Ok, so I’ve got 20 RC servos. What do I do with them? I build a puppet-machine, with twelve servos pulling one string each.
Twelve might seem much, but each string comes out of a fixed hole in the box and can only pull the point it is connected to in one direction. So, in order to move a hand in two axis I need two strings attached to two servos. This way I use two servos for each hand, one for each leg, three for the head and one for the neck, leaving two spare servos for where ever it should be needed. The lower back of the puppet is hanging stationary from two fixed strings and is therefore the base of all movement.
The twelve servos are controlled from a single Arduino board. In the video I use a max patch that let med control each servo from a fader on a midi controller, store positions and crossfade seamlessly between two positions. Later I have programmed positions, transition times and sequences into the Arduino board so the machine can work stand alone. I think I will give it some optical sensors so it can respond to people passing. Lamps are also coming up.
After years of experimenting with machines and chance in creative processes, the time has come for reflection and teaching others. We are doing this the next week at CAMON in Alicante. So I have spent some time lately reading up on randomness, aleatoricism and improvisation, including their branching into artistic practices from the 20th century to the present. Fun stuff, but it reminds me of all the times I tried to make a machine with one button that would rearrange my material and failed, ending up learning something else instead. Random is not easy, but its epistemological journey from the divine via scientific discourse to our present Take-away-random, has made it soft. Magic on the other hand is the result of tangible processes.
Here is my first cut-up, it was made during a writing workshop some 10 years ago based on a personal story describing computer games, roleplaying and finally theatre.
That journey was one get’s whole new world the different confided for me and when house with thick books beginning of fantasy/mind, into the real world a hack’n’slash and how you stone and he answered; reality and the end worlds of the different playing on tired of you want “to do” we started of game it was possibilities roleplaying was it wasn’t anti different styles just throwing so I’ve travelled different dimension like a stepping started playing so we a bunch of boys trapped in the TV-set the concept of a very strange idea no playing board and pictures sitting around a gradually exploring the anything why do anything this box world and I asked my friends social but still eventually the glory days you can a totally is theatre game, but still infinite in dragon’s a opened up very basic the game is my stepping stone after playing is that was dungeons & I was young table from into took win etc. I think computergames all over the galaxy in my for me could I saw this sci-fi had to end a year of later I do whatever I remember – I don’t wanna grow up basis this games of dices with a year but what type it at.
They are back. Look what they made me do last time. Or look at what my grandmother made for me somewhere around 1986. It was during the post-Star Wars hangover and we needed a theme for our nerd club.
This time be prepared for a up-to-date critique of our new global president as lizard. Also it seems that 1984 is more present than ever with The Nobel War-is-Peace Prize.
Norway is a Democracy. It’s inhabitants are well fed after many years of global drug dealing and very aware of themselves and what they think they deserve. This becomes a catch 22. Most Norwegians don’t really seem to believe in global warming, partially because the government don’t take any action. The government, on the other hand, talks warm about CO2 reduction but take no real action, fearing that the voters will leave them. And they’re right; Any government doing something that really counts will be thrown off at the first crossroad. Populists do the best to keep this going by telling the people what they want to hear: There is no crisis coming up. Just look out of your window, what do you see? Snow! It’s all alright. Just relax and keep on consuming…
So what other reasons are there. Why do so many Norwegians not believe in the upcoming events?
My suggestions:
We are three living generations of Norwegians who have been so lucky to be born in just the right place on earth in just the right spot of history where no evil ever happens. Three generations who have never experienced crisis worse then the swine flu. Since this is all we have ever experienced we intuitively feels that this it how it always has been and always will be.
Norway is one of the main drug dealers. This leaves us with a special responsibility for what is happening. We have to much blood on our hands to admit we are wrong. The Semmelweis syndrom.
As many drug dealers before us, we are hooked on our own stash. To put the needle away simply isn’t an option.
