Posts Tagged ‘art’
looking for an arduino tutor
14 Jan, 2010 • posts i've written • 3 comments
Ever since I first began tinkering with electronics back in high school (I built a football helmet that recorded impacts and warned players of possible concussion), I’ve been fascinated with applying some simple tech to a personal art project or two.
Today, I have a real need to cobble together an execution for my SXSW panel.
And I think I’d like to build it using Arduino.
What’s Arduino, you ask? Well, let’s let The Atlantic explain it in an article published this month,
For humans, connecting to computers via a mouse and keyboard has long been cheap and easy. For sensors, not so much. Now an inexpensive physical computer called the Arduino is changing all that. When the Arduino burst onto the do-it-yourself (“DIY” to devotees) scene in 2005, all manner of tinkerers seized on it as a device that could easily and cheaply run interactive projects.
Using an Arduino is fairly straightforward: buy a board (ranging from about $19 to $65) and attach it to a personal computer via a cable. Then load instructions into the Arduino’s processor via the personal computer. Once programmed, the Arduino makes decisions based on the information transmitted by whatever sensors you’ve hooked up, and does something corporeal, such as turn on or off the motors, displays, valves, and lights attached to it. For a few dollars, creative and motivated individuals—rather than just corporations or institutions—can make highly intelligent tools, perfectly customized for a particular need.
The actual task I’m looking for is simple: measure the volume of a room full of screaming people and reflect that volume in some noticeable way (so you can compare one group of screams with another). The most basic idea I have is to translate the volume into X number of keyboard cat icons projected on a wall. The most complex idea I have is to project frames of a video of the Kool-Aid man breaking through a wall (projected on a wall) – the Kool-Aid man gets further in (the video is played further) the louder the room gets.
I know this could be accomplished (the measuring the room volume) with simpler means – I like a challenge and I tend to like physical tech rather than Flash and Actionscript. And I also like learning.
Anyone know someone with some Arduino skills that can show me the ropes?
Anybody? Please share this post so we can cast the net wide.
mexican billboards
13 Jan, 2010 • posts i've written • 5 comments
CUT-UP MX is a blog run by Norman Palm that catalogs the curiosity that is the Mexican billboard.
Chopped up, partly exchanged and randomly assembled they often become exciting commercial collages. Rumors say that once a company’s advertising time is over and a new hirer is still to be found, the pieces are mixed up to disguise the sales message.
I find it wonderful that a scheme concocted to ensure that advertisers don’t gain extra impressions has been turned into an art and photography project.
But I also wonder…
Remnant banner space on the web is usually filled by some random Google Adwords unit selling something no one wants to buy in an aesthetic you’ll never want to click on. So what happens? You learn to ignore those ad units of a site. Banner blindness.
What if unsold banner space contained something like the Mexican billboard – a creative collage or artistic bit of nonsense?
What if instead of trying to squeeze one more penny out of an advertiser, Google decided to preserve those placements (and your focus on them) by serving art when an ad couldn’t be found?
instant message art
09 Jan, 2009 • posts i've written • No comments
I have strange IM conversations during my day. From time to time I like to make a little something like this to commemorate those moments.
