aram’s blog

Concepts:

* Balance and Counterbalance - Physical Wellbeing (Upper/Lower, Ying/Yang)

* Organs that have emotional associations

* ‘Action at a distance’ - connections between two things that seem separate

* ‘Human’ versus something clinical, removed, Realism vs. Abstraction

* Horizontal vs. vertical/ 2D vs. 3D space/ Sculptural vs. Illustrative

Game vs. Art

game brings incentive to interact, but might be mundane - ‘fun’ way of presenting knowledge
vs.
art could be more complex, but people might lose interest, asks more of the viewer

game that becomes art / art that becomes games

Foot model vs. body:

full size vs. scale
reduced model vs. too much info

Subway Map/Data Map vs. Emotional visuals/Video:

interesting metaphorical connection, showing relationship between two different systems, blood flow like flow of traffic/pedestrians
vs.
not so ‘one dimensional’ or ‘cute’ - not as easily resolved/understood, potential for more complex connections and relationships between people/emotions/organs/situations

Using data visualization as a model to explain connection - potential for different educational model
vs.
More associative response

Education vs. Expression:

Mitch Said, my ICM classmate approached me for some knowledge and experience of arcupuncture I have learned years ago.
Since I teamed up with Oscar and Sophia to do LightWaveDj physcomp project already, I had to decide where to go for final project. After Mitch and I discussed O-Haeng theraphy and arcupuncture for about four hous(!!), I finally decided to group with Mitch. (Sorry, Oscar!)

Although none of us clearly had something very specific in mind, both of us felt somewhat ‘connected’ in somewhere.
We’ve discussed what kind of visual and physical interface will be, in terms of adapting this acupuncture to computer-generated way of expression. Mitch strongly showed his interests in general philosophy of doing acupuncture - trafficking congestions.
Then we came up with the idea of connecting that idea to mundane life such as heavy traffic jam occurring in public area, protesting crowd, subway congestion, bottleneck…to name a few.

This is, so far, our idea of physcomp final project. We’re ready to ignite our creativity to further more.

The reasons we chose not to only focus on the ‘educational’ aspect of the project:

Simple. To make acupuncture educational, one should consider so many things. Even if they are organized and structured in educational form, we wouldn’t want to argue ….

More detail about our decision to focus on one main aspect of acupuncture.

http://getmitchquick.wordpress.com/category/computing-physically/

This is the link to Mitch’s physcomp blog. You might get more ideas from here.

 ’friendly hat’ is designed to express several social body languages: showing ‘availability’ to answer any question from the passers-by(green light) when the user is not in mobility, emitting a signal not to bump people when mobile.  

1. Goal: to encourage interactivity when people needs any ‘answer.’

2. Action: Tapping the visor which has a switch inside. When the switch is triggered, the hat shows either ’symbols’ or ‘icons’. Shutting off your iPod, also.

3. Environment: any public area such as subway platform or park.

4. Sensing: this is the part I am confused with ‘action’

Yeah…this was too late to do DC motor lab after most people uploaded theirs. But, I did it, and am (even) proud of it.

It worked pretty well except several times that the motor won’t be running without any reason. I assume that this is the problem of the motor quality, not caused by arduino.

The gear box - set worked even worse than the motor on the pictures below.

Space is, I believe, that the most popular subject in sculpture area. It sounds very familiar, even friendly enough to recall what I had been working on the same subject when majoring sculpture while ago.

Back then, limitation of the materials I could utilize almost dictated me to come up with something very traditional such as stone or metal sculpture. Being ‘flexible’ to choose interesting material was not recommended at that time.

For this project, however, I decided to take courage. I chose to use several photos from my photographer friend who is studying at Brooks institute. A part of his works is about ’space and lighting’ - just perfect for this week’s project.

What I have done is making series of paper sculpture by using of printed photos. Each photo has already

contained ’space’ such as shadowed building, framed scenery and etc.
After printing them on papers, I started crop out the shape I wanted to extract and formed in 3D shape by folding the lines.

This series of comparisons of two different spaces - three dimensional vs. flattened(by camera lens?) represents that the people’s perception or educated concepts
about space might be fragile. Three dimension could be decomposed to two dimensional in very deceptive way. The opposite is also possible.

Serial