Too tired to fix things
A week-end of running around showing Zers around town, driving from here to Radford to Newport to Mountain Lake and back several times finding cheap places to live. I’m tired and I hurt, and I don’t want to even think about the next part of the project.
But I made the capacitive touch sensor an hour before class, and got some Processing code running to read a little bit of it’s data. Next, make it talk to Flash!
What? yes, I said the hour before class. Oh, sure, I looked up all the crap about code and technique last week. But damned if I could find a spool of wire or even the bag of ‘resistors, mixed’ in all these boxes. So it went together right before I went out the door. Just enough time, too.
Next up, more fun with Sparky the robot, build to serve as a tour guide for the natives of Paspahegh. Okay, so Sparky is really just the robot model Dane Webster had prebuilt that we are using to test the scripting and later AI abilities of Unity3d. Why did I admit to knowing how to write a parser, and making the promise of “you write the AI in plain language, we’ll come up with a way to make that a formal xml language, and then my parser will make all the various AI do just that.”? Oh, right, cause it was fun. Knew there was a reason.
P.S. Muri, when you read this (you nosey so-and-so), I’ve checked my tweeks to super-cache, so you get to check the database. I know the posts are there, but we have to make them public. And, just to speed you up, that nice rule, from ICANN I think, that says a real phone number has to be attached to the registration of a domain. Thanks. A lot. 10 phone calls today alone. I’m glad I never answer the phone to begin with, but holy crap! Maybe we got linked some place. Hello, some place!
In: cyberart · Tagged with: cs4xxx, ramblings
Proposals and Conceptual Art
First, my proposal, mentioned in yesterday’s post.
Cage’s 4’33” made people sit and, in a very Zen way, take notice of the things around them. What if that could be taken a step further, and allow the noise and environment to be more than just a passive experience; to allow the world around us to talk back, in words we can understand?
I’m proposing a means by which this could be done utilizing a mixture of simple and complex technology. Microphones would detect the ambient sounds, and could be placed anywhere around the exhibit, or on the street outside. That sound would be fed through a spectrum analyzer algorithm to pick out certain peaks of noise. When noise peaks are detected at one point near 697, 770, 852, or 941 Hertz, and at 1209, 1336, 1477 Hertz, a letter would be added to a display, either projected or stored to be read by a computer when a whole word is formed.
Why these frequencies? These frequencies represent the tones generated by Touch-Tone phones, DTMF signals. These tones are no longer heard when dialing most cell phones, but the beeps from text messages are nearing ubiquity. Since each tone represents a button push, and each button can be used to type the letters of a message, there should be some way to connect the two. Most phones utilize a system called T9 or word auto-complete, and an implementation of this would sit between the sound gathering equipment and the display.
The vocabulary of the world around us would be limited only by the dictionary we give it, and the amount of processing power we can throw at it.
Absolute crap, ain’t it? So was the essay I wrote on a piece of modern art, even though the piece itself kicks ass. Check out about DIGITAL COMICS. See if that doesn’t change your mind about some hard and fast rules about how comics should work.
The project it looks like I am working on is Singing In The Rain. Anna, whom I “worked” with on the Wonder project, proposed this. Looks like it will be a challenge to tie together some wireless chips, some micro controllers, and a lot of sensors with something like Flash or Processing to do the display. More on it when I start thinking about it.
So, tonight was lots of stuff that we’ve covered before in art classes (Thanks Simone!). The Dada-ist idea is one of the reasons I like Singing In The Rain, of all the proposals that got picked to move on. Something about just leaving an umbrella in a dark room. Indoors.
Fluxus, I’m torn between the riot of a card game like Fluxx, and the controlled madness of Improv Everywhere. Anarchy of the mind is fun, but I still think there are places to take it further. And those places are not art galleries where the elite and the critics can stare and go “Ah, I get it.” I want them all scratching their heads saying “What the hell just happened here?” while the common person looks on and says “Ah, I get it!” Oh well, it’s a lovely goal.
We moved on to algorithmic art, which always reminds me of the stuff Shay does with POV-Ray as well as Bathsheba Grossman. Absolutely amazing stuff. I used to have a surface editor, something from sourceforge, that made the creation of some simpler pieces easier. Wish I could find a link to the software I had used before to create much simpler images, toroid stars and mobius pipes, but it got lost in last years computer formatting, and I can’t find the link any more. Oh well, I’ll find it eventually.
