aram’s blog

My database

Data always tags me along the word ‘collect’, because that’s how I studied English matching proper words sets, and repeating the words together as ‘collect the data’. This way, I may not forget the words, but could also have a prejudice of the word - data is mean to be collected?

I created three data base sets: things that I collect ‘actively’ and thing that I collect ‘passively’. Although I’ve already showed my collections of Nike sneakers for the first assignment - Weathermap, creating my own database of Nike seemed an expansion version of weathermap, not recycling, so I included it. Second database is collections of ‘Paper sleeve vinyl replica CDs’, also known as ‘Kami-jyake CD’ (in Japanese, Kami means paper and Jyake is pronunciation of jacket which means ’sleeve’ to be exact) And third database is stacks of receipts that I ‘had to’ collect for some use such as tracking money flow.

Technically, I benefitted a lot from ‘Preview’ and ‘Dash Board’ that come with mac osx. Preview was used to show all data, so with Preview, I can ‘access’ the data. Dash Board (F9 key lets you do this function) contributes the randomness, because I can’t precisely layout which images to go where before Dash Board is launching. Images spread out in a second and they stay with desktop darkened.

Feedback:

What is the relation between each database? I certainly expected someone would be asking if those receipts are the results of above two categories purchase. (and someone did.) My answer is ‘no’. I wanted each database exist independently,  …..

When they are shown, why some parts of display don’t really match to the others? I didn’t do my perfection to make all three screens look same when presenting. For example, I did not modify ‘dock’ from mac osx to automatically disappear (following pictures show the installation at the hallway at the presentation time), whereas some were hiding it. 

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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.

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.

Serial

Stacking books on book shelf, stacking dishes on dish racks, replacing drained AA batteries with new ones or refilling rechargeable batteries to your charger…
There are similar motions that remind me of reloading magazine of M-16 rifle I had carried when I was in the army in South Korea, and this made me come up with my midterm idea for ICM - THE FOUR.

‘Four’ only means that I chose any physical interface which contains four, identical empty ’space’ for refilling the objects. It was a bit embarrassing to show three movies in the class, though. (I will come up with one more video soon…)

Movies starts showing three videos in horizontal strip, all hands in each movie briefly shows what kinds of actions will occur. Once any numbered key (1, 2, 3, or 4) is pressed, it plays the movie of doing four-times of generic action. (see the movies below)

All movies can be stopped at the point where each actions divided by pressing key 1, 2, 3, and 4.

For coding, I used ‘time’ however Danny pointed out that I would have used ‘jump’ instead.

//********************************************************************************/
//* Author: Aram Chang */
//* Description: ICM Midterm Assignment Ver 1. Wednesday’s 12:30 PM Class */
//* */
//* Date: 10/24/2007 */
//********************************************************************************/

float stopframe=0;
float mt;
import processing.video.*;
Movie theFour;
Movie theFour2;
Movie theFour3;

void setup() {
size(720, 180);
frameRate(30);
theFour = new Movie(this, “four batteries.mov”);
theFour2 = new Movie(this, “four books.mov”);
theFour3 = new Movie(this, “four dishes.mov”);

theFour.noLoop();
theFour2.noLoop();
theFour3.noLoop();
//myMovie.loop();
}

void movieEvent(Movie theFour) {
theFour.read();
theFour2.read();
theFour3.read();
}

void draw() {
background(255);
image(theFour, 0, 0);
image(theFour2, 240, 0);
image(theFour3, 480, 0);

theFour.play();
theFour2.play();
theFour3.play();

mt=theFour.time();
if(theFour.time()>stopframe && theFour.time()
theFour.speed(0);
theFour2.speed(0);
theFour3.speed(0);
}else{
theFour.speed(1);
theFour2.speed(1);
theFour3.speed(1);

}
println(mt);
}

void keyPressed(){

if(key==’1′){
stopframe=3.5;
}else if (key==’2′){
stopframe=7.2;
}else if (key==’3′){
stopframe=10.9;
}else if (key==’4′){
stopframe=13.9;
}
//stop=!stop;
//myMovie.pause();
}

As I stated on last post, my old arduino board died leaving only digital I/O. So, I bought a new one from NYU bookstore, not from eBay for this time. Also I made sure that they will swap the board in case not working.

I brought some of my old toys from Korea to see if these are good materials to do physical computing works. The toys includes a Radio remote control box with two servos and one digital receiver.