It’s been great being in this class. Sorry I forgot to upload the file.
Dean.
I’m interested in exploring ways in which we can physically move through text. This is something that is inherently a part of reading a book or newspaper - there is a tactile sense of how much you have consumed and how much you have left to go. But this is something that we get further away from as we do more and more of our reading on the screen. I started thinking about preexisting ways that we move through or break apart text for different purposes, whether it be text scrolling on teleprompters, lines broken apart on cue cards, or words that are physically assembled into magnetic poetry.
I’ve also been thinking about ways to liberate the screen - to make into something we can touch and hold and make it responsive to it’s own physical environment. There are lots of examples of explorations being done in this direction, like the Interactive Digital Wall by Onomy Labs, but I wanted to embark on some explorations of my own.
In considering how to combine these two interests of physically exploding text and liberating the screen, I considered possible actions that could be used to reveal text with a portable screen including scrolling, attaching, throwing, and banging. For this project I settled on attaching and made a prototype of what I call the “Screen Reader”.
The Screen Reader is a setup that allows you to physically move through text in a linear fashion by attaching a small screen to specified locations on a wall. When the screen is attached to the wall, it shows a word. When you move it to a different location, it shoes a different word. When you reach the end of the line and then return to the beginning, you will reveal a new line of text. The idea is that you can read and reveal a text one word at a time.
The back of the screen is covered with the hook side of conductive velcro. On what would be the wall are patches of loop side conductive velcro. When the screen is attached to any of the available locations, the velcro on the screen creates a connection between the two small pieces of velcro on the wall and in effect closes a switch. Each location where the screen can be attached is a switch. All switch information is monitored by an Arduino which then sends information serially to Processing as to which switch is activated. According to which switch is activated and in what order the switches are activated, the Processing code determines which word to display. For this situation I hooked up the LCD to my computer via the s-video out and showed the applet on the secondary display.
A video of what I showed in class can be seen here.
I was pretty satisfied with the result. It’s a rough prototype, but I enjoyed turning the act of reading into a more physically engaging activity. I started very simple approach but have ideas that I plan to pursue as to how I could expand this into a larger, more dynamic system, both in terms of content and physical interface.
My final project uses a regular expression to get the two words immediately following “I love” and “I hate” in a Google blogsearch to display side-by-side as bedfellows in the opposite of indifference. Link.
I used php and ajax to build the pages. There’s a bit of code to get everything working, so I’ve pasted the part most relevant to the class here.
Zach Layton and I developed a system for generating music while exploring tonal pitch space. We were very influenced by the work Fred Lerdahl (pictured below) is doing regarding this aspect of music theory.
At the beginning of this project, we set out to use some kind of existing data like gene sequences or molecular formulas as the score for movement around a pitch space such as this:
We wanted to know what those sets of information might sound like. More importantly, we wanted a data set that had some larger meaning - for example, gene nucleotides are (obviously) used to control the development of living organisms. But we ran into the problem of arbitrarily mapping those sequences into the pitch space. The more music we tried to make with existing data sounded entirely random, which, ironically, we thought we could avoid by using these data sets.
So we settled on using the Monte Carlo method to control the movement through pitch space. By using the Monte Carlo method, we were able to massage the use of random numbers so the movement through pitch space wasn’t so random. There are two systems running in our code - one choses the notes of a scale, the other choses the scale. Through using MaxLink, our Java applet can send this information to Max/MSP to generate the results of the program.
Code
sorry i forgot to post this earlier…
documentation here
This project was concieved of and created as part of my master’s thesis at Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), New York University
Proposition:
Use Data from news feeds to brew a cup of coffee which is representative of those news feeds.
Background:
It is possible to encode data into taste and deliver it to someone in the form of a beverage. Coffee and tea offer a number of distinct possibilities for use as informatic beverages as they are well suited to information encoding having many different varieties and being incredibly flavorful with a wide range of characteristics that are tastable by humans. Since coffee, tea and news are a classic pairing, often enjoyed together we have decided to use coffee and or teaas a delivery system for the daily news. Because Coffee is farmed in countries spanning 4 continents, coffee beans from each region are used to represent news from that region. A tastable version of the news is created in which a region’s presence in the news is reflected by its presence in the dispensed beverage.
Technology:
NewsBrews is a coffee brewing apparatus which uses information parsed from internet news feeds to create a cup of coffee whose composition is indicative of the current news. The logic contained within the device itself is minimal. There is a pic chip (18f252) which controls motors and communications and a Lantronix Xport which connects to outside servers via internet. The process of encoding the news into a cup of coffee requires 2 separate translation stages. The first is a reduction of text to pure data and the second is a translation from information which is easily readable by humans ta format which is more easily used by machines.
Because the News Brews device is running off of a small microcontroller with somewhat limited logic abilities, it is necessary to use an external server for the task of parsing data from the news. For this task I have chosen to work with cgi scripts written in perl. Perl is a language ideally suited to completing this type of task with utmost efficiency. The first script I created for this purpose is here and delivers extensive information about the exact number of occurrences of my search words in the news, specifically the New York Times. This script was necessary for determining the accuracy of the code (currently, a minor variant of this code is under devalopment to store detailed results in a database for future analysis). This same raw information is tabulated and fed to the News Brews Device through this cgi. Information must be transmitted to the News Brews device in an exceedingly simple form, so the News Brews device receives only a short string of comma delimited characters which defines the percent of the daily news originating in each of 6 regions: Region 1: Central and South America, Region 2: Sub-Saharran Africa, Region 3: Middle East and Northern Africa, Region 4: Central and South Asia, Region 5: South East Asia, and Region 6 : Pacific.
Because the tree structures of different news feeds are not the same, the addition of a user selectable news feed mandates separate cgis for each feed. The NYT news feed is the most simple to parse as it delivers the full contents of the paper via XML. The BBC and FOX cgis are slightly more difficult to parse as they provide only headlines in XML which link to HTML pages. The News Brews device uses the “GET” function over HTTP protocol to connect to the server(nyu stage) housing the cgi scripts and requests whichever information the user has selected. The cgi scripts use the same protocol but with the benefit of a computer which has many basic functions built in invalidating the need to be aware of certain components of the protocol.
Once the News Brews device receives the news information it has requested from the cgi script, it uses this information to drive two motors, one stepper and one servo. Hoppers housing selected coffee varieties from each of the 6 regions rotate past a window in which they can be viewed by the user and are repeatedly passed over a small opening with a servo operated door mechanism. The door mechanism opens into a chute which delivers coffee beans to the hopper of a grinder where they await pulverization. Once ground, the beans are deposited in a paper filter where boiling water is pumped over them producing a cup of delicious, invigorating and data-packed coffee.
FOR ADDITIONAL DOCUMENTATION AND A LOOK AT THE NEWS BREWS COMMERCIAL(new commercials on the way) go to www.therealbenbrown.com/newsbrews
for For human readable webpages which instruct you how to make your coffee for the day, go to
NYT BBC FOX
Documentation is here
GenBookby James and Vaibhav
We finished up HaikuNews with the creation of an interface with buttons that pull the content of an RSS feed, compare that content to a list of words arranged by syllable count in our database, and then puts the matching words into an ArrayList. To generate the Haiku, the matching words are randomly chosen and set into preconfigured templates. The results appear, along with an image, in the large window on the interface.
Here’s a picture of the interface.
Here’s the source code for the project:
You can find the latest copy of The Zipwire at www.thezipwire.com
It will work with gmail (aka googleTalk) or any jabber address. You can also sign up for a test account at www.thezipwire.com if you want a jabber account.
Sorry, mac only for now…
