Just for a public record I wanted to post some writing about this project I made initially because I feel it still is holds true to my direction with this project, and might not have been seen yet. Also below is an image of an artist statement I finished last week. The first artist statement I am actually happy with.
Object & Machine: a Relational Performance
“Object”- Has a natural reaction. Has many natural states.
“Machine”- Performs actions or verbs on the object(s). Has many calculated states.
“Happenings” – Happenings take place anywhere, and are often multi-disciplinary, with nonlinear narrative and the active participation of the audience.
“Coincidence” – correspondence in nature or in time of occurrence.
At some point this blog post became list formatted, so we are just gonna roll with it.
Here is my progress so far:
1.
I experimented. A lot. I think I’ve tried almost all the chemicals in the print shop, plus the basic assortment of rubbing alcohol normal alcohols, bleaches and other cleaning things. 90% of the things did absolutely nothing to the ink on the page.
This project is based off of current and past research that vibration can be used as an educational device for the deaf. I have used resources that have focused on wearable computer platforms, but have also looked at platforms that are Non-wearable, and serve more as an Educational object. By incorporating other senses like movement via projections, and light I hope to make something that is useable to children and adults.
So! This is the second milestone of my still unnamed project. Maybe I should name it! I’ll consider that while writing.
So!!! Last time I was like THE HELL DO I DO WITH THESE SENSORS AND CAMERAS, and the answer was discovered to be STUFF. So now I did some stuff I guess.
First, Ali helped me set up a camera helmet combo, which is very fun. I am like an Angler Fish. Pictureeeeeee:
It is pretty exciting! I also used some clothesline I had lying around to attach it to my face better. This has the wonderful side effect of choking the wearer. Besides that it’s pretty comfortable, though.
What else happened? I played with a Raspberry Pi some. I don’t have any pictures of that, because I haven’t really gotten anywhere yet. But yeah, I might end up porting things to PD and putting it on that? That would be splendid. I guess that is happening next a little bit.
I made a little video to show what it looks like in Max right now. Uh.
You are reading the first milestone of Henry Armero’s so far unnamed project. What an exciting premise! What is it?
Well, currently The Plan is to create some manner of mask, costume, suit, and/or outfit that will have some means of detecting motion of the wearer. It will form an instrument that works as follows!: It encourages stillness, building off the slight involuntary motions of the wearer and the static of the sensors. However, when there is a big movement, like a blink or a twitch or an itch or a whatever, the building sound will get jarred and it will be a thing.
COOL OK SO, how will this be accomplished? Well, I didn’t want to just jump in and start planning around certain aspects in case they turned out to be mega shitty. So I started out by doing a test of the various techs just to see how they rolled. First, how would having a webcam with live processing go?
To decide that, I built a little max patch and played with the jit openCV boxes. And I think they work pretty well! My patch looks kind of like this, if you are curious. You can click for big!
I’ve always found Ikea a very strange place. Especially strange is their style of testing furniture. They create these incredible weird and awesome machines for testing their furniture. The entire goal of this machine is to try and simulate a human person or gesture (such as sitting or cabinet opening).
Two videos below (2nd one is disturbing):
-An actual machine testing how a person would sit.
These are my top inspirational artists I have recently come across. There are more classic examples than these people, but I’m excited about this group as I haven’t seen their work until very recently. Refreshing work!
My first new favorite body of work and huge inspiration for my senior thesis project is the work of Maywa Denki. A Japanesse artist who was maybe best known in the mid 90’s.
“Who am I? […] I wanted to create ‘products’ with a fish motif in order to discover myself”
“I decided to assume I was a fish. The fishes shape is very simple[…] If you look at non-sense from a different angle, it becomes common sense.”
*click the image for an INCREDIBLE 3 part “commercial” for his Naki series of machines.
Maywa also does an incredible series and concerts of musical instruments.
A few other artists I’m very inspired by in one way or another: