Sunday, February 28, 2010
Arduino Change Color of Processing
This Arduino project reads in voltages that can be modified from basic potentiometers and write those values to the serial port. On the Processing side, the values are read back in and then converted to red and blue values to dynamically update the application's background in varying shades of violet.
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
144 characters statement
"McTweet dress" is a visualization of twitter messages designed for display in public space.
To develop twitter generated dynamic dress Arduino and Processing software would be used. Twitter messages would be projected on several surfaces such as: mannequin, white board, boxes, etc. Possibility of using images and videos from Alexander McQueen collections may acquire.
Scope of work
Software: Arduino and Processing.
Location of work: B120 (Monday, Tuesday), B132 (Thursday), home.
Period of Performance:
- Class work (3.5 hours)
- Homework (3.5 hours).
- Project delivery: Week 13. 30th April 2010.
Displayed information: review presented data
Identify surface: appearance of artifact.
Research for public space: where artifact would be exhibited.
Testing artifact: week 11-12
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Arduino + A. McQueen


In memory of Alexander McQueen I have decided to create tweet dress.
How it's going to work?
- Getting Twitter messages designed to display in public space.
- Each Twitter message containing famous fashion designer name will be projected on mannequin, which will create the virtual dress.
- You Tweet = You design


Similar project: Twitter to Flash
Saturday, February 20, 2010
Alexander McQueen

Runway Archive
Alexander McQueen was born in London on March 17th 1969, the youngest of six children. He left school at the age of 16 and was offered an apprenticeship at the traditional Saville Row tailors Anderson and Shephard and then at neighbouring Gieves and Hawkes, both masters in the technical construction of clothing.
From there he moved to the theatrical costumiers Angels and Bermans where he mastered 6 methods of pattern cutting from the melodramatic 16th Century to the razor sharp tailoring which has become a McQueen signature. Aged 20 he was employed by the designer Koji Tatsuno, who also had his roots in British tailoring. A year later McQueen travelled to Milan where he was employed as Romeo Gigli’s design assistant. On his return to London, he completed a Masters degree in Fashion Design at Central Saint Martin’s. He showed his MA collection in 1992, which was famously bought in its entirety by Isabella Blow.
Alexander McQueen shows are known for their emotional power and raw energy, as well as the romantic but determinedly contemporary nature of the collections. Integral to the McQueen culture is the juxtaposition between contrasting elements: fragility and strength, tradition and modernity, fluidity and severity. An openly emotional and even passionate viewpoint is realised with a profound respect and influence for the arts and crafts tradition. Alexander's collections combine an in-depth working knowledge of bespoke British tailoring, the fine workmanship of the French Haute Couture atelier and the impeccable finish of Italian manufacturing.
In less than 10 years McQueen became one of the most respected fashion designers in the world. In October 1996 he was appointed Chief Designer at the French Haute Couture House Givenchy where he worked until March of 2001.
In December 2000, 51% of Alexander McQueen was acquired by the Gucci Group, where he remained Creative Director. Collections include womens ready-to-wear, mens ready-to-wear, accessories, eyewear and fragrance (Kingdom 2003 and MyQueen 2005). Expansion followed and included the opening of flagship stores in New York, London, Milan, Las Vegas and Los Angeles.
The following awards have recognized Alexander McQueen’s achievement in fashion: British Designer of the year 1996, 1997, 2001, and 2003, International Designer of the Year by The Council of Fashion Designer's of America (CFDA) in 2003, A Most Excellent Commander of The British Empire’ (CBE) by her Majesty the Queen in 2003, GQ Menswear Designer of the Year in 2007.
Retrospective

I admire the most!
Spring 2010


Interesting presentation.

Best Collections!

Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Twitter to Flash: Class3
Afterwords, I will be looking to connect Flash data to device like projector.
I started looking up for online tutorials, grate example was given by RiverCityGraphix
When i completed the tutorial i got this error:
"Error #2044: Unhandled ioError:. text=Error #2032: Stream Error. URL: http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline.xml?screen_name=skwinte
at twittertoflash_fla::MainTimeline/twittertoflash_fla::frame1()"
While looking for any description what Error #2044 and Error #2032 mean I came across to Judag's blog.
The blog explains what causes the error. My exported swf tries to access a file across a restricted domain.
"It’s not going to get the file if it is not allowed to access it. This behavior then generates the error. The fix in is to add a cross-domain policy file to the domain where the page is located at. The cross-domain file must specify that your domain (or any other domains) can access that URL. You can also use a proxy on your server to get the file."
p.s. this task is for the weekend
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Arduino: Class 2
Projects using pressure sensor:
- 1.

