and a recursive tree made out of recycled cardboard – i couldn’t help myself

more 5-in-5 photos on flickr

First of all what the fuck is a “guest star”? I hate that heirarchy wierdness.

Second of all, this is my project. I am documenting the documentation of my day doing a project as a participant in 5-in-5 at ITP. I will post things as soon as they are captured. I’ll be doing everything I can to let you know about my progress throughout the day. I’ll be doing tutorials on life, uploading music videos that I make, uploading precious photos of myself, and interacting with my readers. Basically, I’m doing everything that comes to mind. Filtering is low. Release early and often. Make desicions quickly. I don’t know how I feel about that yet, but I’m going to see it through. Here’s the ongoing documentation. I strongly encourage and am asking for commments, questions and participation of all kinds. My phone number is 917-701-3226. Call it. My email is metablog@andrewjs.com. Write it. What happens now.

Anyone who has ever spent time building anything knows that frustrations can mount quite quickly during the process. If you’ve ever spent anytime in the P-comp lab on the ITP floor, it’s more then likely that you’ve heard people venting these frustrations, often in the form of loud expletives. Swearing, for whatever reasons, is probably one of the most common forms of expression on the planet. Profanity almost always captures the listener’s attention, and nearly always conveys a definite mood or point.

I am no stranger to foul language, and often surprise myself with my mutterings when a task isn’t going as easily as I had originally hoped. Last night, while finishing up my project, I found myself repeating a series of words over and over and over again. At one point, around 4 am, the words seemed to blend into their own incomprehensible sound, forming the ultimate dirty word.

Today, for my last 5-in-5, I decided to keep things pretty simple and recreate a vulgar blended word for all to hear. After spending some time search for a definitive list of ‘swear’ words, I found that the most comprehensive and respected collection seemed to belong to the late George Carlin, from his routine “Seven Dirty Words You Can Never Say on Television.” For those of you not familiar with the routine (and you really should be), Carlin also lists three ‘auxiliary’ words in addition to the original seven, all ten of which are guaranteed to get you in immediate trouble with the FCC. I won’t repeat the words by themselves, but you can find the list on Wikipedia, ihttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_words, if you are interested). Some of these curses are far too harsh for my usual repertoire, but I decided to include them in this project nonetheless.

Next, I recorded myself saying all of the curses in Audacity, edited them, and then layered the sounds on top of the other. The result is completely incomprehensible, but, by my reckoning, should in fact be the dirtiest word known to man.

Take a listen, and don’t worry, it’s impossible to make out individual profanities: The Dirtiest Word

As a counterpoint, I also poked around the net for the ten happiest words in the English language. There were no definitive sources on this, but I did come across several message board/blog postings, and self help pages, listing ‘happy’ words, so I used a medley of the ones that came up the most frequently.

The words were:

Happy
Bliss
Joy
Ecstasy
Sunshine
Blessed
Love
Laugh
Serene
Smile.

This, by all means, should then be one of the happiest sounds you’ll ever hear;

Take a listen; The Happiest Word

Anyway, I have to say that I was shocked by how similarly the audio collages sound. I expected that the ‘dirtiest word’ would have much harsher ‘R’ and ‘U’ sounds, but instead has a sort of ‘shhhhhhh’ sound. The happiest word just sounds like a bit of a mess, really no surprise given the tonal variation amongst the samples used.

This project, though finished for today, feels like something that would be fun to explore much further.

In the mean time, feel free to drop as many D bombs as you’d like,

And I wish you a “???” day.

Thanks!

One of the biggest problems at the Burning Man Festival is locating all of your friends once you arrive. Cell phones are useless in such a remote location, email is useless (there are a few stations, but the lines are ridiculous), and GPS nearly pointless (Black Rock City moves every year, so it’s nearly impossible to know it’s precise coordinates). One of the most effective means of communicating with those not in your immediate vicinity on the Playa is leaving a message on a huge communal board, a system that quickly degrades into near chaos.

If one is lucky, you may serendipitously chance upon a familiar face amidst the throngs – a truly amazing occurrence considering the forty thousand plus attendees. If you’re not willing to leave your meeting up to fate, however, the best thing that one can do is to inform their friends as to the general location of their camp before arriving. Black Rock City is well planned, with named streets and an actual city grid, Despite this, navigating your way around a temporary tent city metropolis can be a bit chaotic.

That’s why it’s always good to have a landmark on your home turf, something easily recognizable, something you can tell your friends to look out for, and something to guide you home at night.

This is exactly why my girlfriend, Jennifer Fisher, and I spent the evening making The Big-Ass EL Wire Arrow Flag. As we are flying to the festival, we needed something that could easily fit into our luggage. We plan on using military surplus tent poles to get the flag about 16 feet off the ground, just high enough to make it recognizable landmark. I also have a hankering to attach it to a weather balloon banner style, pointing downward. When attached to a belt loop this would work as a sort of airborne beacon, bobbing aroundabove the user, indicating their position to anyone that may be looking for them

This flag can not only be used this to navigate by, but also to navigate with, in a manner nearly identical to that of my Free.P.S. Project. I also can’t help but think that it’s a bit funny that the thing that we will be using to navigate home will always be pointing somewhere else, encouraging further wandering.

The flag is constructed out of rip stop nylon, trimmed with 2″ black sail tape, and EL wire with a great little tail for sewing. Neither were the easiest materials to actually sew, but, all in all, Jen and I are both exceedingly happy with the final product.

Take a look at our construction process below:

Laying out the pattern.

Sewing on the tailed EL wire. This was a real pain.

Arrow trimmed with EL wire, and side panels added. Next came the black trim (shown in the 2nd picture), and finally the thing was ready to be lit up.

In future iterations of this, now that I’m familiar with EL wire, I would really like to build in some sequenced animation, along the lines of old neon bar signs.

You can never go wrong with more EL wire.

Thanks!

]]> http://4-in-4.com/2008/08/01/the-big-ass-arrow-el-flag/feed/ 1 http://4-in-4.com/2008/08/01/iwander/ http://4-in-4.com/2008/08/01/iwander/#comments Fri, 01 Aug 2008 07:55:30 +0000 David Steele Overholt http://5-in-5.com/?p=178 When studying the Dadaists in undergrad, I remember being fascinated with the artists’ technique of going on walks to gain inspiration and materials for their work. Specifically, Kurt Schwitters’ Merz assemblage pieces (check the bottom of this post for more info). This seems fairly natural and obvious to me now – when I need to get inspiration and think about my projects it’s second nature to go driving, walk, get on the subway, or just take a shower to have time to think and mull-through some ideas, but at the time I was flabbergasted. Why would I want to just walk around for no reason?

The purpose of this project is to go on a randomly navigated journey which concludes in a collage/assemblage, and use the event as an alpha prototype for the creation of an iPhone application that would navigate these journeys for me.

Prototype:
Record myself saying forward, backward, left, right, take picture, and multiple 5 and 10 second empty tracks
Put these tracks into a playlist, upload to iPhone
Open iPod app on iPhone
Shuffle and repeat the playlist
Switch to Clock app and set a timer for 10 minutes
Switch to the camera app
Take a pic when commanded
Go back to my computer and make a collage – try various ways

Studying:
Timing
Number of pictures able to be taken within allotted time
Attraction of idea
Worth of making application
What happens when you can’t the desired path? (add a “re-route button”?)
What if the route is against your moral compass or would put you in harm? (into a house, over a fence, into the ocean)
What if i’m supposed to take a picture where i’m in danger? (middle of an intersection)

Additional Questions:
What if a call comes in?
Should it not be time based? (10 minutes or whenever you feel like stopping?)
From the hip/blind picture taking? (more Dadaist)
How is this the same/different now that it’s a methodical application?
Suggest what to take a picture of? (something round, dark, jagged, etc)
Use other proponents of the iPhone? (vibration for take a picture, a way to use the ear-bud button for camera, etc)

Test 1
Time: 10 minutes
Total pictures: 9

Discovered:
Need a way to pause if it’s an application (use ear bud button)
Consider battery life
Need to start off with a direction
“Forwards” doesn’t mean anything… taking it out
I basically ended up walking around in a circle: adding a lot more pausing for next test
iPod’s shuffle repeats the same shuffled list, I had to reshuffle periodically – will add more tracks for test 2 to offset this
When you come up against an obstacle you can always stop, or just wander on your own
Use the voice as a guide, it’s okay to take liberties
It’s fun and actually really funny!

Collage:

Great temptation to take individually “good” or “interesting” pictures, but better for collage to do flat spaces with some angles and perspective
Pictures of the sky help
Don’t have to use all the pictures
Take landscape view pics and only sometimes use profile
Should be able to crop at angles for collage
Collage needs to start out with a blank canvas
Need the ability to re-use pictures and not just one instance
Could be good to have a black and white setting for collage (pictures expose differently)

Test 2

Time: 10 minutes
Total pictures: 8
Canyons traversed: 1

Changes:
Added more empty time and duplicated tracks to playlist
Took more horizon/foreground pictures
Followed commands less strictly (forced upon me)

Discovered:
I had it easy the first test – this one landed me in a canyon… twice!
When you run in to an obstacle, a rule set could be to use your last given command to rectify
Wear shoes; you never know…
Go in to it with an open mind
If you run in to something interesting, you already have your camera out and ready to shoot

Collage:

If taking picture of horizon only, could create a timeline of the walk (possibly an automated feature)
Having a common element to revolve the design around (foliage and sky in this case) was very helpful

Test 3: Collage Only
Testing if it would work better to have a signifying mark to align pictures to which would make a common thread, so I tried to take pictures that had a line half way through the image and then stitched them together in a panorama-style collage.

Discovered:
Could be useful to fade in/out of images

Conclusion:
Creating an iPhone app that leads you on a random inspirational journey, and perhaps prompts you to take pictures along the way, is the most useful.

Adding the ability to create small scale collages on the iPhone would be a waste: the amount of detail needed, as well as the users of the application that would use this function, would require more in creating an assemblage.

An alternative should be considered in creating an automated summary of the photos taken – perhaps a video or slideshow. The most interesting outcome of the prototype was the journey itself, and having a record of the happening would be a bonus.

iPhone Mock-ups:

Additional Features:
Upload or e-mail finished collage to server for others to see
Geotag pics with current location
Play music in the background and fade out/in with directions

Dada, Merz, and Kurt Schwitters:

Dadaism on Wikipedia
Kurt Schwitters on Wikipedia

Example Merz pieces:

it’s food day here in sunny Burbank California for 5-in-5, with a modified Salazar: the peacemaker. A Salazar is a historically fantastic, gorgeous, and satisfying sandwich. It was created 2 years ago at mawopi HQ with Mehmet and Charles, in a desperate moment of severe hunger as a testament to collaborative cooking and fortifying friendship.

A Salazar consists of a a huge turkish bun with some sour cherry spread, a fried egg lying on top of moist roast beef, and armenian string cheese. Delicious, hits all the major food groups, and includes enough tartness to get ya going real good.

Our project today was not a Salazar. This is definitely not the Salazar. I mean, there’s no roast beef. This is a modified Salazar. See, the way it works is that any sandwich that isn’t a Salazar but is made in the original spirit and with some of the original ingredients, is a modified Salazar. Some are good, some are not. Failures are generally named after shamed latin american dictators, such as the Pinochet, a rather disgusting sandwich with turkish kefte and pita bread. This is the peacemaker, a sandwich created to resolve conflict. Don’t believe me? try a fresh august fig with a piece of feta cheese. If you have any fight, argument, or pride left in you afterward I’ll be surprised.

ingredients for one peacemaker:

1 ripe august fig, on the large side. the green skins, not the purple/black ones.
1 Turkish Bread Bun
Feta Cheese to taste, on the salty side
veal bologna
egg, poached.

