The Internet of Things relies on several processes working in unison. The First of which is that many Different devices and appliances will communicate to create a greater cohesion of activities, this could be for example your toaster telling an extractor fan to turn on, or a printer reminding a office supplier when it is running low on ink directly.
Robots and their functionality in art.
The door opens and then suddenly the screaming starts… To a viewer this might seem a tad shocking, but I spent quite a large amount of time programming the switch in the door and while it certainly has it’s artistic merit robotics is a slow game often leaving you with very little to show for yourself, this is something I have personally struggled with having made art in mostly expressive or philosophical manners it is hard to adjust to something which is not immediately in front of me. On top of this I broke my elbow part way through the course and found it both impossible to participate and record the happenings of the various workshops and lectures. I did however still engage where I could and by the end of this assignment I am on my way to creating a roving robot which will eventually be able to turn in various directions. The robot needs to be able to understand that there are two motors that need to work in various polarities depending on what it wants to do at this moment in time it is a simple circuit and has to be rewired to change it’s function. To progress with this project I will need to learn how to program this with the robotics programming language Arduino. Arduino is a simple (comparatively) program created alongside with Arduino boards which allow people to create simple robots without needing to solder components together. While they are not simple to understand without instruction they could be very useful for artists’ who are looking at creating interactive art. I personally found that they are perhaps still to far away to be useful for art students or really any students really who are not already well versed in code, the problem is that at this moment in time coding is not intuitive and I don’t think it ever will be, I think what is necessary for robotics to be usable for artist in general is a program that works in a flow-chat or visual manner something that is built with sliders and visible connecting imagery like Maxmsp and not created by first finding the serial input and then working out the appropriate values to set as minimum and maximum.
Kinetic environments
The ability for a room to react to where and how you are when inside it is perhaps the most useful and most dangerous of current technologies being developed. At this moment in time the ability is rather clumsy and has only really research benefits, while it does have the potential to be used for art; to react to a person and change to give that person a greater feeling of immersion. In the future this technology will be extremely efficient and will be able to create stunning reactions to our actions but at this moment in time the best we can manage is rather simplistic snapshots. We can’t say however that what can be done though is all together worthless, in fact the creations that can be done now can have a intimate feeling to them for example a piece I saw in the Lumen Prize (cannot find the artists’ names at this time) used a Xbox Kinetc camera to take an image of the outline of your body and then project this in a fashion that it would collapse afterwards scattering parts of the image down, this created a feeling of temporary existence that you where there to take a short time out of the planes of existence. This while certainly moving is really only the bare bones of what will be possible in the future, it is very likely that we could have rooms which not only alleviate stress and other negative emotions but also help to embrace others allowing us to sink further into ourselves and create and greater and more powerful experience than has previously been available.
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To look at what will be possible in the future I believe it is best to look to the world of video gaming in which we see multiple different paths being undertaken at once to begin with I will talk about Oculus rift the augmented reality vision hardware [link] this device will allow the user to see a 3D video feed of a digital world and look around using gyroscopes this gives the user an incredible amount of depth perception into the worlds’ physical shape and the distances in these worlds. Another device that is taking a similar approach is the Steam gamepad which has haptic feedback built into it’s trackpads this allows the user to get a feel in a literal sense of their environment thus allowing a greater level of perception and interaction.
The Real and the Virtual.
In the Real and the Virtual Field module, I looked at the potential for Augmented Reality (AR) in Art. AR effectively allows for the closing of the gap between the world of the digital to bridge into the world of the real through the use of physical markers and the use of pattern recognition technology. At the beginning of this project we toyed with the use of symbol markers with the Aurasma program which allowed us to attach small videos to markers in the real world. It was a useful introduction and allowed us to get a firm idea of what the technology we would be using was capable of. After this first experience we were tasked with coming up with our own project in which we would use AR, in my case I decided I wanted to try to create a animation that would by scanning devices that could be connected to surveillance show documents explaining how they could be used. Unfortunately it was around this time my laptop completely stopped working, I believed it was a simple hard drive issue and could easily be replaced but after multiple returns to the shop over several weeks it turned out to be a motherboard issue, over this period I was unable to use the specific programs I needed. In the future I intend to try to disconnect my work as far as possible from computers to avoid problems like this arising at least in term of specifically computer orientated work like the programming I used in this project.
I did however plan my work and decided to make quite a big change in design, I moved from the idea of a marker showing you what was around to a false app that would allow me to scare someone by taking their information and relaying it back to them. I moved to this idea thanks to lectures and tutorials with various lecturers most useful of these was with Spike who helped me define best how I should go about enacting the piece I wanted to make. This idea went through several stages before I came to an idea I thought was suitable and could be effectively pulled off. The final idea was that I would create an application using processing that would imitate a terms and conditions waiver that when clicked to accept would run a GIF that showed a animation of files being transferred to the NSA. It wasn’t until the day before the group presentation that I got my laptop back so I spent all night up creating this application fitting it perfectly to the screen of a iPad and running smoothly to look like a genuine file transfer.
Although I did enjoy the ideas and the experience of working with these ideas I don’t think this is an area I will be working with at least as a primary area of interest, I still think what I want from art is not in the digital realm but instead that of the physical, the analogue with all it’s bumps and grains is too entrancing and throughout my time working with digital art I have started to pine for what was one my primary style of work.
selfarrested 