challenge for the new term follows Ratto’s ideas of critical making: Design a “messing about” one that aims to fulfill Greer’s point: “A space for conversation opens up somehow, with this simple act.” Looking forward to see the ideas.

Some news clip on the Invention Lab and the Maker Club at Tech.

Should be worth a look once the term is back on track.

People who step onto balance boards in this interactive installation are complicit in the production of a collective painting. They participate in a process that combines traditional artistic mediums with networked electronic communication.

Each of the two balance boards can be manned by one, but are large enough to accommodate two, affording the chance for human connection through serendipitous engagement. Bystanders dictate the color of the painting, dipping balls into nearby paint buckets and tossing these into the production frame. The paper in the framework is replaced and the painted piece hung up to dry. People take away the work as a record of their collaborative effort.

This project evokes the nostalgia of our childhoods through a combination of three formative games: labyrinth puzzles, Montessori balance boards and marble paintings. The two-dimensional art in the production frame evolves organically as users movements on the balance boards transform into digital signals. These signals are communicated over a short distance to the double-axis production frame, where the kinetic movement of paint-covered balls are a focal point of the performance.

Via incoming PhD candidate Mariam Asad: awesome biomedia project

This project provides a collaborating experience, where performer and audiences will work together using their body as an expressive tool to create dynamic paintings. On one hand, the performer will be dancing on the stage while painting positive shapes. A kinect will be recognizing and recording the performances movements so that the performer could use his/her full body as paint brush to paint on the screen. The paint action itself will be recorded and animated. On the other hand, the participants will also paint in front of the dancer to “erase” and paint over with negative shapes. Together, the dancer and the participants create a dynamic painting with their shadows interacting with each other.

The audiences will be participating with the creation of the dynamic painting by revisiting and modifying the dancer’s movements. It’s very interactive and illuminating in the night .

Here’s the video prototype of the project:

Progress for this week on the Origami project:
Learning to work with an IC to create the flashing led. Changing the capacitor changes the frequency at which the lights flash. This along with a variation in LED color should distinguish the different origami pieces from each other.

With origami paper, I experimented with wax paper and parchment, finally settling on parchment because it is not slippery and still lets a good bit of light through. Next step is to integrate the LED with the paper somehow.

And, finally a video of the vision!

For my submission, I want to explore the somewhat inexact craft/practice of circuit bending. Circuit bending is a process by which anybody can open up a simple noise-making circuit (as in a child’s toy), and begin playing with it to make new noises. A lot of the process of circuit bending is about experimentation and playing with the circuit in a manner the is both fearless and exploratory. In practice, circuit bending can do a lot to make the physicality of a circuit real. Those who see all machine and computer inner workings as a black box guided by mystical electronic forces may learn a lot through a simple act like placing your finger on a circuit board and changing the pitch of the resulting sound.

I propose a sort of bend-by numbers approach to a circuit bending station for Flux. Here, any number of pre-opened toys will be arranged on a table. Each toy will have its circuit exposed and come with things like alligator clips, potentiometers, switches, and resistors. Depending on the nature of each toy, some may have a few wires pre-soldered to them if it enables an easier or more enjoyable experience in bending for the participants. Each circuit will be labeled or marked in some way with either some permanent marker or colored electrical tape. These markings will indicate places to attach alligator clips, or a pontentiometer, or to rub your finger over. Each will hopefully result in the creation of a sound since these spots will be pre-determined in the first place.

Here is the text from my proposition for a FLUX 2012 project. The full PDF with pictures can be viewed here: Antmungous_AQ_01

————————-

Antmongous

Proposal for FLUX 2012

Andrew Quitmeyer (GAtech phd researcher)

Digital world and Image Group | Multi-Agent Systems and Robotics Lab

Antmongous is an embodied, interactive exhibit featuring live, continuous communication between humans and a live colony of ants. The exhibit will be physically spread throughout the Flux festival but exist in harmony with the other works. It will encourage participant exploration by emergently provoking individuals or groups to follow ant-designated paths, but its design will not detract from or overshadow the exhibits situated along these routes. In essence, it becomes a collaborative scavenger hunt between humans and ants that runs in parallel with the festival, and requires no outside technological distractions (eg. Smartphones) on behalf of the participant.

Any money received from the commission will be spent exclusively on materials. The artist and his supporting labs will waive any other fees.

Entomological Background

Ants, such as our Aphaenogaster cockerelli, are able to work collectively to find and recover nutrients in the environment without direct communication. Simple, distributed behaviors enable many separate individuals to display emergent, large scale behaviors such as optimal path finding. The goal of Antmongous is to situate humans within this network of the ants’ actions, and have them replicate the ants’ behaviors.

