Musical Elements to Brain-Machine

Over the last few weeks, we've been building up some of the musical elements of the piece.

Now, introducing the guitar playing robot!:

We're working on tweaking the song so it sounds good. We programmed it so that as a user's attention level is high, the song will play at speed (and actually sound like real music.) Excited to see it come together...

I forgot to post this earlier, but here is a video of of early prototypes of the instrumentation. We tried playing Thermin, thumb pianos and even a flute...

An early mallet prototype for striking marimba bar elements.

updates

Here are some more images from my project. The third one is a lithograph. The entire image didn't scan but you'll see the real one at Party on the Edge. Been having a lot of fun working digitally on my traditional pieces... it's also fun to be working with the end goal of making something completely out of my own head. Lots of imaginative stuff. All your projects look amazing, I'm really impressed!

Tibet Painting Series Update

I'm still working on my project, a series of nine different paintings all reflections on my trip to Tibet and China. I tried to incorporate my own style with Chinese propaganda and Tibetan influences. This is where I am. I have been working on all paintings concurrently and am just about done with the project. I will be putting the final touches on these paintings in the next few weeks. Here are some pictures of my work spaces these past few weeks. Sorry about the low quality images. When I am done, I'll take some nice, high quality photos for a later post.
 

Ariana's blog on art

Hey guys,
Just a reminder to check out my artsblog at koblitzarts.wordpress.com for continuing updates on my project process.

My camera broke down and so I'm working on it at the moment, so most recent photos will have to wait, but being back on campus means I finally uploaded earlier ones!

Cheers,
Ariana

Update on Pop-ups

Hi everyone,

This summer I've been busy refining my pop-up book about how seeds grow into flowers. I've improved my paper engineering skills by researching other children's pop-up books, practicing various techniques, prototyping mechanisms, and applying them to my book. Each of the mechanisms in the final version should be more intuitive and functional.

Here's a sample of the refinements made to the book.

BEFORE

Problems: The pull tab sticks out beyond the boundary of the page and it jiggles up and down instead of moving in and out smoothly and consistently. Also, the "flow" of the water works nicely/somewhat realistically as you pull the tab out, but not as you push it back in.

AFTER

Solution: Using a wheel allows the water to start, flow, and stop in a more realistic way

Blog 2 Pablo CA and China

I just returned from the Deep Springs Valley in eastern California, where I found and sampled an incredible variety of rocks and minerals. Work to do, things to do, rocks to cut apart. Here, however, are my newest micrographs of serpentinites from Livermore, CA., and sandstones from the Gansu Province, China.

In exchange for my temporal absence in this blog, here is a small summary of how my project developed throughout the summer.

I just had a plan and an ambitious idea; I wanted to make a series of huge charcoal portrait drawings (and by huge I really mean big). The beginning was very frustrating. It turned out to be extremely difficult to get the paper I needed for the drawings in Mexico, since I was living in my hometown this summer, Mexico City. After searching literally dozens of art stores for a roll of paper bigger than 1.5m tall I managed to find the one I needed in a little art shop in San Miguel de Allende, a small but beautiful town north of Mexico city filled with new artists. I was happy and ready to start drawing, now that I had my “big paper”. Of course the next problem was where to draw such a big piece. After discussing with my mom I took control of a room in my house where I could do everything I wanted. This is a picture of the room, with an adapted drawing table and the paper.

Everything was ready now, except I didn’t had a subject to draw. I knew I wanted portraits, and I wanted to mix them. After thinking a while I decided to make my own portrait, since I had never drawn myself and it felt exciting. So I started…

The way I do my drawings is buy first painting the paper as dark as I can with the charcoal, until it ends like black velvet texture, then I begin “painting” the light with an eraser; so I basically do it the other way around, draw the light instead of shadows. After two weeks and a loooooot of charcoal I finished the drawing.

It was time to start the second one. I decided to make a portrait of my best friend. I thought it would be interesting to have both portraits mixed, for he is like my brother and we have twin souls.

The next step was not easy. I was afraid of cutting the drawings. If I did one wrong movement, that would have been weeks of hard work destroyed. My hands were shaking, but I manage to do it. I cut both drawings in small squares of 10x10cm. Each drawing ended up in 300 small pieces. I then began mixing them, like building a puzzle. It was very interesting to see what new faces came out. Each new drawing had a unique expression, some were happy, others angry, other neutral. It was very shocking to see myself in those drawings, for I could recognize myself, but also my brother at the same time; it felt very creepy, but also extremely captivating. I mixed them a couple of times until I was satisfied with the expression. These are the final drawings:

These drawings have a special meaning. The drawing represents the two souls together; two friends united by experiences, dreams and hopes; two souls that are one and who’s image only exists in our minds and a new spirit which I hoped to capture in this drawings.

