Tats à Rotterdam

Here is the output of the activity we did at the workshop yesterday. We were first asked to write down on a paper the description of our project. Here is what I wrote:

The object has a sound input, a sound output and a sense of its energy level. It seeks, in turn, company and loneliness and tries to find how to get them with its sound sensing/emitting.

Here are my notes from the reading activity that we had last thurdsay.

Similarities:

• Instructions/algorithm
• Situations

Differences:

• Probe is collective ie. two groups
• Other article is about experiences to do alone

Question: why do we need instructions?

(Here is a first try for a small abstract on the object I wish to build.)

The object is an artificial being whose behavior stem from the idea of an adaptive system under constraints. It has a limited set of tools to engage with its environment, namely: (1) a way to produce, store and expand energy; (2) a way to get information about the environment and its own state; and (3) a way to express itself.

I went to this fun store in Rotterdam called SCRAP where they basically sell all kinds of industrial wastes for very cheap (often by the kilo!!!)

I found those very nice orange devices for 1 Euro each, batteries included. They have a microphone and a small speaker.

It's strange how life goes. A few years ago, I was out of my M. Sc. and wanted to do art, and I thought it would be nice to use all of this knowledge I had from my postgraduates studies. I worked in a Machine Learning lab at the time and so I was out there with all these ideas of using adaptive neural nets and support vector machines and all this kind of very advanced stuff to do art.

Here is a picture of the first notes that were written about my project. It was created as part of a collective exercise. The first part was written by me and the rest was written by other students.

I finally did it! I opened the big old-fashioned speaker and I hijacked the circuit to plug it in. I also replaced the dimmer with a light sensor.

I don't have any proper tool so I wasn't able yet to make holes in it and glue the components to that I have a nice object.

There's this pair of old-fashioned speakers that I found in my room at Duende. I dunno whose they are. Maybe this dead artist I found in the closet (?)

Anyway, yesterday night I tried something funny: I just hand-connected the speaker's wire to the metronome and it worked: I could hear a much louder sound from old times...

I had this idea to have the metronome tiny speaker make enough pressure to have a larger membrane vibrate.

It didn't work.

I've started thinking about what to do with my eletronic metronome. But every idea that comes to my mind seems to be... say... not enough conceptual, too formal. I'm always worried about the conceptual aspects of what I do and this is often blocking me.

As one of my artist friends told me lately: "concept is not content: it's not because you have a good concept that you have a good content, and vice versa".