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Marko Ahtisaari is another one of those thought-leaders sitting high on the technorati pyramid of tribal alphas. Here he offers an interesting take on what the world of mobile wants to look like from one designer's perspective.
Geominder creates location-based reminders, anchored to physical, geographic places.
hen arriving at a marked location, the system can play an alarm and display a stored text note or a voice note previously associated to that location. For example: "When I arrive at the office, remind me to review next week's schedule", "At home remind me to call Dave"Geominder uses mobile network's cell id information and doesn't require an extra GPS device.
It also stores text notes or voice notes, can use audio alarms or silent notifications, locations can be learned and tuned.
Just a reminder that we'll be meeting at the Center for Land Use Interpretation for our first make up class this Friday. For those who can, we'll be meeting at Justin's at 3:30pm, which is nearby CLUI, and walking over. Or, alternatively, just meet at CLUI by 3:45.
The CLUI main office is located at:
9331 Venice Blvd.
Culver City, CA 90232
(310) 839-5722 / Fax: (310) 839.6678
See you then, there.
Marco Susani, Director Advanced Concepts Group at Motorola, had some interesting words on what he calls "Aura Networks" that captures succinctly the nature of networks that are more like social meteorology than the tinkertoy network graphs we're used to. It's not a new conversation on Susani's part. It's a valuable contribution to the ongoing discussions about what mobile communities "look like." It's nice to have the actual audio of the presentation.
You can listen to his presentation from the Ars Electronica Festival website
No longer solely for time-wasters, Massively Multiplayer Online Games (or MMOGs) are fast becoming the preferred method of conducting activities ranging from business meetings to weddings, to funerals. Trying to free these games from their often-violent plotlines are artists-designers Auriea Harvey and Michael Samyn, of Tale of Tales, a game design studio based in Gent, Belgium. Initial founders of the groundbreaking websites Entropy8 and Zuper!, the duo aim to challenge the fundamentals of game play by creating a 'plot free' experience of exploration and contemplation. 'Endless Forest' is their answer to this call. It's a third-person perspective 3D MMOG where each player assumes the likeness of a young deer running through a magical forest landscape. Harvey explains, 'We want to make paintings with game technology. Interactive, immersive, operatic paintings.' They conceived of 'Endless Forest' as 'a performance space and a screensaver, as an interactive environment m! asquerading as a game.' After releasing their first game, '8,' about a young girl-turned princess, the duo are attempting to use the medium as a storytelling device that replaces video gaming's traditional goal-based narratives with those of discovery and community involvement. The game is now in public beta-mode and freely downloadable at their website.
via Rhizome's Net Art News by jonah brucker-cohen
A recent paper on the old favorite, capture the flag (or steal the bacon if you grew up in my neighborhood) using cellphones, only in a clever lotek fashion. (Which isn't to say all lotek is clever, but oftentimes if it does the same job as well as or better than the hitek, it's not only clever but fashionable.)
Capture the Flag: A Multiplayer Online Game for Phone Users
This paper explores the concept of using smart phones to facilitate pervasive mixed reality, location-based, physical and social gaming. The interaction and communication between the virtual and physical worlds are explored and studied using a mixed reality version of the capture-the-flag game. In this game, players from two different paradigms, virtual and real, compete and collaborate in a social gaming environment using mobile devices and network system. (…) Unlike Human Pacman and ARQuake where players are equipped with head-mounted displays and complicated wearable equipment, players can move freely over wide outdoor area with true mobility and minimal hardware.The basic goal of our smart phone-based CTF is to capture the opponents’ flag by acquiring it from their base and bringing it to the home base.
