Two public tours of Our City, Our Music for Leeds Light Night with Ben, Megan and myself.
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Light Night tour, Leeds, Oct 2009
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inflatables
I thought I’d dig out and edit down some old email conversations I’ve had about making inflatables. After making the networked rabbits I’ve had occasional emails over the years asking about the best way of building various air filled projects. This is a summary of a couple of my responses.
Basic answer is just get making! I put off starting to make inflatables for quite a while, trying to find the right plastic, etc..
Then just tried making one with a computer fan, a bin bag and some sellotape (scotch tape) that worked great.
You can get computer fans from larger computer or electronics shops. they look like this.
You can find them in an old thrown away computer too (just unscrew the case and unplug it from the main circuit board).
Computer fans tend to run on 5, 9 or 12 volts. They tend to not mind too much if you run them at the wrong voltage either (within reason), so just find an old power supply that you’re not using (it should have the voltage and the polarity of the wires written on the sticker on the back).
How big do you want your inflatables to be? these computer fans are only good for small (pillow sized) inflatables.
Do you need them to react to things, or just ‘breath’ a little?
You can use lots of materials. If you want to use fabric, try kite material. My rabbits were lined with light bin bag plastic to keep them more air tight and then wrapped in satin-finish material. The satin alone actually held the air pretty well, but took too long to re-inflate for my needs.
Lots of ideas in this book if you can find it:
http://www.amazon.com/Blow-Up-Inflatable-Art-Architecture-Design/dp/3791326872
The Ant Farm group did a lot of large scale inflatable projects. I ran across one of their original guides to making inflatables from the 70’s, but they’re hard to track down. They have info on a dvd too. More inspiring than useful information, but good to watch if you can find it:
http://www.microcinemadvd.com/product/DVD/286/Ant_Farm_Video.html
They suggest melting plastic together rather than sticking with tape to build shapes. I found melting too fiddly for small scale projects. But foil wrapped around the seam to stop it sticking and then an old iron or hair straighteners should work for some plastics.
Simplest control of inflation is:
- turn on the fan for a while
- turn if off
- on again
- etc..
A more complicated system would change the fan speed, but i don’t think that’s really necessary.
To turn the fans on and off, you can use a micro controller (a small chip you can program), but you would have to buy or make a circuit board. PIC and ATMEL are two ranges of these chips. I used PICs because I had inherited a whole load for free, but building circuit boards is a little pricey for small numbers and a little laborious by hand. So instead, especially if you’re new to this type of electronics, I’d suggest you check out this project:
which took it’s inspiration from this project:
“Arduino can be used to develop interactive objects, taking inputs from a variety of switches or sensors, and controlling a variety of lights, motors, and other outputs. Arduino projects can be stand-alone, or they can be communicate with software running on your computer (e.g. Flash, Processing, MaxMSP.) The boards can be assembled by hand or purchased preassembled; the open-source IDE can be downloaded for free.”
For bigger inflatables you’ll need a big purpose made inflatable blower. Another way to inflate a structure and make it float is to use helium (more costly but longer lasting) or heated air (cheaper but short-lived). We used helium to make a giant inflatable pretzel. Check out some of Otto Piene’s work for more examples of large scale inflatables of this sort.And yes, I do wish I’d thought of Joshua Allen Harris’s subway airvent inflated animals – such a lovely design and motion. And for me a nice evolution from Michael Rakowitz’s HVAC inflated and heated paraSITE homeless shelter too.
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One & Other plinth, London, Aug 2009
Hour long slot on Anthony Gormley’s London plinth project, One & Other. Talking about digital documentation, privacy and public art. Giving away sweets, drinking Gin & Tonic, eating a kebab, dancing and letting my hair down.
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Interactive & Generative Art Workshop, Sheffield, Jul 2009
Helping Paul Emery deliver a spirograph-inspired interactive and generative art workshop for 7-12 year olds at Lovebytes. Using scratch, vvvv, max/msp and processing, plus projectors, a speaker array and pens & paper. Devised and run in collaboration with the School of Interactive and Algorithmic Art.
