AMANUENSIS

AMANUENSIS: [L. (in Suetonius) adj. used subst., f. denominative phrase a manu a secretary, short for servus a manu + -ensis belonging to.] One who copies or writes from the dictation of another.

So, it has been a while. Too long, actually. But alas, here I am to update my status (or at least my intentions for tonite... I need sleep). I will update my blog to a greater extent over the weekend once I am in Montreal. For now I need to produce the pieces I will be using over the next week.

As for my intentions with this project, I want to begin to question the notion of drawing, technology and authorship. I will be constructing my own amanuensis using a typewriter and both physically and digitally adapting it in order to begin to experiment. Can we dictate drawings just as authors, writers and poets did with the introduction of the typewriter? If we may start to do this what then becomes the implications on authorship? A translation begins to emerge between author (drawer), technology and amanuensis in which information may be misunderstood and transformed... or maybe not?

Flexinol Demo

Here is a really good simple sampling of the possibilities for exaggerating the slight movement of muscle wire: http://www.mrsec.wisc.edu/Edetc/cineplex/OHP_NiTi/index.html The example shown on the website uses Flexino NiTi memory wire available at Dynalloy, Inc.

NiTi actuator wires contract like muscle fiber when electrically driven. Batteries resistively heat the wire, causing it to shorten while exerting considerable force. NiTi can be incorporated into devices that are smaller, lighter, and easier to use than motors or solenoids. This demonstration shows some basic ways actuator wires may be used.

This FLEXINOL NiTi memory metal overhead projector demonstration is based on materials in the Sample Kit available from Dynalloy, Inc. The description provided here is adapted from the accompanying Dynalloy documentation. The overhead projector demonstration was developed by Eric J. Voss.

Youtube & Typewriters

Thanks to Rachelle to sending me the first link. Pretty amazing the level of detail that he gets out of a typewriter. Jorge Castillo:



This one is kind of funny. I don't quite understand the point of it, but coinedentally, they've made some finger-like extensions from the typewriter to the computer keyboard which are sort of similar to the pincer objects that I am starting to construct.



I don't know what this one is about, but that mechanism is huge and it looks really interesting.



This one was too weird not to put up here... more funny than anything. What the?

Living Glass

Came across this nice little project that uses muscle wire while searching for some resources regarding Arduino and muscle wire. Here it is... from the Make Blog.

Ever since I bought the Muscle Wire Project Book in the mid '90s and experimented with the "Flexinol" shape memory alloy I bought with it, I've been fascinated by this material. I've also been amazed at how few applications SMA has enjoyed in the real world since then. There appears to be a recent growth in real-world applications, in fields like medicine and aviation. New York-based architecture firm, The Living, have been demoing their concept for using SMA to create "living glass," breathable surfaces that open up like fish gills using MCU-controlled SMA. Their presentation documents, in decent detail, how they went about the process. While this may or may not be a workable idea for walls and windows, hopefully it'll get people thinking. SMA continues to seem like a really cool, futuristic technology in search of worthy apps. I mean, look at Flexon...

Living Glass presentation - [via] Link

Arduino Day One

So I started playing with the Arduino board today. Darcy has kindly lent me his Arduino NG board so that I can start to learn the interface and some circuitry before we head out to Montreal. I started by following this tutorial, which I had posted a while back.

The tutorial started with a very basic circuit, controlling one LED... basically following a very simple example in the Arduino software and turning the LED on and off. Here is that result:





I then added a second LED to the circuit, and modified the sample code in Arduino to change up the pattern of the 2 blinking LED's:



Here is the code written in Arduino.



Video of the 2 blinking LED's.



Next I added a third LED. Modified the code again and started to play with different patterns. Here it is:



The new code, written in Arduino:





Next, Walter had the idea to hook up a speaker in place of one LED. The first video is pulsing the speaker for 25ms (milliseconds).



This second video is pulsing the speaker for only 1ms. You can start to notice the different "beats" that it creates.



Lastly, my circuit was a bit messy I thought... so I decided to clean it up and make it more legible. I feel better now.



Tomorrow I'll be on to some more complicated stuff. Arduino is fun.

Worms!

I stumbled across this and thought it was too weird not to post up. Interesting and repulsive all at once!

Performative Ecologies

Here is some work by Ruairi Glynn that we were lucky enough to meet in Halifax. Ruairi runs the blog: http://www.interactivearchitecture.org. Do check out his blog and while you're there check out his portfolio of work. It is inspiring stuff. Here is the link to this specific project where you can download videos of the work. Here are Ruairi's words:

“The role of the architect... I think, is not so much to design a building
or city, as to catalyse them: to act that they may evolve.” Gordon Pask

'Performative Ecologies' examines the potential of responsive environments to engage in gestural and performative forms of non-verbal communication and conversation. This explorative project based over a series of iterative installations considers how architecture could enter into a dialog with its inhabitants and surrounding built environment. How can we, with the aid of increasingly cheap and powerful responsive technologies, build an architecture capable of Interacting with rather than Reacting to, human and wider environmental activity?

Rather than pre-choreograph the actions of an interactive architecture, Performative Ecologies explores the role of the architect as a designer and builder of frameworks, rather than predefined events, in which responsive adaptive environments are able to not just react, but also propose. Often, through trial and error, these environments can suggest new gestural and spatial interactions and evolve their own expressive qualities while negotiating these actions with human inhabitants and other architectural systems.