(…)
There are two player roles; smart phone players play as Knights while online players play as Guides through desktop PCs and they are connected via the Internet. The Knights whose positions are tracked via Global Positioning Unit (GPS) have to set her team’s “castle” in the beginning of the game by placing their own physical flag (a Bluetooth embedded device) on the ground. Once done, a virtual castle and a flag appear at the corresponding location in the Guides’ 3D map and in Knights’ smart phone interface. (…) Communication between various players using text messaging is an ongoing process throughout the game.
via nicolas nova's toaster pastryesque blog pasta and vinegar
Lost Phone: 18,900 Google Entries
by Emily Conrad
I lost my cellphone in the back of New York City taxi. Friday, September 2nd, around 1 in the morning. This must happen all the time.
Listen to the cellphone journey here.
This audio is about twelve minutes long, edited down from over an hour.
And the truth is, taxi driver's do not get that many fares, even on a friday night.
Feel free to scan through if you get bored.
Some highlights include the cabbie jamming out to T100 (a cheesy NYC station), and a group on there way to Brandy's, and a few bits of other beligerency.
[via Glowlab]
Networked Performance has a great interview with our own Kazys Varnelis and Robert Sumrell on the topics of new media, history and architecture. A recommended read!
Grand Finale_Yellow Arrow: The Secret New York
Yellow Arrow: The Secret New York is a public art project that
celebrates the extraordinary details of the city that often pass
unnoticed. Upon encountering a Yellow Arrow, the public participates by
calling 212.201.2005 from mobile phones to hear an audio message that
tells a secret story about the location where the arrow points.
This Saturday marks the Grand Finale with 20 Yellow Arrow sculptures
visible across Manhattan and Brooklyn from 12-8 pm, at places like:
Union Square, Chinatown, The Lower East Side, East Village, Lower
Manhattan, Williamsburg and DUMBO. This is is a fantastic opportunity
for people to experience some of the most compelling content of the
summer in one single day.
Over the summer the project has touched a lot of people in all 5
boroughs and there are some very fun stories about bringing it all
together. Creators of the project will be leading two behind-the-scenes
tours to share these anecdotes and insights. Tour 1_Lower Manhattan
meets at Battery Park at 12 pm and will visit 5 nearby Yellow Arrows.
Tour 2_East Village meets at corner of Ave. B and E. 7th St. at 6:00 pm
and will visit 6 Yellow Arrows, grab dinner in the area and head to the
after-party.
The day-long installation and tours will be followed by a celebration at
the Lotus Lounge (35 Clinton St at Stanton), with drink specials, video
projection and a sound installation on the street.
Grand Finale
Downtown Manhattan, Williamsburg and DUMBO
12-8 pm
Full map available at: http://www.yellowarrow.net/GrandFinale
Tours
Tour 1_Lower Manhattan 12 pm at Battery Park
Tour 2_East Village 6 pm at corner of Ave. B and E. 7th St
Grand Finale Party
Lotus Lounge
35 Clinton Street at Stanton, Lower East Side, Manhattan
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=35++Clinton+Street+Manhattan+NY&spn=0.018447,0.033350&hl=en
9p-?
From Nicolas Nova's Pasta and Vinegar is a post reporting on a recent paper by Christian Licoppe and Yoriko Inada, Learning in the Mobile Age Conference (Hungarian Academy of Sciences, April 28–30, 2005), titled “Seeing” one another onscreen and the construction of social order in a mobile-based augmented public space: The uses of a geo-localized mobile game in Japan.
The article is about how location awareness of others in mobile game Mogi Mogi is important to create affordances for social encounters.The ‘onscreen encounter’ in which the protagonists are able to perceive their respective icons on the screen map and to share that perception configures a form of encounter peculiar to context-aware cooperative devices like Mogi.
Here's a unique mobile cameraphone game that I might describe as Mobile Social Software game if I weren't taking advice from Ben that we put the "social software" meme to bed and just make social software. Dan and Frank and Kevin cooked this up for Ubicomp2005 as part of their contribution to the workshop on ubiquitous computing, games and entertainment I organized with Ian Smith and Nicolas Ducheneaut.
Cross posted from Regine's entry: Superstar Tokyo
Superstar is a multiplayer photo-based game designed for Ubicomp 2005, Tokyo. The game is free, and open for anyone with a phonecam and self-portrait Puri Kura stickers of themselves.The game uses Japanese Puri Kura stickers as a starting point for an experiment in social networks, automated phonecam image analysis, and urban visual culture.