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BBC Learning Unplugged case study, Bristol, Jun 2009
Presented ideas as part of the BBC Learning Unplugged day at the Pervasive Lab in Bristol.
The aim of this event is to build new relationships, project ideas and understanding between BBC staff and commissioners and creatives working in pervasive media.
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Our City, Our Music launch, Leeds, Jun 2009
Culmination of a year long project in collaboration with Megan Smith and Ben Halsall. Launch evening, including a screening of all 11 films to the bands and filmmakers plus live performances from Cari Flower, Ellen & The Escapades and Breaking The Illusion. The following day GPS iPaqs available for people to explore the geolocated album, plus tours throughout the day starting from the Leeds Met Uni NTI building.
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b.TWEEN 09 Interactive Digital Media Forum, FACT Liverpool, Jun 2009
Location-based Narrative workshop with Megan Smith, Ben Halsall and Alfie Dennen at FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) Liverpool as part of b.TWEEN09. Speaking about making location-aware projects work in terms of technology, audience and content and showing the Our City, Our Music project and some of Alfie’s projects including Britglyph.
Slides:
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The rules of Pullman’s Dæmons
A recent post from Ben Fry describing On the Marionette Theatre by Heinrich von Kleist reminded me to return to the ideas of dæmons as created by the author Philip Pullman. In the acknowledgements of the His Dark Materials trilogy, Pullman cites On the Marionette Theatre as a particular influence for some of the themes in his books. In a 2007 interview, Pullman concludes a description of Kleist’s short story about the human struggle between grace and self-consciousness by saying:I can’t tell you what an impression that essay made on me, and how profound and important I think it is.
What interests me in this essay however, and in the Pullman books that followed it, are the themes of puppetry and personal companions. Pullman’s creation of soul-like dæmons – physical manifestations of some aspects of human nature in the form of personal animal companions – establish an interesting set of rules for experiments in personal robotics. Pullman describes daemons as “one being in two bodies”. Applying this to robotics-for-everday-life we move towards a zuhanden teleoperation interface that begins to form an extension of self. The users expression of emotion through a limited system is then much like the puppeteer at the beginning of Klesit’s story.
The rules for personal robots built to work like Pullman’s dæmons would be:
- animal form
- almost always the opposite sex to their owner
- touching somebody else’s dæmon is an act of intimacy
- a dæmon may have a shifting form or a fixed one depending on how fixed a person’s personality is
- human and dæmon must stay within a short distance of each other (with the exception of witches)
- dæmons tend to talk mostly to their owner
A fun set of restrictions to work with I think.
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Contextualising online diaries
In the process of archiving some old media lab class work I ran across notes I had made and forgotten about on the subjects of “moblogging, temporal and spatial rhythms and visualisation”.
While my final class paper for Judith Donath’s ‘Designing Sociable Media‘ is an interesting enough read, looking back it’s these notes I find provide a clearer narrative on the subjects I studied during that class.
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Using PRoPs for presence
Published in 2000, The Robot in the Garden, is a collection of essays edited by Ken Goldberg on telerobotics and telepistemology – ‘the study of knowledge acquired at a distance’. While many of the texts feel a little taken by the novelty of the internet, it remains a succinct review of foundations in the field.
In their chapter, John Canny and Eric Paulos describe PRoPs – Personal Roving Presence devices which allow them to explore to what extent manifestations of computer mediated presence can be effective in placing distant participants into the social and physical context of a space.PRoPs need not be realistic portraits of humans because our motor-intentional behaviors are flexible. Our PRoPs are cubist statues, with rearrangements of face and arms, and separation of eyes from gaze … dictated by function and engineering constraint.
Their devices are relatively simple – a conferencing system mounted at eye level on a roomba type device or a helium filled blimp that can navigate a space – but allowed for social experiments into the psychology of interactions mediated through mechanically extended body. Canny and Paulos have long since moved on to many other projects, but their research approach remains a pertinent and valid one.
