Final Presentation

Project Demonstration

Project Statement

Final Installation in the MDP Wind Tunnel Gallery. 12/01/2009

In his essay “The Art of Noises: A Futurist Manifesto,” Luigi Russolo states that “In the 19th Century, with the invention of machines, Noise was born.” He goes on to reinforce this theory that before the industrial revolution there was not noise, but only sound. It wasn’t until the invention and proliferation of the machine age that we as a culture became bombarded with noise form all types of man made mechanical sources.

With the introduction of digital technology, a new type of noise immersion was created. As I am writing this form my living room table I am “hearing” the laptop in front of me, 2 or 3 hums coming form the kitchen, and thebuzz of the monitor and tower several feet to my left that I can’t even see. (Which I forgot were on and just turned off after having written that sentence.) We barely even notice this anymore. Now that we are not only surrounded by digital technology but the advancements have been such that it has become increasingly portable, an entirely new type of noise has become so pervasive that it is commonplace. But there have also been interesting side affects of these occurrences. One of which is the common nature to encounter one half of a private telephone conversation in public.

Sure, its annoying when a lack of phone etiquette holds up the line at the grocery store or causes confusion in determining just who someone is talking to (thanks small hands-free headsets). But at other times, the voyeuristic temptations to listen in and fill in the other half of the narrative are just too great to avoid.

The reworked rotary phone explores both of these characteristics of digital public noise through the use of a familiar single-user device that caries a sense of direct connection to the communication experience along with a certain nostalgia or celebration for not being assumed to be “always available.” There are 2 aspects to the audio experience created. Both of these experiences are controlled and manipulated through the use of the single rotary dial.

The first is the public display of the performance. Parts of conversations are mixed with ambient, mostly digital, sounds collected from public spaces to create textural compositions reflective of public spaces invaded by these sonic washes and injections. The ambient sounds are given priority in the composition and through the continued manipulation of the rotary dial, the sounds have the ability to deteriorate over time in a manor consistent with the ways that mobile phone conversations break-up and cut-out.

The second is the individual experience of listening to the audio performed through the handset. The original handset speaker was utilized to provide the appropriate texture for the sounds relevant to the device used. The material for the individual display is provided in a way that composes the conversational language and digital ambiance with more priority given to the voice-based narratives. The composition is also reminiscent of attempting to listen to someone who insists on using their phone in a public place.

Through the use and manipulation of the rotary dial of the phone, not only is the user affecting the sounds that they hear through the handset, they are also affecting and manipulating the compositions performed publicly which they are able to hear as well. The individual experience is intended to include both the intimate handset audio performance along with the public composition so that they can build upon each other to create new moments of silence and chaos, depending on how the user is interacting with the device.

Project Statement

Ubiquitous Street Bureau: A design research project to study the thresholds of walking in a driving culture.

Developed and explored by Daniel Lara, Ana Ramos, and Alex Braidwood

Final Presentation

(Click on the images to view them full size)

Sole Scans

Every sole tells a story. By collecting images of the bottom of people’s shoes along with some additional information collected form the provided survey, this inquiry looks to investigate the roll that footwear plays in our determining when and where to walk.

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Multi-Amphitheater – Collective Performance.

I’m proposing a space where the performance is no longer a one-way transmission passively absorbed by a gang of viewers. Instead, each person becomes a participant, even if just by their presence, in the creation of an audio/visual experience. In this sense, the performer should be considered to be the algorithm – the system behind the scenes that is collecting, trimming, modifying and presented the content for output. The output, however, is determined by the decisions and actions of the participants within the space.

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Using an Arduino, a proximity sensor, and an infared LED, I created this remote trigger to fire off my camera whenever the sensor determined that an object was within a few feet of the box.

Version 1: Maxbotix Ultrasonic Rangefinder

This one worked well indoors and gave a good long range however once outside, there seemed to be a lot of environment interference. The first on location test that we did for threshold investigation, the sensor was firing at not only proximity detection but also loud noises and vibrations.

Version 2: Sharp Infrared Proximity Sensor

Although the range of this sensor was much shorter, the results outdoors where much more accurate providing a greater amount of flexibility for the location in which we could use it. I was also able to get it to fire off both of my Nikon camera’s with the same burst using a small tripod and a mirror to deflect the IR LED’s signal.

