Week 1 – Tuesday
Media Remixes
The Idea
- Using instruments that I own, I wanted to record sounds of the same length, turn them into RAW files, then images and then back into sounds
- I used a flute, a recorder, a guitar, a hammered dulcimer, my voice and the high and low tabla drums
- I then used Photoshop to give the black-and-white images colour and added a circle to each image
- I started to think of the sun and the dangerously hot summers that will happen with climate change.
- Working with the remixed audio and images, I created a video called “Dystopian Summers”.
- The translation of music into ‘noise’ that then becomes new images and new sounds highlights how digitisation is a process of transformation.
- We don’t usually think about what has been added or removed from the media when they have been translated. The tone of the piece is foreboding and fits with how I feel about some of what is being promised with new AI technologies.
Process Photos
The Video
Degrading Data Through File Compression
- I started thinking about how different file formats are loss-generating or lossless and read about JPEGs and the way that they are compressed (by removing data that we’re unlikely to notice)
- I wanted to see what happened when I ran an image of a toilet through a JPEG compressor 10 times (note the toilet is a photo I took as part of research – I had not used it!)
Image 1
Image 10
The file size was significantly reduced and the image started to become ‘noisy’.
I started playing with the image to remix it further and came up with the image ‘data dump’. It uses a pattern made for miniaturising the toilet and repeating it as a grid.
Reflection on the readings
Images from Digital Art (Christian Paul)
Joe Hamilton is almost the same age as me, and I wonder if this is part of the reason why I am drawn to his work. This image was made using live images from Tumblr to make a live ‘landscape’.
I am interested in networks and how complexity can be shown/mapped. I am also interested in this idea of information overload that we have to manage every day – too many images, too many stories, too many sources that we have to filter, ignore, make sense of, or contribute to.
Looking at their recent works it seems like they continued to work with networks, complexity and ways to display large amounts of information as visual works. Looking at this work, there is a flatness to the work which I am wondering is one of the problems of digital mediums. Screens seem to work as a reductive element (to my eyes) no matter the richness of the colour or detail of the image. I wonder if there is a way around this… Something about phenomenology and I need to explore this further.
References
Paul, C. (2023) Digital Art. London: Thames & Hudson Ltd.
Learning Journeys
Week 2 – Tuesday
Processing Experiments
So I started working with an example from an online processing course that I’ve been studying by Tim Rodenbroeker .
The module was about creating grid systems that are responsive to mouse movements.
I first randomised the monochrome colours using random(), then I randomised the X-axis position of the circles while also reducing the frame rate, and then I increased the number of cells in the grid, and reduced the size of the circles.
The final sketch reminded me of coccus bacteria.
Considering the aesethetics of the works, they have a very digital feel due to the colors, the repeated nature of the shapes and grids and the lack of mess. Even though the third sketch seems more chaotic, it is very obviously computational looking.
If it were a biological process, I think there would have been more error / chaos and a higher risk of unexpected artifact.
In saying this, a lot of organic and non-organic processes can be shown to have underlying mathematical processes informing the way they are ordered (e.g. fractals) and can look computational as well.
I think I am interested in pushing digital work so that it breaks and shows it’s edges. I am less interested in ‘clean’ looking outcomes. I think that the interactive digital art that I have engaged with, no matter how real it looks, still has this hard or too clean aesthetic – it is very difficult to make computer generated screen based media to feel organic. I think this is because they lack the other parts of what reality includes: mess, smell, convincing depth. I’m looking forward to thinking about this more as the course progresses.
Week 2 – Thursday
Making a Webpage
So I started getting into webpage design for the last part of my undergraduate degree and as part of my final project designed a website which showed my experience and also housed a web-based exhibition piece called ‘my mind’.
Here is a walkthrough of the website:
So what I want for the new website:
- a simple layout with 3 pages (home / about / works)
- a way of displaying my works so that they all look good together – tricky due to the interdisciplinary nature of my work
- the website needs to load quickly and also work on a mobile
- probably mostly to work with HTML and CSS – I want to avoid using javascript as I do not find it easy to work with
So over the next few weeks, I will be using this class to work on my new website.
Learning Journeys
Week 3 – Thursday
Digital and Postdigital Narratives
Reading: Digital Storytelling A Creators Guide to Interactive Entertainment by Carolyn Handler Miller
- interactive media has it’s own rules for maximising it’s effectiveness which this books suggests draws on historical forms of play and interactive story telling
- they give advice on managing the particular limitation / strengths of an interactive story
- interesting that it uses greek story structure as a model – wonder what other story telling structures could have been incorporated into this book for added richness…
Reference
Miller, C.H. (2020) Digital Storytelling: A creator’s guide to interactive entertainment. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.
