Christmas came early

Screw global warming!
Today I finally got my batch of twenty RC servos freshly in from Hong Kong at a price only human exploitation can give you!

Oh joy!

Our Global Addiction

The world is addicted. Our drug is fossil energy.

I am Norwegian but not proud.

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 party can’t stop now, can it?

We are robots, you must be a robot too!

We are considering making a moral robot. Nice then to see that others have made a holy robot. Video peaks at 3:30.

“No, you’re right, Colby doesn’t have a soul,” Mrs. Betts explained. “He’s just been programmed to think he does.”

News about Dr Bürhool the Hooverbot

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?

HelloWorld! Demodrama – Faces

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 openFrameworks. 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.

MouseMan Mapping Porsgrunn

This is an image of Dag Jensen, the photographer that have 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.

Using K8055 with Max/MSP

I notice that we’ve got several hits from people searching for the K8055 USB card, probably looking for a way to interface it trough Max/MSP.

When we created our first robot Maxi Wanzl we had the same problem, and I’m sorry to say that we did not find a really good solution. The K8055 however is easy to interface trough C++, Delphi or Visual Basic, so I ended up writing a “driver” in Delphi communicating with Max trough a virtual midi port (i.e. loopBE).

This works but is cumbersome and demands programming skills not possessed by the average Max user, so my conclusion is clear: BUY AN ARDUINO CARD INSTEAD!

• Faster
• More IO’s
• Cheaper
• Easy to interface to Max
• Massive support

But, if anyone reading this actually know a good way of interfacing the K8055 to max, please leave a comment and let us know.

Mapping Madrid – the catalogue

The summer holidays have finished and IED Madrid have made a catalogue of our project. Get it here:

http://iedmadrid.com/area-cultural/publicaciones/

Harder Better Faster Longer

Dear Internet,

We are currently in Porsgrunn at the Stedsans festival updating our MouseMan project. In this small town we have access to more equipment and the infrastructure is of a happy-go-lucky type,  so v2.0 will be better, faster and longer. There is no hacked web camera, but a newly bought IP security camera. Not one projector, two of course. And why not use six par cans with RGB filters instead of buying one expensive IR light.

So the project is upgraded, but and this is why we ask for your help Internet, when we started testing our two projector vertical set-up, we found no solution to spanning the desktop over two monitors with a flash program in full-screen. Our dualhead2go can pivot the screen, we have downloaded Pivot Pro and searched up and down on the net, but still can’t find a solution. There was three entries in forums addressing the same problem, no one has answered yet. Come on Internet, this is relevant for everybody.

How do you put one projector on top of another and get their desktops to function as a whole, just like it is in horizontal set-up?

The Crop Circle Incident

We are currently working on a project similar to Mapping Madrid in home town Porsgrunn where a major theatre event called “Stedsans” is held for the fift time this year. This time the projected map will be a air photo of Porsgrunn and the surrounding area, and the pictures will be from the earlier events of Stedsans.

During the assembly of the air photos which I collect from gulesider.no/kart, a service similar to goole maps but with better norwegian coverage i made this amazing discovery:

(bilde av kornsirkelen)

I have never heard of any crop circles in this area so I though that “this is big!”. I am avare that the images used can be several years old and that the circle probably was gone by now. However I wanted to find out just how old they where, so I could search lokal newspapers and other sources for unusual events araound the time the pictures where taken. I contaced gulesider.no to find the source of the image database. They politely forwarded me to Statens Kartsentral which translates the State Map Center. I sendt them a mail with the GPS coordinates, explaining the issue and asking for the date of the images. I never got any respons.

Here comes the weird part: A couple of weeks later I wanted to show the phenomena to a friend opened the browser on the gulesider maps. The crop circle was gone!

(bilde uten kornsirkel)

Now I should explain that I am a great sceptisist of “supernatural” phenomenas like crop cirles. I have allways beleived that human beings are clever folks well capable of making these patterns just to have a laugh at the people beleing they come from outher space. I just havent figured out HOW they have made them and I thus keep an open mind.

The real question is not hwo made the cirle and how. It is: Why did the gouvernment remove the evidence? What are they trying to hide?

Me, I’m pussled. Maybe time will show…

We are currently working on a project similar to Mapping Madrid in home town Porsgrunn where a major theater event called “Stedsans” is held for the fifth time this year. This time the projected map will be a air photo of Porsgrunn and the surrounding area, and the pictures will be from the earlier events of Stedsans.

During the assembly of the air photos which I collect from gulesider.no/kart, a service similar to Google maps but with better Norwegian coverage, I made this amazing discovery:

I have never heard of any crop circles in this area so I though that “this is big!”. I am aware that the images used can be several years old and that the circle probably was gone by now. However I wanted to find out just how old they where, so I could search local newspapers and other sources for unusual events around the time the pictures where taken. I contacted gulesider.no to find the source of the image database. They politely forwarded me to Statens Kartsentral which translates the State Map Center. I sent them a mail with the GPS coordinates, explaining the issue and asking for the date of the images. I never got any response.

Here comes the weird part: A couple of weeks later I wanted to show the phenomena to a friend opened the browser on the gulesider maps. The crop circle was gone! Link:

Now I should mention that I am a great skeptic of “supernatural” phenomenas like crop circles. I have always believed that human beings are clever folks well capable of making these patterns just to have a laugh at the people believing they come from outer space. I just haven’t figured out HOW they have made them and thus I keep an open mind.

The real question is not who made the circle and how. It is: Why did the company remove the evidence? What are they trying to hide?

Me, I’m puzzled. Maybe time will show. Maybe not…