tziteras

I'm researching for an arts grant call and as I'm about to hand it all in, I thought I'd put on here what I can't fit in my proposal. The best person to introduce it all is Neri Oxman . She mentions 5 tenets of generative design that sound a lot like the beautifully disagreeing  Beam Bot philosophy or the 12 principles of permaculture . But my project isn't just about making something that complies all those great tenets, but it adds an internet connection and community to a "generated" space, together with attempting to deal with a big problem I've seen in working with the Catalan Integral Cooperative, with many intentional communities, trading goods and working together from different locations, so I've been able to see this problem a lot. Communication. My project is all about bringing together sustainable construction techniques, hackerspace style electronic invention and 3d printing in order to create a shared networked space that allows y...

Here is a quick recap since it's been a while I've written here (I've written a bit on my blog in n-1.cc though). When the spanish protest camps made their decision to shift focus from camps to assemblies in each neighbourhood, back in June, I started going to my local commission meetings. It was a brilliant experience, to sit with other spaniards and see what we actually wanted to implement from our experience of the camp. I took part in the culture group and talked about participative art, and how you can use flashmobs and quite innocent actions to get people involved, or at least questioning things. We organised a cabaret where we brought together lots of local people for a memorable performance in our local square. This was in Sant Andreu del Palomar. I've since moved to the city centre, so am too far away, but I have about 4 different assemblies to choose from here, and getting energy to get stuck in a bit more. Sant Andreu in Barcelona is an area with small st...

[IN PROGRESS - need to add links. Sorry but I'm into participative process, please comment and help me write this! I was just thinking about this thing about robots - online or physical, or more tentacular cybernetic systems like what international corporations and/or tech companies have built up around us over the years and how it interacts with us. I felt I should come and write it down.] There is terrible totalitarian news starting to edge it's way in to passive acceptance, from the government injustice and brutality across the world, and the international coordination of this violence (that goes all the way to the top), from that to the drones that patrol prisons and are made to kill people. I've spent a little time working with electronics, making and conceiving of materials to make a symbiotic musical, solar, improviser bot, and programming software based bots to guide kids around a 3D reconstruction of Sydenham Crystal Palace in London (and Second Life). I learn...

My predictions for Spain are pretty bleak at the moment, although I have some hope. I predict the right wing Partido Popular, founded by a member of Fascist dictator Franco's government, will win these elections. The PP will have none of the PSOE's qualms in dislodging the protestors once results are in. There will be some trouble with police and law in order to empty the squares, and for some time, things will return to normal. These are beautiful protests – more a spontaneous group of people just expressing discontent, and trying to find alternatives to the way things are. They now reach 300 cities and towns where people are camped in the main squares, and the evening "caceroladas" (some sonic discontent making at 9pm with cans and pots) reach every street in Barcelona. I think the camp's future is uncertain at the moment, but that a movement may have been born, a movement that will oppose or maybe even cohabit with the old order in new creativ...

An article by Richard Heinberg, " Economic History in 10 Minutes " which I read the other day, inspired me to look a bit more into more elaborate economies than simply gift/tribal based, that might escape people's thoughts as they search for alternatives to the current (failed?) economic system.  His article is a good summary of a lot of peak oiler economics although I've heard him and others say these things before lots of times and in different ways. Heinberg points to our  addiction to fossil fuels as the central reason for lots of current problems, and the article treasures hunter gatherer cultures with their gift economies as a possible future or as something to move towards. Doing something in 10 minutes is bound to leave something out. It would be easy to believe, reading his article, that we once were all happy and shared everything, then - boom! - iPods. (He actually says " So letting go of the gift economy was a trade-off for progress—houses, cities,...

I've been recording rehearsals for a while using my android phone. This gives quite acceptable sound quality and some of it is even on soundcloud . It naturally led to me wondering if more than one track was somehow possible, and I've tried a few combinations of apps to see if they could work together, before getting to this method: This process has only been tested on a G1 so far so I can't say for sure if this can be done on other phones.  It's a bit tiresome but it proves that 2 track recording can be done. With a few changes to the apps that allow it, it could get a lot easier too. 1) Start by downloading Rehearsal Assistant and Ringdroid . Both these applications are open source, and both are listed on the android market. 2) Make a recording using rehearsal assistant first - it's easy - just push the big red button, but you may want to go into it's settings and set it to record directly as .wav files by selecting "Record Uncompressed Audio"...