Learning Journeys
Week 4 – Tuesday
Zombie Hackathon
So I took an old PS3 controller to work with and found a guide on how to use Arduino and processing to access the controller’s buttons.
Unfortunately, I spent the rest of the day trying to get the desktop computer in the seminar room to interact with the Arduino. There was a port reading issue…
I got home, and it only took me 15 minutes to get the software to work!
I managed to use it to control a servo motor with my mouse.
Here’s the result! Looks basic – but it took me the whole day.
Reading: “HACKING THE HUSTLE: SEX WORK, NETWORKS,
& SOCIAL REPRODUCTION UNDER FOSTA-SESTA” in The Critical Makers Reader
I was interested to think about the way that communities develop, organically, around the structures that are put in and around them. This network of sex-workers had developed ways to increase their safety while they worked and these were suddenly broken down when legislation enacted restrictions which meant that what was built was broken down.
Although the chapter ends with details of new ways of organising and reforming, it makes me think of the risks that we are all entangled with now – so much of our lives is tied up in the software and hardware structures that other people are controlling and designing and the blur between what they intended and what we are enacting seems to be getting smaller. I mean that the systems are increasingly pushing our behaviour.
I know that there are myriad networks that are dependent on these structures and if they were suddenly broken or removed – many people would suffer, but probably without voice.
If it was a building that fell down, there would be a way to show what is broken, but when an informal network is destroyed – there are only stories to hear and I’m not sure people are that interested…
This might also apply to redundant tech in some ways. In the constant cycle of consumerism Capitalism we are pushed to keep looking for the new. Some of us only have access to the old and also develop a dependency on this old tech. When it is forced to become obsolete it can be disempowering and perhaps, being able to know how to hack it and bring it back to life – could be the way to bring back a sense of agency.
Reference
Van Ness, G. (2019) ‘HACKING THE HUSTLE: SEX WORK, NETWORKS, & SOCIAL REPRODUCTION UNDER FOSTA-SESTA’, in The Critical Makers Reader, pp. 246–257. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences.
Learning Journeys
Week 5 – Tuesday
Playing with Sensorial and Embodied Spaces
The Concept: An Intimacy Generator
Spatial Sketching
Building the Narrative
I will need to be set up in a space that helps people feel curious, excited maybe but also that suggests that this will be a pleasant or enjoyable experience. I am thinking there will be plants, some images suggesting the provenance of this kind of interaction (magical, spiritual, intimate but safe).
The person will walk into the space and there will be an empty chair at a table where my outstretched hand is resting. There will be a sign saying, “you are invited to touch the oracle and listen to the sound of your heart”. There will be simple instructions explaining how to make contact with the GSR sensor and the person will put this on, or touch it, and also touch my hand.
The music may already be on, so the sounds will change as the system picks up the output. The music will change slowly and probably settle within a range depending on how stressed / relaxed the person is and how long they make contact with me and the sensor.
The music will be atmospheric and haunting but overall warm and tender too.
The participant will leave when they are ready to leave…
Stern, N. (2011) The Implicit Body as Performance: Analyzing Interactive Art. Journal of the International Society for the Arts. Vol 44. No 3.
The article makes a strong argument for a more careful appreciation of the interaction in interactive art, and in particular the role of the moving body in these interactions. I think they are saying that a moving body, a body that is responding, is its own thing that cannot be thought of in the same way as the body at rest.
I wonder what the author would say about the body that is in motion or interacting while it is doing its daily business and how this might overlap or not overlap with the body that is moving while interacting with art. I’m also curious about the way that embodied interaction overlaps with imaginative or vicarious interaction as I think that brain scans show that thinking of moving seems to activate similar brain centers to actual moving.
Perhaps then the article is actually about the role of the musculoskeletal and peripheral and central nervous system in interaction art. Interaction here means movement and movement creates additional sensory inputs and motor outputs above and beyond walking up to a piece of 2D art or film and ‘consuming’ it with our eyes.
There will be elements of overlap with our experiences in normal life but I think that interactive art also works in a zone of disorientation or de-contextualisation. Although we are performing embodied actions, they are almost universally actions that are not ‘of the real world’ and I wonder if I need to investigate this intersection (embodied interaction in interactive art compared to embodied interaction in normal life) further.