CORE DESIGN

Castleberry Hill for Ants

First, we shall replicate the networked layout of the Castleberry Hill festival location, as an abstracted, 1/175 ant-scale abstracted model. Since the core area of the Flux festival takes place in a roughly 300m X 400m geographical area, the ant-sized model will be approximately 1.7m x 2.3m, or the size of a large table. Pathways such as roads, alleys, and building interiors will be featured in the model as areas accessible to the ants. Restricted areas such as rooftops or sides of buildings will be correspondingly elevated in the model and coated in Teflon paint (Fluon) to make sure humans and ants both only have access to analogous areas.

The ant colony will be loaded into the miniature model. The Queen and brood will be placed in the area of the model corresponding to the model’s location in the real world.

Track Ants

I created open-source software for analyzing the positions and movements of our ants in the laboratory environment. This same software can be used for tracking the ants in the Castleberry hill model in real-time.

Project Ants

This position data will be sent wirelessly to a mesh network of inexpensive, battery-powered XBee microcontrollers. The XBees, in turn, will turn lamps lining the sidewalks on and off corresponding to the presence or absence of an ant in the analogous location. Thus an ant at the model’s virtual intersection of Bradbury Street and Fair Street will illuminate lamps in the actual location.

In this way the ants can be felt crawling throughout the village.

Interaction / Gameplay

Setup

At the beginning of the event, food sources (mealworms and agar paste) will be placed in various locations within the ants’ model. In the corresponding geographical locations, we will also hide prize packages. The packages will be of varying sizes, and some will be weighted and supplied with many handles to ensure that multiple people are needed to transport it.

Before the ants have discovered a particular food cache, humans will be able to “feel” the passages of ants wandering about the city somewhat randomly. Trails of light will travel down the streets and alleys relating to the foragers underlying search algorithms. Even if new arrivals to the festival know nothing beforehand of this particular project, the presence of other moving agents should be unmistakable.

Participants may feel the urge of their own free will to follow along with these light movement patterns, and end up exploring the festival in tandem with the actual ants exploring their environment.

Eventually the ants will find of the caches and develop static transportation lines leading directly to the food. In the human world this will translate into illuminated paths directly connecting the nest (hub of the exhibit) and the hidden prizes. At this point, humans coming into contact with the Antmongous exhibit will need only to follow the illuminated paths to discover the hidden treasures.

Before ant discovery

After multi-ant discovery

Capture

There is an interesting mechanic in the ant world which ensures that foragers return captured food to the colony. Adult ants have very tiny throats and do not possess chewing teeth capable of breaking down the food to swallow able sizes. Instead they must bring all captured food back to the nest and share it with the larvae that grind and regurgitate the food into a form that is edible for the adult ants.

To replicate this fascinating feature of the natural world, the packages placed in the human world will need to be transported back to the nest before they unlock. The method of unlocking is yet to be determined, but several possibilities are possible ranging from simply having the humans running the exhibit unlock it for you to mandating interaction with the actual colony.

Unlocking Methods

A)       Human: Participants return with the prizes, and the humans running the exhbit simply unlock it for them.

B)       Ant combination: All prize boxes have a tag with secret combination codes written on them in sugar water. The tag is placed into the ants’ environment, and the numbers area revealed by the ants clustering in the sugary spots.

C) Ant return: all prize boxes have a food scented tag. This tag is placed into their environment, and when it is brought

Prizes

The prizes could be one (or a mixture) of the following ideas

A)       Shared food: The prize boxes contain mealworm burger patties and seasoned agar paste (for vegetarians) that the participants can enjoy next to the ants who are eating the same meal.

B)       Interactive craft: The prize boxes contain random craft components which have pairs of parts in Human and Ant (1/175) sizes. The humans use these parts to design a small and large sculpture which they can place to interact with the ants’ model and into the real world.

C)       Tickets for manipulation: The returning participants can add new food sources/prize locations to the ants’ model and the real world.

Estimated Budget

This is the estimated budget for the project. The primary variable price point is in the number of nodes created in the XBee mesh network. 50 nodes should get us decently high resolution coverage of the entire event area, and the feeling of immersion and movement will reach levels of great subtlety. The amount of nodes can still be increased or decreased due to budgetary conditions.

As mentioned in class: our main challenge this term will be organized a bit differently this year. Instead of ever-new small design challenges we will have one continuous one until the end of February. At that time, we will select one or two of our projects, optimize, and implement them.

