Spinning Brick Flower Cube 32″x32″x32″ Acrylic and flowers on wood on a rotating plinth
For the nerdy: It’s a motor with spur gears on a 12″ rod between two pillow blocks. The motor is controlled by an arduino that tells it to run 10 seconds and not run 40 seconds.
Me and my brother cut this album while he was visiting. Classical music and classical gaming put together. The band name is: I Plead the Fifth Dimension…it’s a quote from that movie with Chevy Chase…Nothing But Trouble.
Visual Piano Cube in Cellular Hallway, 48″x40″ acrylic and electrical components on and in panel, 2011
This is a painting with three knobs on a piano cube. When you turn the knobs the lights change color. I wanted to make a painting that a viewer could change.
Nerdnote: Here is the back. As you can see…quite a bird’s nest of wires. I used an Atmega 328 with Arduino bootloader to control 9 TIP120s..each resistor controlling 5 LEDs . The LEDs are super bright and use 12v of power. I had to get massive 3W resistors. The resistors get pretty hot and you can feel it on the front of the painting. I like that idea of a painting getting warm.
Healing Hertz, various dimensions, Acrylic and electrical components in and on wood, 2011
Each of these machines plays a tone through the headphones that serves a supposed healing function. There is a meditation pillow in front of them so you can sit down to interact, like this:
The inside has the motor, video frame, and a little machine I built to trigger the buttons on the video frame to get the video going.
Data Mining, 48″x48″ acrylic and electrical components in and behind panel, 2011
This is a kinetic painting. The video is on digital photo frames and I made it with Processing…they are 3d cubes and they look like the little ‘bit’ animation from the first Tron. I’ll upload it later to Vimeo. There is also a little 555 synth I built…so some of those buttons are functional. Here is a cell phone video of me playing it:
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.
SYNTH CHAIR!
Acrylic and electrical components on a chair, 2011
I’m powering two 6ohm speakers with an arduino. I had to build a 386 circuit to power the speakers and everything with just one 9v wall wart. It sounds awful so it’s really not even worth putting up how it sounds. Instead, if you’re interested, here is the Arduino program in all its nastiness. I just wanted to do something really simple with an Arduino and use all the pins…and I wanted to paint my chair.
There are five potentiometers that you can move around. They change the frequencies and duration of the tones.
I also hooked up a bunch of tri colored LEDs that flash different colors depending on how you turn the knobs.
192.168.1.177 96″x48″, Acrylic, resin, screen print, digital photo frames and electrical components on and in panel, 2011
Been working on this for awhile. It’s the most difficult to document thing I’ve ever done. It’s acrylic on panel, but then I cut holes in the panel, poured resin in the holes and then Velcroed some digital photo frames behind the resin. The videos are more or less similar to the ones posted previously plus a landscape with slow moving clouds.
There is also an Arduino Mega with an Ethernet shield behind the panel with a little LCD screen and a potentiometer. When you turn the knob the shapes on the LCD change around. You can see what the back looks like in the picture above. If you connect to the network (via cell phone, for example), you can access the Arduino file sever that I built. But you can only access the files if you align the shapes correctly on the LCD panel. (Here is the code) (Nerd note about code: the code was so long and had so many libraries I had to use a Mega. Most of the tricky code is from the adafruit forums and a Lady Ada tutorial on the Ethernet shield…thanks to everyone in the forums who helped me with this.)
Depending on what the shapes are, the QR code will take you to different files on the file server. (QR codes are those block bar code looking things that you scan with a cell phone camera)
The painting is so confusing that I made an instructional pamphlet and also have some old smart phones that people can use who don’t yet have one. This is somewhat of a reaction to a lot of art shows where in order to understand what’s there you have to read quite a bit about the piece. I thought I’d make that reading actually part of the piece itself.
The painting is lit by one 75 watt bulb hanging above it. This is so the videos are easier to see and it gives sort of this creepy atmosphere…like you’re in a basement…alone with all these obsolete and strange computers humming around you.
Soldered a mini file server for a project today. First time I ever soldered something and it worked on first try.
Google AdWord haikus by Lavender Corporation
New Lavender web page! http://www.l-a-v-e-n-d-e-r.com
No CSS or or anything fancy. All old school frames, cheesy javascript, depricated tags and tons and tons of animated GIFs!
Now I have facial recognition and color recognition in one program. The little face in the lower left corner is a notepad with a face drawn on it. The face image blinks and can re-size to adjust to any face on screen. The programming is still pretty sloppy and parts don’t work too well…but I’m pretty happy with how much I’ve been learning. I want to make it feel more like you’re playing an instrument and the images jump around a little too much still.
Here is the Processing code.
I feel a lot of future potential with this color sensor program I made. I put on a yellow kitchen glove and depending on which quadrant of the video the glove is in it makes a unique sound. Written in Processing. Here is the code. The logic took me a few days to figure out how to get the sound to only play once in each section…I learned a lot doing this.
I made a very simple little program about synesthesia. I will probably develop it more and make it a little more “scientific.” When you mouse over colors of a Matisse painting different notes play that kind of “sound like” the color. I can’t post it here because sounds just start playing right away.
Click here to check it out and see the code and stuff.
Been trying to figure out how to get a Processing sketch in a post for awhile. I’ve been messing around with image manipulation and Processing. I’ll post more stuff I figured out soon. For the image on the left, left click to get it going and right click to stop. The image on the right sorts all the pixels by hue.
I’m learning a lot more about programming so I’m able to do some new stuff. I can make Processing interact a lot better with an Arduino. Here I have three FSRs on the long wires and placed in books. The FSRs are hooked up to my Arduino and each FSR makes the lady dance with a different move. The sound is actually coming from the Arduino also with a wave shield from adafruit. I know I could make the sound in Processing but I’m just learning how to use the wave shield. It’s neat.
Here is the Arduino code.
Here is the Processing code.
Musical Chairs, Acrylic and electrical components on canvas over panel, 12″x12″, 2010
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This is a big improvement from my last musical painting. I used the force sensitive resistors to change the tones and their durations. If you are curious, here is the Arduino code.
I found a toy keyboard in the trash…it was wet but I was able to salvage the speaker and on/off switch. I drilled some little holes on the side so the sound wouldn’t be as muffled.
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Trying cheaper ways to make noise paintings. I hooked up a 555 timer instead of using an entire Arduino. This is the first small step…it’s an astable vibration circuit and for the second resistor I put in a force sensitive resistor.
This is a project I’ve been working on for awhile while trying to learn programming and basic electronics. It’s an interactive painting that lights up and makes sounds.
Ceci c’est un piano 12″x12″x3.5″ Acrylic and electrical components on canvas over panel, 2010
I made a 3.5″ deep box and stretched canvas over it. I drilled holes through the painting to insert three tri-color LEDs and a potentiometer which changes the tones of the keys. In between the canvas and the box are three force sensitive resistors which are prefect because they’re paper thin.
The box is full of wires. It’s a little sloppy so hopefully for the next one I’ll learn how to clean up the wire situation. The speaker is also a bit small and hanging from a wire. I used an Arduino Duemilanova which is drilled to the left and powered with a 9V battery so it hangs on the wall and you don’t need to plug it in or anything. I made a perf board which is drilled to the right.
Here it is in action: (I will probably make a better video later…it’s hard to steady one hand and play a “piano” with my other hand.
Here is the arduino code.
If you’re interested in the schematics or anything let me know and maybe I’ll post something up. But mostly I just used the three key keyboard tutorial on the Arduino page. I don’t really know what I’m doing so if you have any input on how to improve this it’s appreciated.
