robot porn

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.

Push the button

I bought a 1-inch-button making machine yesterday. Some friends talked about having some 200 buttons made for their band and I thought I might as well buy a machine to make them at home. I figured the expenses would be covered by selling the buttons in the near future. Even if it does not add up at the end; I’ll still have the machine to play with.

I got it from buttons.de via ebay including a circular paper cutter and 1000 button blanks for a total price of 223 Euros (including shipping). Please talk to me if you live in Berlin and want me to produce buttons for you. Just for fun I set up an extra page for the machine to see how long it takes until I’m back to zero.

pong.mythos: Day 2

No Podcast so far as I just don’t have time here. Wednesday had 12 hours of work while yesterday was more like 15 hours. I didn’t even leave the museum to get some lunch and completely failed to notice the snow falling outside.

On the positive side, first of all, I like this work, so I’ve been authoring and burning DVDs (and learned a lot about converting strange video formats so that they finally will work; maybe I’ll write a separate article later about all the programs I used). setting up computers, running around a lot and even soldering plugs and more stuff that actually isn’t my job here.

The second good thing is that I was actually finished by quarter past midnight yesterday when the final DVD left my PowerBook, which really has grown to me by now. It generally performs better and is more fun to work with than any other system I have used, both free and proprietary.

I really like all the artist guys here, maybe it’s not to late to try and introduce everyone of them on this site. Maybe this afternoon we’ll have some spare time. Of course, they’re all pretty geeky and I feel like we’re having a “coolest t-shirt” contest here, as almost everyone is wearing shirts relating to games, hacking and nerd stuff in general.

The big press conference is at 11h, so I’m going to fix the last odds and ends. More pictures and stuff later.

pong.mythos: Day 1

Actually, it’s not day one. Some people have been working here for a week now, but it’s my first day in Stuttgart.

I’ll try to assemble my first video podcast from here tonight, but of course we’re sort of in a hurry to get everything up and running for the opening on friday afternoon. I help all the artists setting up their pieces while putting together the DVDs that will run in loops on several monitors. Converting different video formats to go together is not so easy after all and I needed several programs to make it all work. Strangely, taking parts of standard DVDs to assemble another DVD isn’t easy as all, as you have to rip and demux and later mux (multiplex) the audio and video and so on. It just isn’t drag and drop like with audio CDs.

Have a look at some pictures on flickr (I tagged them all with “pong.mythos”). A list of all artists and their artwork is here.

LED rotation generation

I need more time. I just fell in love with this cool pov (persistance of vision) tool. It’s a single led row with eight leds that displays a message line by line. And of course this is only visible when it’s rotated (or moved very fast). There are other projects on the web mounted on bicylcle spokes but this version (a small metal pipe on a lanyard) is so much cooler.

I sooo want to build one of these. Preferably before someone encounters the commercial potential (so far the idea is only used for alarm clocks, as far as I have seen) and every soccer fan has something like that.

Here are more pictures from the guy that build it. Found via hack a day.

Podcast #1: pong.mythos

I’m currently preparing the computers for an upcoming art exhibition called pong.mythos, curated by Andreas Lange of the Computer Games Museum here in Berlin. I’ll be in Stuttgart from February 7th till 11th to set up all the interactive and video artworks. The exhibition then will travel to Leipzig in Summer and to Berne (Switzerland) in 2007.

This video podcast is an experiment for myself to put the nice movie function of my Casio digital camera to good use and have a try at programs like Apple’s iMovie. I plan to interview some of the artists and show you what this exhibition is about.

Podcast #1 is my first attempt at doing so. It features myself, some computers and a very bad voice-over (in terms of accent and recording quality), but please have a look and give some feedback. My video podcasts will be in MPEG-4 format (H.264 codec, which seems to be the de-facto standard by now). Use VLC if none of your other players work. Everybody should have VLC anyway. The podcast will also work on iPod Video players.

• Video podcast #1: pong.mythos introduction (3.8 MB, 2:00 minutes)

You can also subscribe to the RSS podcast feed with programs such as Juice or iTunes.

Musings on becoming a Super 8 hero

I have a weakness for all things analogue. Maybe this is some form of technophile masochism, as analogue equipment is usually hard to connect to anything modern and digital. And so I fumble around with my Roland TR-606 drum machine (no MIDI), record players (no line level outputs), reel-to-reel tape recorders (no rca plugs) and so on.

Maybe I’ll start toying with another analogue technology: As I was (unsuccessfully) shopping for a Game Boy link cable today, I again came across a really nice small shop at Hermannplatz selling used photographing equipment. They really have a large selection of Super 8 filming gear, i.e. cameras, projectors and editing stations. And they’re dirt cheap, I guess about 20 euros for a simple working camera or a projector.

As I have no idea about Super 8 and the costs involved at all, I asked how much films and development were. A color film is about 15 Euros, black-and-white 20 Euros with about another 15 Euros for development per film. A standard Super 8 film is 15,25 m which equals 3:20 minutes at standard 18 frames per second (and yes, that’s silent movie of course). The (German) Wikipedia article on Super 8 gives more cool facts like the great slow motion function some cameras provide (by recording live action at double or triple speed). I’d love to have a slow motion film of myself jumping or doing other stupid things.

Of course, with everything I plan, that’s not really worth it. Still it would be cool to have special things filmed on real film, with all the technical imperfections and nostalgia-induced style. Just how retroliciously cool would a Super 8 “video” podcast be? (You see I love creating media breaches.) I wonder if it’s possible to set up a dark room at home to develop those films in short time, have them digitized and online at the same day.

Don’t panic, I won’t go there. Still a nice idea. I’ll bookmark the extensive super8wiki for later. (And no, retroliciously is not a word. And I love “analogue” with “-gue”.)