Reactive Spaces and Media Architecture

Intro to Arduino

Each Group Collect

Digital Multimeter
Variable Voltage Power Supply
Bana Plug Leads
Resistors
DC Motor

What is Electricity?

A general understanding of electricity and the rules that determine how it flows and how it can be controlled are crucial to quickly prototyping your designs. These resources cover the fundamentals of working with electricity.

Tom Igoe: Understanding Electricity
Sparkfun: Voltage, Current, Resistance and Ohm’s Law
ITP: Electricity, the Basics
Voltage is the difference in charge between two points.
Current is the rate at which charge is flowing.
Resistance is a material’s tendency to resist the flow of charge (current).

Water analogy from Sparkfun

Voltage = Pressure in system

Current (Amperage) = Amount of Flow

Resistance = Resistance to Flow

V = I * R (voltage = current * resistance)

I = V / R (current = voltage / resistance)

Solve for LED / Resistor Combo

We know the ideal forward voltage (Vf) and current (I) of the LED.

Target Vf = 3.3v

Target I = 20mA (0.02A)

V = I * R

R = (Vs – Vf) / I

Exercise 1: Learn the Digital Multimeter (DMM)

Sparkfun: How to Use a Multimeter

Set up a simple circuit on a breadboard with an LED, a resistor, and the variable voltage power supply:
1. Anode (+) [because Node.js is positive/great]
2. Cathode (-) [because cats are negative/terrible]
Set the power supply to 5V
Use the the DMM to measure voltage at different points of the circuit
Notice the amount of current being used by the power supply
Insert the DMM into the circuit and measure the amount of current (see if it matches what the power supply says)
What happens if you change the resistor?
Add a switch or button
Draw the [circuit diagram](https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/how-to-read-a-schematic) on the table

What is Arduino?

A simple microcontroller and software combo developed to help designers, artists and non-engineers rapidly prototype with electronics.

Some things to remember:

Analog Pins are for reading only (0v – 5v)
analogRead(pinNumber) returns an integer value between 0 – 1023
Digital Pins can be INPUT or OUTPUT
1. digital pins can supply a low-current (100mA) 5v supply in output mode: digitalWrite(pin, HIGH/LOW);
2. digital pins can read the state of that pin, as either HIGH or LOW (5v or 0v): digitalRead(pin);
You can run the arduino WITHOUT the USB cable attached (only a 5v-24v barrel jack)
1. You can also power from the Vin and GND pins.

Exercise 2: Set up Arduino & Blink

Download the Arduino IDE
Follow the Getting Started guide for the Arduino UNO (word for word!)
Run the Blink! example sketch
1. Open Examples > Basics > Blink
2. Plug your Arduino into the computer
3. Choose your board: Tools>Board
4. Choose the correct port: Tools>Port
5. Click the check icon (verify)
6. If no errors, upload to the arduino

Exercise 3: Reading Data & Graphing it

Upload the Standard Firmata to your Arduino (check out File>Examples>Firmata>StandardFirmata)
Make sure you have the Arduino(Firmata) library (you can download this from the Sketch>Import Library>Add Library… menu)
In Processing and copy/paste this code:

/*
arduino_input

Demonstrates the reading of digital and analog pins of an Arduino board
running the StandardFirmata firmware.

To use:
* Using the Arduino software, upload the StandardFirmata example (located
  in Examples > Firmata > StandardFirmata) to your Arduino board.
* Run this sketch and look at the list of serial ports printed in the
  message area below. Note the index of the port corresponding to your
  Arduino board (the numbering starts at 0).  (Unless your Arduino board
  happens to be at index 0 in the list, the sketch probably won't work.
  Stop it and proceed with the instructions.)
* Modify the "arduino = new Arduino(...)" line below, changing the number
  in Arduino.list()[0] to the number corresponding to the serial port of
  your Arduino board.  Alternatively, you can replace Arduino.list()[0]
  with the name of the serial port, in double quotes, e.g. "COM5" on Windows
  or "/dev/tty.usbmodem621" on Mac.
* Run this sketch. The squares show the values of the digital inputs (HIGH
  pins are filled, LOW pins are not). The circles show the values of the
  analog inputs (the bigger the circle, the higher the reading on the
  corresponding analog input pin). The pins are laid out as if the Arduino
  were held with the logo upright (i.e. pin 13 is at the upper left). Note
  that the readings from unconnected pins will fluctuate randomly. 
  
For more information, see: http://playground.arduino.cc/Interfacing/Processing
*/

import processing.serial.*;

import cc.arduino.*;

Arduino arduino;
int potPin = 0;
int LEDPin = 6;



void setup() {
  size(470, 280);

  // Prints out the available serial ports.
  println(Arduino.list());
  
  // Modify this line, by changing the "0" to the index of the serial
  // port corresponding to your Arduino board (as it appears in the list
  // printed by the line above).
  arduino = new Arduino(this, Arduino.list()[0], 57600);
  
  // Alternatively, use the name of the serial port corresponding to your
  // Arduino (in double-quotes), as in the following line.
  //arduino = new Arduino(this, "/dev/tty.usbmodem621", 57600);
  
  arduino.pinMode(LEDPin, Arduino.OUTPUT);
 
}

void draw() {
  background(0);
  stroke(255);
  
  // Draw a filled box for each digital pin that's HIGH (5 volts
  int potVal = arduino.analogRead(potPin);
  
  //map the values from 0-1023 to 0-255
  int mappedVal = (int)map(potVal, 0, 1023, 0, 255);
  
  arduino.analogWrite(LEDPin, mappedVal);
  
  // Draw a circle whose size corresponds to the value of an analog input.
  noFill();
  int circleDiameter = arduino.analogRead(potPin) / 16;
  ellipse(width/2, height/2, circleDiameter, circleDiameter);
  
}

arduino_input

Demonstrates the reading of digital and analog pins of an Arduino board

running the StandardFirmata firmware.

To use:

* Using the Arduino software, upload the StandardFirmata example (located

in Examples > Firmata > StandardFirmata) to your Arduino board.

* Run this sketch and look at the list of serial ports printed in the

message area below. Note the index of the port corresponding to your

Arduino board (the numbering starts at 0). (Unless your Arduino board

happens to be at index 0 in the list, the sketch probably won't work.

Stop it and proceed with the instructions.)

* Modify the "arduino = new Arduino(...)" line below, changing the number

in Arduino.list()[0] to the number corresponding to the serial port of

your Arduino board. Alternatively, you can replace Arduino.list()[0]

with the name of the serial port, in double quotes, e.g. "COM5" on Windows

or "/dev/tty.usbmodem621" on Mac.

* Run this sketch. The squares show the values of the digital inputs (HIGH

pins are filled, LOW pins are not). The circles show the values of the

analog inputs (the bigger the circle, the higher the reading on the

corresponding analog input pin). The pins are laid out as if the Arduino

were held with the logo upright (i.e. pin 13 is at the upper left). Note

that the readings from unconnected pins will fluctuate randomly.

For more information, see: http://playground.arduino.cc/Interfacing/Processing

import processing.serial.*;

import cc.arduino.*;

Arduino arduino;

int potPin = 0;

int LEDPin = 6;

void setup() {

size(470, 280);

// Prints out the available serial ports.

println(Arduino.list());

// Modify this line, by changing the "0" to the index of the serial

// port corresponding to your Arduino board (as it appears in the list

// printed by the line above).

arduino = new Arduino(this, Arduino.list()[0], 57600);

// Alternatively, use the name of the serial port corresponding to your

// Arduino (in double-quotes), as in the following line.

//arduino = new Arduino(this, "/dev/tty.usbmodem621", 57600);

arduino.pinMode(LEDPin, Arduino.OUTPUT);

}

void draw() {

background(0);

stroke(255);

// Draw a filled box for each digital pin that's HIGH (5 volts

int potVal = arduino.analogRead(potPin);

//map the values from 0-1023 to 0-255

int mappedVal = (int)map(potVal, 0, 1023, 0, 255);

arduino.analogWrite(LEDPin, mappedVal);

// Draw a circle whose size corresponds to the value of an analog input.

noFill();

int circleDiameter = arduino.analogRead(potPin) / 16;

ellipse(width/2, height/2, circleDiameter, circleDiameter);

}

Find a sensor (Potentiometers are a good one)
Attach it to the Analog pins of your Arduino (You may need to find a diagram/datasheet/instructions on the internet)
Run the Processing sketch!

Looking Out – Ammani

Points

Points is a directional signpost designed by BreakfastNY. It provides curated directions/information depending on what you’re looking for, events in your area, tweets and transportation options using the form factor of a common sign post. It can be installed anywhere and someday might replace the common signposts found everywhere.

The product is at an interesting intersection of bits and atoms. It incorporates technology and interaction seamlessly with already existing elements in our environment in a functional and informative way.

Luminaries

Luminaries is a public lighting display designed by the Rockwell Group and installed in lower Manhattan. The installation is meant to encourage the user to “pause, reflect and look to the future”. They are trying to create a new holiday custom which is collaborative and community centric. Visitors to the square can send wishes to the canopy of lights through 3 glowing wishing stations which signal the pattern of lights that will appear.

A video of the installation can be found here.

This project caught my eye because it’s interactive and can simultaneously be enjoyed by spectators. It’s eye-catching but subtly so and can be enjoyed for hours without requiring input from its visitors.

The project can be found here.

Looking Out_01

https://vimeo.com/107650632

BALLS! Is an interactive installation piece in which mechanically directed light spheres move based on data gathered from within the building, using input from physical sensors that measure energy consumption, number of people working, internet traffics, meeting room noise levels, and the amount of coffee being consumed. The staff working in the building played an important role in determining various behaviors for the motion and application of the spheres. This type of passive yet constantly changing and moving structure creates a dynamic space that directly feeds off the actions and interactions of the people seeing it, not because they are intending to interact with it, but because it is the everyday interactions of the people in the building, that powers and directs it. In this, they can see their own actions and those of others throughout the building in an exceptional way.

Webpage: http://www.interactivearchitecture.org/lab-projects/balls

https://vimeo.com/77625638

Light Touch

What I find fascinating about this piece is the combination of these controlled light systems and the much more (in a way natural) and uncontrollable properties of smoke (in how it moves, and the textures it creates). The relationship between this type of traditional, almost sauna-like setting as an architectural space with the artificial, moving lights creates a very interesting tension between the elements. The smoke and the way it interacts with both elements and rooms (being released when people sit in the back area, increasing in amount to create a haze with the lights) pulls it together into a very interesting single interactive space.

Webpage: http://www.interactivearchitecture.org/lab-projects/light-touch

Looking Out 01

Staalhemel

http://christophdeboeck.com/work/staalhemel/

With this project users wear a portable EEG interface on their head which collects brain wave data and maps it to a ceiling grid of steel panels. Tiny hammers, representing the hidden transitory circuits in a human’s body, tap rhythmically onto the backs of steel plates based on the user’s brain activities. As the user attempts to generate more cognitive processes the rhythms are altered. I think Staalhemel is worth talking about because it takes neurological processes which we are otherwise unaware of and develops a tangible art form from that information. Additionally the output is unique for each individual which makes the experience different for each user.

Staalhemel – Steel Sky from Christoph De Boeck on Vimeo.

The Work Comes First

<https://medium.com/@wklodge/the-work-comes-first-f5a0bc9bc018>

“The Work Comes First” is intended to pay homage to all of the creativity, ingenuity, and patience which goes into developing great work. With this project The Lodge is subtly criticizing how repetitive projection screens and interactive work has become by developing an interactive exhibit which is handcrafted using hardware store materials. Using solenoids and 3-D mapping, users’ hands are tracked and cause the bolts to move in a rippling effect. Overall I think this project is an interesting bridge between emerging media and rudimentary construction.

Looking Out 01 – Willow Hong

Project 1: CLOUD

This is an interactive installation sculpted from 6,000 everyday light bulbs by Canadian artists Caitlind r.c. Brown and Wayne Garrett. The work allows any person to stand underneath the sculpture and control the light by pulling the strings (hundreds of them). As people come in and out to become part of an impromptu team that animates the cloud, they experience various conditions that would trigger other feelings, behaviors and interactions.