Here is a picture of me (left), my brother (right) and the finished drawings; to give a better idea of the size of the drawings.

I hope you like it.

Jorge

Almost done!

Here are some pictures of all four of my portraits! The last two are in progress, but I'm hoping to be done really soon. They're about 9 in. in diameter, and I'm planning on installing them within the embroidery hoops that I used.

Visual Windchime progress

Hello all!

Jason, Kiran, and I have been hard at work making a polished version of our Art Affair piece. To give you some background information you can check this out to see what we built last winter. Since then, we've gotten the go-ahead to rebuild it to install it in the new d.School (Peterson, bldg 550). If you haven't gotten a chance to check out the building, we would highly recommend it. It's quite design-y and meant to foster creativity.

To install it, instead of having a dark box for the environment, it will be free-hanging from the ceiling. Thus we needed to hide the wires in the tubes, make the lights visible indoors, and choose wood that would match the ambiance and decor of the d.School.

We're in the midst of construction, but we think we solved all those problems by frosting all the tubes/lights and then plugging the light part with polyethylene to light pipe the LEDs. So when you run your hand across the hanging tubes/lights, two inches of the each of the tubes light up (rather than just a point like before). The light is much more visible and the wires are hidden. As for the wood, we chose a nicely finish apple-ply (which is another type of Europly). It matches wood seen throughout the d.School.

As for how far we are, the holes in the wood have been cut out by a computer numerically controlled machine (CNC router) and all the lights are complete. It's now a matter of assembly and some more touching up.

Water in the West

It's been a productive spring and summer. I was able to go on a couple of roadtrips to Yellowstone and through the southwest, so I took the opportunity to broaden the scope of the project and shoot outside of California. I'm really got I got this chance, since one of the more interesting angles that I'd never have thought of on my own was the Native American perspective. Most of the exhibits in museums and public art dealing with Native American issues uses a very romanticized, out-dated image of tribal peoples:



It's interesting that a river is depicted in this commissioned public mural, since with the exception of a few tribes, most Native Americans have lost the rights to the water flowing through their lands (ie the Navajo traded Colorado River rights for a single community center, not knowing that in the next 50 years, the buyers were planning to expand development Las Vegas and Phoenix, and the water would be worth much much more). Much of their livelihoods depend now on tourism, either to casinos or places like Antelope Canyon or Monument Valley, which hold sacred significance:







Another perspective I hadn't thought about previously was the geologic one. Our understanding of the fossil record, of the past is dependent on the presence or absence of water to preserve remains when catastrophic natural disaster strike or when creatures die naturally. It's ironic that it is sometimes development that unearths some of these geologic records.



I also had a chance to see Glen Canyon Dam and Lake Powell. We rely on dams and resevoirs for energy and flood control, and they are a great visual representation of how we've altered natural landscapes.





I also want to include a couple of photos from California, touching a bit on the politics and everyday implications of water use for agriculture in a natural desert.





I've just started to develop and scan a couple of last trips out to the valley, and there are still a couple of photos of agriculture and livestock I want to include. I am also trying to put together a short photo book of these photos, and may end up putting more photos into that than I display at Cantor. All that's left is to edit all of them into a coherent whole!

Island Story

I just got back from my vacation in Sri Lanka. I've been researching Sri Lankan traditional art and have tried to create a fusion of traditional folk art with western painting styles. Here are the painting's I've done so far:

Blue Water Lilies

Dancer

Monks

Lotus Motif

The Last Stilt Fisherman

Magdalena's Update

http://lublinprojectgateway.blogspot.com/

Prototyping for Brain Noise Machine

Over the last couple months, we did more development with the MindSet EEG headset by NeuroSky. We were able to print out attention, meditation, and blink values with a parser written in C++. But, we wanted an easier platform for mechatronic prototyping so we started using Arduino. Unfortunately with Arduino, there is no MindSet support for returning blink values (myoelectric signals produced when moving the muscles in your forehead).

Anyway, we built a simple program to turn on a light brightly when a user had a high attention level:



Later we went to musical prototypes. We decided to extend on our project from last spring and develop a more complicated robotic band. This system would let two users play the instruments with their mind, and change the rhythms based on their attention and medication levels. A quick video of some ideas including strumming a guitar, playing a thumb piano, adjusting a Thermin, and blowing air through a flute are here.

This is three different minerals. To me, however, it's a tiger eating an ant bear.
And this is two naked bodies.
And this looks like a forest fire.

I have been working on my project all summer, fetching rocks from mines and mountains, to cut them and make them thin, so thin that light can pass through them to see what you see.