Wednesday, 15 October 2014

VART3504 - Controllerism Demonstration

Since June of this year I have been building a custom midi controller using parts from an original NES console and an arduino microcontroller along with developing the software to implement it within ableton live.

The first performance of this controller and a short explanation of the process involved with creating it became the focus for this course.





Tuesday, 14 October 2014

VART3490 - Installation Art :: Major Site Response Project // audiograffiti mk2

RMIT SCHOOL OF ART

Installation Art
Semester 2, 2014

SITE PROJECT
Project Two
The Development of a quick site response into a major project

. Through a personal review of your initial response to a specific site, consider how to widen your inquiry into your chosen location.
. What is the nature of the chosen site or sites, and how to engage more intensively with this particular place?
. What other responses could be brought to this location?
. What further research is required to develop these responses?
. What material, physical aspects will be required in the broader investigation of your chosen site.
. Given that the Quick Response were initially quite short, mark your return with more detailed examination. Eg. through notational, diagrammatic, image-based documentation etc.
. Are there specific entry / exit points?
. How are these spaces used? Observe.
. How are you going to interact with these sites over a 3 week duration?
. Be as exhaustive and detailed in your investigations and insights as possible.
. Once again document these developments.
. Your final outcome(s) to be presented to the group for feedback.

This project is due for Feedback in Week 12, Tuesday 14th October,
2014.

Requirements for Assessment 

This material should appear in your Installation Journal

All relevant research material for Installation Projects.
Documentation of sites and outcomes at sites.
This should be a combination of notations, drawings, models, photographs, videos etc.
Documentation of any appropriate physical residues from the Installation.

Your journal(s) should record your ongoing overview of the semester (e.g. lectures,gallery visits, feedback, tutorials, Projects etc.



site review:

One element of the site that did not present itself on initial assessment was that a homeless man had now made his home in the lane. He would spend some of the day and night sleeping there, while leaving his swag behind when he would leave. I wanted to respect his space, and opted not to intrude with the iteration of the intrusive, repetitive sound and light based installation I was developing. 

With respect to the brief, I needed to select a new site that retained the characteristics of the previous site.

My initial design concept had a broader scope for application as it was developed as response to temporal artistic elements that characterise the site. These elements in turn are characteristically representational of the vast multitude of sites that are involved in an ongoing global artistic movement. 

Graffiti is an exploration of form using urban architectural elements as a medium for artistic conversation. Though site specific elements can inform and sculpt design for individual pieces, the overwhelming majority of design elements within the conversation of graffiti are composed as a response to other designers - as much locally as historically. Pieces are installed in as many places as possible as ongoing portfolio of exhibited work.





I experimented with sonification methods to encode a visual tag into a short blast of audio.



By encoding visual material into a spectrogram using FFT the image would be able to be decoded using a spectroscope on site.

In order for the microcontroller to play back the encoded audio, the sound would have to be encoded again into a format small enough to fit in the flash memory of the board. This is severely limited, the 32 kilobytes of flash memory on the ATMega328p chip requires that the audio fidelity be dropped to about half that of CD quality and truncated to a maximum of one second then converted to a list of individual sample point values read as a single array into memory.


Spectrogram encoded as sample point values into flash memory:


I had also extended my design concept to include a 4 digit, seven segment LED display that I had written code to illuminate the same text that I had encoded into audio.



Limitations of the previous design prevented a long term install due to power constraints. As paint based graffiti is not limited by a similar constraint, I looked at solar power as a means to make the second design address this issue.

I found a circuit online for solar powering the microcontroller that used low cost components with a diy aesthetic - these elements made this circuit perfectly suited to my concept.

The circuit uses small pieces of cheap photovoltaic silicon cells arranged in series to draw the required 5 volts to power the microcontroller board. Each solette can output 0.5v so arranging 10 on the back of a playing card sealed in epoxy allows a cheap, weatherproof solar powered solution.


Unfortunately after making several of these, I could not achieve the required voltage even in direct sunlight. Without epoxy I could draw ~3.5v in full sunlight, which had the scope to develop further using a 3.3v microcontroller board and a low cost regulated NiMH trickle charging circuit I found  - but due to time constraints on the project I had to abandon any further development on this circuit. 

I opted to develop the longevity of the power pack by using 6 AA batteries and optimising the code on the board with a new technique that puts the entire board to sleep while waiting to perform its function.

AA batteries while having a lower voltage output, have a significantly greater (3-10x) the lifespan than the 9v battery I used in the original design (measured in milliamp hours: mAh.) 

The microcontroller has a voltage regulator on board to drop the voltage from 9 to 5v which makes it safe to use voltages greater than 5v.


Testing the 6xAA battery pack voltage.


I housed everything inside a plastic hair diffuser I sourced from an opshop for $5 as an alternative to a prefabricated outdoor plastic horn speaker that would require amplification, more power and and raise the total cost of each unit above the threshold I wanted to retain from the original design.

Final audiograffiti mk2 unit ready for installation.


I selected a stairwell from a different part of the same laneway across the road that was away from the from the area that the homeless guy had claimed. There was only handstyle tags in this section, which was more suited to the image I had encoded to the spectrogram.

I recorded the installed piece in situ as a record of the installation.








Reflection:

I am not a graffiti artist. There are several key elements I find compelling about the movement that I found the scope to transpose my artistic ideals to bring about a new context to my own art, and graffiti art itself.

Through my research I found a vacuum of people exploring new possibilities of multimedia applications of graffiti art outside of a gallery or academic context. The instances I did find were either purely conceptual or functioned as tech demos exclusively within a gallery context. This is entirely antithetical to unspoken tenets of graffiti art.

Removed from its largely circumstantial aesthetic properties, Graffiti art is at its core a movement about expression without boundaries. A highly critical insular culture paradoxically seeks to express individualism,  celebrating new modes of expression and innovation within the medium while retaining an aggressively conservative grip on deviations in form. 

These highly active gallery spaces are the perfect grounds to experiment with new ideas to extend multimedia artistic practice outside of the insular sterility of sanctioned modern art galleries.










Research:

How to weatherproof speakers
http://techchannel.radioshack.com/weatherproof-speakers-3092.html

Many DIY enthusiasts report success in protecting drivers and speaker cones by applying several coats of Thompson's Water Seal or DuraSeal. If you're looking for a polymer protectant designed especially for speakers, you can purchase The Wet Look Pint Clear at your local electronics store or online.

Weatherproof Arduino
http://forum.arduino.cc/index.php/topic,22620.0.html

Lowcost outdoor horn :: $15
http://www.altronics.com.au/p/c2014-redback-15w-8-ohm-weather-proof-plastic-horn-speaker/




Image to Sound Software for OSX:
http://photosounder.com/
http://electro-music.com/wiki/pmwiki.php?n=Articles.ImageToSound

Making a beat with Photoshop and Photosounder:
http://en.440tv.com/video.php/v/2056/Making-a-beat-with-Photoshop-Photosounder


Images to sound software + overview of process:
http://electro-music.com/wiki/pmwiki.php?n=Articles.ImageToSound