COLORFORMS

Mechanisms Midterm Proposal

Feb 26, 2009
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For the past year I have been working on an electroacoustic, robotic step sequencer/drum machine called CrudBox. It has an interface just like any other step sequencer, but instead of playing digitally created or analog synthesized sounds it controls motors, solenoids and other electronic devices and then amplifies their sounds and the sounds of them striking other objects. Any device can be controlled by CrudBox as long as the power source is strong enough. Until now I have mostly been working with solenoids from hacked doorbells, replacing their chimes with various materials like wood, plastic, and sheet metal, and attaching Piezo contact mics to the chimes to amplify their sounds as they are struck.

Because I’ve been using solenoids, each output of the CrudBox can really only make 2 sounds: one when it is switched on and it moves forward to strike the thing in front of it, and the second when its switched off and it falls back and hits whatever its behind it. These sounds are also always predictable and controllable, which is good, but it would be interesting to throw some amount of randomness into the mix.

So for my Mechanisms midterm I would like to create a series of CrudBox-controlled instruments based around DC motors. Whereas when energized a solenoid moves outward in a straight line, then goes back to its original position, a motor starts spinning from wherever it was the last time it stopped, and with this there is a certain amount of controlled randomness, which interests me. Each motor will be held firmly in place on a platform. Attached to each motor will be some sort of mallet, and within reach of this mallet will be various amplified surfaces for it to strike.

In order to do this I need to figure out 1) How to firmly attach a DC motor firmly to a platform, and 2) how to attach a mallet to a DC motor shaft. The rest of the project will largely be experimentation with sounds and with finding the stall torques of the motors to figure out how to build objects for them to strike which are not too heavy or sturdy for them to strike and push past.

I’d like to build 3 of these with different size and strength motors and with the mallets striking different materials.

The budget for this project will be very small. I have a few dozen motors of different sizes and powers at home waiting to be used, I have a few toy xylophone mallets which I could use, and cheap or free wood is easy enough to find.

Mechanisms Midterm Proposal

Feb 26, 2009
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For the past year I have been working on an electroacoustic, robotic step sequencer/drum machine called CrudBox. It has an interface just like any other step sequencer, but instead of playing digitally created or analog synthesized sounds it controls motors, solenoids and other electronic devices and then amplifies their sounds and the sounds of them striking other objects. Any device can be controlled by CrudBox as long as the power source is strong enough. Until now I have mostly been working with solenoids from hacked doorbells, replacing their chimes with various materials like wood, plastic, and sheet metal, and attaching Piezo contact mics to the chimes to amplify their sounds as they are struck.

Because I’ve been using solenoids, each output of the CrudBox can really only make 2 sounds: one when it is switched on and it moves forward to strike the thing in front of it, and the second when its switched off and it falls back and hits whatever its behind it. These sounds are also always predictable and controllable, which is good, but it would be interesting to throw some amount of randomness into the mix.

So for my Mechanisms midterm I would like to create a series of CrudBox-controlled instruments based around DC motors. Whereas when energized a solenoid moves outward in a straight line, then goes back to its original position, a motor starts spinning from wherever it was the last time it stopped, and with this there is a certain amount of controlled randomness, which interests me. Each motor will be held firmly in place on a platform. Attached to each motor will be some sort of mallet, and within reach of this mallet will be various amplified surfaces for it to strike.

In order to do this I need to figure out 1) How to firmly attach a DC motor firmly to a platform, and 2) how to attach a mallet to a DC motor shaft. The rest of the project will largely be experimentation with sounds and with finding the stall torques of the motors to figure out how to build objects for them to strike which are not too heavy or sturdy for them to strike and push past.

I’d like to build 3 of these with different size and strength motors and with the mallets striking different materials.

The budget for this project will be very small. I have a few dozen motors of different sizes and powers at home waiting to be used, I have a few toy xylophone mallets which I could use, and cheap or free wood is easy enough to find.

Mechanisms Week 3: Torque

Feb 10, 2009
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I looked through all the motors in my toolbox for one with a part number and a data sheet. I found a datasheet for my RS-380SH, a DC motor. According to the datasheet the stall torque is 839 gram/centimeters. The only other info it gives is "torque at maximum efficiency', which is 111 g/cm. Since I'm not sure if this is what I'm looking for I may have to attach a weight to the motor shaft to test. More on that later.

Mechanisms Week 1: Rube Goldberg Machine

Feb 5, 2009
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Mechanisms Week 2: Notes of Minimum Constraint Design

Feb 5, 2009
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Here is what I understand about using Minimum Constraint Design:

1) Support and guide each body only at points, and as few points as possible, to get the desired performance.

Example: Building only 3 legs for a chair, since 4 is redundant. The disadvantages of this are that the chair may be less stable and that less points of stress means more stress on those points.

Virtually all examples of minimal constraint design seem to involve tripods or otherwise 3-legged things.

