robot porn

Chicas y robots

Hope you all had great holidays, I’m off to Berlin’s annual Chaos Communication Congress now. Meanwhile, enjoy La erótica del robot (via BoingBoing):

Robot nativity scene

On Sunday, I have been at Berlin’s Lido club for a little christmas party with several bands and artists and they had set up this cute robot nativity scene by Markus Kolb:

And if you don’t remember what christian folklore is about, get an update by having the bible explained with LEGO bricks.

Envelope generators

The great GetLoFi blog recently featured the Bugcrusher downsampling circuit by Tom Bugs who suggested in the post’s comments to get the needed AD781 chip for free (usually about $10) via Analog Devices‘ free sample offer (they send you up to three chips as free samples).

So I ordered two AD781s and one AD633 for this ring modulator thing. They are sent from different shipping centers and the single AD633 arrived yesterday. See if you can spot it on the picture. Should I feel bad now for saving $25 worth of chips and at least the same amount on international shipping? I guess not.

An ephemeral machine with built-in dysfunctions

I saw this leaflet on a bulletin board at university. Sounds interesting. Maybe someone with a real understanding of electronics can help him? I guess I should ask him about his project in some months to see what he made and how long it lived.

Coming up next or never

Currently I’m building a little noisemaking device, basically following the Your First Synth schematics by Music from Outer Space.

I also odered some 555 and 556 timer circuits to toy around with and build the so called Atari Punk Console and similar things. Actually, I do not really need the finished devices, or rather, I don’t know yet what to use them for — like with Lego bricks, the creation is the more satisfying part of the game. That usage may appear spontaneously or not at all, but I like having strange artifacts laying around for visitors to play with. In case of the noisemaking device (I’ll post some pictures in the next days) I will give it away as a gift to a musician friend.

Still in the thought queue of things to make:

• An analogue tape echo/delay. The plan is to hack up four (identical) walkmen and a fifth tape player with a recording head, fix it all on some wooden board and have a tape loop running continuously. Electronics would include switches for the echo depth, basically switching the play heads on/off and a pot for motor speed, ie. echo delay time. Another simpler idea is to use an old double tape deck with one tape loop in two prepared cassette shells, so that audio is continously recorded on deck 1 and played back with a delay by deck 2.
• I recently bought another b/w TV on ebay, a 70s model in an orange plastic case. I want to fit one of the above noise maker circuits inside and feed the output into the deflection coils like in the Wave Vessel/Wobblevision. The sound must not necessarily be heard, so it would be some kind of piece of digital interactive art: A TV with several unlabeled knobs and switches that shows a strange picture you can alter using these controls.
• Another idea from today involves an old 70s turntable, also in an orange plastic shell turned into a new instrument. Besides a speed controller for the motor (to play records at unusually low or high speeds), I would add a small noise circuit like the aforementioned APC and one or two small sampling circuits. These are found in cheap “memo” devices that can record several seconds of audio in low quality. I tinkered with a free giveaway memo keychain once and produced nice aliasing effects by changing the resistor on the small board, enabling ultra-low sampling and playback rates. So the turntable would feature two of these memo circuits to sample audio snippets from the record and to play them back once or continuously. Add some controls to mix the various sound sources and you have a strange sonic artifact.