Connecting Free-scale pressure sensors

The Fluidforms Punching Bag contains a matrix of 9x7 force sensors that measure the force exerted by a blow to the punching bag. The sensors are plugged into an Arduino board that sends the values over USB to a computer using the MIDI protocol. The Computer is running a Processing sketch that receives the MIDI packets and writes the current state of the sensors to a folder in a “|” separated format. An OpenGL render then reads these text files and graphically represents the current state of the punches to the bag since the last reset.
video
- 2. Similar to mine
- 3. A circuit for changing the color of an RGB LED based on the amount of pressure applied to a force pressure sensor. by jacek
- 4. Connect your MAC with the pressure sensor and a resistor connected to the Arduino board. by macworld.com\
- 5. Touch sensor and servo motor with Arduino. by brian chung
Monday, February 8, 2010
Arduino: Class 1
Sunday, February 7, 2010
Friday, February 5, 2010
Avant-garde as Software
In the 1990s, the technological shift of all cultural communication to computer media gets under way. We may think that finally the avant-garde techniques of the 1920s will no longer be sufficient and that fundamentally new techniques will start to appear. But, paradoxically, the "computer revolution" does not seem to have been accompanied by any significant innovations on the level of communication techniques. While we now rely on computers to create, store, distribute and access culture, we are still using the same techniques developed in the 1920s. Cultural forms which were good enough for the age of the engine turned out to be also good enough for the age of the "geometry engine" and the "emotion engine". ("Geometry engine" is the name of a computer chip introduced in Silicon Graphics workstations a number of years ago to perform real-time 3D graphics calculations; "emotion engine" is the name of the processor used in Sony's Playstation 2, introduced in 1999; it allows real-time rendering of facial expressions.) In short, as far as the cultural languages are concerned, new media is still old media. Why? If historically each cultural period (Renaissance, Baroque, and so on) brought with it new forms, new expressive vocabulary, why is the computer age satisfied with using the languages of the previous period, in other words, that of the industrial age?
During its history, the identity of a digital computer kept changing almost every decade: a calculator (the 1940s); a real-time control mechanism; a data processor; a symbol processor; and, in the 1990s, a media distribution machine. This latest identity has very little to do with the original one, since distribution of media does not require much computation. As computing became equated with Internet use during the latter half of the 1990s, the computer, in its original sense, became less and less visible; its identity as a carrier for already established cultural forms, more and more prominent. Music and films streamed over Internet; MP3 music files to be downloaded and played using stand-alone MP3 players; books to be downloaded into stand-alone electronic book devices; Internet telephony and faxing—all these applications use the computer as a communication channel, without requiring it to compute anything.
The reader may ask how the computer's other new post-Internet role, that of a communication link between individuals (as exemplified by chat, newsgroups and email), fits into this analysis. In my view, we can understand "person-to-person communication channel" identity as a subset of "media distribution channel" identity. For what is being sent by email or posted to a newsgroup is simply another form of media—one's thoughts formatted as text, i.e. human language. If this perspective may appear strange, it is only because during the history of modern media, from photography to video, a media object was usually
- (1) created by special types of professional users (artists, designers, filmmakers);
- (2) mass reproduced;
- (3) distributed to many individuals via mass printing, broadcasting, etc.
In 1920s communication techniques acquire a new status. New media represents a new stage of the avant-garde. The techniques invented by the 1920s left-wing artists became embedded in the commands and interface metaphors of computer software. In short, the avant-garde vision became materialized in a computer. All the strategies developed to awaken audiences from the dream-existence of bourgeois society (constructivist design, new typography, avant-garde cinematography and film editing, photo-montage, etc.) now define the basic routine of a post-industrial society: interaction with a computer. For example, the avant-garde strategy of collage re-emerged as a "cut and paste" command, the most basic operation one can perform on any computer data. In another example, dynamic windows, pull-down menus, and HTML tables all allow a computer user to work simultaneously with practically unrestricted amounts of information despite the limited surface of the computer screen. This strategy can be traced to Lissitzky's use of movable frames in his 1926 exhibition design for the International Art Exhibition in Dresden.