2) Provide only the minimum number of constraints needed to permit the degrees of freedom desired and no others, allowing no looseness.

...

Legos are good examples of MinCD because they allow little or no room for looseness in both moving and nonmoving parts moving parts are held in place using only a minimum number of constraint points.

Mechanisms Week 2: Lego Lab

Feb 3, 2009
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Mechanisms Week 1: Rube Goldberg Machine

Jan 29, 2009
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Text and video coming soon.

ISCO: REMIX: Videos for Airports

Nov 16, 2008
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Assignment:

Create a Remix, in which the content and form are reflected in each other.
The original(s) should be recognizable, but you should think about saying something new in your reframing/remixing of the original material.

My response, 'Videos for Airports':

My piece is an installation for 6 screens and 6 speakers, each screen being tethered to a speaker which sits on the floor below it. On each screen is a simple looped animation consisting only of a bright yellow rectangle, the size of the entire screen, abruptly popping up on the screen and fading out to a bright green rectangle behind it. As the yellow rectangle pops up, the sound of a sine wave is played on the speaker below it, and as the yellow fades away the sound fades out.

Each sine wave is one perfect fourth down from the one coming out of the speaker to its left, and each screen pulses and fades yellow at a rate of about one second slower than the one to its left.

The basic idea behind this was to tie minimal music to minimal sculpture and minimal video art in a way that they all work together naturally. Things remixed:

Steve Reich's Phase Pattern music

Brian Eno's "Music for Airports"

Dan Flavin's light sculptures

Tony Conrad's "The Flicker"

I was asked in class why I chose the colors that I did, and why I chose such a minimal color scheme. The piece is intended to create a soothing and pleasant mood in as clear and direct a way as possible, and I feel, like the artists I'm referencing, that the best way to do this is to use as few elements as possible, and make the relationship between those elements so clear, that the viewer, regardless of his or her understanding of of the works referenced, or the greater cultural picture the work fits into, has to do as little thinking as possible to understand the feeling I'm trying to evoke.

I chose green and yellow largely by the process of elimination. Using blues to represent calm is something of a cliche. Reds imply tension and hunger. Orange represents fire and warmth in such an obvious way it also makes me nervous of running into cliche color usage territory. Black and white are too stark and too sterile. There's both warmth and coldness in bright green and bright yellow, but not too much that their goal seems as obvious and the viewer will so quickly "get" the work that they'll grow bored and walk away.

Using more than two colors, which here really only represent a positive and negative, would have only clouded the viewer's experience. This piece isn't about contrast, and adding more elements than necessary would go against that.

ISCO: Character: Diamond Eyes

Oct 27, 2008
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Link to Flash Movie here

Character:

Diamond Eyes and his kind eat gems, diamonds, and other shiny things. He spends his day searching for them. He eats his findings until full, then brings the rest home to his family. He currently lives with a pink, circle eyed female. They do not yet have any children. Periodically his current partner and/or their children will be caught and eaten by monsters and he will start over with a new female.

Diamond Eyes is essentially a flat, one dimensional character. But this is not because I, his creator, have been lazy and chosen not to further develop him ever though he is in this sizable project the main character. It is because I see birds, and most nonhuman animals, as such. Their lives are controlled by the instinct of survival and propagation of themselves and their species, and they are surrounded by other animals of a similar plight, some of whom want nothing more than to rip them apart and eat them. So for my purposes Diamond Eyes is a stand in for a large part of the natural world and the animal kingdom: all he wants is to eat (survive) and partner with females (propagate himself/his species).

Medium/Concept:

Projections onto a grid of 11 sound insulating squares on the rounded back corner of room 447 on the floor. The projections are to be read like a comic, although they can be read both by row, as comics traditionally are, or by column, and the same narrative is to be had. I originally intended for it to be read vertically, by column, with the leftmost column just being decorative, and the other 3 being 1 piece of text on top and 2 illustrations of that text, but ultimately, as was pointed out in class, it can be read either way.

For the projections I created a Flash application which allows me to project onto each angled screen, record where its corners are in 2D coordinates, and distort the image on top of it by stretching its corners to those 2D coordinates.

NIME: Inspirational Actions

Sep 24, 2008
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Randy Yau is a noise artist whos work is largely based around sounds from his mouth.

This is a particularly inventive performance of his which I saw the Knitting Factory this past May. In addition to his mouth, he introduces a few bunches of cellery to the mix. He has a contact mic strapped to his neck, two regular mics pointing around his face and mouth, and one sitting on the table in front of him.

He switches on a distortion pedal at some point towards the end but for the far majority of the sounds are clear, sharp amplifications of the sounds of his mouth crunching and slurping the cellery and its juices. There are, as far as I know, no elements of traditional musicianship involved but there is an excellent use of pacing and progression both in terms of sound and the performative elements.