Using a combination of hardware and software, I got extreme glitching. Through random coincidence and exact settings, the beta version of Isadora I was using completely glitched out and made this even better than I was trying for. The only way to save the footage for later was to shoot video of the screen. I’ve used this since then as a source clip for visuals.

(Mac, Evolution MIDI dial controller, PSOne LCD display, Radio Shack video booster, Troikatronix Isadora, Steim Junxion)

If you asked what I was working on during the past year, I could probably tell you that I was “working on “The Machine”. While this could sound like a vague reference to “the man” or something of the sort, it was actually a huge collaborative project that I was working on with a bunch of people. This was created for the 2005 Burning Man Festival.

We had people from many professions including contracting, art, realty, party and event creation, shmoozing, welding, computer geekery, audio, engineers, graphic design, multimedia, dance, performance, and some architecture background. This huge structure was community created, community run and used during the event, and then community destroyed at the end of the event.

The short description given to the Burning Man event beforehand:

Made primarily of steel and wooden parts, The Machine (Mach12e) expresses an elusiveness of time and place. Burning Man participants will at first have the opportunity to view the sculpture, a triangulated meta-mechanical temple, in the open vista of the playa. They will explore its isolation, both spatial and emotional. Three elevated drive wheels and housings, a raised rotating central core comprised of a tower of gears and a transmission, and an upper platform that suspends eight articulated kinetic limbs define its multifaceted rust, blue, and gray form.

(wood, steel, nails, screws, cable, gears, rubber belts, hard rubber casters, soft rubber tensioner wheels, belt tensioner/belt rider system to cut down on the belt harmonics caused by the wind, 8 channel audio, olfactory)

(DV Camera, Final Cut for making clips, Isadora for creating the visuals, recorded onto DV)

(DV Camera, Final Cut for making clips, Isadora for creating the visuals, recorded onto DV)

(DV Camera, Final Cut for making clips, Isadora for creating the visuals, recorded onto DV)

(DV Camera, Final Cut for making clips, Isadora for creating the visuals, recorded onto DV)

Audionic Videotronic Electronic Robotic, eh!

Robots can be your friends. Your friends can be robots.

I’ve been wanting to make a robot costume for Halloween for quite some time. For Halloween of 2004, I finally went ahead and did it. Instead of building a cumbersome cardboard box to wear and do the robot, I decided to just build a helmet and wear a shiny silver jogging outfit. Funny thing is that I didn’t finish the costume until well into the morning, missing any parties that were happening. Or at least all of them I knew of. That’s ok though, I had fun. Next year, I plan to actually wear it.

Ok, so, you want to build a robot helmet? Here’s a possible parts list:

Laptop with audio input (just need the logic board, drive, battery)
My First Sony karaoke tape player (cheap at thrift stores, like $1)
Samsung micro-cassette recorder (to send audio to the laptop)

Sony PSOne LCD Display
Cardboard, or some other easily cut and glued material
Foam for padding
Twisty ties
Hot glue gun and lots of glue sticks
Spray paint in desired robot helmet color
Screen material for speaker grille and for your eyes to see through
Thin plexiglas to protect the LCD screen
Various cables and adapters found and made

Misc bolts to hold on the speaker, or just more hot glue

This is definitely looking mostly like a list of the old things you find in the back of your kitchen drawer, no? Well, maybe besides the plexiglas and the laptop. And maybe the karaoke thing.

Ok, anyway, you have this desire to be a robot. Cardboard is good stuff. My
studio classes from architecture school really shine through in the fabrication of robot skulls. Hot glue guns are your friend. Funny thing about glue guns is that I always thought they seemed really annoying and I didn’t try them until after college. Hot glue is one of my favorite ghetto tools now. Right up there with duct tape.

The specifics before building that I wanted to keep in mind were: an LCD display that I wanted people to be able to see, a speaker that I wanted people to be able to hear, a mic I had to be able to talk into, and a head that I had to fit into the thing once complete. I started by making a frame for the LCD as I wanted to make sure not to damage it. I even went so far as to lay a thin plexiglass sheet in front to protect the LCD panel.

Then I set this face down on the table and started attaching other shapes on, sticking my head on the table every once in a while to make sure something would be far enough away from me, or that it would fit one of the items. For example, the recorder is attached in such a way that it juts out to the left of the main shape. This was fine with me as I didn’t really want the whole form to be symetrical.

To test fit for the back angles, I had my digital camera on a tripod and used the remote to take shots of what I could not see.

Most Halloween costumes just have a shape, a form. I wanted a robot costume with function as well. So besides looking kid of weird, I had the idea to have a computer (which happened to be in pieces at the time) modulating my voice in a robot kind of way. I realized about two microns later (yeah, I know that’s length) that I could use the screen from my toy laptop and also give my robot a smiling face. Obviously, I just was not in a party mood.

In my helmet, the voice comes in through the Samsung microcassette recorder, with the tape paused. I just realized that the microcassette recorder could have just been a cheapo mic, or even a USB mic. I think I had a specific reason for using the microcassette, but I’m guessing it was availability at 4 in the morning. This audio input goes into my laptop and into a program called Plogue Bidule. This program can route audio through filters and equalizers and all sorts of things. So I played around for a while and came up with something kind of robotic.

After the laptop, the sound gets piped into the hacked apart karioke tape player. I wired the switch to just turn the machine on and off. I figured if I coughed, I didn’t need to robotocize that. I also had no idea how long the batteries would last.

