ITP
Rest of You Week 1: Analog In, Serial Out
For the first week of Rest of You, Dan asked us to brush up on our physical computing skills by reading input from two sensors through Arduino and displaying the readings in Processing. My skills were pretty rusty, so first I reviewed the Analog In and Serial Out labs. I wanted to see readings from [...]
Cabinets Week 1: The Met and The Frick
Last Saturday afternoon I visited The Frick Collection and The Metropolitan Museum of Art for Cabinets of Wonder. For each visit, Nancy has asked us to gather our first impressions of the place, observe others in the space, and write a collection of short reviews, adopting a variety of viewpoints.
The Frick always seems to me [...]
Bestiary at the ITP Spring Show
Bryan and I are having a great time showing Bestiary, our projection-based book of randomly generated animals, at the ITP Spring Show. Here’s a quick video we shot this morning during set up:
Bestiary from Caroline Brown on Vimeo.
Yesterday was day one of the show, and we got lots of great feedback on the project. Today [...]
Bestiary Sketch (aka Menagerie, Round 3)
Bryan Lence and I revisited our A to Z midterm to create another version of the creature maker. We kept our foundation of the context-free grammar, but we altered our template for the images. Instead of layering transparencies in set positions, we anchored each image to a specific variable associated with another image (i.e. the [...]
Fall Classes
Hooray! Fall course schedules are out! I’m looking forward to my classes: Design for UNICEF with Clay Shirky, Cabinets of Wonder with Nancy Hechinger, Crafting with Data with Rob Faludi, and Visual Communication with Katherine Dillon.
5000 Dogs in the Clone Lab
I chose to revisit the Animal as Object assignment for my final project in Animals, People and Those in Between. Instead of really focusing on Mira this time, however, I decided I wanted to convey how overwhelmed I was by the number of dogs supposedly used in the lab that cloned the first dog: 5000. [...]
Visualizing Arduino Survey Results with Circos
Since I used a free account with SurveyMonkey to conduct my survey of Arduino usage patterns, I’m unable to download the data and easily manipulate it. I find reviewing survey results on the site a little unwieldy, so I uploaded the results of my first question (How many Arduino boards do you own?) to Circos, [...]
Arduino Lifespan Survey
As noted on the Arduino blog, I’m gathering some usage data to support a Life Cycle Assessment of the Duemilanove. The results I receive will help me to determine functional units and usage hours for the analysis. Arduino fans, please complete this short survey (now closed– please see update below) if you have a spare [...]
LCA of Materials for Intro to Physical Computing
After some serious thought about my final project for If Products… I’ve decided to drop the modern heirlooms project. It’s just not well-defined enough to be successful during the short time span between now and the end of the semester. Instead, I’ll be performing a Life Cycle Assessment of the Arduino Duemilanove. From there, I’ll [...]
Artists’ Materials via the Brooklyn Museum API
For Programming A to Z last week, Adam asked us to get some XML from a web service and use it as input into one of our previous programs. I chose to work with the Brooklyn Museum’s API. In looking through an XML sample from their site, I was intrigued by the variety of artists’ [...]
Interface Sketches for Joules
Nothing solid yet (not even the name), just some sketches Peter and I made…
Mira– Animal as Subject
Following on our Animal as Object assignment for Animals, People, and Those In Between, we were asked to create another piece adopting the point of view of our chosen animal. Here’s the project brief:
5. Animal Subject
Due date: Mar 24
Format: pdf or other form (paper, film, web site) AND character model sheet (pdf)
You will take your [...]
InformationOverlord
Sometimes keeping up with all of the reading I’d like to do leaves me crushed by information overload, so for Programming A to Z this week I built a simple program to tell me whether or not I should bother reading a given document. Our assignment was to augment, modify, or replace one of our [...]
Use Desire as an Anchor
Over Spring Break we had two assignments to finish for Programming A to Z. The first was to modify, augment, or create a program based on our in-class examples of context-free grammars. I originally planned to create a grammar for walking– some sort of computer-generated dérive– but the weather hasn’t been particularly conducive to walking. [...]
Menagerie 2: A2z Midterm Code
This is the code for the main class of our creature-maker:
import java.util.HashMap;
HashMap words = new HashMap();
String[] lines;
String oneLine;
String animalName;
PImage head;
Menagerie 2: A2Z Midterm
Bryan Lence and I developed a creature-maker for our Programming A to Z midterm. We based the program on a simple context-free grammar defining our animal structures, and applied that grammar to a Processing sketch based on Adam Parrish’s ContextFilter. Each click of the mouse while the sketch is running assembles a new animal assembled [...]
Mira– Character Study
For Animals, People, and Those In Between, we were asked to create another character study, this time based on research of a real animal. I chose Mira, one of the first dogs to be cloned from a pet. She lives in Mill Valley, CA, with the owner of BioArts International (previously Genetic Savings & Clone), [...]
Mira– Animal as Object
For Animals<>People we were asked to create a piece looking at a specific animal as an object. Here’s the project brief:
4. Animal Object
Due date: Mar 3
Format: pdf or other form (paper, film, web site) AND character model sheet (pdf)
This assignment is a combination of research, character development and implmentation of a documentary form.
You are going [...]
No Money, No Honey
For Animals, People, and Those in Between, I worked with Ozge and Anderson to create a world where our characters might coexist. The Dictator Bee, Sunbear, and Ole came to this project with very strong, developed characters, so figuring out the ways in which they would interact provided a few challenges. Here’s a comic strip [...]
Markov’s Menagerie
This week’s assignment for Programming A to Z was to modify or augment our in-class example of a Markov chain. Somehow during class I got the idea to make a program that would create imaginary creatures by analyzing n-grams from a list of animals. I created a list of creatures from a medieval bestiary, and [...]
Succinct Scrivener
Imagine my surprise, nay, my consternation, when without moving from his privacy, Bartleby in a singularly mild, firm voice, replied, I would prefer not to.
But in quite as clear a one came the previous reply, I would prefer not to.
I would prefer not to, said he.
I would prefer not to, he said, and gently disappeared [...]
Interview with a Green Consumer
Our assignment for If Products Could Speak this week was to interview someone with “green” consumption habits. In class we’ve discussed at length the ways in which the term “green” lacks any real meaning, but right now it’s the easiest term we have to work with.
My friend, Sam, gets most of the things she needs [...]
Life Cycle Thinking
This week in If Products Could Speak… we looked at Life Cycle Assessment as a tool for considering the impact of products. After spending some time digging through web sites and article databases, I found an LCA for a wind turbine. I was surprised by how readable the article was, although I don’t have a [...]