zero station presents an installation by Michael Huggins (Portland, ME) and Nick Lally (Oakland, CA) opening on July 5th.
The two artists have filled the gallery with Japanese Knotweed, a fast growing invasive weed harvested from the surrounding area. The plants, together with visitors’ bodies, modulate a complex sound installation as electric signals connect the plants, humans, and electronics. Did you know that plants communicate with each other using sound waves? Come talk to to some plants that are taking over the northeast.
The artists will be serving snacks made from Knotweed during the opening.
I recently put together a bike-powered USB charger for touring, pictured above. You can find all the details on the Vintage MTB site.
Ambient sound installation with 4 cassette players playing 8 tracks spread across 20 speakers by 8 mics and numerous feedback loops, powered by 8 homemade amps and 8 homemade preamps.
Nik Hanselmann and I installed a sensor in the Sesnon Gallery that collects environmental data (light level, sound level, proximity and temperature) from the space and uploads them to an online database every two seconds. We developed software that creates a generative drawing that changes with the data over time. Above are screenshots of the drawings at different points in time.
We exhibited the live generative drawing in the Porter Faculty Gallery and the DANM Lounge. An online version can be viewed here: http://transmogrify.me (let it run for a few hours for a rich, complex image).
In this program, each bubble has a note (in C major) associated with it. When a silhouette in the video feed overlaps with the bubble, the note is sent to an audio program (Reason, in this case) in the form of a midi note. The bubbles can be moved left and right using an Arduino equipped with an accelerometer.
Similar to the above, but now two video feeds are incorporated. Now bubbles can only be played if they overlap with red sections of the video. Red sections are created when two silhouettes from separate video feeds overlap, so cooperation between people in the two video feeds is necessary to create notes.
I hooked up an accelerometer, a light sensor, a piezo pressure sensor, a small speaker ripped out of a phone, a vibrating motor and a potentiometer to an Arduino. The tilt of the accelerometer controls the pitch of the speaker (with some random noise thrown in for effect), the light sensor controls the speed of the motor, the potentiometer controls the volume and the piezo can be squeezed to make a high-pitched tone in the speaker. All variables from the sensors are printed to the serial port.
One of my projects for last week’s 24h Thesis was this noise-generating box. It has two speakers, four buttons and two potentiometers mounted on a cardboard box and connected together with a breadboard and an Arduino. Each button has a different sound, which can be modulated with the two potentiometers. It sounds like this:
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I modified another old Processing program of mine to graphically react to sound using the Minim library. The program outputs the sound level to an Arduino connected to a breadboard, creating a sound level meter using LEDs. The code is a bit sloppy (and uncommented!) as I quickly tried to prototype these ideas:
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