So during the opening at the exhibition in Seattle, I met with Melinda Minch, an employee at Microsoft currently on their Seadragon project. She informed me that one of her colleagues, Mike Rorke, had a great time with the wiremap instructable and built one of his own. I finally got in touch with him, and he's uploaded a Flickr set. Check it out!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/zimbo/sets/72157621811624584/
So this last week or so I visited Seattle and had a hell of a time. Many thanks to McDavid for letting me stay at his place. Also, many thanks to Alberto and Andrew Carr for helping out w/ the build process, and for driving me everywhere between Seattle and Federal Way. Lastly, thanks for all the folks at Dorkbot Seattle and 911 Media Arts Center, especially Eric McNeill of Dorkbot and Steven Vroom of 911.
And for your viewing enjoyment, check out the photos and some videos at my picasa acct:
The Wiremap will be exhibiting as a part of People Doing Strange Things with Electricity 4 in Seattle from June 27th - July 24th! I'll be in Seattle a week leading up to the event building the structure, which will be built for the event (as opposed to building one in NYC and shipping it out).
In any case, if you're in the area, please come on out. I'll only be there on opening night, but will be happy to give you an explanation.
See ya then!
Around the beginning of this year I got contacted by Matt Parker, a student at ITP, who wanted to do his thesis on the Wiremap. I was absolutely thrilled to help him out and to get the project a load of more exposure. His work was exhibited @ the ITP Spring show. He made a few changes to my original designs - most of the mods he made were beautifully executed. Both the top & bottom plates were made of plexiglass, with magnets holding the strings in place. All in all, the presentation was beautiful.
Unfortunately, and Matt would agree with me on this, the construction wasn't as strong as he would have hoped. He was looking to make the entire thing out of plexi, but it couldn't hold it's own weight.
In any case, well versed in object oriented Javascript, he's made a public codebase. It's very strong, and much easier to learn and deal with than my amateur code. He's also very open to talk people through developing work for the Wiremap.
Access to the code base, . All of that, in addition to lots of really sweet documentation of his work, can be found @ the website for his build:
http://www.madparker.com/lumarca/
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/4488775[/vimeo]
The Market Value of Monkeys and Robots is a performance that marries movement to digital media – including sound and projections. Instead of dancing to music, our process is to build sound effects to choreographed movement:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvMvi0UeViM[/youtube]
We’re also looking at ways to unify the dancer’s impulses with the projected imagery. Here’s a promo we built for the workshop of “Market Value” that we held at Media Lounge a few months back:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYM-u4zl-8s[/youtube]
Performances are 7pm on Friday the 22nd and the 29th of May.
*This work is a part of Breedingground’s 2009 Spring Fever Festival. Click here to buy tickets and for more information about all the other cool work that’s being exhibited in the festival.
Thanks to all those who came to say hi! It was a lot of fun sharing our project, meeting new people, and ruminating on the the possible ways we can cram more strings inside this project. My partner in crime, Elliot, aka gvilt, wowed me once again with his technical prowess. He uses vvvv, a toolkit that from what I understand can patch directly into DirectX. With it, it took no time for Elliot to whip up some really incredible visuals, including this one:
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/3986190[/vimeo]
Exhibiting alongside Elliot was quite a relief, also. Not only were we able to exhibit a number of incredible programs, but we were also riffing off of one another and learning a lot about the project just by explaining it over and over around eachother. Also, it was nice to use Elliot's materials to help explain what was possible with the Wiremap:
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/1400012[/vimeo]
Also, I must say, the quality of the work at NEXT was, overall, pretty damn good. During our setup, I overheard some American English, and it turned out to be Nick and Ron Sears, inventors and developers behind the ORB, whom I had met before at The Last HOPE, as well as a few times in passing at ITP (Nick attended ITP, I exhibited in their facility once and visited a number of their shows).
I also met up with an inspiring group of students from the Copenhagen Institute of Interactive Design. The program is in its first year, and although they've only been working on their projects for a couple of months, they've produced some pretty strong work.
And lastly, a big thanks to the Innovation Lab, who were easily the most organized group I've ever dealt with. I've had some pretty hairy experiences with some other events (minitek...), but the staff at Innovation Lab were so helpful and put together that it made the experience a breeze.
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