I have been experimenting with sewing sound-generating circuits on textiles as part of the klangmaschinen workshop with Nico Kirisits and Klaus Filip. Here is some text.

title Stromtod engine rev.a

tag research

tag klangmaschinen

tag stromtod

tag wearable

tag circuitbending

tag tshirt

written 18.01.2009 12.20

Back in October we were asked to work on a concept for the department's exhibition, due next summer. Our pitch stood no chance, but for the record - that's what we came up with (we, that's Tim Blechmann, Bernhard Garnicnig, Korinna Lindinger, me, and I am sure I am missing someone here..):

Titel: wtf?

oder: Really New Media

Künsterische Arbeiten der Stundenten zu den, für uns relevanten Themen, jeweils im Bezug auf "neue Medien"

- Absenz und Präsenz

- Gegenwärtigkeit

- Körperlichkeit

- Raum, Raumgreifen, das Erweitern von Raum

- Identität, insbesondere die Fragmentierung von Identität und ihre Konstruktion (Social Software..)

- Territorium

- Liebe

Zusätzlich stand noch im Raum für die Ausstellung den Verzicht auf (Push-Button) Interaktivität und allzu angestaubte Patterns aus dem Fundus der Apparatekunst (Feedback-Loops) zu fordern.

title wtf? or really new media

tag digitalekunst

tag uniak

tag concept

tag interaction

tag research

written 11.01.2009 00.26

* if a process is an instance of car bombing

* then there exist an object and object so that object is an instance of bomb and object is an instance of transportation device and object is an instrument for process and object is an instrument for process and object is connected to object

* if a process is an instance of hijacking

* then there exist an object and an agent so that agent is an agent of process and object is an instance of transportation device and agent doesn't possess object holds during immediately before the time of existence of process and agent possesses object holds during the time of existence of process

title reasoning engines

tag research

tag logic

tag reasoning

tag software

tag warpolitics

written 31.12.2008 12.00

On the topic of archiving comes a work//script that reflects the indexical notion of contemporary art (i.e. title+image) and the connected act of appropriation by means of data mining, spidering and semantic data extraction: vvork-bot.

title vvork-bot

tag research

tag vvork

tag datamining

tag indexical

tag archive

tag art

tag project

tag software

written 04.12.2008 19.18

I heard that Superbertram lost his visual memory a few days ago when Yahoo decided that he violated their terms of use and deleted his flickr account outright.

This made me once again think about the volatility of our means of storage and distribution. I myself ended up using flickr as my single place to put my camera images - the platform's approach towards organization and browsing (think tags..), the instant dissemination of the moments and aspects you capture and the possibility of ubiquitous access makes it just so much more appealing than having files laying around somewhere on an external hard drive.

I did a quick survey of existing tools for backing up flickr images, together with all the metadata and found surprisingly few.. FlickrEdit (formerly known as FlickrBackup) is a promising Java application but for me it always bailed out with a nondescript error after some hundred photos. There is also Net::Flickr::Backup a software in Perl, which I frankly just couldn't get to install.

So I decided to write a small web application in PHP using the API that also powers the aggregation of my flickr images on this website. flickdmp (download version 0.1) should be fairly easy to set up on most linux servers - see the detailed instructions in the readme file. This applications allows to asynchronously download all your account's pictures (public or private) to a privacy-protected directory on the server. Together with the photos, their metadata is stored in an RDF file. Also supported: incremental backups and the possibility to automatically change the image file's date to the date the picture was taken.

Enjoy..

title flickrdmp-0.1

tag research

tag flickr

tag archive

tag project

tag software

tag superbertram

written 03.12.2008 21.58

I redid my I2C patch for Arduino software version 011: patch, tar.bz2.

I dropped the change in addressing slaves, so the only changes in semantics are now:

endTransmission() returns zero for success, one if the data to send exceeds the size of the output buffer, two if the address was not acknowledged by a slave device, three if a data byte was not acknowledged by a slave device or four if any other error occured (lost bus arbitration, bus error, ..)

requestFrom() now returns the number of bytes actually read from the device and also set the internal buffer size accordingly, so that available() and receive() also don't return data you sent yourself anymore

These changes might end up in the next Arduino software revision.

title arduino vs. i2c

tag arduino

tag i2c

tag debugging

tag patch

tag research

written 29.03.2008 11.57

Gordo put up some sound snippets of our performance at the transmediale.08 festival.

title ds revolt sound

tag dsrevolt

tag sound

tag research

written 24.03.2008 08.32

I want to share some hints for using the Arduino's TwoWire (aka I2C) interface:

First, make sure you have wired up the two cables (SDA and SCL) to the analog pins four and five respectively. (It was quite embarrassing finding this out after some time on a super-expensive logic analyzer..)

Then, there is a twist with regards to slave addresses: I2C uses 7 bits for adressing and the following bit signals a read (1) or a write (0) operation. While in most documentations of peripherals you'll find the slave address given in the way use 0xC0 for writing and 0xC1 for reading, the stock Arduino library expects the address to be given as 7-bit value (hence: 0x60) and does the left-shifting and appending of the read-bit itself. This is, however, not obvious unless you read the library's sources..

Finally, the library is not really good in returning hints about what's going on in the communcation process back to the Arduino sketch, which would be a good thing to have when something just doesn't work right.

I quickly fixed these two issues for my own work, if anyone want to give it a try: zip or patch.

This changes the address behaviour and implements getError(), which returns the mask of the IRQ that signaled something going wrong (like not receiving an ACK) from the slave - or 0xFF in case of success. Similar, getErrorString() returns an error string or ACK.

If you want to monitor the success of a master transfer, you have to put it after the call to endTransmission() as the library doesn't do any communication over the wire before that.

(Thanks for gordo and stock for helping me track down this bastard!)

title arduino vs. i2c

tag arduino

tag i2c

tag debugging

tag patch

tag research

written 23.03.2008 18.42