So, as the title of this post indicates, we had a hard time deciding on a final name for this project. I think in the end I like News Organ the best. Here is some looooooong-overdue video of the completed project. Unfortunately the audio really doesn’t do justice to the quality of the sound that you get in person, which is kind of ghostly and hypnotic and subtle.
Weekend-before-last I went to the Guggenheim to see Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho. It was being screened as part of theanyspacewhatever show focusing on 90s/relational art. It played in its entirety, on two adjacent screens, one running forward and one backward, begining at 10:00 AM on Friday and running until 10:00 AM on Saturday. I went with some friends from school; we got there around 11:00 and stayed until almost 2:00. The videos were projected on two large screens in the darkened lobby, and there were giant bean bags strewn about for visitors to stretch out on. Overall, it was a great staging of this work, both more theatrical and more ‘relational’ than when I saw it at MoMA a few years ago.
The midterm assignment for “Recurring Concepts in Art” (which has turned out to be an amazing class) was to recreate a previous work without using technology. Scott Hoffer and I collaborated on a game we titled “Equiveillance,” a reworking of Scott’s game Panopticombat. This was my first experience designing a game and I have to thank Scott for being immensely patient with me. He is a straight guru when it comes to game design/theory and it was really rewarding for me to work with someone so deeply immersed in both the theory and craft of a field that was essentially totally new to me.
I have been mulling over Rob Myers’s brilliant tweet from several months ago, proclaiming that “Data visualization is the socialist realism of neoliberalism.” While I have yet to write a post that fully investigates this idea, it has been in the back of my mind througout the semester and informing, at least indirectly, I think, the direction of a lot of my work.
For the pComp midterm assignment I worked with Alex and Ted to create a “news organ,” which is a sort of musical instrument/data sonifier. Entering a term into a simple onscreen search interface queries ten different news sites for the term[s]. The results are then used to trigger an array of ten fans, each corresponding to one of the sites. The fans generate fixed tones by blowing over the mouth of plastic bottles filled with varying amounts of water.
We’re using a small Arduino program that reads in single integers to toggle the state of each fan, and a Processing app that sends these signals over serial.Here we are initially testing the fans and arduino program with a simple digital momentary switch:
We used an array of TIP120 transistors to control the 12v fans with the 5v Arduino control signals:
We added LED indicators in parallel with the transistor’s control input and set up a program that would allow us to turn each fan in the array on and off using the keyboard. This ended up being a huge help in testing/tuning the fans and bottles:
Video of completed work and post on Processing code to follow.