I like how this project really blurs the social boundary by encouraging spontaneous participation and collaboration. The use of mass-produced objects as a reference to the materialized city is also well embedded in the project. All exhibited interactions at the site can be viewed as statements about social relations, which I think is a smart approach.

Project Link

Project 2: Transcending Boundaries

In this installation, water is represented by a continuum of numerous water particles. When a person stands on the waterfall they obstruct the flow of water like a rock, and the flow of water changes. The flow of water continues to transform due to the interaction of people. Previous visual states can never be replicated, and will never reoccur.

This project illustrates the transient property of time and space in an aesthetically appealing way. This piece is more about personal reflection than public socialization. The visuals, the sound and the way of interaction for this work are coherently combined to give the audience a very poetic experience.

Project Link

Looking Out 01 – J. Loeb

In Flanders Fields Museum: Gas

The entirety of this museum in Ypres dedicated to World War I is interactive in some way. The viewer is given a swipe card (An example of a ‘tab’ from our reading.) with the name of a soldier from the war, whom they follow throughout the war during the course of the exhibition:

That, however, is “old hat” for interactive exhibits. More notable is the display about gas attacks. There the visitor enters a space featuring tubes of bubbles containing gas masks that turn from clear to sickly shades of green and yellow, a metaphor for the poison gas:

The colors match the audio, which are a number of recordings of accounts of gas attacks, including Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est.” (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46560/dulce-et-decorum-est) By the standards of such experiential spaces, it’s rather old (over 10 years), and small scale, but it achieves its purpose exceedingly well in conveying the harrowing nature of chemical warfare.

links:

http://www.inflandersfields.be/
http://www.hiroshimapeacemedia.jp/mediacenter_d/w_museum/20090608125924565_en.html

Living Wall – MIT Media Lab

The “Living Wall” allows the user to monitor and control the conditions in a room using only the wallpaper itself. The paper and paint that make up the wall paper are controlled by simple touch. They are linked to a computer system through Arduino sensors.

link:

https://creators.vice.com/en_us/article/ezamqa/mit-media-labs-interactive-living-wall

Looking Out 01 – Qiao Yin

LIGHT BARRIER SECOND EDITION

The light installation creates floating graphic objects which animate through space as they do through time. The creators constructed a phantom effect of light with millions calibrated beams.

The visual story follows the journey of a digital form. It begins by passing through the Light Barrier, so that this digital form transcends the limits of its home reality and enters into our physical one. It then explores the possibilities of its new found physicality, whilst attempting to assert its digital identity. Finally, the form travels through the Light Barrier again to pass away to the next reality.

The reason I found it fascinating is that it consists of deliberately calibrated constructions but the visual effect out of light surpasses the physical limitation and creates a gorgeous and phantom-ish feeling, which is beyond those traditional light usage such as projection or physical light tubes.

LightBarries

Spectra-3 by FIELD – Choreographing a physical-digital system

Created by digital design studio FIELD, Spectra-3 is an audio-visual light installation premiering at London’s Lumiere light festival on 14th January, 2016. It is a physical-digital sculpture that tells three stories of communication through a choreography of movement, animated lights and spatialized sound.

It uses a symbol of human seeking for extraterrestrial civilization as the form to present the interconnection among human. And also it’s stunning and visually engaging, which becomes an Instagram magnet that spurs a social population. The underlying reason for this phenomenon is also worth exploring when it comes to making an installation a social and interavtive attraction.

Spectra-3

Looking Out 01 – Morgan

Outdoor Inhouse

Outdoor Inhouse was an in-house (ha) installation created by Intermedio Studios in 2016 to simulate the almost forgotten act of relieving oneself outside, but in a public bathroom. Motion sensors detected when someone entered a bathroom stall, and then played a field recording taken from outside an actual outhouse in rural Ohio. The installation was meant to target “the controlled, plastic quality of contemporary elimination and it’s isolation from natural environments, while referencing a recently abandoned architectural staple of daily life prior to indoor plumbing.”

