The AZ Labs residency at Espaço do Tempo in Montemor-o-Novo is sadly over for now. Folks have been working hard to finish things up for the proto exhibition of projects we had on Saturday.

A few projects were shelved or abandoned for different reasons. Not stable enough, not enough time, no right materials, not enough beer. In the end were left with 9 projects.

AR Cubes — André Sier developed a few experiments with cubes glued with printed augmented reality fiducial markers. Different markers trigger different effects. You can play with them to make different combinations of objects and lines interacting with each other.

Tracking Head — Tiago Serra, Andrea Inocêncio and Mauricio Martins worked on a manequin head rescued during a dumpster diving session. They equipped a box with IR leds and use a camera with filters to track the movement of the box. With these values they send rotation information to a servo motor equiped in the base of the manequin head. The same values are also sent to a software that selects a corresponding angle photo which is projected in the manequin. This system makes the freaky manequin head rotate in the direction of the object.

Talking Head — Next to the Tracking Head we have a speaker box equipped wih an arduino, an ir receiver and a wave shield. When the box handled by the user aims at the speaker box it triggers random samples from a sample pool, giving the illusion that the head itself is talking. Mauricio, André, Filipe, João and Rita worked on this project.

Tracking Boids — The floor of the Tracking Head space is covered with small light spots flying around. These boids, programmed by André Sier may look like random disco lights on first glance but when someone moves into the camera they flock towards the user.

Micro CNC — Tiago Rorke had been working on a Micro CNC project, pieces printed with the Makerbot. Tereza Cardoso gave him a hand making a project out of it by taking photos of the attenders of the residency, downgrading them to vector format and having the micro cnc sketch them. They are drawn on the walls of the residency itself, along with qr code linking to video interviews talking about each persons involvement with the different projects.

Paint Video Signals — Andrea Inocêncio recorded some short videos of red blue and black paint being applied to different mediums (water, paper, table). Filipe Cruz did a little processing sketch to extract midi values from a grid of pixels in the video and send them to reaktor. Some generative sound tests were recorded and mixed into a video dvd.

Blip Blop Blir Boxes — André Sier and Mauricio Martins worked on a few small boxes packed with an Arduino, IR sensors, LEDs and speakers. Boxes pointing to each other make the LEDs change their color. A third box pointed to the previous boxes makes them give out some blips and blops sounds.

“O mundo é em cada instante o que ele não pode não ser.” — A project conceived by Patricia Proença consisting of a hand drawn animation of a tree growing being projected into a wall. The animation is triggered when a watering can equiped with a cellphone is tilted into an alien plant object. Tiago Serra gave her a hand with the technical implementation.

Trailchi — Guilherme Cartaxo and Sónia Malaquias been working for while on their project involving long exposions to tai chi sessions performed in the dark with a sword and suit equipped with 12 LEDs. The captured animations makes some beautiful light trails art. Also helps analyse the motion of the session.

]]> http://altlab.org/2012/01/22/az-labs-espaco-do-tempo/feed/ 0 http://altlab.org/2012/01/16/az-labs-o-espaco-do-tempo-2/ http://altlab.org/2012/01/16/az-labs-o-espaco-do-tempo-2/#comments Tue, 17 Jan 2012 01:35:20 +0000 filipecruz http://altlab.org/?p=3000 Day three is already upon us at the AZ Labs Residency. Folks still happily hacking away day and night.

Run to the local chinese store brought back some hackable goodies like colorful balls, a giant rubik’s cube and some wooden boxes. Andrea Inocêncio was assigned to drilling duty after finishing up with the manequin head. Ricardo Webbens left behind his radio location arduino circuit prototypes for me to test.

César Coelho took the time to learn some new software stuff. Tiago Serra is currently trying to make the kinect and the arduino talk with each other and make some annoying sinus sounds. André Sier spent the afternoon hacking with Mauricio Martins programming the arduinos with ir detection to give some random blips and blops.

Tiago Rorke is almost finished with printing and sanding the hardware of his revolutionary Micro CNC. Ricardo Lobo tried desperatly to get the other Makerbot working. Pedro Ângelo seccluded himself to code some kinect stuff for Play With Fire. Filipe Cruz spent some time testing new versions of kinect libraries and random iPad development.

Ivo Andrade dropped by to enhance his project of the boy sitting on a metal cube. Patricia Proença sketched some concept art. Other folks were also walking around looking busy and discussing ideas. 7 more days to go.

AZ Labs are back in residency at Montemor-o-Novo. This time we are trying to have a connecting theme for the creative technology hacking insanity. The plan for the next 10 days is to brainstorm, conceptualize and prototype project ideas for tangible objects that can interact with each other and the environment.

We have folks attending with all sorts of backgrounds: computer science, plastic arts, performance arts, electronics, industrial fabrication, graphic design, sound design, statistics, sociology. We barely had time to introduce ourselves to the first timers and new ideas are already brewing. Plans for infrared communication. Augmented reality environments. Radio signal triangulations. LED boards and cubes. Multiple kinect abuse. Let us wait and see into what these ideas will mature into.

Right now it’s 2 am, some folks already went to sleep while others are hard at work on personal projects. Using one of the Makerbots to print parts to build a Micro CNC. Trying to get the larger CNC working again. Hacking malfunctioning audio adaptors to create contact microphones. Implementing some tangible interaction with the kinect. Testing out some things with Arduinos. Failing to install ofxPTAM. The list goes on.

True hacking knows no sleep.

You might have noticed what derived from our Residency @ Espaço do Tempo, a dozen projects from several folks spread over the 3 labs exploring the robotic, the interactive, the sensorial, the tangible, the generative, the audiovisual, the augmented, the provocative, the performative and a few other of all those dirty little words you so much secretly love hearing about. Don’t be shy now. Nothing wrong with getting a little tangible now and again. ;)

We even participated in a little exhibit last month at Pavilhão Atlântico to present these and a couple other works. And now we’re back with more weapons of mass destruction. And now, this very weekend we’re meeting up again for some holiday hacking follery at LCD to show some more of our projects and do a few mini-sprints. Feel free to join us. Lock up your geeks, we’re coming for them!

And if all this wasn’t good enough to turn you on and make you come down to meet us and participate, allow me to break some further news to you. Two of our projects have recently received their due acknowledgement by two of the highest distinctions in these parts:

• “Among” By Sérgio Ferreira et al won Fundacion Telefonica’s VIDA competition, read all about it in the news (.pt only) and the interview.
• “Big Brother Goes Green: Surveillance for Sustainable Forests” by Mónica Mendes et al was approved at South By SouthWest.

And just in case you recognize the lab affiliations from the above and feel like xDA is slacking off compared to our counterparts: we’re not, we got multitouch interfaces.

And if you’ve read this far, please make some tea and have yourself a Bieber moment in a cube. You’re welcome.

We also have a mini-site with bios of the authors and descriptions of the works, temporarily hosted here. Not only of the works present at the exhibition but also a few others developed during the residency that couldn’t be exhibited by one reason or another. Check them out!

Big thanks are in order to everyone at O Espaço do Tempo for the opportunity we had, and all the in loco support to our needs, you rock. :)

A few folks seem to be missing in action. Mauricio is back with some news from Interactivos to lend us a hand on pending projects. Mónica and Pedro are still working on B-wind!. Margarida working on his robot Freddy. Victor Silva rehearsing his The Last Words of Dominico. Victor and Marco working on Discardable Beauty. Guilherme finishing his Róbotica Criativa works. And me finishing up Meta Gen Haiku. Catarina and Joel should also show up tomorow with their Micro Dérive.

Website with more info on the presented projects should go online soon. In the meantime if you should show up on Monday the 12th July in Montemor-O-Novo for the exhibit. We will have 7 projects installed under exhibition until the 31st July, and 2 liveacts presented on the exhibition day 12th July.

In the meantime we’ll leave you with some important t-shirt quote material we have recently acquired:
“48 horas são 6 dias de trabalho, em turnos de 8 horas“
“Eu só faço projection mapping quando estou bêbado“
“Não tens pincel para isso. Vai antes de rolo.“
“Queres falar ao telefone? Fala aí! *slap*”

AZ Residency at Espaço Tempo has resumed its course on the 14th July 2010, and we’ve been kicking it real with some hardcore project dev for a whole week now! Our main aim is to get all of these projects kicking and screaming on the 12th July for the big opening of the exhibition.

Catarina and Joel spent most of their week fiddling with some heavy duty MakerBot printing trial and error. In between random python re-learning fast courses, they managed to pull off some awesome hacks, such as a makerbot microscope to observe bacteria, a nutella jesus on a toast, and some robot printed & baked cookies.

Random project quotes include:
“we have scientifically proven that strawberry yogurt is not printable“
“if you believe, it will work“
“how big should we make jesus?“
“only two jesus toasts and already out of nutella?!“
“there is a guy coming by on monday to get a jesus on a toast”

Meanwhile Francesco and Mariana been hard at work on their ant tracking project. Marco drawing some more Suicide Girls for his secret projection art installation project. Ricardo working on his thesis. Pedro and Mónica working some more on the RTiVISS (Real-Time Video Interactive Systems for Sustainability) project. Vitor upgrading his version of Attic Tesla / Last Words of Domenico performance. Margarida working on her arduino based reactive robot.

