This project began as a joke. One night during the fall semester of 2008 me and a friend decided to keep the wristbands from going to the bars on our wrist for the entire semester. Well about a week in he quit, which just gave me more motivation to continue doing it. I would catch a lot of flak from people about it. For some reason I knew that there was something more in it, that something could be derived from it.

The semester came and went, I cut off the wristbands and didn’t think too much of it until I was approached by some friends of mine who were putting together a book of images and writing about change. It took me a while to figure out what I was going to do. I remembered that I had taken a picture of my wrist each day of the fall semester, and that by definition it changed depending on whether I went out, or where I was when I woke up.

The piece was built with Processing. I start with the first image and then slowly change it by grabbing pixels from the next image, and replacing the first image’s pixels with the second’s. I take snapshots in time at a constant interval to document the change.

We notice large changes in our lives, and when these large changes happen we tend to look for a root cause. Usually though there isn’t one single root cause of anything, it is all an accumulation of very small changes. In the piece I started with the beginning of my venture and the ending of my venture. There are two changes between them. The start has fewer wristbands and the wristbands are on my arm, opposed to the end where there are more wristbands and they are cut and lying on the table. If we were to look deeper we would realize that there are a large number of steps from A to B, and paying attention to those steps is critical to our understanding of ourselves and others. I think bottom line is that I want people to pay attention to the very small things that happen everyday, and understand that a lot of very small change is what inevitably forces the very big change.

It seemed that the show was well received by everyone, and everyone enjoyed the experience. I personally got a kick from everyone asking what was in the reflecting pools. It seemed that everyone was very surprised that it was water when they touched it.

I also want to thank Sarah Salbu for writing the article about our show for the Miami Student. The article came out very well, and it is always cool to see that there is interest in the stuff we do outside of the Art department. If you would like to read the article its up here

Below are some short videos of the installation and the reception for anyone who missed it, check em out they are pretty cool. . Remember that the show will be up until this Saturday May, 9th. Again THANKS for everyone that made this possible!!! I hope everyone enjoyed the food.

Spatially Snesed Experience: Phase One Reception from christian mclean on Vimeo.

SSE: Reception from christian mclean on Vimeo.

SSE: Reception from christian mclean on Vimeo.

SSE: Reception from christian mclean on Vimeo.

SSE: Reception from christian mclean on Vimeo.

For my upcoming collaborative show at Miami University, I wanted to do something other than just have a comment book. Because of the nature of what we are doing with technology in the form of installation and involving the user in the environment, and because I want to be the best genY’er I can be, I wrote a sketch in Processing that uses the Twitter4j library for processing.

What happens in this sketch is it is actually two sketches. The first sketch runs in the background, kinda like a separate thread, this sketch runs the queries to twitter, writes them to a file; then finds all of the unique words within the whole document. It then compares each of those words to each tweet, and uses that count and an index of how relevant the tweet is in relation to the other tweets that showed up in the search. It then writes those numbers to a file indexed the same way as the whole file that contains the tweets, to keep a one to one correspondence. The second sketch is the visual part. This is the video shown here. It grabs all of the tweets and counts and pair them up in an object, and then displays it to the screen. Remember that number from the unique comparisons earlier, well it is used to determine the size of the rectangle drawn to the screen, as a visual way to see how relevant the tweet is within each of the other tweets.

Well thats the long explanation of what is going on behind the scenes, but what I intend to do with this is have it replace the comment book is in a gallery setting, because these days there really isn’t a need for a physical comment book when we can always have our comments in the cloud and access them anytime we want. Because o this non-spatial comment book, anyone in the world can has a direct impact on anyone else in the world who has viewed the show, either by video, photographs, or were actually there. Breaking down barriers of the specific gallery “space”.

There are a few problems I see. One, well twitter is free and it might be really busy that day. Two, it seems like everyone I talk to around here doesn’t use twitter, nor would they get an account just for the opening. Three, I have written the code so fat that it locks up, hopefully I can solve this problem, but you can’t change humans.

Here I have a video courtesy of Mr. Geoff Riggle. We set this installation up for a graduate critique last night. This is the first time that we have been able to get a half-way decent installation of this piece.

We have been working with the arduino hardware, and ceramic materials, mainly ceramic fire brick, in order to create an interactive environment. What happens here is the board controls the fading of the light, and when the P.I.R(infrared sensor) is tripped the board fires the secondary light. There is still a little issue with the timing due to the hardware and the fact we are using ac current.

It’s hard to talk about these conceptually right now, because we have been so involved in how to get these things to work. Especially with using newer technologies, you tend to get wrapped up in making it work, that’s fine. The idea was to create a monolithic element contrasted with a more ephemeral element, hence the large brick structure and the dimming light. From that ideas of breathing, life, cycles start to enter the frame. A comment came up that these things start to reference cities. That is the closest metaphor for what we are making. Just like a city, these modularly built structures that begin to have a life of their own. Without people the city would have it’s character that it has, trying to incorporate that further into the installation I am working on a twitter and Hiestand Galleries, located at Miami University, Oxford Ohio. We hope to have a large gathering, and maybe enough tweets to summon the FAIL WHALE.

built with processing

I have been dealing with a visualization of sound for a while. This one here is an image of what an hour at Kofenya, my local coffee shop, looks like. I adapted the pillbug sketch to “record” the sounds of life around me. What is happening here is that about 50 “chains” (stings of drawn lines) are drawn and follow a vertor path affected by the noise in the room. The noise also affects the size of each link, resulting in the varying line weights giving a us this image. What’s fascinating is the incredible variation of the lines weight, allowing the viewer to compare to amount of quiet and noisy times. I will be posting the source code and the application online, when I can get everything cleaned up, and also add controls to allow the viewer to be the composer of the random acts of noise. Please leave a comment, and let me know what you think.

So the bugs follow a ball and the strokeweight and length react to sound.