Last was structuralist art, art with rules that aren’t algorithms. Okay, so that’s a bit of a joke, just different rules than the the previous categories. On a personal level, dissecting this style just doesn’t work. The rules for it are up to the individual, and anything could fall into it simply by having an OCD artist who insists on creating a piece in a certain way. Not to say all are done that way, but they could. One picture of a face, each day for a year; The common internet age trend. There are enough out there I won’t even link to them.
In: cyberart · Tagged with: cs4xxx
Technology causes more problems
While typing my proposal for the next project in the CyberArt course, the grammar ‘fixer’ decided that my prose was too florid, and it needed to be corrected. It took the phrase:
The vocabulary of the world around us would only be limited by the dictionary we give it, and the amount of processing power we can throw at it.
And perverted it into:
The dictionary we give it, and the amount of processing power we can throw at it would only limit the vocabulary of the world around us.
I couldn’t have written it better my self.
Now, I just need to take after Quin here and hit Muri with a stick, to see why some posts are showing up, and others are not. Guessing SuperCache settings have something to do with it, but I have too much work to do this week to bother fiddling with it. Old posts are there, I promise. And they’ll show up once someone has time to bash their head against the server that we are paying someone else to run.
Oh, and pics of the new apartment/workspace/closet-that-should-be-a-bedroom will follow once I finish proposals, reports, and the hours of code that I’m behind on. Tomorrow maybe; or Friday of next year.
In: cyberart · Tagged with: cs4xxx
Moving Day
I am moving. I’ll be busy all weekend. It’s just across town, but then I have a paper to finish writing, a proposal to scribble, and I have to have the new joint clean enough that company can stay next weekend. Why did I pick to move the week before I had a friend visiting?
Post-Human
I don’t know how I made it through class tonight. I could barely keep my eyes open. Not because I didn’t want to, mind. I’m still recovering from that bug that wiped me out weeks ago, and I guess it just caught me again.
Anyways, post-humanism is a topic that, I think, gets too bloody much press as it is. We can replace limbs, that must make us post human. We can tell when a nerve that is somewhere under this sensor is firing, that must be it by now. We can feed rough signals into a nerve and the body notices, that’s it, we are almost there!
No, we aren’t. We are far from the singularity, and while these are admirable advancements, they are not much at all. A magnet, embedded in the soft tissue of the thumb, does more to add another sense then wearing a camera with video fed contact lenses will. When we can replace the eye, we are post human. When we can move the brain into a vat and have it survive and control a cybernetic body, we are post human. When the entirety of what makes us human can be digitized and stored and run as a program on a computer, we will be post human. But for any of that to occur, save possibly the eye, we need to make machines human.
I can see people scratching their heads, how can we be post human when we would be living in human machines. Well, we wouldn’t have to. But, before we can most past human, we need to know what human is. While I am completely in agreement that most human behavior is governed by chemical shifts, we need a much better, detailed understanding of what those are. Picture, for the technologically inclined, trying to emulate a black-box board made up of a black box chip that you can actually test separately. You test the chip, individually, and find it to be relatively deterministic. I’m going on what I remember from HS biology and what little I’ve read of modern research, but I think the neuron is still considered pretty deterministic. You do X to it, Y happens. Do X again, Y happens. Try doing Z, W happens. Go back to doing X, and Y happens again. Simple enough.
But when you test the box that you know is made up of those same chips, it doesn’t respond in a deterministic way. You could take apart the whole box (brain), but the wiring and connections are too small for you to put back together. So you test each chip from it, find them to be deterministic, and then more on to a second black box that should be similar. And it is just as non-deterministic. So, why?
The chemistry geek in me thinks the answer is quantum. On a small scale, single short molecules, chemicals can be trusted to do certain things. Once you start combining them, and make longer proteins, things get weird. Sure, we know that in pure water, there are an equal number of H+ and OH- ions, and with logarithms we can figure out how many. What they barely tell you is that it is not stable. Some of those are colliding, combining into H2O and the energy knocks another molecule apart. I don’t know if anyone has proven, by measuring at very small increments of time, that the number varies to some degree, even +- 10^-100, but there is not a reason it shouldn’t. Just about everything else varies. Half-lives are the same way, we know that after X amount of time Y number of radioactive atoms should decay out of a batch sized 2Y. But, when any certain atom will decay in that set is not known. And one atom all by it’s lonesome? It has a 50% chance of having decayed if measured after the time known as it’s half-life. Schrodinger was pissed at that one, and his cat might be even more so.
