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Yesterday I spent two hours talking to the students at a physical computing course at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH). I talked about what physical computing (i.e. the art of “sensing and controlling the physical world with computers”, to quote Don O’Sullivan and Tom Igoe) has to to with art.

I argue that the concept of interactivity is lurking there somewhere in the intersection of physcomp and art. But what is this thing called interactivity, anyway? And indeed, what is art?

Then I went on showing a bunch of examples of new media art pieces, and finally some of the stuff we’ve been doing at the Art & Technology Program, as well as talking a bit about the tools we’ve been using.

Here are the PDFs of the handouts (which were not actually handed out…)

1. handout: Physical Computing and Art
2. handout: New Media Art
3. handout: Art & Technology backstage

A cheap embarassing drink that hooks you up with senior dolls

Interactive creativity tool (2005).

Download Excuisite Corpse for Excel

The Exquisite Corpse for Excel is a creativity tool. It is a very crude random phrase generator. When you download it is loaded with words that will give ideas for silly installations or devices. The point is that it will suggest combinations you hadn’t thought of. Perhaps, every now and then, it will actually give you something that will give you a good idea. You can modify it with other words to change its domain, like using it to generate characters with random traits for stories, or why not a whole new cuisine.

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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