Learning Journeys
Week 6
More processing experiments
Getting a GSR sensor to output from Arduino to processing
I started by doing one of the exercises from the book:
Then I made a GSR sensor:
It was pretty cool to see the graph of the readings working:
I then managed to get processing to receive the output in a code example file that moves shapes on a screen:
I think when I come back to this, I need to work out how to introduce greater degrees of change with the skin response values as the image doesn’t move much.
The work is part of my experimentation for my final project idea, and ideally, I’d like to work with something like this where a person grabs a hand and then the sensor reads their response.
It didn’t work but I don’t understand enough about electronics to know why at this stage! The arduino didn’t read any changes when I checked the serial monitor.
A simple music video
I used processing to make a moving image of circles going up and down and then added effects in Premier Pro to get the images to change over time.
I then added the sequence to a music track of mine to create a kind of simple music video.
Learning Journeys
Week 7
Using processing for generative art
I wanted to use processing to experiment with using sound as an input and generating images as an output.
I found a tutorial that used a spectrum analyser to generate an equaliser band and then played around with it experiment with distortion.
I turned the rectangles into ellipses and then changed their scale and position.
I tried to get them into a grid – but didn’t quite work out how to do this.
Some of the experiments
I ended up with the equaliser being a blob in the top corner and I wondered if I could make a kind of a face.
This is what I came up with using one of my (old old) songs.
I added a face shape and black pupils in Premier Pro and it’s become this… 🫣
It’s very rough and glitchy but with some finessing – this could be an interesting way to output audio. Low fi and glitchy – which is what I like I think.
Learning Journeys
Week 8
Finishing my Artist Website
So I started with a license free template from W3Schools which used a black and white design. One of the early challenges was working out the best format for my works.
As the process continued – I started thinking about the ‘vibe’ that I wanted for my site and how it worked with my artistic practice and works.
One of the best things I liked about the ‘my mind’ section of my old website was that it felt like it was a night-time website. So I started to think about how I could create this feeling in my new website.
This is what I ended up with.
The landing page
I finally settled on a dark background with white text. Clear and it avoided the usual white on black style. I made this firework style illustration which was originally a full page background. Although I liked the way it looked – it made the text hard to read and using opacity overlays didn’t quite feel right. Also scaling the text boxes up and down depending on the size of the screen meant that it was difficult to balance everything.
I went for the simpler option.
The about page
I carried over the long banner theme from the landing page. I chose this painting of mine as it invites us to look into the scene without knowing who we are looking with – which I hope encourages people to read the text! I’m still working out the best way to write about myself and think this artist statement will need more revisions.
The works page
This started out as a square image grid and it went through a lot of iterations. I settled on circle images as this suggest a peephole. I think it emphasises the intimate nature of looking at my work – especially as a few of the pieces include my body or face.
The mobile view
The original template used Javascript to manage the menus with smaller viewports. After lots of headache – and not really understanding what the javascript was doing – I decided to use the same format as my previous website: a menu that becomes a hamburger menu when the screen is smaller than 600px wide. This seems to suit most screens.
Working with the media
I needed a few solutions for the works I wanted to display. The most tricky thing was adding a slide show with text but I worked it out in the end.
Overall I’m really happy with how the website has turned out. It is a good representation of my aesthetic and I am pleased with how it showcases my work.
Learning Journeys
Week 8 – Thursday
Learning how to use Unreal Engine
I was thinking of an interesting idea for a level and came up with this idea for a short experience called ‘the oracle’
I started learning how to use Unreal Engine in class and then followed it up with this tutorial:
This is how much I managed to complete in one session and I hope to have time to come back to it to develop it further.
Learning Journeys
Week 9 – VR, Unreal and Unity Engines
The Idea
In the class on AR I had this idea of a body detecting application, that would detect when someone’s chest was in frame and then would place a glowing image of a heart in the centre of the body and then play music. The heart would be emitting some kind of light, rays or particles.
The concept is about using tech to create a piece of tech that encourages people to think about feelings (love, care, joy) as symbolised by the heart, music and movement in the piece.
I decided to try making this in Unity as I wanted to learn how to use it.
Failed Beginnings
I find both Unity and Unreal Engine to be very intimidating interfaces. I thought that I could try and learn the specific bits that I needed for Unity using a YouTube video.
These are some of the videos that I tried:
What I found was that even though the videos generally gave clear descriptions of what to do, once I tried to apply it in Unity, something would break or not be easy to work out.
The most I managed to achieve using these was learning how to build an app for android and how to build it and run it on my phone. This was using template AR app that Unity provide.
I realised that to understand what was going wrong, I needed to start with the basics so I completed a beginners tutorial written by Unity.
The Unity essentials course
The course was well structured and I feel much more confident with understanding how Unity works. I learnt about cameras, 3D, 2D, meshes, and the physics of the world. They also introduce you to C#.
Image: Building a 2D environment
Image: Making a ball, a ramp and knocking over a tower of cubes
The AR Essentials Course
Unity also have some beginners AR courses and so I completed this one as it has some similarities to what I plan for my concept:
I learnt how to use a face reference and how to add a mesh and material.
Final thoughts
I expected to have achieved more than I did by the end of this process, but I’m glad that I spent longer on learning the foundation than trying to rush to a more fully formed outcome as I now feel less intimidating by Unity and have a better sense of how I would approach the project if I have more time in the future.
The face recognition app is similar to what I had in mind (recognising a part of the body) but I think isolating a particular part of the body is going to be much more complicated and I haven’t really worked out how the animation of AR meshes work. Lots still to learn.
Week 10 Learning Journeys
Week 10 + 11 – Re-becoming human: bio-digital convergence: Group Task
Project Title: RoboCutter – An automated grass cutter
Group Members: Louis Cook, Kajal Sachdeva, Kuljit Bhogal
Introduction to the Project:
- We started this project with the idea of communication between a self-autonomous grass cutter of the future and how this could use sensors to respond to ecological conditions and to maintain its charge through solar power
- This would be marketed at people who feel time-poor, and who have the money to buy an expensive item
- Below you can find the writing that informed our thinking on the project, a storyboard of how it might work, and a poster marketed at a rich person who has a house and lawn and selling the idea that leisure should not involve cutting the grass
Our Work
Writing
“A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century” from “Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature” by Donna Harraway.
In this chapter, Harraway describes “the cyborg” as “the awful apocalyptic telos of the ‘West’s’ escalating dominations of abstract individuation, an ultimate self united at last from all dependency.” (Harraway, 1991: p. 151) The idea of “individuation” here suggests a destruction of community by technological development. Integration of machine and human to make tasks easier to complete can lead to less “dependency” on others (and on yourself), and as such less collaborative work and community building. We see a great deal of new technology intended to improve convenience, making tasks easier to complete, leading to less “dependency” on others as all tasks can easily be completed by oneself with the aid of these technologies. Paradoxically, this increased reliance on the self comes with a reduced “dependency” on the self, as machines aid in completing tasks. However, the freedom from “dependency” in this “telos” is false, as it is instead a reliance on the machines with which we are integrated. This reliance serves a capitalistic “individuation” desired by those who profit from technology. As people become more individualised and community and collective care models fade, reliance on technology equates to increased profits for tech companies. While enormous tech corporations continue to profit, I believe we will see more integration of machine and human for convenience, encouraged by a false image of this “ultimate self united at last from all dependency” and continuing the escalation of “individuation.”
Harraway also discusses the idea of the cyborg in war:
“Modern war is a cyborg orgy, coded by C3I, command-control-communication-intelligence, an $84 billion item in 1984’s US defence budget” (Harraway, 1991, p. 150)
“The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism” (Harraway, 1991, p. 151)
The cyborg in war is an interesting concept that I believe will continue to increase in its prevalence, for the exact reason Harraway states – its creation in “militarism and patriarchal capitalism.” This concept is particularly interesting, as the human element of the cyborg is idealised and encouraged in war environments. A recent advertising campaign by the British Military promoted the idea that entirely robotic machines cannot “do what a soldier can do” (The Telegraph, 2022). The importance of the human aspect in war is the focus here, presumably intending to suggest that the empathy a human can feel will always triumph the efforts of a robot in war. It is all too easy, however, to read this as the perishability of humans. Nothing can do what a soldier can: die. As such, there is an interesting conflict between the capitalistic drive for improved military technology, reflected in the ever-enormous budget for the US military, with “$84 billion” in 1984, and $1.99 trillion allocated to the department of defence in 2024 (USASpending, 2024). This conflict, between capitalistic drives for increased violent technology and the paradoxical valuing of human life in the taking of human life, will likely see a continual integration of machine and human for the purpose of more efficient killing.