The avant-garde of the 1920s developed a particular approach to visual communication which refers to as visual atomism. This approach is based on the idea that a complex visual message can be constructed from simple elements whose psychological effects are known beforehand.
The atomistic approach to communication reappears with new force in computer media. But what was a particular theory of visual meaning and emotional effect grounded in psychology now became the technological basis of all communication. For instance, a digital image consists of atom-like pixels, which makes it possible to automatically generate images, to automatically manipulate them in numerous ways and, through compression techniques, to transmit them more economically. A digital three-dimensional space has a similar atomistic structure—an agglomerate of simple elements such as polygons or voxels. A digital moving image also consists of a number of separate layers, which can be separately accessed and manipulated.
In computer culture, a media object is typically assembled from ready-made elements such as icons, textures, video clips, 3-D models, complete animation sequences, ready-to-use virtual characters, chunks of JavaScript code, Director Lingo scripts, etc.
When a computer user interacts with a Web site, navigates a virtual space, or examines a digital image, he is therefore fulfilling the wildest atomistic fantasies of Kandinsky, Rodchenko, Lissitzky, Eisenstein and other "atomists" of the 1920s. The digital image is made up from pixels and layers; the virtual 3-D space is made from simple polygons; the Web page is made up from separate objects represented by HTML statements; the objects on the Web are connected by hyperlinks. In short, the ontology of computer data space as a whole and the individual objects in this space is atomistic on every possible level.
The key feature shared by all modern human-computer interfaces is overlapping windows, which were first proposed by Alan Kay in 1969. All modern interfaces display information in overlapping and re-sizable windows arranged in a stack, similar to a pile of papers on a desk. As a result, the computer screen can present the user with a practically unlimited amount of information despite its limited surface.
The 1920s saw a revolution in typography and graphic design. Traditional symmetrical layouts appropriate for the old age of slow reading and private engagement with the book were replaced by new principles: the clear hierarchy of type sizes, the economy of block type against clean white background, the energy of simple geometric elements designed to grab the attention of the viewer and then to lead him through the message, step by step. All these principles received further development in computer interfaces. On the most simple level, the graphical style of Windows 2000 or MAC OS perfectly follows Tschichold's thesis that "the essence of the new typography is clarity."
But GUIs also take new typography to the next level. The task of the interface designer is no longer to simply present a limited amount of information in the most efficient way, as it was for the designer of an invitation card, a magazine layout or a poster. The new task is to create an efficient structure and tools for working with arbitrary information, information which is always changing and always grows. Therefore if a modernist designer broke a message into a clearly defined hierarchy—main heading, sub-heading, and so on—GUI provides the user himself with tools for hierarchical organization of arbitrary data. The examples of these tools are nested folders and nested menus; outline display options of word processing applications; zoom and pan controls which can operate on any data, from 3-D spaces to text (Pad++ interface). In this way, the principles of new typography and modernist design have become the principles of what can be called meta-design: the creation of tools which are employed by a user himself to organize the information on-the-fly.
The idea of visual epistemology received a new life in a computer age. It justifies a computer version of the avant-garde defamiliarizing points of view: interactive 3-D computer graphics. This technology allows a computer user to observe any object from an arbitrary viewpoint in order to understand the object's structure. Similarly, any quantified data can be turned into a 3-D representation which the user can examine in order to uncover the relationships between visualized data. From chemistry and physics to architectural and product design, from financial analysis to pilot training, 3-D visualization is an essential tool of the post-industrial labour of information processing. Defamiliarization now involves simply a movement of a computer mouse to change the perspective, thus producing a new view of the scene.
Inspirational Artists and their work:
Thursday, February 4, 2010
Avant Garde
Avant-garde represents a pushing of the boundaries of what is accepted as the norm or the status quo, primarily in the cultural realm. The notion of the existence of the avant-garde is considered by some to be a hallmark of modernism, as distinct from postmodernism. Many artists have aligned themselves with the avant-garde movement and still continue to do so, tracing a history from Dada through the Situationists to postmodern artists such as the Language poets around 1981.