The goal is to see and be seen, using tiny images woven into the fabric of Tokyo streetlife.To play, place your own stickers (with a star on it to recognize participants) wherever you want and collect the stickers of other players by shooting them with your phonecam. Whenever a player snaps a Superstar sticker both players earn points.
A link is then created between the two players. From this point on, any time either player earns points (by shooting a new sticker or by having their sticker shot) the other one will also earn points (though not as many).
Superstar thus builds a network of connections that forms a social, pyramid scheme. Successful players will be the ones that forge connections with other active players.
The workshop I organized at the Ubicomp (Ubiquitous Computing) conference here in Tokyo is on the topic of ubiquitous computing, games and entertainment.
Most of the presentations are available on the Workshop page, in some format - PDF, PPT, etc.
http://www.techkwondo.com/external/pdf/reports/ubicomp2005/workshop_w5
The main workshop page is http://ubicomp.techkwondo.com and if you poke through to http://www.techkwondo.com/external/pdf/reports/ubicomp2005/workshop_w5 you'll find copies of the presentations. Many are relevant to our location-based mobile media course. Some aren't directly related, but are useful to look at because they represent some of the fascinating directions that are being explored in the area of ubiquitous and pervasive games and entertainment.
Matthew Chalmer's gave a paper on Castles, a new prototype game from the UK-based Equator Project
Benjamin Joffe's paper on Mogi.
http://www.techkwondo.com/external/pdf/reports/ubicomp2005/workshop_w5/BJ - Ubicomp2005 - Mogi.ppt
Superstar is a game that Areacode developed for the Workshop that will be running in Tokyo for about the next six weeks. It's a real mobile phone game using photo stickers (I forgot the , that's a collection-oriented game that uses the camera phone to capture stickers of other players with points distributed in a cooperative social pyramid. You're a Superstar when lots of people collect your photo sticky that they find around town. Those who collect your photo get points, as do you, as do everyone else whose photo _you_ have collected, with diminishing points based on how far down your collection hierarchy your connected network is.
Daniel Ashbrook had an interesting project on a kind of mobile version of Dance Dance Revolution using Bluetooth Accelerometers connected to cell phones.
Kaho Abe, a grad student at Parsons School developed a very cool, very kinesthetic game called Hit Me! inspired by a mash-up of Sumo and Twiser and Dance Dance Revolution that includes Snoopy-esque headgear.
http://www.techkwondo.com/external/pdf/reports/ubicomp2005/workshop_w5/hitme_presentation_ubicomp.pdf
Anita Wilhelm from Caterpillar Mobile discussed a game developed out of her and Jeff Towle's graduate project at UC Berkeley's SIMS program at the intersection of mobile gaming, photo sharing and social networking. It's a start-up, so it was a bit hush-hush, sadly, but there are some interesting nuggets in their motivation, including this:
"Instead of thinking about virtual games and how to make them fit the small screen. We like to think about games we played when we were younger and how to bring part of them to the virtual world"
http://www.techkwondo.com/external/pdf/reports/ubicomp2005/workshop_w5/CaterpillarMobilePrez.ppt
Hiroyuki Tarumi presented an overview of a developing virtual-physical persistent world experience in which users with mobile phones working in real world can experience virtual cities according to their locations in the real world.
Koji Yatani, a graduate student at Tokyo University presented ARHunter: A multiplayer game using gestural input - a souped-up whack-a-mole game.
http://www.techkwondo.com/external/pdf/reports/ubicomp2005/workshop_w5/ARHunter.ppt
Steffen P. Walz presented on serious pervasive games for sentient architectures. Steffen believes that games are about learning.
http://wiki.caad.hbt.arch.ethz.ch/twiki/bin/view/Gamearch
http://www.madcountdown.de Massively Multiplayer Audio Reality Gaming (including use of radio drama methods).
http://www.techkwondo.com/external/pdf/reports/ubicomp2005/workshop_w5/walz_ubicomp_workshop.pdf
This just in from the TOC (Table of Contents) service through the Association of Computing Machinery's Digital Library (semi-recommended point through which one may access and search published proceedings, articles, etc., from ACM meetings, newsletters, etc.) — Computers In Entertainment, some new articles.