Critiques:
The Stihl iMOW 5 is a robotic lawn mower, which was rated the best robotic lawn mower of 2024 by BBC’s Gardener’s World. The mower connects to a 4G hub, allowing it to operate wirelessly and autonomously.
This robotic lawn mower requires a wire mapping out the boundaries in which it is able to mow. This seems somewhat disappointing, as it requires a great deal of setup, and users must either buy an installation kit separately, or paying a “Stihl approved dealer” (Duncton, 2024) to install it – a hidden cost that does not seem entirely necessary. While there is an argument that GPS based mowers, which do not require a boundary wire, may have connection issues when travelling under an overhang (Machinery Nation, 2024) I would argue that solving this issue does not offset the extra cost. Some sort of combination of both GPS and a boundary signifier would seem more efficient to me. A more simplified boundary system would also seem better – for example, if utilising GPS, two objects could be placed around an overhang, one on each side. A straight line between these two could be drawn by the mower and used as a boundary within the overhang. This would fail, however, if the boundary underneath the overhang is curved.
The mower also offers “bio pins”:
“As well as the standard fixing pins which hold the wires in place, there’s also the option to purchase bio pins, made from 100% biodegradable material that gradually break down in the soil.” (Duncton, 2024)
Offering an alternative which is bio friendly is not entirely effective. If there is an environmentally friendly pin that can hold the boundary wires in place, this should be offered as the default. Particularly as this product is marketed towards gardeners, care for the environment should be a priority. Only offering the bio pins would ensure the product remains as environmentally friendly as possible.
The Roomba Combo 10 Max (iRobot, n.d) is a robotic vacuum cleaner and mop by iRobot. It is the companies first device to combine automatic mopping and vacuum cleaning. The accompanying Autowash Dock cleans the Roomba’s mop and empties its vacuum cleaner. This product takes the concept of technology for convenience further, not just automating one chore, but two different chores in one device, taking the user one step closer to Harraway’s freedom “from all dependency” (Harraway, 1991, p. 151).
The price tag of £1,499 exemplifies my main critique for this product (and the Stihl, which costs £1,699). The purpose of these products is convenience, they carry out a mundane task that must be completed but is presented to us as unnecessarily time consuming, an unfortunate necessity. Instead, when this product is purchased, a user can use their time more efficiently for productivity or rest. Of course, the reason why a user has so little time and therefore must delegate this necessary task, is due to the overwhelming schedules produced by working in a capitalist society. Ironic, then, that the solution to our need to spend time earning money to survive, rather than cleaning (or mowing the lawn), should cost a great deal of these earnings. These products prey on overwhelmed individuals who are already exploited by a capitalist system, using said system to profit from the solutions to these problems, ultimately leading to further exploitation of these individuals.
Bibliography:
Duncton, H. (2024) ‘The best robotic lawn mowers for 2024’, Gardener’s World, Available at: https://www.gardenersworld.com/reviews/lawn-care/best-robotic-mowers/#BESTBUY (Accessed: 7 January 2025).
Haraway, D.J. (1991) Simians, cyborgs and women: the reinvention of nature. London: Free Association.
iRobot (no date) Roomba Combo® 10 Max robot + AutoWash dock. Available at: https://www.irobot.co.uk/en_GB/roomba-combo-10-max-robot-with-autowash-dock/X085840.html?_gl=1*1qawbfj*_up*MQ..*_ga*OTE3ODg0OTYyLjE3MzYyNzkyNzA.*_ga_WNZ0ESVFE6*MTczNjI3OTI2OS4xLjEuMTczNjI3OTI3Mi4wLjAuMTk3ODg1MjY1Nw.. (Accessed: 7 January 2024).
Machinery Nation (2024) The All NEW STIHL iMOW EVO Robotic Mower – A Mower With Boundaries? 4 April 2024. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnQPLPt0ypM&t=8s
The Telegraph. (2022) British Army unveils TV ad featuring war robots: ‘Nothing can do what a soldier can do’. 1 July 2022. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHyEV6CsJuA (Accessed: 7 January 2025).
USASpending (2024) Department of Defense. Available at: https://www.usaspending.gov/agency/department-of-defense?fy=2024 (Accessed: 7 January 2025).
Story Board :
Marketing Poster:
Target audience – people who have enough money to buy an expensive item of technology, have access to a private lawn and who don’t want to be cutting the lawn in their leisure time.
Learning Journeys