Progress

I haven't posted in a while. I have, for the most part, completed construction of my final project as well as my first project. I will post pics soon. I am currently working out some coding issues on my final project. I also ran into a power issue...and believe I might have a solution, though I am not sure. I will be cutting it close I suppose. I hope to complete the final portions of project 1 this weekend and have it ready for the electric art show. And pertaining to the power issues, if anyone knows a solution for adding amperage to a stepper motor externally from the make controller while still utilizing the controller to control steps...let me know.

Project 2&3

I want to combine project 2 and 3 for my kinetic sculpture. I am taking the safety class for the wood shop on Monday at 7 p.m. I will also be going home to fabricate some of it over spring break. Below is a rough sketch of what I had envisioned for the set up to look like.

Detail

Detail 2008

A work of art is intrinsically influenced by its medium and, historically, vice versa. Digital art is no different. It also functions as a utilitarian format. Since its inception it has been considered archival and has evolved into a space of social congregation. Detail focuses on the medium as well as its perceived archival nature. The work is relatively small and forces the viewer to approach it, if not by shear curiosity. Once a viewer begins their approach the work begins to amplify its basic composition of pixels, thus making them the central focus of the work. At the same time it manages to give a notion of corruption or wear by distorting the original image. The manner in which it is displayed also questions the dependence we, as a culture, have formed to its seemingly inherent qualities.

In retrospect

I might try and move Detail to the digital picture frame sooner than expected. Below are some good DIY solutions for creating multi purpose digital picture frames.

http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2006/05/cheap_n_easy_digital_picture_f.html

http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2006/08/digital_picture_frame_1.html

http://www.flickr.com/photos/007ben/243259139/in/pool-make

Detail

Instead of showing KS progress I decided I would make something else using Max/MSP and Jitter. I haven't had any experience with it before so I figured I would give it a try. I titled the work Detail. I used an IR distance measuring sensor to pixelate a digital image the closer a viewer gets to it. My goal was to install the sensor on a small 5x7 digital picture frame with an Arduino board attached to the back. Monetary difficulties have stopped me from pursuing the picture frame aspect of this project, but I have the patch working. Nothing crazy....simple, but functional. It was based on the jit.plur patch.









I am posting a screen shot of the patch. The image size and resolution is set up for a 5x7 digital picture frame.

Kinetic Sculpture on hold for the moment

So Kinetic Sculpture is on hold for the moment. My OS on my home computer crashed and I am having difficulty booting up, thus making it difficult to retrieve files. I believe I should have this fixed over the weekend. I was planning on showing the progress of the sculpture for Friday's crit, but shit happens.

On the other hand KS was coming along nicely. I found a bunch of good sites that discuss motion tracking via webcams using AS. With the advent of flash player 9 and AS3 the need for computer processing power is minimal. It is such a light language. The following links are to some motion tracking sites:

http://www.actionscript.org/resources/articles/613/1/Camera-motion-controlled-ball/Page1.html

http://blog.ericksouza.com/en/experiments-with-motion-detection-in-the-flash/

http://www.urdalen.com/blog/?p=214

http://blog.rackdoll.nl/?p=63

http://drawlogic.com/2007/10/17/motion-detection-in-flash-as2-and-as3-and-c/

I also have been playing around with Papervision3D a lot. I think I am going to use that to render my real time 3d graphics as opposed to jitter or openGL. I don't have any .swfs to post yet, but I will soon. I have been playing with the stepper motor that came with my make controller kit and I believe it will work perfectly for KS. Also I found an AS physics engine that is just nothing more than cool, so I will post a link to that too!

http://box2dflash.sourceforge.net/

Flash Server

Here is a link to a flash server that will allow you to communicate flash programs with max/msp and jitter. It would make for some interesting possibilities, as well as allow for more efficient processing on certain tasks due to the faster speed of the flash player.

http://www.nullmedium.de/dev/flashserver/