I could go off on tangents here, and make up stuff about how if the chemical reactions in the brain were sensitive to which electrons paired when chemicals mingled, that quantum dynamics would play a hand in how we behave. I’m not, though. It would be too close to wandering into Quantum Mind territory, and I’m not convinced of the science there. But, while neurons are large enough to be classical objects, they are also close enough for chemical bleed over, the equivalent of cross-talk in digital wires. Even that effect would be noticeable in a system with as many interconnects as the brain.
So, what does this lead back to? We won’t be post-human until we know what human is. We try defining it as language, but fail. We try memory and problem solving, and then teach those to parrots. Even when we know what makes us, us, we may not have the understanding to recreate it artificially.
And hell, as a classic sci-fi geek, I thought we would be putting our brains in robots long before we were able to clone ourselves. But it looks like the opposite will be true.
In: cyberart · Tagged with: cs4xxx
/?
Well, Wonder Wall, or as I believe it went down in the grade book /? went off without a hitch. I didn’t get any sound bites in, no one would stand in front of a microphone I held while I was coughing. Who can blame ‘em.
But, with . . . what did we eventually have, 6 computers in a darkened room, playing various sound bites of “I wonder . . .” or anything else with the word “wonder” in it. It was intense. A few of the systems were loud, and a few clips were near clipping. And the space was just one of the drawing rooms in the armory, so only a little we could do acoustically. Sure, given total control over the space, some speakers on the wall, some under the floor with high bass, some felt on one wall and solid material on the other, the whole space could have been a different project. But it worked as a sketch.
In: cyberart · Tagged with: cs4xxx
More bad ideas
So, Wiind Chimes are up again, which means more time to brain storm other strange projects that could be fun. Or could be more hassle then they are worth. But even that would be fun. So, Stacy mentioned the crazy idea of a blog where people could just drop off their absurd ‘this will never work’ kind of ideas. You all know that type of thought. It’s the kind that has so far resulted in the Wiind Chimes, MJP/MMUVA, and most of the other strange projects I keep ending up involved in.
Maybe it’s because I’m the kind of person who says “well, it wouldn’t work that way, but if we changed this . . .”
Will it work? When I have free time, or more people to code it, you might see this running here. It should be a fun side venture for us, and is the kind of absurdity we aim for.
In: cyberart · Tagged with: cs4xxx
On Line At Last
So, the fellow ditzes have gotten things running. Guess I need to get my ass in gear and start contributing as well. Soon enough, some old blog posts from previous public endeavors will get copied over. Expect lots of pictures of the projects that we have going, a copy of what ever the latest Flash project I somehow got conned into coding.
On that note, the Wiind Chimes are going back up, again, tomorrow night. Why? Because someone *cough* thought it would be good to give the Dean or President or whoever another chance to ask us if we would give him one. This time, I think we can say ‘Yes, we can have one for you. When would you like it?’ Not that I’m looking forward to altering our sound system from bluetooth triggers forcing wav audio over speakers into something more akin to bad wiring results in temporary circuits triggering a DAC to pretend to be PWM audio. Not even a good DAC, just the cheap ones built into Arduinos.
I would trade my job to work with some real audio chips. Or better yet, I’ll take a job programing real audio chips. Please? Anyone?
sick
Alright, I lied. I will back date something to explain why I missed Bobby’s Wiimote demo. I was sick. Couldn’t walk, so we got the blog working on the 16th (tomorrow, by the chronology of the blog). Couldn’t even get responses to emails about the Wonder Wall (of sound) project. Everyone thought someone else was keeping me up to date, I guess.
I was sick enough that I barely contributed, but somehow it all . . . well, that’s a later post.
Circuit Bending
First major project, and we get to do circuit bending!
Why. . . why do I get stuck with the kids who don’t know how circuits work? One team mate, who I have worked with before, had the major contribution of unscrewing a case, and finding out that a button still worked even after you took the top part off. “Look, if I lick my finger and push where the button used to be, it still works.” Huh, sometimes I wish for higher voltage toys.
In all, it seemed to work. I taught the other team mate to solder, and we got a turbo button and adjustment dial added into a baby’s musical toy. Want them to learn rhythm at 320bpm, have we got the toy for you!
Oh, and I am not back dating another post to talk about Steve’s slides and the video on circuit bending. They are the same slides as last year, and before that, with a few changes. Nothing to cover a second time, the notes from last year are still the same.