Start with poaching the egg. I use the easy method of bringing water to boil, adding a teaspoon of white vinegar, turning off the flame, and laying the egg into the water gently from a saucer. I like the yolk in between runny and solid, which means that I leave it in for about 3 minutes. Adjust accordingly. I keep a bowl of ice water next to the pan to use as the first drop off point of the egg. Usually this is done when you have to make more than one poached egg, but I find it also tightens up the white and washes off any odor of vinegar. After this, it’s all smooth sailing.

Since I prefer the bread soft, but I like the inside toasted, I put the broiler on high and the buns facing up right under the flame for 2 minutes, just to get a light brown. lightly butter to make sure the bun has some give under it, and pile on the meat. I used veal bologna because I was looking for two things: even texture and no pork. A true Salazar and a true peacemaker both don’t use pork. lay on top of the meat the egg, then the figs and the cheese and you’re done. Now remember, the peacemaker is consumed ideally in the sun with a lager, old friends, in the Mediterranean sea of your mind, and only the best intentions guiding your discussions.

Other Modified Salazars:

The summer of Salazar, chives, peaches, yogurt and roast beef, lightly drizzled with honey stuffed into a pita bread.

The recursive Salazar,aged parmigiano reggiano, sliced sweet sopressata, thinly sliced peaches, sour cherry jam, fresh mint garnish on a raisin challah bread.

the Vegetarian Salazar Original ingredients minus the meat. simple, yet so elegant.

see more pictures on flickr.

Walk

http://itp.nyu.edu/~tas353/walk.jpg

For today’s project we made a cooking show with one of the Robot Chef recipes which we called Cashew Suprise Cake. Enjoy.

Robot Chef Cooking Show from Anderson Miller on Vimeo.

Chris Cerrito recommended I use hex inverters (specifically, 74HC14′s) to generate my audio. These are very simple to use, and since the 74HC14′s contain four inverters per chip, this could be a compact one chip solution. I managed to get a tone, but then I realized that there was no way to use one hex inverter on a chip to trigger another one to play at a regular cycle.

It turned out that I needed to use a 4093 NAND gate/hex inverter chip. Each inverter has TWO inputs, plus one output (the 4HC14 only had one input). This enabled me to generate a slow cycle with one inverter, and use the output pin to trigger another inverter with a higher frequency…providing an audible tone. The beauty of this solution is that it only required one chip and four components (two resistors and two capacitors…which determine each inverter’s period). Here are some shots of my circuit:

The problem with this circuit is that the two 3v coin cells I was going to use simply couldn’t handle the current draw. They made an awesome series of descending-frequency chirps…but died after about 5 chirps. I figured I could use either a 9V or a AA battery with a step-up circuit…but I never got far enough to have to make this decision.

My troubles began when I soldered the freeform circuit. Creating a such a circuit is difficult…you have to solder the components directly to chip pins, as well as to each other. You also have to solder wire to the components and chip to act as power and ground bus. And you have to do all this without shorting anything. Unfortunately, that must be exactly what I did. I melted two small speakers, and apparently fried the chip itself with my 9V test. On the off chance that I had simply soldered the circuit incorrectly, I attempted a second try using the other two inverters on the chip…but go nothing. I suppose I fried the one and only 4093 chip I had. (Chris gave it to me.) So, unfortunately, my 5in5 project for today will not be complete. Well not entirely. Here’s what I unded up with:

But the day wasn’t a TOTAL wash. Since I was inspired by LED Throwies, I decided to make one with a superbright LED and the coin cells I was going to use for the Chirpie:

movie of the Throwie in action

So yeah I made SOMETHING…but it ain’t all that. Still, I learned far more than I ever expected to about creating oscillators with analog circuits. I’m actually very happy that I can come away with that useful knowledge…and I’m committed to actually COMPLETING a Chirpie when I can get my hands on another 4093. Only next time, I’ll probably do the whole thing on a perf board and cut it down as small as possible. Freeform circuits are just too unpredictable.

Link to video.