Below is an image of the circuit board for the karioke tape player. You can see from the first one that there are multiple wires coming off of the board that I needed to deal with. On the left there is the audio input coming from the computer, and the switch to turn on and off the power. On the far right is the speaker connection, and coming off the bottom right is the power.

Next is an image of the battery connections. Luckily, this board was quite specific in it’s markings. That made it much easier to deal with. Here you can see that the positive was on the left and that my soldering job was not so great. I remember that left solder point just never holding. It took forever for it to stay like it did.

Just connect these wires to a battery holder that gets velcroed or hot glued somewhere out of the way, probably across from the laptop to balance things out. I used the same amount and kind of batteries as the device took initially using a battery holder from Radio Shack (part 270-396).

Here is the speaker connection. The speaker wires had to be elongated to be able to reach from where this board is located. Just snip the speaker wires in the middle so that you can tell which color goes where.

This next one is kind of hard to see. The black wire is connected to a point marked GND for ground. To get audio into the board, you will need one wire connected to here and the other connected to the place marked SIG for signal. The wires for audio came from an end of a stereo headphone jack cable. Since I only had mono inputs on the karioke board, I just connected the left and right leads together when soldering onto the board. This gave a cheap and easy mono input. If you wanted to, you could have two speakers in the helmet aiming a bit away from the front center and make sure the laptop was outputting some highly stereo effects. That could be very impressive. I might even do that for next halloween. The only thing here would be to see if the batteries could power two boards at once.

To hook up the switch (any switch that will stay on after you flick or press it), you also use the ground connection, but then hook up the other side to the CTRL, or control point.

Here is an image of the viewing area where my eyes were looking out. I wanted it to look something like a vent or neck divider or something. Anything so that it wouldn’t draw your eyes to it. I ended up using two layers of light plastic screen material like you might use for a window. I could still see out pretty well, and it made it less obvious that there was actually a human in the costume.

Here is an image of the speaker bolted into the top section of my helmet. Any time you can use real hardware like bolts, sheet metal, fans, or anything a real robot might have, it makes the effect that much better. On the very top you can see the wires and a piece of a fan that I install into the top. My thinking here was partially for effect, but mostly because I didn’t want to be in an uncomfortable outfit for very long. Turns out the box is large enough compared to my head that there was airflow.

Below are a couple images of the bottom front of the helmet showing placement of the voice input, some of the construction details of the eye piece, and the general mess you can have going on inside as long as you pay attention to the outside.

Related Links:
Plogue Bidule

Troikatronix Isadora
Radio Shack battery holder for 4 “D” Cells (part 270-396)

Don’t belittle your vote.

Electronic voting is an important issue in this country. This project is a comment on some of the possible downfalls of the technology. It displays imagery of politics interspersed with war, to portray the importance of our decisions when it comes time to vote. There is a section of the screen showing lie detector rolls (probably for earthquakes, actually), this section gets colored progressively more and more depending on how high each of the votes goes. A large number of people feel that the truth can be colored by who is in power, and this is my nod to that idea.

The first showing of the project was 2005.03.26 at a “Bring Your Own Art” show located at the old Sandpoint naval base in Seattle, anti-curated by SOAP.

The basis of this iteration of the project was an industrial 27″ television turned on it’s side (literally). On top was a box with three buttons. Inside of the display was a laptop and circuitry for the buttons. The circuitry for the buttons was simply the circuit and cabling from an old USB keyboard, hacked apart and three buttons wired up instead of a matrix for a normal keyboard.
The software utilized was Isadora, by Troikatronix

From watching the actions of the guests and contributors at the event, I have come up with some changes to the display of the buttons and the onscreen imagery. This will most likely go up in a somewhat different framing in a Capitol Hill bar in a little while. A large percentage of viewers assumed that the imagery displayed was a video loop and so did not attempt to interact with the installation. A large percentage of people who understood that it was interactive expected something to happen right away when they voted, which wasn’t the case when I set the machine up. Part of the way through the night, I changed the setup to allow for more interaction. I still consider this to be a work in progress.

Related Links:
Electronic Voting Page
Verified Voting
Rebecca Mercuri, Ph.D.’s Electronic Voting papers and articles
Black Box Voting
Electronic Frontier Foundation’s E-voting page

Unrelated Links:
All this talk about “black boxes” made me think of the band Black Box Recorder

Project Description:

V8 Media raises awareness of important events happening in our world. V8 Media seeks footage of important world events, focusing on war and peace, and democracy vs. corporations. If there are images, audio and/or footage of an event that are contrary to or far exceeding the coverage given by corporate media, V8 Media wants to show it. Any topics will be considered. Raw footage is preferred over edited content.

The initial project is a multimedia vehicle. This vehicle will be touring Seattle, WA and will be visiting other areas of the country based on invitation or current events in question. The exterior of the car will feature lcd panels, a projector, as well as cameras, buttons, dials, and microphones for audience participation. There will be the ability to switch between inputs and the ability to mix audio on the fly from the various sources.

Donation funds will be accepted through PayPal, the Amazon Honor System, or in person. When giving funds, please comment on what you like as well as what you think should be added or changed. The vehicle will also be able to be rented out for use as an attraction for events.For questions or footage submissions, please email v8media@gmail.com

(This project is dead for now. I am keeping it on the site as I still really like the idea and will try to make it happen in the future as funds and time allow.)