Myself and Tiago arrived yesterday night and been hard at work in our own projects as well. Me preparing a release version of Gen Haiku, helping out with the webdev side of things on the iCookie fast-hack project and conjuring some evil plans for world domination preparing a liveact for the opening day of the exhibition. And Tiago working on his bus GPS tracking system app.

I arrived to Residência AZ with a very simple project in mind called Bloop. This project explores the idea of “enfo” — unnecessary/useless information and information overload on the web, looking particularly to social networks.

Fishes don’t speak, but they communicate between themselves. For humans, this is an invisible process which is at the moment completely insignificant for us. Who cares about what is a fish saying to the other or even if he’s complaining or philosophizing alone? The project doesn’t intend to put fishes talking but instead to use their actions to dump random messages to twitter. This work plays with the metaphor of the glass house and observes this very own moment of social networks incrustation.

In order to develop this work, an improvised structure was built using some objects available in he kitchen and all over the residence space to track 2 fishes inside the aquarium. The computer vision setup was made using 2 cameras and values of x and y of each blob (fish) were available to calculate the distance between them, When a minimum distance value was reached a random message was sent to twitter profiles, Bloop_a and Bloop_b, updating its status. A different perspective of the work using two fishes was also develop but this time with the intent to create a fake personal profile. Here an algorithm searchs all over twitter for messages with certain key words and post them into fake profiles controlled by fishes interactions. Thus, each profile presents a line of interest and shows up as if some person could be behind it.

In the first two days I was dedicated to computer vision issues and also to the communication between processing and twitter. For the second perspective/project I was coding a small routine in order to communicate with twitter api, search for tags and update each profile status. During the third day (Wednesday) the projects technical issues were solved and working as expected but the fishes seemed not to like their new home and problems came with that. In order to create a good environment for them, I ran over local shops searching for a new aquarium and water treatment products. This task took a lot of time, not because we were in Alentejo but because new ideas arrived within group interaction and new material needs came to complicate more the situation.

By the end of the week, a team formed by me, Ricardo Lobo and Mauricio worked hardly on the Piano Cocktail, an original idea by Boris Vian . The results obtained were enough to celebrate during the last eve and make everyone, or almost, drinking trough the divine mechanism.

Some moments were odd and I found myself imagining and making bizarre things as The Wig’on’wheels:

New ideas came up and they’ll be worked out in the next residence.

This was the last image I have from Montemor-o-Novo, by the way, a wonderful place to work and to get inspiration.

Today was a sad day, everyone who was taking their time getting up was also woken up with a new personalized rendition of Vitor Espadinha’s “Recordar é Viver”, payback is a bitch. We packed up and headed down to a local restaurant for the last meal of this week’s residency. With promises of returning in June for 10 more days of collaborative hacking.

Late arrivers João, Vitor and Mécia arrived shortly after while i tried to finish up some work on the haiku generator and Mauricio was working on the keyboard mischiefs with Catarina. Guilherme was already gone, he had to prepare his work for the Talk Show piece downtown. A little while later Mónica and Francesco decided to join us in discovering where Blackbox was actually, we got abit lost but managed to all arrive on time.

The piece was pretty great! Well produced and performed! So props to the ones involved was in order and back we went to our residency for some food and project pushing. Guilherme and Catarina still messing with the Makerbot; Mónica blowing plants; Filipe, Ricardo and Mauricio finishing up the Piano Cocktail; Luis and João working on the meal tracking ballet system; Pedro helping out Jorge with his Arduino issues; and me trying out a couple new remixes of the remix.

Before dinner we also had a short visit from a few performance related folks, seemingly guests from our host and friend here at Espaço do Tempo, Rui Horta. They seemed pretty interested in our adventures with the new technologies, especially in terms of networking and open source mentality.

There was no catering on Saturday aparently, so things were abit more erratic but it all worked out in the end. We managed to organize a nice dinner event with nearly everyone present, and proceeded directly to judging the world famous Vitor Espadinha “Recordar é Viver” remix compo, participating was me, Sérgio and the proclaimed winner mister Pedro Ângelo.

90’s electro night proceeds as i type, everyone seems to be happily working on their projects and/or enjoying their refreshments. It sucks hard that tomorrow is the last day already. As a curiosity note, it seems 95% of the folks here at the residency use Mac’s, even if one of them does have Linux installed.