Underlying is the main approach for this term: the idea of interaction as performance and both as being process-based. Crafts and making cultures are seen as equally process-based. Thus, we aim to design a digital craft process – the making of something as the “big challenge.”

We want to spend a bit more time on the process of developing our ideas. So the first deliverable (next week) will be a presentation of the idea – just like our concept presentations last term. The second step is presentation of a prototype (the week later). If possible, it would be good to test your process already on the rest of the group like we did with our projects this week. Finally, we will have 5 different and revised projects that we, then, optimize for a submission to Flux projects.

You can find out more about Flux here.

But please remember the experiment we are doing here focuses on the question what parallels we can detect between the making and the interacting and the performing processes.

This craft activity is designed to remind people to call friends and family members from time to time by creating and displaying the craft. The idea is to use paper cutting, one of the simplest forms of craft, to transform single set of telephone digits to visible building blocks.

The procedure of making a single building is as followings:

First Step—-Draw

Take out a piece of paper, write down the number on 1/4 part of the paper as baseline. Then draw the same amount of squares under the corresponding number.

Second Step—-Cut
Cut the outline of the blocks out. Cut two sides as well to get the negative shape. Remember to keep the baseline of each side attached.

Third Step—-Fold
Fold the cut out parts up.

You can populate the building blocks and eventually form a city skyline. Display your telephone city in your territory and you are always reminded to get in touch with your beloved ones.

For this first assignment, I suggested a combination of noodle-based sculpture and simple machines. To do this activity, you need macaroni (and various other pastas), a glue gun, and if you’re going the mechanical route, some simple motors, levers, and other moving parts.

Build your own noodle sculpture, and then make parts of it mobile by working in these automatic machines. The possibilities are limitless!

UPDATES: more recent pics at the end (video coming soon!)

The goal of this craft is to create a hanging Moebius strip for live ants to crawl upon. It is inspired by the escher drawings of ants on Moebius strips, and also the Moebius strip’s archetypal description that “If an ant were to crawl along the length of this strip, it would return to its starting point having traversed every part of the strip (on both sides of the original paper) without ever crossing an edge.”

We are going to make a primarily sculptural/aesthetic device to hang over our boxes of ant nests. We should be able to load ants onto the strips and watch them wander around in endless crazy loops. To keep with the current aestethic of our ant containers, the strips will be forged from transparent acrylic. The primary crafting experience in this project comes from building the tacit knowledge of turning and manipulating hot molten acrylic.

Materials:

To create this project you will need:

• 24 inch long acrylic sheets (1/8th in)
• 3 Hard rubber (somewhat heat resistant) clamps
• Heat gun
• Monofilament (thin fishing string)
• Cylindrical, heavy, heat resistant wrapping surface. I used 7-8inch diameter glass ash tray.
• Additional heat resistant cylinder (comes in handy sometimes)
• Something to cut the acrylic sheets (I used a laser cutter, a dremel with the right bit could also work, or a bandsaw)
• Wet sponge. If you want to make a part of the acrylic instantly cooler and freeze into place, dab it with the sponge.

Step One: Cut

First you will need to make several strips from your original acrylic sheet. Follow the attached adobe Illustrator template to laser cut it, or base your cutting off. In short, each strip should be about 24 x 3/4 inches, and have several small holes in each end. Make several strips to test out the techniques on before doing the final one.

Step Two: Play

Prop the heatgun on your worktable, and using some scrap strips of acrylic, and grabbing it with your clamps, practice smoothly bending and twisting the plastic. Get a feel for how quickly it heats up, and at what distances from the heat gun. The goal is to avoid extremely localized heating which can result in sharp bends, or really hot areas that can make it bubble.

Step Three: Twist

Clamp one end of the strip to the thick ash tray, and hold the other clamped end of the strip in your hand. Slide the strip slowly back and forth in front of the heat gun while rotating the end in your hand 180 degrees. It is best to twist it even a little further than 180, because when we start wrapping the strip into a circle it tends to try to unwind itself.

Step Four: Wrap

Now that your strip has a nice smooth twist in it, keep the entire thing heated up and begin slowly bending it to try to make the ends touch. Do not bend it too quickly or the strip might snap! Don’t leave the heat gun pointed in one area too long or you may get a very sharp bend, which may or may not be the aesthetic you are looking for.

Step Five: Connect and Smooth

When your bend is good enough to connect both ends of the strip, clamp them both onto the ash tray in the same spot. Use the heat gun to go back around the strip and smooth out, or make certain areas more circular and bendy. Keep your ends clamped together around the dish in the moebius shape until it has thoroughly cooled.

Step Six: Tie it up

Once cool, use your fishing wire to tie the ends together. Lace the holes together tightly and trim the ends.

Step Six Alternate: Fuse

If you are really good with acrylic you could also try to use weld-on to fuse the ends together, or simply heat the ends up REALLY hot and squish them together. I have tried both, but they were hard to make it look nice.

Step Seven: Hang and load

Loop another string of mono-filament through the end holes to make a long strap for hanging your moebius strip.

This idea was inspired by the ornamental work that was part of the William Morris article we read for the week – and how his sense of form and function differs from the cooperate style that is so dominant at Georgia Tech. I am often confused by ornamental art and wonder why anybody would spend his or her time making exactly this pattern. Here is one of Morris’ patterns, for example:

So, in my project I try to get a pattern without really designing it but instead using pure functionality. To do so, the project uses print techniques and computer hardware components as shapes.
The main design task for a motherboard or circuit is functionality. To save space and money, these boards are usually optimized not for any aesthetic value but for cheapest and most reliable operation. What if one could take the trace of this optimization and use it in our crafts context? Then you would get a shape that reflects optimized function but – I argue in this project – is also an ornamental pattern.

To do my craft exercise, you need:
– colors
– brushes
– an old board (I took one from an old remote control car)
– some paper
– some piece of clothing (I used some socks)
You paint the backside of the board with a color of your choice, do some test prints on the paper to get rid of the surplus paint, and when you start to get the desired result with the motherboard shape, you print on the piece of clothing.
I used a remote control car and some socks to play with the idea that you can wear the interiors of a electric car on your feet. Maybe it speeds you up?

In designing for this challenge, I drew heavily from the Niedderer reading:

This remarkable quality of craft seems to emanate from the emotion bestowed on craft objects both by the maker within their creation and by the owner through possession, display and use. They consist in material quality and sensitivity of a craft object which imbue it with personal emotions and meaning, values and memory that can be perceived as related to the idea of

the gift.

Both the process of making and using will imbue this simple item with emotional value from both the creator and the user.

Welcome to the new year – and the new challenge.

As we turn our attention to crafts and digital media a key question is how to incorporate these crafts. One approach is to focus on the procedurality of crafts. One has to “make.” The challenge for this week is in this spirit:

Create a “craft activity” that is a gift for somebody else. The person, for whom the activity is, should engage with your piece and this engagement, the “making” is where we see currently the craft included. It would be fabulous to include digital media, but if your “craft activity” is analogue only, that is okay, too.

Quick production turnaround and fast access has shifted the source of journalistic video footage from centralized news organizations to distributed crowdsourced video or small groups of independent journalists. These new modes were made salient with the waves of distributed media content flowing from the middle-east uprisings starting in late 2010 (“Arab Spring”), and hammered in by the Occupy Wall St protests. Protesters using Mobile phones and cameras flooded social video sites like youtube with up-to-the-minute coverage of major events and attrocities, and they were supported by censorship evading software and proxies provided by groups of internet denizens as well as major governments like the US (though they would often also be working in parralel with the oppressive governments http://blixblog.com/?p=396).

A combination of technical availability and cultural need, has also spurred the use of live-streaming mobile newsfootage collected by individuals with smartphones and unlimited data plans. Though it had existed for a while, the popularity (and therefore conventionalized use) of Ustream grew with its use by a handful of citizen journalists broadcasting live happenings within the Occupy Wall St. movement at different locations around the US.

As the new wave of distributed journalists takes over the roles  of traditional news they are also absorbing and manipulating many of its conventions. One of the most popular Ustream reporters of OWS is now even poised to begin creating aerial drones which would emulate newscopters but be able to reach closer regions to the ground within a city (“Dronecam Revolution” http://boingboing.net/2011/11/23/theother99.html ).

Aerial videography was typically only used by hobbyists (RC flying cameras http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDpL8aQlCDA&feature=related) or production studios http://www.skycamusa.com/. The ongoing imperialistic wars in Iraq and Afghanistan also popularized the concept with the US’s use of aerial drones http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgKN2Q5EgKU.  The standardization of technologies, as well as popular demand helped lead to results like the filming of a Nov 2011 protest in warsaw.

At the same time, this technology was also being reappropriated by commercial organizations creating toys like the ARdrone (http://ardrone.parrot.com/parrot-ar-drone/usa/ar.free-flight-for-android). The web of hackers and DIY enthusiast saw this packaged set of hardware however, and began a re-reappropriation with the release of an open-source ARdrone API (https://projects.ardrone.org/projects/show/ardrone-api).

