192.168.1.127, 24″x24″ Acrylic, steel, digital photo frame and electrical components on panel, 2011

This is part of my ongoing project to network a bunch of artworks. This “painting” has a Twitter account and it takes your picture when you are near it. The twitter account is @1921681127

In the digital photo frame is a catalog of all of Messier’s space objects. So while you’re looking at the catalog, the catalog is also cataloging you. The black hole in the bottom is an LCD panel. It just tells you that the painting is either on stand-by or uploading a picture to TwitPic.

I hid the camera and the sensor in an amoeba like abstract thing. I used a LinkSprite JPEG Color Camera and a Maxbotix EZ1 range finder. Originally, I wanted to do all this with an Arduino but they aren’t powerful enough so I used an mbed microprocessor instead. Mbed is the same price as an Arduino mega and way more powerful and awesome.

I built the wooden stand and panel and then painted everything with acrylic steel paint.

Writing a library in C++ for Twitpic was way above me so I employed the services of a genius programmer, David Griswold, who hammered the thing out for me in a few days. Here is that library if you’re curious. I also used a good library for the camera which is here.