Project 3: Brainstorming

We were assigned our third project this last class, "All Senses but Sight".

In assigned groups, you will develop a project that involves all the senses EXCEPT sight. You should brainstorm all the human experiences that we call “senses”. The project will probably be a kind of performance or time-based experience, and will therefore need a thoughtful sequencing. This should communicate an idea; your audience should “get something” from the experience. All of this takes planning and rehearsal. It may also take technology.

After eventually finding our groups we began brainstorming some ideas for the project. Almost immediately an idea was mentioned that the whole group was in support of. We wanted to express the four seasons as an experience for the class. We began talking about all the different ways we could do this for each of the non-sight senses:

Sound

-Ambient noise

-Music

Smell

-Nature smells

-Festive scents (candles)

Taste

-Seasonal foods

Touch

-Fans
-Heaters

Project 2: Presentation

We presented our second project for the Hardware Hacks assignment today. After spending the past weekend meeting up many times we had finally finished our glass tornado. Below are two pictures of our project in action...



and a video too...

I felt that this second project went much better than my first project and presentation. This time my group focused more on creating art and leaving the interpretation up to the audience as opposed to my first project presentation where we tried to convey a very distinct message to the audience (which I think we ultimately failed at doing). This project, even if the audience takes no message away from it, they saw a fun looking device demonstrating the goal of hardware hacking from this assignment.

Project 2: Brainstorming and Construction

Project 2 was assigned to us this Tuesday and it is due to be presented next Tuesday. The assignment is shown below:

Project 2 Houseware / Hardware Hack or Circuit Bending
Hardware hacking can consist of either making new hardware, or simply modifying old hardware. Circuit bending is, to creatively short-circuit devices such as, low voltage, battery-powered guitar effects, children’s toys and small synthesizers, to create new musical instruments and sound generators.

Our group first brainstormed about the different skills that we had that we could apply to this project. Between our group we had 3 CS majors and an Art major. None of us had any real experience working with hardware or circuitry but I did know how to sodder and understood how circuits should work from physics courses.
We checked whether anyone in the group had any hardware laying around their apartments that we could use but no one seemed to have any. Andrea (the art student) did have a lot of tools and items like a hot glue gun that we were able to use. We figured that we couldn't really come up with an idea for a project without knowing what materials we will be able to work with so we decided to check what hardware was available at Goodwill and brainstorm ideas while there.
The next day (Wednesday) we went to Christiansburg and while at Goodwill we found a light-up display case for electronic flowers. We thought it would be cool to utilize the display case and enhance the lighting to display a scene inside the display case.
One idea we had was to remove the existing flowers from the case and to replace them with flowers we made out of glass. We then thought of showing something other than just flowers and the idea came to us to show a tornado. We purchased the display case and glass cups from Goodwill and shopped around for a small device with a motor that we could use to make the tornado spin. We eventually found a childrens toy at Wal-Mart and added it to our supplies.



We met again on Thursday during class to begin work on the construction of our project. We managed to completely disassemble the display case and childrens toy, and smash up a lot of glass to use for the tornado.






We met again on Sunday to rebuild the electronics inside of the display case and to create an internal structure. This involved a lot of soddering and gluing. It was very difficult to hold the motor in place while it was on but we eventually devised a structure using extra exacto-knife blades and hot glue to hold it still. Then finally on Monday we met for the last time to construct the glass tornado on top of the motor. We finished that evening and were ready to present the next day.

Project 1: Presentations

Today we presented our first project to the class. We had all the materials ready and prepared in advance and had all the lines and activity for the skit practiced, but we had never actually done a full practice run. Since we had never actually run through the full performance beforehand, we didn't know how certain elements would work such as having group members within the audience. In hindsight it would have been good to have practiced with an audience beforehand to get a sense of how it would work and to ensure the whole skit went smoothly. We didn't receive a positive reaction from the class nor professors and if we had run through with an audience beforehand we might have been able to make necessary adjustments so the audience would enjoy it more and understand the message we were trying to convey.

Between all projects I felt like groups emphasized different goals. Some groups aimed to convey a distinct message (some succeeded and some failed) and build their projects around that while others had a cool project that they tried to add a narrative to.

I found some of the other groups presentations very interesting. In particular there was one which displayed Twitter messages real time. The idea of displaying Twitter messages was okay by itself and it had a very nice presentation, but what made the exhibit special was that it was taking actual Twitter messages being posted at that time and displaying them. I know it made me and others think of ways this exhibit could be modified and used for non-art applications.

Poetry Lecture

This last class was a Tuesday lecture which focused on understanding what makes a form of art good or bad. This spurned a confused reaction in me as I see art as being completely objective to the viewer, what some love, others will hate. We began by splitting up into our project groups and looking at different forms of cyber-poetry then finding an example that we liked and an example that we disliked. As our group went through many different examples, we were able to identify different characteristics that we either appreciated or disliked. A large portion of cyber-poetry that we found were either poetry generators (http://thinkzone.wlonk.com/PoemGen/PoemGen.htm or http://www.poemofquotes.com/tools/poetry-generator.php) or hyper-poetry (http://community.middlebury.edu/~harris/Hyper-Poetry/fireflies.html or https://www.msu.edu/~corcora5/hyper/Storm/storm.html). We had no trouble at all finding poetry that we didn't like, and honestly were unable to find any that we did like. Sure, if we deeply analyze some we can find some characteristics that are interesting, but the poetry itself is still completely unenjoyable.