Testing outside The Wind Tunnel

On location use during a reaerch outing.

Movement 1: Questions / Disorientation

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Movement 2:  Investigatory Framework / Thinking Through Making

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Movement 3: Critical Analysis / Dissemination

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Download all 3 tracks as MP3s

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Track Artwork: Movement 1

Track Artwork: Movement 2

Track Artwork: Movement 3

Project Statement

Alhazen: The 10th century scientist considered to be the pioneer of the scientific method and the “father of modern optics.” [Source]

Cycle: In musical organization, a cycle is considered to be the grandest level of organization. it concerns the arrangement of several more or less self-contained pieces into a large-scale composition. [Source]

The scientific method is one valuable model for designers to look to when assessing useful methods for process, exploration and the development of new ways of thinking or working. On September 18th, 2009, as part of the Design Dialog Series at the Graduate Media Design Program (MDP) of Art Center, Seth Ruffins, Ph.D. presented the work that he and his group have been doing in the development of atlases that visually map embryonic development. Along with the work of his group, he also laid the foundations for where his interests developed from as well as where his group’s work could potentially go in the future. His interests and the creative output of his group show us as designers that the analytical approach of scientific processes can integrate with aesthetically stunning representations in ways that create new relationships between people from a variety of backgrounds and dense sets of information.

The scientific method traditionally contains 6 steps. These 6 steps were divided into groupings of 2 in order to inspire and inform the formal, structural, and material decisions made in the creation of of a compositional cycle containing 3 movements with 2 parts each. Each movement is composed using only the audio documentation of the spoken lecture as material. The outcome provides the listener with a sequence of 3 different views of the lecture given by slicing and composing the presentation in 3 very particular ways.

Movement 1: Wandering, amorphous, unsure, undefined, potential, lacking structure, theory
Movement 2: Experimentation, exploration, discord, unsettling, hands-on
Movement 3: Refined, resolute, towards definition, communication, concrete, reproducible

Lecture EP Packaging: Front with CD

Lecture EP Packaging: Back - Track titles as Process

The original process begin by investigating the manipulation, scanning and slicing of time visually in a manor influenced by the embryo visuals developed by SethRuffins. With the early introduction of audio manipulation to extract succinct and isolated meanings from the lecture, the visuals become less relevant to the sequence being explored.

In the final form, the visual exploration process was utilized to design the packaging of the audio compositions. The case as well as the disc contain sequenced frames of all of the visual time manipulations and audio visualization studies explored during the process.

Project Statement

On Friday October 19th, 2009 during the NOWCASTING conference at UCLA, Warren Sack proposed that computational languages should be studied not from within the sciences, but as language from within the digital humanities. This idea is intriguing and the development of new programming languages would benefit a great deal from this mode of thinking. Contemporary models for the majority of computational language development is still very much rooted in what should be considered “the original” ways of communicating with computers. Sure, some portions of logic and naming conventions are set in the traditions by which we understand thought processes. However, at a certain level, there tends to be a wide range of barriers unintentionally integrated into the various systems that prevent different types of thinkers with different aptitudes from being able to understand the constructs considered to be “inherent” within the incredibly short historical contexts of these “language” environments. At times these are the strengths of the systems for the initiated but this also is the aspect that prevents these structures from being fully integrated and understood as proper language. The presentation proposes that by studying programming structures in this way, those who develop programming languages and those who utilize them in order to create should be considered to be writers, essayists and storytellers. By embracing this model of studying programming languages as language to look at the past and evaluate in the future, new systems for the creation of the media through the exploration of computational process can become more accessible to a wider range of thinkers and makers.

As a non-programmer (or more accurately a “folk coder”) and someone who has played around with generative processes in a variety of media (see: www.formalplay.com) this also raises the question “how much emphasis should be placed on how something is built?” In written language, literature for example, the way in which a piece is written, the language used, is an integral part of a critique. But in this case the relationship of language and experience is much more clear. Once the system of “writing” is such that the “writing” and the “result” or 2 very separate elements, should how something was made be included, even in a small way, in the value or perception of what was made? This piece poses this question directly through the development of an audio and visual system in which the full meaning is most accessible when both the code that has created the piece and the piece itself are viewed. Information about the audio and visuals being displayed have been carefully crafted into the function names, variable names and comments for development of and integration into the final display.

In its original form, this piece is displayed full-screen on a large monitor with wireless headphones.

The first step to get the cover off. Let me also say that I love devices made in a time where things could be taken apart. In order to disassemble this phone, all I needed was a couple different screw drivers. I didn’t have to break any seams or destroy any chemical glue bonds in order to get into the case. I just had to deal with a few decades of dust, rust and grime.

Once I got the parts separated, laid out, I cleaned off the layers and layers of built up… I’m not sure what it was. Compacted dirt and dust I suppose. At least that’s what I’m going to tell myself it was just so that I can move forward.

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This is the initial field test of our design probe that we will develop to investigate walking as a threshold. We are interested in developing an understanding of people’s motivations and limitations when to comes to walking as a means of transportation. We are not interested in walking as a method of fitness and this has informed the development of our various probes. For this investigation, we are specifically interested in information that can be extracted from the collection of scans of the bottom of various types and styles of footwear. For our initial field test we went to a nearby coffee shop to gather a variety of soles, including one barista who was gracious enough to take a short break to participate. Below is a collection of images form this location, people in our studio, and variety of other people from South Campus.

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Our base threshold for exploration and research is walking. For this study, we were interested in exploring the act of walking as a way to generate marks. To test the feasibility of our initial idea, we performed this test ourselves by talking a stroll around the block with a sheet of paper a soft piece of charcoal hung from a string in order to compare our different movements.

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Science, Not Magic

Science, Not Magic

Quickly hooked an RGB LED up to a knob to see how the sculpted forms would react to the light.

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Multi-Amphitheater – Collective Performance.

I’m proposing a space where the performance is no longer a one-way transmission passively absorbed by a gang of viewers. Instead, each person becomes a participant, even if just by their presence, in the creation of an audio/visual experience. In this sense, the performer should be considered to be the algorithm – the system behind the scenes that is collecting, trimming, modifying and presented the content for output. The output, however, is determined by the decisions and actions of the participants within the space.

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The method for design research that I was assigned to research was Semiotics. Below is my contribution to the class’s body of research and collection. The full resolution PDF of my contribution can be downloaded here.

In an effort to explode an existing text and reorganize the text content as information to present in a new way, I developed a system this system to read and show the text from the book Flatland. The first thing the system does is parse the words from each section of novel and arrange the words for that section in alphabetical order. This creates the text that the system reads to the viewer. Visually, the system displays the text in the original context and highlights the words as they are read aloud while also plotting its location within the original source.

The formal decision for pacing and which voice to use are based on my own difficulty with following the fake inflection and “forced-natural” pacing  that occurs when a long text is read.

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The goal with this iteration was to stop thinking of the space as “room” with walls and floor but explore how the space could take shape if I were to break away from the rectangle base. By raising the the surface, the space takes on a new feel as a user aproaches. From the “ground level,” a new attendee would be able to see get a sense that something is happening but they wouldn’t know exactly what until they ascend the stairs to take part. The clear screens around the edge would provide a blurring between inside and outside however the reactive floor and ability to manipulate the overall experience create a difference between seeing / hearing it from the outside and being right in the middle as an active participant.

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This is the next iteration of space-sketching and procession-ideation for my space that celebrates the thesaurus. Formally, I wanted to experiment more with how the overhead canopy can integrate with the idea of drawing connections and creating relationships. The overhead canopy as well as the clear, curved walls are the display surfaces for the visual results of the user’s interactions. The space is open on both ends and can be entered from either direction. The 2 interactive modules are the “same” however, when initially approached, each will vary in possibilities and display based on the actions of the users who have previously or are currently interacting with them. Each module will be able to be interacted with by multiple participants simultaneously and the results of their interactions are the basis for the displays both on the overhead canopy and the curved outer surfaces. These interactive modules each have 3 surfaces to allow for interactions with word, image and sound. The intention with the form is to create a unique interactive surface that is more connected to the overall space. The interactive modules are based on the earlier sculptural explorations and work to integrate within the space and engage the user in a better way than the interface surfaces in the previous sketch did.

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