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All you see is light

Interactive art piece with Arijana Kajfes at Interactive Institute (2004)

Monochromeye is part of a larger art driven project, occular witness, in which the artist Arijana Kajfes has been investigating properties of light as an artistic material and as a carrier of information. Monochromeye is a wearable optical machine, consisting of a semitranslucent helmet and a pointing device that fits on your index finger. The finger piece picks up colors (using sensors for red, green and blue light) and transmits it to the light emitting diodes right before your eyes. What you see is not an image, but a pure color. This deprivation of resolution (and context) forces the viewer/wearer to find new strategies of forming meaning from the limited information that is available. Monochromeye is one of the pieces in the exhibition Touching the Invisible. My contribution to monochromeye was in making the electronics and programming the onboard microprocessor.

The larger project Occular Witness was awarded an honorary mention in the interactive arts category at Ars Electronica (2006). They even liked this picture enough that they used it as the logo for the Interactive Art category in 2007.

An interaction engine for hybrid realities

Interaction engine for multiuser interactive environments. Developed at the Interactive Institute 2003-2004.

The Multiuser Interactive Environment Language (MIEL) is an interaction engine developed at the Interactive Institute. I was part of the development theme (together with Peter Lundén, Olof Bendt and William Sporrong) doing system design, coding, and testing. I am also currently one of about a handful of people who know how to express myself in the MIEL language.

The basic idea is that instead using conventional programming, you use an XML-based markup language to define how the interactive environment works. The system has been successfully used in two places, the Verket in Avesta and in China Before China, a permanent exhibition at the Museum of Far East Antiquities in Stockholm.

Read all about it in the MIEL White Paper and then contact me if you want to know more.

A paranoid web spider searching for the devil on the Internet.

Digital art piece produced at the Interactive Institute Smart Studio by Thomas Broomé, Fredrik Bridell and Olof Bendt. (2001)

Hellhunt contains a web spider, a computer program that goes to one web page, downloads all the images on the page and remembers all the links leading out from that page. It uses a corner detection algorithm to detect corners in images, and then tries to match those corners with the pattern of an inverted pentagram, a five-pointed star with two points on top, considered to be a symbol of evil. If it finds it, the image is saved along with a copy of the image with the pentagram filled in. In some versions the image is also printed out, and an e-mail is automatically sent to the owner of the page, saying that we have detected that they are posting satanic material on the web, and would they please be so kind as to remove it.

This piece (conceived by Thomas Broomé) was originally part of a larger exhibition called Lords of Legacy, shown at Art Node in Stockholm (2001). I did a lot of the programming (in Lingo, the curious programming language used in Macromedia Director).

Out there:
thomasbroome.com

Sharing a room with artificial creatures

Responsive environment made with the Interactive Institute Smart Studio, servo, and Pablo Miranda (2002)

The Interactive Institute Smart studio developed this piece in collaboration with servo, a research and development collective in the field of experimental architecture. They designed the actual “lattice archipelogics”, a spatial arrangement of over a hundred large plastic modules, suspended from the ceiling. The Smart studio (and, in particular, Pablo Miranda) developed the “responsive field”, an artificial life algorithm which populates the modules with organically responsive clouds of light. The arrangement responds to the presence of visitors (using agents that live in a virtual space aligned with the physical location). As the agents move around in (transreal) space, they leave traces which form a kind of pathways in space - a morphogenical process similar to many naturally occuring phenomena such as the the formation of river canyons, paths in the forest, urban landscapes, etc. The paths affect the future movements of the light patterns.

My role in the project was part coordination and planning, part software/hardware interfacing and (some rather rudimentary) electronics design. Not to mention a painstaking manual labour making cables and actually installing the thing.

The Responsive Field of Lattice Archipelogics was originally shown in the Latent Utopias show in Graz, Austria, 2002. It was later shown in the exhibition Architectures Non Standard at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, France (2003) and in the show Glamour: Fashion, Industrial Design, Architecture at the San Fransisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). It was awarded an honorary mention in Vida 5.0, a contest for art and artificial life (2002).

When PD starts, audio is off, and you have to click the “compute audio” tick box. But what do you do when you want to start it automatically, like from a batch file?

The answer is, cryptically enough, “; pd dsp 1″. Below is a screenshot. Make sure that this goes in a message box.

Note that you can start a pd patch just with a “pd patch.pd” command from a command prompt or batch file. This patch does nothing interesting (it just plays an annoying sine tone) but it does it automatically.

This is a little thing I made for artist Petra Vargova. It’s a home-made “shield” for the Arduino, i.e. this circuit fits on top of an Arduino board. (Indeed, it is sitting on top of an Arduino in the photo).

It’s not made using an Arduino shield PCB (which would be much more elegant) but just made using a piece of stripboard and some pin connectors. It contains two relays - two omron G6S-2 4.5 VDC relays.

It works like this: The lower relay is used for reversing polarity. It’s got plus and minus coming in on its input pins (the second from the right on top and bottom). When the lower relay is off (the control pin labeled reverse is low) the power is just connected straight away to the load. When the “reverse” control pin goes high, the power comes out on the two rightmost pins on the relay, which are connected to the load in reverse.

The top relay is just a switch that switches to positive input on and off.

To control it you just need two digital pins on the Arduino, one for the main on/off and one to reverse polarity.

Switching and reversing relay shield - arduino code

I wrote this little Processing application I’d thought I’d share with you.

It opens a little window with a black circle in it. When you press a key - any key - whatever you press gets sent to your serial port. Also, the circle turns white just to let you know your program is live.

The Processing code that really does anything is just this:

In setup():

String[] ports = Serial.list();
serial = new Serial(this, ports[ports.length-1], baudRate);

and then in keyReleased():

serial.write(key);

That’s it. Very handy.

Download the sendkeys processing code

Stripboards (sometimes called veroboards) are typically used for prototyping electronic circuits. They have little holes, evenly spaced at 0.1 inches (yes, even in Europe - electronic components usually have their pins 1/10″ (0.254 mm) apart.
The image shows the soldering side - usually the back or bottom side. You stick the components in from the other side and solder on this side, and then cut off the pins so they don’t stick out too far.

See also: Yoshi’s DIY stripboard cutter

I was in the electronics lab making a prototype and was just saying how I prefer the stripboards with links, where the solder points are connected in groups of three, rather than in strips that run the full length of the card. Yoshi just reached out his hand, picked something up and waved it triumphantly. “You need this!”

It turned out to be a little tool he made himself. It’s a poor photo I took with my camera - it’s not actually rusty, it just looks like that in photo. He made this from a blade from an jigsaw, using a Dremel tool to cut away all the teeth and make a sharp point at the edge. Using this it’s really easy to cut away the copper from the stripboard.

Processing is an easy-to-learn programming language that is geared towards visual programs. It’s completely free and even completely open source. It is very easy to make simple things and still powerful enough to do some really interesting things. There are lots of examples of what has been done at the Processing.org site. Processing builds to applets (so you can post them live on a web page), or to executable files. And it works for Windows, Mac and Linux.

Download Processing and learn more from http://processing.org