I’m preparing for my residency at the Digital Performance Institute and have been working up some ideas of how I will use the space. One of the challenges of working in this space will be the drawing surface; I don’t have a blank wall to hang my paper on. After sketching a bit, one solution I’m considering is using a roll of seamless background paper mounted on a pipe above a 4′x8′ sheet of plywood which is attached to Auto Poles with some Super Clamps
A 3/4″ thick sheet of 4′x’8 plywood weighs approximately 75lbs (or 34.02kg). A Manfrotto Super Clamp is rated to hold 15kg, so I figure that a clamp at each corner of the plywood (along with some simple adapter hardward) should be able to hold 60kg.
I created a video to tell the story of the rope&pulley project and how it developed during my final year at ITP. In addition, the video also expresses what I’m planning to do during my residency at DPI in 2009.
Thesis Presentation
Every graduating student in my program is required to give a twenty minute presentation on their thesis project. My presentation about the rope&pulley performance system I developed will take place on Thursday evening at 9:00pm EST. You can watch my presentation in two ways:
On the Web:
http://itp.nyu.edu/shows/thesis2008/video-stream/
- the presentation is streamed live and also recorded for later viewing
In Person:
721 Broadway
4th Floor – Room 447
New York, NY 10013
ITP Spring Show
My rope&pulley system will also be exhibited in the ITP Spring Show, where I’ll demonstrate a different application of the system — as an instrument for informal musical collaboration
Monday, May 12: 5-9pm
Tuesday, May 13: 5-9pm
This Spring Show is also located at the addressed listed above, but takes up the entire fourth floor.
April 25, 2008 [tex|ges]ture Drawing – compressed charcoal, oil pastel on butcher paper (96-inch x 36-inch). While listening to SoundGarden (Boot Camp) and Bjork (Pagan Poetry) and trying to map out my final thesis performance, the drawing disintegrated into another gestural exploration.
All of the pieces for a single assembly are together. I’m happy with the way the unit looks and feels. I’m a little dissatisfied with the way it turns, though, so I’ll need to do a bit more sanding to make sure the wheel spins as freely as possible.
Today I etched two test boards for the pulley encoders: the RJ-45 breakout board and the emitter/detector pair board. I wanted to make sure that the board design worked correctly before ordering multiple copies of the boards. After soldering the components onto the boards, I connected a CAT-5 cable between the newly fabricated boards and the interface board I made last week. Before plugging anything in, I checked continuity on the various traces to make sure things were wired properly — or so I thought. When I plugged in the unit after testing, I found that it didn’t detect rotation. I inspected the infrared LED on the detector and found that it wasn’t glowing (I used my digital camera to check). I wasn’t completely surprised; when I hacked apart the mouse circuit board, I found that the X- and Y-axis LEDs were wired together. To fix this problem, I soldered the second IR LED onto the bottom of my interface board. Still no luck. Double checking things, I found that copper traces were bridged on one of the the circuit board I etched. After fixing the bridged traces, I found that the circuit still didn’t work. From prior experience, I figured that either the LEDs, the phototransistors, or both were probably blown, so I decided to try again with another mouse.
This afternoon I returned to Glide Design to have my pulley parts fabricated on a CNC milling machine. David Liatti tweaked my designs to make sure the mill produced the best results. The sounds of machinery running, the smell of sawdust, and the opportunity to spend the afternoon watching and learning from a man who practices the art of converting ideas into physical objects was inspiring. Thank you, David!
Yesterday as I was looking for inspiration, I found an Erhu recording from the subway platform last November. I liked that I could use my rope to “bow” the sound as I applied granular synthesis to it. I used this sample yesterday for my first drawing with the Rope&Pulley. Today, I made a larger drawing. One of the ropes controls the location of the sampling “window” (ie, the area of the sample the granular synthesis engine looks at) and the other controls the output volume. This was a fairly crude demo.