Click here to see the TOC.
Here are two that seem interesting:
Creating entertainment applications for cellular phones
Paul Coulton, Omer Rashid, Reuben Edwards, Robert Thompson
Pervasive games: bringing computer entertainment back to the real world
Carsten Magerkurth, Adrian David Cheok, Regan L. Mandryk, Trond Nilsen
The Drop: pragmatic problems in the design of a compelling, pervasive game
Ian Smith, Sunny Consolvo, Anthony LaMarca
Just a reminder that the submission deadlines for SIGCHI 2006 are approaching - September 23 for Research Papers, CHI Notes and October 14th for Experience Reports and January 23 for the Student Design Comptition. CHI is one of those conferences that is arguably a "must" for the broad idiom of interactive media and, usually, one can easily find a way to position work in such a way to make it exciting and relevant to the research vectors of the fairly broad CHI community.
There are a number of opportunities for submitting your work. One is the "Research Paper", which is probably best suited to a project that is complete, where the measure of completeness for CHI usually means some user study or equivalent. After that are "Notes" and "Experience Reports" which are briefer and usually require less in the way of having done a full user study.
Don't forget the Student Design Competition on the topic of Nutrition and Fitness.
All this is listed on the main CHI2006 page.
OFFICIAL CALL FOR PROPOSALS
http://www.urban-atmospheres.net/ISEA2006/
INTERACTIVE CITY
ISEA2006 + ZeroOne San Jose
5-13 August 2006
KEY DATES:
Proposals Due: 9 December 2005
Final Decisions: 10 February 2006
"Never confuse the map with the Territory"
- Empire of the Sun, J.G. Ballard
The city has always been a site of transformation: of lives, of populations,
even of civilizations. With the rise of the mega city, however; with the
advent of 24/7 rush hours; with the inexorable conversion of public space
into commercial space; with the rise of surveillance; with the
computer-assisted precision of redlining; with the viral advance of the
xenophobic, the contemporary city is weighted down. We dream of something
more. Not something planned and canned, like another confectionary
spectacle. Something that can respond to our dreams. Something that will
transform with us, not just perform change on us, like an operation.
The Interactive City seeks urban-scale projects for which the city is not
merely a palimpsest of our desires but an active participant in their
formation. From dynamic architectural skins to composite sky portraits to
walking in someone else's shoes to geocaches of urban lore to hybrid games
with a global audience, projects for the Interactive City should transform
the "new" technologies of mobile and pervasive computing, ubiquitous
networks, and locative media into experiences that matter.
The Interactive City is one of four major themes to be featured at ISEA2006
Symposium + ZeroOne San Jose Festival. Interactive City proposals should
embrace aspects of the city of San José specifically and/or the surrounding
metropolitan San Francisco Bay Area. Please visit the Interactive City web
page for a list of early round accepted projects and a partial list of urban
sub-themes.
http://www.urban-atmospheres.net/ISEA2006/
Let us experience your vision of the Interactive City!
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Annenberg Center visiting fellow Kazys Varnelis is exhibiting a relevant project titled "Ether Exhibit" based work he and his collaborators have done explicating the aesthetic, material and political-capital substructure of a building simply called One Wilshire, situated precisely at One Wilshire Boulevard. This building is best described in the exhibit as "The Palace of the Empire of Ether" — "..a building crammed full of the hardware and global capital needed to keep the internet and telecommunications alive." What is this building? A 1966 era skyscraper — LA's tallest at the time — that became a 'carrier hotel' and eventually came to house so much telecom (voice, data, internet - the lines are now pretty well muddied at all levels) traffic that its vulnerability to disaster gives me the chills.