In case you are from Bristol and haven't noticed, there's currently a "big debate" being held over at http://askbristol.wordpress.com in the comments area . Basically, the city council are asking the public how to cut the huge sums of money that they will have to do without anyway from very soon. There are lots of reasons why this is flawed. As one commenter posted, "This “consultation” is a pointless exercise without access to a clear summary of what is for the chop and doing it on the internet just encourages the lunatics. Are there any plans for proper town hall style meetings? Or is this just a sham?"  But still, I thought I'd publicise it, even if it's a sham, in case somehow it can get a bit closer to becoming an actual debate and taking of responsibility by all parties. So how do you sift through all these comments and start to extract something resembling usefulness from it all? And how can the public actually get the...

I've come to realise, through my experiments and readings, and through spending months in the world of instrument design, that I had until now marvelled in the idealistic beauty of Open Hardware without considering it's limitations in much depth. I thought it might be time to start to see where this fantastic creative world still might fall short from the point of view of the various " green " threats around us. This shiny new thing is the possibility of: Having a brain wave. ordering some cheap parts online , Going through a creative process to produce a circuit diagram, a materials list and parts list, a printed circuit board before finally assembling an item Whilst designing what turned out to be my Bird Symbiot, a prototype of a system for outdoor sound generation, I visited and contacted lots of people in different occupations. It's not the most essential of applications but I do know a bit more about what happens between me recording some music, and ...

Last week I made the raku clay bird ornament in which the device will be kept, unless I can make a better one before the faire . It was a really interesting process to follow, and Hilda, the potter who showed me it, said things sometimes randomly emerge with clay, not always what you expect. I like that idea, as opposed to 3d design where you try and go for an exact shape. Also it shrinks 10% when it's fired, and so any calculations as to size or tuning would have to be done through lots of different models and trial and error, which I don't have time for as she is now going away for a bit, and I won't have access to her kiln again until after the maker faire. I'm not completely happy with the results of my first big process of making: it's a bit small and the "bird" only happened randomly during the slab rolling process. But still, it's functional and I put a lot of stuff in it, that I know will need to go in any subsequent thing I make as an enclosur...

It's not very often you get a chance to work on such a varied project. The brief for the project in the previous post on this blog, but I thought it useful to put down some thoughts at this stage in it's preparation. Especially in case I get lost later on. Last week I did the first parts: I wired together light sensor, piezo buzzer and an electromagnetic field detector and they are sending data back to an arduino that is now capable of "sleeping" - i.e. switching to a lower power mode. There are lots of ways of getting it to fall asleep though, and I prefer no power to lo-power as Newcastle is not known for it's warm bright weather (for example - this week, according to the newspaper, sunset came to Newcastle at 4.40pm, and the average temperature is of about 4-5 degrees with showers half the time, leading me to think rain power may have been a better choice than solar). To amplify all the recorded and generated sounds this device is beginning to produce, I got a ...

An outdoors low consumption, self powering musical installation. This blog post is about the design and creative process around the concept of an art object I'm making, to be displayed at the UK Maker Faire in Newcastle in March. The intent is to install in an outdoors area, various sensors and various sound sources - mostly amplified piezos as well as a wave shield. These will be guided by an arduino which is powered in turn by various solar panels. The device will capture sunlight during the day (I'm also considering windmill or crank power ), and gathers readings through the day and night to play a short "concert" at dawn and dusk. The readings are light, temperature, sounds, humidity and, I hope, some simple electrode type readings, for which I'm currently experimenting with EMF, which I hope to couple with a second one, so as to have a sort of electrode. When light reaches a threshold, the device plays a melody based on readings gathered, fires off a recorded...

Most people symbolically see birth of the robotic race as 2015, when those famous wikicars escaped from the race course, rode into their trainers, and escaped into the desert. They do not realise that the first large scale battles to use robotic killers was not just the well known oil wars of Iraq and Afghanistan, but this had begun far far before, in these few streets of Bristol UK known as Stokes Croft, where all the new electronics factories had come to converge. In Bristol, in the valley of dilapidated houses swathed in graffiti between Montpelier and Kingsdown there was once an insurrection, and a great battle, with augmented free running kids fighting police, then the army, each other, and finally fire juggling armies of anarchist clowns as well as the more familiar modified urban fauna we know today (at first with abortive attempts to domesticate wild Foxes, followed by the now familiar Slug, Seagull and Crow, with effects we all remember with such apprehension and shock today)....