I feel that I had an incredibly successful and helpful critique. I got the success measurement I was looking for when Stefani Bardin said something along the lines of, “wow, I’ve never really thought about wind like that.” It definitely made the risk I took with changing my concept at the last minute worth it.

I think that the best critiques occur when the critics both say that they like your concept and only give you tips on how to take it further. For example, I really liked how the other critic (I unfortunately cannot remember his name) told me to embrace the darkness of this violation. I loved his suggestions to play with both the omnipotence of the user blowing into the pinwheel, and to explore having the content of the video change based on speed (such as my face get more and more upset). His idea to also have the wind movement physically touch the user, with a fake hand or whatnot, was a little out there but interesting to think about as a future exploration.

I could definitely see the wind affecting the content of the video idea be explored in a future exploration. I would also like to explore the use of fans and the video that gets degraded be of the user himself using a camera.

I think it was definitely risky to change my visualization ideas in the last week, and I certainly was unable to push the concept as far as I would have liked to given the time constraint that I gave myself, but as a first exploration, I am incredibly pleased with how it turned out.

Whelp, I had a huge setback/breakthrough this past week. After spending hours on the visualizations in Max/MSP/Jitter, I realized that they just plain looked terrible. And that the real reason I wanted to focus on wind had nothing to do with wind power as an alternative form of energy. Growing up between PA and DC, the wind was always a pleasant indication of the changing of seasons (both autumn and spring), but since I moved the NYC, the wind has morphed into this assaulting violation. It got me to thinking: We largely control that which touches us, and that which we touch. In fact, when we experience unwanted touch, we feel violated and even degraded. Yet the wind touches us daily without invitation or permission; sometimes we feel annoyed, surprised, happy, alive, etc., but we rarely feel as violated as we would with an unwanted touch. Why is this? What would happen if we saw the wind as violation and degradation?

So, still using the pinwheel as the main user interface, I want to have the speed of the pinwheel speed-up and degrade video on the screen, to show the sense of degradation/violation the wind creates. I want to have the user create the wind, since we generally only feel violated when it is being done to us by some uninvited person, almost an omnipotence idea. The video will be degraded using the data from the Arduino. It will get fuzzy and break down, become desaturated and speed up. Grating sounds of electricity and wind will raise in volume as the speed increases.

Here is the video that will be degraded:

Here is a video of user testing. The user suggested to change the frequency of the sounds (higher frequency for faster wind), and to reduce the lag time after the user stops blowing.

*note: videos were added later to add completeness to entry.

I would like for a user to blow into a pinwheel and have it affect visualizations on the screen and a 3D city of lights in front of the screen to show the power of wind energy.

To do this, I will have to gather a speed rating from the pinwheel. The pinwheel itself must spin unimpeded in order for human breath to move it effectively, which forces me to design it with the least amount of additional weight from hardware as possible. While there are many established ways of recording rotational speed (Servo motors, reed switches, Hall effect sensors, etc.), I decided to use the simplest switch possible – a break in a light beam using an LED and a photoresistor – and read the time in between breaks of light using the Arduino.

The Arduino has two sets of pins – analog, that read values from 0 – 1023, and digital, that only read high or low (5 volts or 0 volts). Normally, a photoresistor is connected to an analog pin to read different values of light, but since I needed to read only high/low, I had to convert it to read on a digital pin. To do this, I routed the photoresistor through a transistor, which took the smaller voltage from the photoresistor and converted it to the necessary 5 volts for the Arduino’s digital pin to read high (figure 1). I used a circular disk with a piece extruding made out of black illustration board (figure 2) attached to the pinwheel’s axel to break the light beam between the LED and the photoresistor. Therefore, whenever the light beam between the LED and the transistor is broken, it will read high, and mark the time (in milliseconds). After the second break of the light beam, the Arduino calculates the time difference between the first break and the second break, and exports this number to the serial monitor. From here, we can use this number to affect visualizations on the screen using Max/MSP.

I would have love to have the pinwheel vertical and transfer the energy from the top of the pinwheel to the bottom where the Arduino setup is connected (figure 3), but I found that it lost too much energy in the transfer, so i made the support rod of the pinwheel also be the axel that spins the disk that breaks the light (figure 4).

Prompt:

Discuss precedents/references/inspirations and how they relate to your idea.

1. Windcuts by Miska Knapek: The Windcuts are experiments in turning sensor data into physical instantiations, via Processing and a computer-controlled drill. Wind movement measurement data (wind direction, velocity and temperature) was used to generate a 3d form, which was then cut out of wood. According to Knapek, “This is my memento to the wind’s movements. Sometimes chaotic, sometime calm, always very living.” I found her work unique in taking wind data to create a physical art, with very little human involvement.

    

2. sound & color streams of the lake champlain waterfront by Jenn Karson and Matt Larson: This project is an installation that sends live sound and color streams from the Lake Champlain Waterfront to a live visualization. This project explores creating a visualization from a live feed, something that I thought might work well for my explorations.