We are a bunch of spoiled children and we will not let anyone take away our toys and tell us that Santa doesn’t exists.
I am deeply pessimistic. The addiction is heavy and the consequences are still not really felt. I think we will keep pumping oil until the last drop is squeezed out, burning it all into the atmosphere leaving nothing for future generations but chaos.
The project is progressing slooowly as a humanoid-project titled “Aüduhn” takes most of my time.
Anyway, the bot IS developing and now features motorized wheels, servo head movement, animated eyes and a web cam. Camera and control is done trough WiFi connection. Bleeping sounds will come. Probably also some doomsday device to help him enslave humanity. Considering a button on hes back where you can select “Good” or “Evil”, wouldn’t that be cute?
We presently have one big problem. The motors is to heavy geared. The motors are strong enough indeed, but it is impossible to run the thing slowly or to run something near a straight line. The motors are hacked battery drills, so the only way increase the torque is putting on smaller wheels, which is kind of tricky. Also we will then loose the incredible top speed is has now. Just see him spinning around in the video below
A challenging but plausible solution could be to computer control the motor speed. The motors are already controlled by a Arduino card so the main problem here is to get a fast motor speed feedback so the computer can calculate the thrust to compensate for any over/underspeed. But HOW?
Dear people. How can I create a fast and reliable speed sensor/counter for a hacked drill motor, which I can feed back to the Arduino?
Again at Medialab-Prado for a workshop, last time we held a two-days-build- your-own-light-harp session. This time I joined as a collaborator on Demodrama, one of the HelloWorld! projects. During their presentation, the siblings that started the project, said that one of their original ideas were to use an EEG-machine as a possible controller for the mask. A perfect project to test my machine. I really enjoyed the talk that Zachary Lieberman gave about his search for jaw dropping moments when making interactive pieces.
Demodrama uses the same infrared camera trick as we used with MouseMan, but the software is tBeta. It comes with libraries that tracks, calibrates and reproduce image and video, but a bit too much C ++ for me. The system of projecting green dots in the space that you later mark for the camera is the best. Thinking back I really don’t know how we managed to calibrate MouseMan that good without something like this.
It was originally thought to be a work with digital masks, but in my opinion it became more of a face as screen. No longer a tribal/animal mask with the head working as an extension of the body, but a free-floating white wall/black hole machine. My inital scepticism towards the lack of physicality, it is only a surface loosely connected to the head, was brought to shame when we saw the thing working. This will be magical.
This is an image of Dag Jensen, the photographer that has done most of our performance photos, standing in our installation, taking pictures of a picture he took in 2006, with the audience in front of a 6 x 5 meter poster of the photo he took in 2005 of a girl running away from fire. The sequence has a dizzying effect, it reminds me of learning strange new words in college, like mise-en-abyme meaning, “placing into infinity” or “placing into the abyss”.
First of all the two MouseMan projects in Porsgrunn and Madrid are almost opposites, in Madrid it was inside the Altamira Palace, all made of marble, with a cool atmosphere and plenty of time for people to interact. In Porsgrunn it was inside the popular Folkets Hus, at the end of a 2 hour theatre walk in the city, together with lapskaus (traditional norwegian food) and entertainment. The visitors had become audience and as an audience they where in a theatrical time mode.
We tried making interactive things for Stedsans in 2007 with little success in the field, so we ended up performing the interactivity. With the Tesla Coil in 2008 we dropped the interaction altogether and did a Pythonesque mad professor routine which worked well. This year, because of reproduction and MouseMan being our new project, we went back to full scale interaction. It seems that Stedsans and interaction doesn’t belong together.
But then a challenger appears. Kids. The kind of people that’s not content with sitting politely at the table and listening about the good old days. We made an easy to understand interface, when you move the red circle follows, a 5-year-old could get it, but it was difficult to grasp for the pre-computer generation. The future for MouseMan could be a large 3D version of PacMan.
Screw global warming!