Varnelis' exhibit is up only until September 10th, but I highly recommend checking it out. Also, don't forget that Varnelis will be here on campus for the rest of the academic year — I'm sure you'll be seeing more of him.
AUDC Gallery, 6128 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 211 | Open Thursdays, 2-6 p.m., and by appointment | (323) 634-7850 | Through September 10
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I've tapped out a fistful of reviews of some projects exhibited at Ars Electronica. I saw probably 90% of everything exhibited, and these are some that stood out for a variety of reasons.
Our own Peter Brinson along with his c-level collaborators won an Honary Mention for Interactive Art at Ars Electronica, which is pretty dang cool. Documentation for their project was here at the festival.
The first two chapters of The Power of Maps lay some important ground work for understanding how location is a framework that tells stories. When Wood describes the way maps, as renderings of geographic locations are subject to the vagaries of representation, he is reminding us that maps are authored, and as such are but one way of telling a story. Thinking of maps as stories told may seem a bit 15th century. But, as Wood works hard to convey, the actually steps by which a map is realized is entirely authorial — even scientific maps, drawn from satellite data. This is why he goes through all the trouble of describing the politics, discussions and debates surrounding what technology was to be used in early satellites. We all probably understand that one technology may create a different kind of visual representation than another.
Think, for instance, of the difference in image acuity between a typically low-end cameraphone versus a 7 megapixel digital camera. One bit of technology captures an image in a different way. It's difficult to say which is better — it depends on the purpose to which the technology is deployed. Many people would prefer a cameraphone because of the convenience, novelty, ability to share photos easily, etc. If one expects to capture an image for use in print, a high-end film or digital camera is required. For the researchers developing the technology for mapping the earth from satellites, there are similar tradeoffs to be made, and each decision is the result of a kind of story — of the discussions amongst colleagues, vying for influence, playing their political hand so as to obtain advantage or mitigate conflict. Each one of those decisions, when taken in sum, made it so that one kind of representation of the earth occured rather than another. And the point to come away from beyond that is that the particular maps we see from satellites, for example, could have been different from what they are. Which reminds us that these satellite maps may well have been otherwise.
As other related examples of this notion, check out my entry on Ars Electronica exhibits particularly the Milk Project, Life: A User's Manual and Wikimap Linz.
One of my favorite projects here didn't start that way at all. Winner of the big prize in the Interactive Art category is called Milk Project. Before I went to see the documentation of the project today, I found the idea somewhat routine, although that probably comes from having had my attention focused on electronic projects that use global positioning systems for several years.
Here's the catalog description:
Enabling us to catch a glimpse of the points of intersection where the paths of goods and people cross and material as well as immaterial transactions are consummated across the borders separating nations and cultures, and revealing thereby interconnections on a larger scale is the agenda of "MILKproject", the winner in Interactive Art. GPS technology makes it possible to trace the path of milk being shipped from Latvia to the Netherlands. GPS-visualization, sound recordings and photographs of the human beings involved are blended together into a one-of-a-kind installation that enables viewers to comprehend trade routes passing through various different cultural spheres.
But at the centerpiece of "MILKproject" are, above all, the stories of human beings. The path of a commercial product, milk, serves as the narrative thread that ties together the amazing variety of lifestyles and worlds of personal experience at the interface of Eastern Europe and Western Europe.
Tracing the path of milk shipments could only possibly be interesting, from my point of view, for seeing its path visualization maybe once or twice. The project became a completely different one once I actually sat down at the exhibit and read and listened to the farmers and farm families watch the visualizations and make anecdotal comments about what was happening along those paths. Seeing their visualizations unfold with the only boundary lines drawn being the paths of milk shipments around Europe was a fascinating representation of the route maps without political boundaries. It almost appeared as though a new land were being presented. Hearing their joyful surprise when they realized that the cows really did go up to one particular part of the pasture drew me into the project in a way that was much less smarty-pants than many GPS projects.