Unfortunately true advances in the new mediums tend to be slow to realize and new technology is typically used in facsimile of older production codes but with larger cheaper distribution. Perhaps further meditations will lead to truly digital new devices, like fleets of semi-autonomous newscopters that are owned and controlled by the public via the internet.

deliverable:

1) Kinect sensor
recognize motion activity in a certain square
– can we adjust the level of detection per square?
– how many kids?
– do we get constant garble from the lowest row?
– how to deal with the height/ width of the final performance area

question: do we need some visual feedback for which square you trigger?

FK: Nov 16

video format? can we make sure we get certain data limitations?
are kids making own content or collection from the web?
should we give them a cheat sheet to do the movies the way we want them?

2) Media playback
– when you get a message you play a data (any kind: sound, video, graphics) that you pull from a folder
– we fade out after 10 sec OR when the media is done
– we want dynamic mapping
– idea: can we play all media all the time and just change visibility?

XACN: Nov 16

give us a tech spec for the data

3) combined piece

DUE Nov 30

Digital Historical Reenactments

Premise:
Student-created theatrical settings are constructed in a digital environment, and the students control puppets to create reenactments of notable historical events.

Details:
We will use Unity3D to make an engine for digital theatrical stage creation. This engine will have the capability to add a limited number of actors, an arbitrary number of image plane backdrops, and additional prop items. These items may be represented as image planes, or possibly created in a 3D environment. The actors will be created from additional image planes, and controlled using either the Microsoft Kinect or DWIG’s Android puppet controllers. Prop items may also be linked to controllers and moved throughout the scene. Scene changes will be programmed in, and will occur by sliding one scene’s backdrop offstage while sliding another in.

Assignment For Students:
1. Go out into the world and gather photographs at a historical location. Frame these photographs as if they were backdrops or scenery items on a stage.
2. Using the photographs, create a number of scenes in our digital stage around this re-enactment.
3. Design digital actors using photographs as well.
4. Create a story or historical re-enactment around these designed scenes/actors.
5. Perform it live in front of your classmates?

DWIG’s Role:
We must create the engine for the construction of these settings. The current “puppet theater” interface already allows for puppet control using an Android phone. We would need to create ways for students to bring in an image file into a Unity application and apply it as a texture to a plane or other primitive 3D object. Additional tools for image positioning, resizing, and cropping may also be useful in this endeavor. We would also need to create an interface for constructing the puppets. If we went the KInect route, we would also have to create a way for linking motion as detected by Kinect into puppet movement. Finally, we would need to devise a means for arranging these backdrops on a stage. We could do this by having fixed backdrop positions, or by allowing the students to move them through the scene on their own. Also, a means for automatically saving and retrieving these custom scenes would be needed so that the students could work on them over time and keep them for future use. Finally, we would need to spend time instructing and helping the students in the use of this software, an inevitable task no matter what we go with.

Division of Work:

Nick: Unity Programming
Andy: More Programming?
Friedrich: Additional Programming?
Christine: UI Design
Ashton: UI Design
Xiao: UI Design
Some Combination of Us: Student Instruction

Full PDF

This is a proposal built off the initial “Digital Mirror Parade” where kids and students would go on a historical walk, compile a 3D map of this walk, and re-project it onto the actual space.

After further discussion, it looks like we are going to focus instead on a single building or place. Here is a revised version of the idea to attempt to provide a feasible concept. This new concept consists of three parts:

A)      MAPPING                               Kids map an area using RGBD6D SLAM

B)       MANIPULATION   Let kids manipulate 3D content

C)       INTERACTION/DISPLAY        Interact via Re-project onto actual space

The technical part of this challenge is: create something that allows us to scan/ register an existing space. This virtual form of the space, then, is a sort of collection space where the students can assemble, activate, perform … things related to the site or to historical elements of the civil right movement.
We cannot provide for all kinds of data collections – so part of the design challenge is to limit the students’ access in a reasonable but still engaging way.
With this challenge we move ever closer to the final project to be implemented, so keep the feasibility of your idea in mind. In fact, include a breakdown of who does what from the group in your presentation.

In this piece, gestural movements of dance are preserved but recoded as an interconnected set of paisley shapes. The artist’s dance would be recorded and the movements paired with specific points on the vector, multiplied and translated in space to disguise the dancing human female form objectionable in the context where it is to be displayed. Movements required to interact with the piece constitute dance, and the process of exploring the responsive feedback transforms onlookers into dancers. This interaction removes them from their immediate environment and recasts them as unwitting subverters.

See below the scribbled notes taken during the session 10/5