I was drawn to this project because it is almost entirely opposite to a typical work of media architecture, which tends to invoke High Art and High Tech. Outdoor Inhouse forces participants to reexamine a mundane act of everyday life in a location where the average person is not “primed” to experience a work of media.

Outdoor Inhouse

SUN

SUN was a project created by Dutch artist Philip Schutte as a playful exercise in self-generated landscapes. Sensors capture the movement of a giant ball controlled by the user, and reflect and distort light through the “atmosphere” backdrop based on the ball’s relative position to the horizon.

I particularly like SUN because of the artist’s fascination with world-building. According to the an interview in the Creative Applications blog, Schuette was inspired by rendering algorithms for world generation in a video game. Because the position of the sun has such a powerful emotional effect on people, the ability to move the sun and alter the emotional landscape of a scene is a way for the user to create a personalized emotive environment.

Philip Schuette

Looking Out 01

Stella Artois: Give Beautifully

This interactive light installation was designed by UNIT9 for Stella Artois’ global Christmas campaign ‘Give Beautifully’. It was released December of 2015. The concept was to create a space that gave city dwellers a canopy of stars that they otherwise would not be able to experience due to the mass amount of lights in the city during the night.

The installation is 20m x 20m and consists of clusters of interactive and kinetic stars. The floor is made of glass so the stars can reflect off of it and double the impact of the stars: creating a sense of infinite amount of stars.

There were three types of stars that differed in sizes and functionality: largest ones were kinetic globes; small static globes; and a cloth dotted with hundreds of LEDs stars. When the audience raised their arms towards the sky, the movement triggers the large stars to descend down towards them.

Five of the large kinetic stars were extra special. When the audience reaches for one of those particular stars, they flash white and a hidden camera captures a picture of the people reaching up from below.

Website

The Event of a Thread

This installation by Ann Hamilton was shown at the Park Avenue Armory in New York. The center piece of this installation involves 42 swings hung from the ceiling. The swings are divided into two fields by a large white curtain that bisects a 55,000 sq.ft. hall. The swings are connected to each other and the curtain via ropes and pulleys. A visitor’s momentum on the swing activates a rolling undulation of the curtain. The two fields of swings mirror each other so when corresponding swings are moving at the same time, the undulation of the curtain is enhanced.

Artist Website

Hyperallergic Article

Looking Out 01

The Heart Archive – Christian Boltanski

French artist Cristian Boltanski started this project in 2008, collecting people’s heartbeats around the world as a proof of their existence. The Heart Archive, a small single-installation museum on Teshima Island in Japan, is a site to permanently store and display these heartbeats. Visitors can also record their own heartbeat on site.

The exhibition is made up of three rooms. Recording Room collects visitors’ heartbeat; Listening Room has three computers where you can listen to recorded heartbeats in the archive; Heart Room, which is the most experiential among the three, plays heartbeats from different people, with a light beaming in synchronization with the heartbeats. You will see your own reflection in the mirrors on the wall, in the flickering light.

This project creates a conversation that transcends time and space, in forms of both collective memory and personal narrative. Heartbeat is the very representation of life, and also one of the most intimate sounds of a human body. Listening to the heartbeats was like experiencing the liveliness of another human being.

Listening Room

Heart Room

Volume – SOFTlab

Volume is designed by New York based design firm SOFTlab, using responsive mirrors to “redirect light and sound to spatialize and reflect the excitement of surrounding festival goers(Volume-SOFTlab)”. The installation is comprised of 100 mirror panels with an array of cameras to track the movement of people around the installation. The mirrors will turn to the nearest person, while the sound increases volume when more people approach the project. The light reacts to the ambient sound in the space.

This installation is an experiment using lights and sounds to reconstruct the empty room and blur the lines between ephemeral and physical space. Instead of simply responding to viewer’s movement, it creates a bilateral conversation by staring back at viewers and collaging the viewer’s image back into the space reconstructed by their movement. It not only manifest small vibration of invisible particles floating in the space, but also creates a strong self-awareness of one’s own being.