    

    

    

3. Blow Up by Scott Sona Snibbe: A precedent for the user interface, “Blow Up records, amplifies, and projects human breath into a room-sized field of wind… Blow Up’s simultaneous processes of recording, translation and amplification is meant to increase the breath’s salience and legibility, while detaching the breath from the body that allegedly produced it.” The user blows into a panel of twelve smaller fans that then affect the wind speed of twelve larger fans across the room. Though his project primarily focuses on breath, I wanted to take this further into the realm of wind.
4. Heart Chamber Orchestra from 12 musicians and artist duo TERMINALBEACH: This performance provided me with precedent for how I want the visualizations to look. I think that they show great power and energy, while remaining quite beautiful.

    

problem

in a sentence…
The wind, while immensely powerful and a strong choice for renewable energy, is essentially invisible, and people have a difficult time understanding, yet alone caring about, that which they cannot physically see.

audience

voters and children

solutions

1. have users blow into a pinwheel hooked up to an arduino that reads rotations per minute. this speed affects visualizations created using max/msp. it also lights up LEDs hooked into a wooden cutout of a city skyline
2. create a visualization that takes live wind data and visualizes it (with an audio composition) so that people can see the wind and hear music from it
3. build a miniature windmill and have it power LEDs in a lego city

here’s a sketch of my final concept:

also, this video is beautiful and an inspiration for visualizations

More info »

idea

As someone who has associated color with abstract concepts of time, letters, and numbers (and at one point in my life, music), I am interested in visualizing the previously unseen, most notably, the wind. We “see” wind through the way it affects leaves in trees, pedestrians’ hair, flags, etc. What I seek to do is to pull the wind out of its invisibility and visualize it through color and sound.

I wish to use Max/MSP to parse out the wind speed and degrees from the wunderground.com api. I would then use these numbers to affect a stream of color, with the numbers affecting the location on the screen and the saturation of the color. Since the data can come from any airport, this project could be easily personalized to the location it is being viewed in.

Ideally, for the background image, it would be fantastic to pull geotagged images from the flickr api of the location of one’s choice. [If the flickr api proves too difficult, I would download many images to use in the program.] I would abstract these images and have them form the background for the wind to flow through.

I would like to incorporate sound, with the volume increasing as the wind blows harder.

Finally, it would be nice to incorporate some fans for the presentation, but altering their speeds with the wind might have to wait for stage two.

precedents

• Sound and Color Streams of the Lake Champlain Waterfront by Jenn Karson and Matt Larson
  
• Storm Room by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller
• max msp jitter raindrops by bestbefore
  

RESEARCH

Movie of the park at lunch on a weekday.

IDEAS

We decided to design a function for easily recording your journey (through photos, videos, etc.)

David is a 29 year-old gay male flight attendent, originally from Denton, TX, but currently living outside of New York City. He works for a major international airline, and travels frequently. He often finds himself in major cities worldwide for only a night or two. David enjoys sharing his adventures online with his friends back in the States, but considers it uncool to noticeably take pictures and videos when out at clubs. It also needs to be lightweight and easy to pack. He needs a product that will respect his need to keep his tourist-status under wraps, but that will still record his journeys.

We designed a product that David could wear on his wrist as a watch. In fact, it looks and behaves exactly like a watch. The default screen is a watch. It’s classy and understated. If you turn the ring around the watch to one of the notches (located at 12, 3, 6, and 9 o’clock) the clock changes to a new function – photo, video, check-in (hooked up to your favorite social check-in service), and secret compartment. The secret compartment opens up to hold David’s party drugs, so he doesn’t get caught in countries with harsher drug laws. Please see the diagram below:

dimension

The dimension printers are presumably intended for a commercial audience (despite their website saying that they’re accessible to all), with models starting around $15,000 and going to around $30,000. The price point is a bit high for smaller, independent firms and small businesses. It can certainly do a lot, including rapid prototyping, functional testing, and model making. What’s nice about having a 3d printer in general is it keeps your confidential concepts in-house, it’s much faster than sending out, and can actually save money. However, there’s another option.

MakerBot 3D printer

MakerBot is an open source printer that you can build for $1,225 (or build the smaller, starter one for $650!). After assembling it, you can do just about anything you would do on a regular 3d printer for a fraction of the price. It’s fairly bare-bones and stripped down, but certainly gets the job done. The MakerBot is great for smaller firms and studios, as well as for individuals just tinkering around.

Today was the first really chilly day of fall – 56 degrees and a soft, cold drizzle. I was thinking that as much as love fall, it would be nice to extend summer just a bit. I took my idea from day 5 and applied it to the beach in Rockaway. Here are the results (the third one is my absolute favorite):

Today I decided to go with a bit of a mirroring narcissism theme. Since your facebook profile is generally an egotistical representation of yourself, I decided to make my facebook profile picture a screenshot of my profile. See the photos:

Today I decided to experiment with mirrors creating volume. I walked around my neighborhood and realized that, while there are parks, many of them are quite small. The urban landscape truly has displaced nature, and is continuing to do so at an alarming rate all over the world. So, I thought, what if we could falsely increase the natural world?

I went to some parks and set up mirrors to create the illusion of more foliage. Here are the results: