at first streaming the inauguration in cyberspace seemed like a better idea then digging up my 30 year old portable 5” television to watch the festivities on. but sadly the tubes seemed to be clogged on the liberal end of the internet. but there was still hope: foxnews. their servers werent even sweatin’ the 1/2 dozen or so people that were on it at the time. which made for an especially pleasurable viewing experience.
thanks papa bear.
Executive Summary
1. Interrogate Maslow’s pyramid and flip it on its axis.
2. Allege that devolution has began.
3. That current architecture is for trans-human cyborgs.
current architecture and the objects that are designed and fabricated from it’s process are moving towards occupying a space that exists in between the physical and the virtual. This is a response to the devolution of humans and their strive to successfully fufill Maslow’s pyrimid of self actualization, unsuccessfully.
exhibit a.
Un-self actualization consists of reaching the top of Maslow’s pyrimid and subsequently jumping off. Commiting suicide of the individual and slowly submerging one’s “self” into complacency.
exhibit b.
THE NOW
the present or the future will consists of trans-human beings or cyborgs that have lives that exist in virtual and the real, sometimes simultaneously via the inter galactic computer network.
exhibit c.
the woman/man of the now.
exhibit d.
the purpose of our project/tag was to create a framework for UV graffiti and tagging.
The first assignment for net objects presented a task that ultimately lead to a simple project involving the use of serial communication between an arduino and another piece of software, in this case processing.
it also had specific limits. the resulting project had to work within these constraints and be made up of one thing from each of these categories:
Actions
Things
Responses
i chose to start with the “response”, which would be some speech coming from a computer. This speech would be a reaction to the “action” (tickling/caressing) which would be applied with the “thing” (feathers).
In the spirit of the assignment i further limited myself by using an eeepc 701 to complete the project in. This required installing a piece of speech synthesis software called festival and some of AVR related compliers and runtimes that made the arduino and processing go (gcc-avr, avr-libc and the java runtime).
the phys comp part involved a standard arduino NG and a three axis accelerometer, of which only one axis was used (to keep data sent from the micro-controller to processing simple). they were both attached to a feathered duster with some clear tape.
when the duster was tipped in a certain direction (down towards the keyboard) the accelerometer would send some y-axis information to processing which would trigger a console command (echo “ha ha ha ha ha ha ha” | festival —tts) to make the computer “laugh”. if i had used the other axes in addition to the y axis i would have needed a delimiting character between each axis to make sure nothing got mixed up.
some (n00bish) oversights:
1. when there is no power going to the accelerometer the serial data coming from the pin it is connected will be a bunch of random numbers. ( i was expecting it to be “0”)
2. processing receives serial data in bytes. forgot to send processing bytes from arduino.
3. if using println instead of print, the data will include newlines (10) and carriage returns (13)