The recipe we followed is here, for anyone at home who wants to cook along with us:

Ingredients
0.5 Cup Cashews
1.875 Cups Water
1 pinch salt
1.625 Cups Sugar
3.875 Units Egg
2.75 Tablespoons butter
2.25 Cups Milk
0.625 Cups Onion

Directions
1. flatten the egg
2. cutt the butter
3. divide the water
4. sift the flour
5. add the butter to the water
6. blend the milk with the egg
7. pour the egg into the milk
8. heat in a pan on the stove on low

(The source text used in the demonstration video is Lord Dunsany’s Poltarnees, Beholder of Ocean, which has nothing to do with fruit. I don’t know why I drew fruit. I guess I drew fruit because it’s easy to draw, and also delicious.)

Here’s how it works.

Strokeweight requires a two-dimensional array of strings. I created this array by running a short story by Lord Dunsany through a Markov chain algorithm, and then using the Markov chain to populate the cells in the array. The algorithm I used works like this: A random seed token is placed in a random grid cell, and this token is passed to the Markov chain to generate values for the surrounding cells. The tokens in those cells are passed to the Markov chain to generate values for the cells surrounding them, and so on recursively, until the entire grid is filled. You end up with a two-dimensional grid that has tree-like “strands” of Markov-compliant text running through it in different directions.

The “Markov grid” thereby created is loaded into a Processing applet, which associates the position of stylus (or the mouse) to a position in the grid. The string contained in that position on the grid is sent (via OSC) to a Cocoa application that actually displays the text. Lifting the stylus from the tablet (or releasing the mouse button) tells the text display to insert a new line; leaving the pen up for more than a second or so will generate a second new line.

Here’s how the interface is set up.

The relationship between the drawing and the text is not literal in any way, of course, but it does manage to capture a number of drawing-related gestures and translate them into textual “gestures”:

• Small, slow movements of the stylus tend to move along (relatively) coherent sequences of cells, and therefore generate (relatively) coherent text
• Large, fast movements skip across sequences and create less coherent text
• Detail work in which the stylus is repeatedly lifted from the tablet, then replaced, creates staccato enjambments
• Lifting the stylus to “rest” effectively creates a new stanza

Overall, I’m satisfied with the results, especially for a day’s worth of work. I’d like to think about making adjustments to incorporate stylus pressure, and maybe adjust the “markov grid” algorithm to create coherent text more frequently (or ditch the concept altogether).

Bonus for people who have read this far: a complete reading of the poem written in the demonstration video, read by yours truly (192kbps MP3). I did this mostly to test out ITP’s swank new audio booth.

“The oldest surviving samplers were constructed in the 15th and 16th centuries. As there were no pre-printed patterns available for needleworkers, a stitched model was needed. Whenever a needlewoman saw a new and interesting example of a stitching pattern, she would quickly sew a small sample of it onto a piece of cloth – her ‘sampler’. The patterns were sewn randomly onto the fabric as a reference for future use, and the woman would collect extra stitches and patterns throughout her lifetime.

16th Century English samplers were stitched on a narrow band of fabric 6-9in (15-23cm) wide. As fabric was very expensive, these samplers were totally covered with stitches. These were known as band samplers and valued highly, often being mentioned in wills and passed down through the generations.”

I decided to do an interpretation of the band sampler and have the base cloth for my sampler be a long, narrow form:

Since the idea with the sampler is to collect techniques as you learn them, this is just the beginning of a work in progress. The first example on it compares various soft conductors: ironed-on conductive fabric, as well as machine-sewn and hand-sewn conductive thread.

Soon to be added are different insulation techniques, crimp beads with surface mounts components, as well as various connectors and switches. More pictures to follow!

I took this picture when some of my friends and I were coming back from a weekend on Amantani Island on Lake Titicaca (in Peru), and it was breathtaking. I wanted to see if I could deconstruct this picture in AfterEffects and make the water, clouds, and sunlight move, so here is the finished result. The resolution is relatively low because I wanted to minimize render time and disk space.

more 5-in-5 photos on flickr