The Ladder conceived of by John Gerrard is a mixed reality installation. The backstory of the project turns on a boy or small man who stands atop a ladder, looking out a small window to the world outside. He reports in abstract terms (color, speed, shape) the things he sees outside. It's a contemplative piece, with chairs in the room for people to sit and wait for him to say something. The viewport to this boy's world is a computer screen that's mixing the live video from within the room with a digitally composited rendering of the boy at the top of the ladder. So, the mixed reality part is the composition of the boy at the top of the ladder. Everything in the scene except for the boy are "live"; the boy is composited in and properly registered (although peculiarly scaled) at the top of the ladder. The computer monitor is on a rig so that you can pan it across the room and, magically, the boy stays at the top of the ladder.
I was initally curious about the piece mostly because of the orientation business. Panning and re-aligning the magic viewport is related to my interest in orientation sensitive interfaces. Frankly, I found that part a bit unnecessary — it seemed to be an overwrought component of the project and more a bid at doing some technical wizardry. There was no compelling reason to actually move the viewport, at least from the perspective of the boy's narrative. He was standing still, on top of a ladder, not moving, so there was no reason, really, to move the viewport through which one sees him.
What was he looking at? A firewire camera on the other side of the built wall and pointing out onto the street was what allowed the boy to see. When I saw the project, he mostly hmmm'd and whistled, or made other non-specific comments. So, not super exciting. A unique and promising concept that could've been better executed, in my humble opinion.
Fallen Art another Prix Ars winner. I don't know what to say about this one. I saw it at SIGGRAPH for the first time and found it upsetting and really didn't want to see it at Ars Electronica, but they showed it at the award gala and so I just dealt.
Here's why I've been told I should appreciate it: art is as much about life as it is about death; death, what death means and how we represent it can be about hope, possibility, vitality and the enduring spirit of humanity.
That's the usual smarty-pants turn on art that represents life and vitality through art.
So, there's that.
My first reaction at SIGGRAPH was much more visceral. I couldn't find a point of entry for thinking through an analytic take on the content. I wanted to walk out but that would've meant an embarassing climb over a bunch of rapt attendees. It wasn't until a pal here said she loved it and I asked why that I heard someone's reasonably articulate take on what the short meant. It was the art and death thing, which I could understand, but not what I really believed.
What I saw were soldiers given meaningless medals with a meaningless commendation ("blah, blah blah blah, blah") by a sadistic sargent who booted them mercilessly off a 1000 foot tower to their revolting death. A walking-dead technician guy with those menacing small round metal frame glasses (evocative of Dr. Joseph Mengele in my opinion) was standing a the ready at the spot where the soldiers were splattered on the ground. He took their photo and handed it to a hapless aide who clearly feared disrupting Mengele's attention lest he be made to climb the tower himself. The aide ran the photo of the freshly splat soldier to a disgustingly slothful ogre-general in an abandoned warehouse who put the photo into a machine that then played, flip-book style, through hundreds of splat photos that were choreographed to look as though the dead soldiers were actually dancing a dance of celebration. Ogre-general danced himself, revealing a hidden desire for a vitality that he now lacked with his labored breathing and encumbering, disgusting, slothfully slothful girth.
So, in brief — this isn't an animation about death begetting life when you think about whose death begets whose life. It's about the mindless sacrafice that zillions of powerless people have gone through for the sadistic, hedonistic pleasure of a few powerful sloths.
Sounds familiar.
Jumping Rope is one of my favorite exhibits in the Ars Electronica Center (along with Tenori-On, which others have written plenty about.) In this project, you're goaded into jumping a virtual rope by a bunch of different characters on either side of the virtual rope. It's fun, mostly because the characters who encourage you to jump. They're all done with video, not computer animation, that somehow makes it seem wonderfully retro.
