Be Your Own Souvenir

Another interesting project I came Across was Be Your Own Souvenir from blablabLAB. THis project takes advantage of perhaps two of the most exciting technologies becoming available to students,artists and hackers in recent times. Notably the Microsoft Kinect, and 3D printers. 3D Printers really have the potential to change how our world works, at the moment the price is the issue keeping it out of most people's hands but in the future it might be possible that if you break a Hoover nozzle you could download and print a replacement! Anyway, I digress, check out the video.

Be Your Own Souvenir! from blablabLAB on Vimeo.

I really like the description 'This proposal aims to connect street users, arts and science, linking them to under-laying spaces and their own realities.' The fact that the brilliant Golan Levin approves in the comments is also a big feather in their caps. It is also worth checking out their other projects, such as HABERLANDT. All their projects have an academic basis so are very relevant to the study of Avant Garde.

LEDs etc

One of the most interesting Blogs I've come across about LEDS and other electronic projects is Limpkin. He is a DJ and is very capable technically, creating his own displays and projects. The detail in his Blog is very interesting too, there is a clear step by step order that is lacking in others. One of the more intriguing projects he has done is involving an LED display and a webcam. The full post is available here, it does get quite technical as it's a fairly in depth walk through. Very cool though:

Leaving

As part of my research into emigration I studied the RTE documentary Departure Day. This documentary follows the lives of people forced to emigrate and how it affects them and their families. There is strong imagery and visuals in this piece. One area they miss out on is waiting on the plane to take off. I have decided that my audio piece will run just over 8mins long, as the CSO figures are 65'300 in 12 months and 525600 minutes divided by that is 8.04 or one person leaving every 8 minutes. The first audio piece based on this is below:

LeavingJet by blueswannabe

This might seem slow building and a bit boring but I think the gradual volume increase and the monotony of it helps build tension in the final climax as the Jet Roars into life, leaving behind the passengers old one. I intend on doing user testing to see how the audience reacts to this piece.

Daytum

One of the artists I came across in reading literature was Nicholas Feltron. He is known for his interesting info vis, or social vis, depending on what you see his work as. His well known for his annual reports on his everyday life. This obviously got a lot of attention as it's cited quite a bit and a group made his theory into a website / app called Daytum. Daytum lets users make visualisations of their actions and interactions.

This project is interesting from a psychological and sociological sense also, we all know that twitter exposed that sometimes people like to tweet about the most mundane, boring things but that usually isn't their sole purpose for being on twitter. So what if your sole purpose of being on a site is to make visualisations out of only boring mundane things? It's even interesting how they describe this service

"Whether you would like to tally an afternoon or a year, Daytum can help you collect and communicate the most important statistics in your life."

Most important? I find it interesting that people would consider what food they eat the most important statistic in their life...

On the other hand there is a positive side to tracking your 'statistics' like this, you could keep an eye on your diet or on your training. These kind of projects take info vis a step further, by telling you something personal you already know subconsciously. I must admit I find it amazing that people pay a monthly fee for this service, but they do. And they like it.

"Daytum is a web application that lets you set up any number of various displays tracking virtually anything you want, and presents it in a beautiful way."

It also shows just how important aesthetics are to users.

HTML5 And The Times We Live In

As part of my college course we do HTML 5. We also do a subject called Avant Garde as I may have mentioned. I am new to HTML5 but as with everything practice makes perfect. The Canvas element in HTML5 surprised me as in a lot of ways it is more similar to flash than HTML 4 in my opinion. We were given a simple lab on how to animate some images, making them appear on the Canvas using a simple for loop.

For my Avant Garde assignment I’m going to be concentrating on Emigration figures. We were advised to start ‘making things’ as soon as possible so I married both concepts. After some quick googling I grabbed a simple timer code from Neil Broderick. I also grabbed some pictures of passports and passport holders (to add some colour). I married these with a modified version of the lab code.



The Result can be seen Here

Explanation: The timer starts a function that places 5 passports a half-second/10 a second randomly on the page, so 600 a minute 65’300 / 600 is 108.833, so 109 minutes roughly. The opacity is set so the patterns gradually build up. I find sometimes these demonstrations can get reality across a lot better than simple facts. 65’300 doesn’t seem like a lot but when you see it portrayed graphically and consider every one of these is an individual, most forced to leave the country due to the economic situation it hits home harder. If I get the chance I might add the code to let you save the canvas as an image.

If you do for some Bizarre reason leave it running for the duration it won’t stop, this is as although we have a new Government in Ireland, we haven’t yet sorted the Emigration problem, as a matter of fact 100’000 are estimated to Emigrate in the next two years.

Hence the title, HTML5 And The Times We Live In.

More Cowbell...

The unforseen issues you can come across with this project are quite numerous. Mainly technical of course and hard to figure out if the problem with Pd or Flash. Either way I digress, a poor workman blames his tools. The tidying is complete, I turned that god awful mess into THIS:

Although this is tidier it is still as complex as the previous posts screen grab, but organised better. One of the Issues that was brought up by my supervisors were that if the keywords that I had set up parameters for weren't in the tweet what would happen. There were a number of different ways to approach this and I got bogged down using the post time date and other Metadata. However the best solution was suggested by one of my lecturers, to use the letters in a persons name. I incorporated a sequencer into this and tested it out.

Obviously if a user name has the exact same amount of the same letters this system will produce the same result, however unlikely this is the solution is to include postdate or other metadata as a parameter as well. This system works quite well and though a tad repetitive suitable for the project. Here are 4 different Authors and their signatures.

AuthorKey by blueswannabe

The next big step is to get User Testing done, then take the GUI further and 'flesh out' the keywords.

Progress

Right, I probably haven't been posting here as often as I should, not to say I haven't been doing work. One of my most recent obsessions has been Pd or Pure Data, Pure Data was developed by the same man behind MaxMSP. It is a visual programming language designed for audio creation and modification. It takes a while to get into but once you do you can do a lot with very little and modify free to use patches easily. However if like me you are new you can get a working solution but a very messy one:

I had a meeting with my lecturers and on advice have decided to work towards the aim of a working prototype, I got to caught up with the Technical side of things so did some work on the GUI for the Flash file.

The next step is to figure out what exact system to use for analysing the tweets and deciding on an acceptable level of correlation. And work on the audio and do user testing, a lot more work to do!