Yeesh.  A really short day in the LEMUR studio this evening.  Leif helped me out with note dampening on the guitar bot which helps with things like this:

VIDEO!

More to come tomorrow. The long haul for show prep (which happens on Friday, May 2nd) will be over this weekend. All my performance is belong to you.

Okay day three.  I had a vision in the shower.  That’s usually how it happens.  Change of plans somewhat.  Today I shifted focus from gestural mapping cueing to programming.  The “ModBots” / or the bots that are mainly percussive and tend to hang from the ceiling at LEMURplex / are easy enough to control using simple thresholding detection while wearing the TwitchSet.  But the bots with notes, i.e. the XyloBot and the GtrBot are much harder for me to control with any sort of fine resolution.  The GtrBot, for example, takes MIDI notes of 36-81, which means 45 note resolution.  I had been trying to control notes variations using one axis of the TriAx accelerometers on the TwitchSet.  An accelerometer is not a tilt switch and is a bad substitute for one in this case of trying to get 45 steps of resolution with a 180˚ rotation of my shaky hand.

Besides, I’m not a musician.  I’m not going to become a musician just because I have the pleasure of spending the next two weeks with musical robots.  I’ve decided to focus on the performative aspect of why I’m doing the residency.  Hell yes.  I think I’ve got something going here.  Below is a short clip documenting the partial results of today’s programming.  I didn’t write the song.  And I’m not going to tell you what song it is based on, or who wrote it.  That’s the surprise for the performance.  In progress:

Recently I spent my first significant amount of time at LEMURplex in Brooklyn as part of my April residency in preperation for the Resident show on Friday, May 2nd.  I’m not great with Max/MSP for logic, which seems to be the biggest hurdle for me right now.  That and not possessing the ability to write music are bringing me down.  I will not rest though.  Hopefully I’ll use these obstacles to make more interesting work.  Here’s a video of yesterday’s experiments:

April showers bring May flowers musical robots.  I am fortunate enough to be a ReSiDeNt  at LEMURplex this month in Brooklyn.  LEMUR stands for the League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots.  Um….could there be a more perfect residency?  I get to interface with their xylobot, guitarbot, hydrobots, and modbots.  I’m planning on using the Twitchset and Performoshoes (together)as a starting-off point with the bots.  I also plan on doing a lot with the fiddle~ object.  Fellow ITPer and now full time LEMURer, Leif gave me a breif walk-through of the space yesterday.  I’ll be setting up another blog over at LEMUR to document my stuffs.  Here we go…

PONG

This week’s task:
“For this project, the whole class will play a giant game of networked Pong together. You’ll be given the address of a server on which the Pong game will run, and the details of the protocol for each Pong paddle client. Your assignment is to make a physical input device that logs into the server and plays the game.”

idea:

The classic Pong game maps physical movement to a virtual screen representation. How can I magnify and extend this?

mapping the real to the virtual:

The pong controller from the classic game is fairly simple. Rotate the controller counter-clockwise and the virtual paddle moves left, rotate the controller clockwise, the virtual paddle moves to the right. With such a structured and simple set of parameters, mapping the movement became an excercise not in what was most suitable, but what was most fun and expressive.

After some time working through a pong set-up based on some of the techniques of Matthew Barney, I decided to take the thinking in a less lofty direction. What I ended up with, is a very physical mapping scheme: taking off one’s clothing.

implementation:

Using a very low resolution method of analog video tacking, I was able to determine whether the paddle (stripper) was to move left or move right.

A small security camera feeds an upturned black and white monitor. The monitor is capped with a perf boards covered with strategically placed photocells. As the stripper moves from left to right, their corresponding image moves left and right on the monitor. Pixels grow brighter and fade. The photocells pass the corresponding brightness values to an Arduino module, which connects to the network and plays the game. Arduino Code.

Rocio and I (in the absence of Chris Paretti and Kati London) presented our concept of “The Future of the Clock Radio in a Networked World”:

Ultimately we decided to flesh out the “Around the World Clock” from last week’s notes. The clock has now been dubbed “RadiUs.”
We got some good feedback, and Rocio and I both expressed some interest is exploring the project further.

A pdf of the presentation can be found here. Although without the notes we read from it doesn’t really do you much good now does it?

The Future of the Clock Radio in a Networked World :

This week’s project actually spans the next two weeks. Woking in groups, we are come up with a paper project implementation of the alarm clock of tomorrow. I’ve put an order in for a flux capacitor, but it looks like Sparkfun is all out. Here are our groups initial outlined ideas:

All of our project proposals seem to deal with this subject through awareness — alarm as carrier of information rather than closed alert system.
(more…)

moonwalkers

For this week’s project we chose from a list of three simple parameters: ACTIONS/THINGS/RESPONSES.

My respective choices:
-dancing
-sneakers
-music

The initial idea involved a pair of old sneakers, repurposed, to dynamically manipulate a sound file.
Basically I wanted to build shoes that would BOOM! when you walked. The louder you stomp the louder the BOOM! In a sense — “giant” shoes.
(more…)

Throughout the course of this class, I plan to dedicate “week.n” entries to progress on related projects, thoughts about that week’s readings, and other miscellanea related to the networking of objects.

The four main projects however, as detailed in the syllabus, will all have their own dedicated entries which I will link to from week to week.

That said, our first project is due week.02:

Project 1: Physical Computing Improv