Whoa. reacTable (..get it?) is a truly reactable table. I'm generally a fan of the idea behind interactive tables, but this one rises to a whole new level. It's so much more than the all-too-familiar gee-whiz eye candy tables because, firstly, it's a musical instrument with a good deal of sophistication and performability (not just blips and bleeps, although novices were able to produce those fairly easily) the interaction has a good bit of depth to it and the visualizations go a long way to providing really compelling visual clues as to what your interaction is doing. There's going to be a performance of this table this evening, so I suspect I'll have more to say later. But, in the meantime, I can say that it's interaction modality includes a variety of blocks encoded with a visual tag that gives each block different kinds of functionality. Some blocks are "effectors", others are sound sources, etc. Similar in some ways to the wires and boxes of Max/MSP, only the wires resonate with their effects and the boxes visual propogate their sound or functionality in a very cool way. Certain boxes can be "paired" by touching them together and then moving them apart that they interact, but can be moved to other parts of the table. Just very cool. Sadly, when I went by to see it after the opening (anticipating smaller crowds) the piece was down, persumably moved to set up for the performance this evening.
Life: A User's Manual is another stand out.
Those cans are actually 2.4GHz antennas tuned to pick up video signals from wireless video cams. The monitors become battery powered when the salvage cart is taken out to the streets and display whatever wireless video camera image is in range - surveillence, baby monitors, surprises..
The title 'Life: a user's manual' is taken from a novel of the same name by Georges Perec. 100 chapters long, his novel tells the story of a ten story building in Paris, each chapter used to describe an apartment, its interior and the stories of its inhabitants, both present and past. As observers, we are led through a sequence of readings and views as we mentally navigate from one apartment to the next.
I'm running two days behind with providing some notes from the AEC Festival, but I'll be catching up this evening, so stay tuned.
In the meantime, here are notes from Day -02, two days before the official festival opening.
Ars Electronica Festival: Day -02
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| Today was the installation day. I guess it's been installation day for several weeks here, particularly for the larger projects that involve truckloads of sand, cranes and other such things. My project fits in a small crate and basically just needs to be mounted and plugged in to the wall. Err. Wait, the plug won't fit.. |
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| Fortunately, the incredibly accomodating, prescient and experienced production crew here has been phenomenal in all regards, and particularly in the case of such things as power transformation. Although this project has been installed in places where power from the wall is at 220 volts, I neglected to bring a power transformer. Somewhere in the back of my mind I knew that most modern power adapters for computers and monitors and such have a wide range of voltages they will accept in order to power a device, but the electrical engineer in me knew that running at a higher voltage, although possible, will result in much more heat generated, which is an issue as the Pussy Weevil enclosure is metal, and small, and has a fairly powerful computer made by Stealth Computer (by small computer standards) that generates a lot of heat on its own. | 
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| So, Gerold, the excellent tech, carpenter, motivator who, along with Silvia Keller, was responsible for getting everything in this particular space set up, thought to provide a transformer. I was a little bit anxious to get the Pussy Weevil tested before physically installing the whole thing, so I flaked out the entire guts to run it through its paces. Once that worked, all that would be left would be to decide on how to mount it to the wall and then have Marc, the carpenter, take care of the rest. |
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| But..when I plugged in the transformer, nothing happened..except that the artist on the other side of the wall - John Gerrard - poked around the corner and said, "what happened?" Cause and effect led me to believe that I had done something and that something had done something to John's installation. I unplugged the transformer and checked the fuse, which was blown. | |
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Marc was dispatched to find replacements and some time later returned with some. I replaced the fuse, plugged the transformer in and nothing happened..except that John poked around the corner and said, "what happened?" Cause and effect led me to believe that I had done something and that something had done something to John's installation. I unplugged the transformer and checked the fuse, which, this time, was not blown. I puzzled..screwed my face..then John poked around the corner and said, "do you think that transformer could blow out my video cameras?". Now, I was fairly certain that a really nasty surge could blow out pretty much anything, but each time this happened, a circuit breaker was tripped which would've prevented a large power surge. But still..suppose I blew out his expensive fancy firewire video cameras?? John has been installing his mixed reality piece The Ladder all week.. |
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