This is a video prototype to explore how people would play with objects that make sound. I provided “sound clips” along with simple materials to make “instruments” and invited participants to make whatever they felt like making. I then asked them to move the instrument and describe the noise it would make. Finally, I found similar sounds in a sound editing software, and created a small song from the composite movements and sounds.
So it’s done. I successfully wired up a glove with two sensors and connected them via Arduino and Processing to my laptop. When the fingers curl, the graphics draw to a screen. I covered a lot of ground in this project, and I surprised myself that I actually made this work. More
I spent four months in the fall of 2011 in Martin Venezky’s form studio class at CCA. At the beginning of the class I selected two brown paper bags – one contained 3×5″ index cards, and the other tinfoil cupcake cups. I had to explore form through any media possible – drawing, photography, sculpture, painting – with the only restriction that the work displayed each week was in 2-dimensional form and in black and white.
The following gallery is the best of the best of my explorations.
The ether is space. Space stretches inside us and between everything, between two masses, between two people, between data and understanding.
I was inspired by news in late January of the largest solar flare activity recorded in recent history. With a bit of searching, I discovered a huge dataset gathered by NASA satellites. I felt that this was an opportunity to visualize an invisible phenomenon.
I believe that we are still far away from understanding how these flares affect life on Earth. Perhaps through effective visualization, we can come to see the patterns and correlate this data with other trends, such as weather or biorhythmic patterns.
The data was harvested from .txt files that are filed chronologically on the National Weather Service Space Weather Prediction Center.
I focused on five data points: date; start time of solar flare; peak time of solar flare; end time of solar flare; and number of solar flares per day.
Sketching helped me to understand the dataset in a tactile way. By sketching graphs of the data, I was able to understand how the different data points correlated to each other and what I could possibly model in a virtual environment.
My favorite idea was a wearable display. I envisioned a pin with LEDs that would glow during solar flare activity. The length and intensity of the flare would determine brightness and number of lights. A Processing/Lilypad system would parse a live data feed from the NOAA website.
This idea proved to be ambitious. But not forgotten.
I chose to work in Processing to strip the data from the .txt files and visualize the data points. As I worked with the code, my experiments branched into scientific, comparative visualizations and artistic, expressive visualizations. I have chosen the best variations. Big thanks to Wendy Ju and Scott Minneman for their help in the code wars.
This project really challenged my coding skills, but I feel I have expanded my knowledge through this fascination with solar data.
Notable lessons
I believe this project can continue to serves as a vehicle for my learning about how science, art, nature and technology can combine into understanding and beauty.
Possibilities