These approaches to interactive design I believe hold exciting potential to generate interactions beyond the preconcieved visions of the original designers, and create systems able to evolve to changing contexts over the lifetime of an architecture. In my continuing investigation of approaches to building physically reconfigurable architecture, the final installation (Image Right) looks at how, with relatively simply computational systems, it is possible to build environments able to discover for themselves, ways of attracting and keeping the attention of its inhabitants. Through similar forms of adaptive learning, the wider implications for an interactive architecture suggest how our built environment could learn to provide more effective functional services such as environment control or security, beyond the preconceived visions of the original designers.

Max/MSP

Here is a link to a Max/MSP/Jitter course offered through Columbia. Darcie Watson passed this along (Thanks Darcie!). You can download their "case study patches" and play around with them if you've got Max/MSP all set up. If you dont, go and download the trial from Cycling 74.

Unbrako

I had mentioned in studio the other day about some really nice fasteners. I tracked down the link tonight and I thought it would be good to share it with everyone. The company is called Unbrako and I believe you can get their products through Adams A Supply here in Winnipeg.

The Museum of Unworkable Devices

Zach also passed along this really quirky page (in which David Jones' work is featured) filled with devices that just don't function. Hey, who knows, a bunch of our studio projects might end up on this page by the end of the year... but hopefully not.

Description of the page:
This museum is a celebration of fascinating devices that don't work. It houses diverse examples of the perverse genius of inventors who refused to let their thinking be intimidated by the laws of nature, remaining optimistic in the face of repeated failures. Watch and be amazed as we bring to life eccentric and even intricate perpetual motion machines that have remained steadfastly unmoving since their inception. Marvel at the ingenuity of the human mind, as it reinvents the square wheel in all of its possible variations. Exercise your mind to puzzle out exactly why they don't work as the inventors intended.

The devious deceptions of David Jones

Zach sent me a link to this. I think it is great.

David Jones is a true genius and a hero of the Athanasius Kircher Society. Between 1964 and 1996 he wrote the “Daedalus” column for New Scientist and later Nature. Each week he would propose a different completely implausible scheme based on entirely plausible scientific principles — like coating the moon in magnesium oxide to make it twenty times brighter. Those brilliant columns were collected in a now out-of-print book, The Further Inventions of Daedalus: A Compendium of Plausible Schemes (Last check: Amazon has 12 copies left) [[UPDATE: Amazon has only 1 very expensive copy left, but they also sell the original Inventions of Daedalus, which we trust is just as brilliant]]. Jones is also a serious chemist, best known for the modern theory of bicycle stability and for determining that there was arsenic in Napoleon’s wallpaper.

We recently stumbled upon the Museum of Unworkable Devices, a site dedicated to man’s quest to conquer perpetual motion, and were touched to find a short homage to our hero Jones:

David Jones has built a number of ingenious “fake” perpetual motion machines for museums and trade shows. These are beautifully made of bicycle wheels, sewing machine parts, plumbing hardware and other embellishments. They are displayed in glass or clear plastic cases with no obvious means for energy input. Observed by visitors daily, they slowly turn, day after day, without diminution of speed, over periods of a year or more, seemingly in defiance of the laws of physics. Sometimes a nice prize is offered to anyone who can puzzle out the precise secret of their operation. Jones once said that an analysis of the entries showed that many engineers thought that he really had discovered the secret of perpetual motion, while many physicists proposed methods of deception that couldn’t possibly work.

Thanks for passing that along, Zach.

Muscle Wire / Flexinol / Nitonol / Shape Memory Alloy ...

Here is some information and the link to the manufacturer of the muscle wire demonstrated in the Fly Trap piece. Take a look.

From the Dynalloy, Inc. website:

Dynalloy, Inc. is a manufacturer of shape memory alloy specially made to be used as actuators. In other words made to provide movement much like a solenoid or motor would for many many cycles. The high repeatability of such applications requires a dependable, reliable and very repeatable material.

Dyalloy, Inc. manufactures these nickel titanium alloys as small wires under the trade name of Flexinol to differentiate them from other shape memory alloys which do not have theses same properties.

Flexinol actuator wires contract much like little muscles a distance of approxiamtely 4-5% when they are "on" and relax when they are "off".

Jean-Pierre Gauthier - Lecture & Arch II Gallery Opening

Jean-Pierre Gauthier gave a very interesting lecture tonight at Centre Space of the J.A. Russell building which was basically an exposé of his works from the past few years. The majority of his work involves sound and, very basic, everyday objects. He often gives life - and a "voice" - to inanimate objects.

The lecture was followed by the gallery opening of his installation at the Arch II Gallery in the Architecture 2 Building - University of Manitoba. His installation consists of 3 drawing machines which lightly rub the gallery walls with graphite. The graphite will slowly build up throughout the duration of the installation to gradually reveal the subtleties in the structure of the wall - be it nail holes, drywall seams, or paint strokes. I look forward to checking back in on this to document its progress. I apologize for the poor quality of the video, it is hard to make out the gentle graphite markings on the wall, but I assure you, they are there.

ACADIA - Metabolic Workshop

When we arrived in Halifax on Sept. 30 at about 2:00pm in the afternoon. After a 25 minute taxi ride from the airport we arrived at the Architecture Building of Dalhousie University. With it being a Sunday afternoon, the facilities were locked down - so we waited until a very trusting student kindly let us in with all of our bags and belongings. The entry way led us directly to the space in which the Metabolic Workshop was to be held - and there were already a number of people getting started on preparing all of the rope and electronics. This was to become our home for the next 3 days.

The workshop started with a group discussion and introductions of all participants. The brief for the workshop was basically that we were going to turning the mass of rope hanging from the ceiling into some kind of responsive textile environment installation - by impregnating it with motors, electronics, new materials and engineered pieces.

Once introductions and the initial explanations were through, we broke out into smaller groups in order to tackle all of the tasks that would be necessary to complete the installation.
The 3 groups consisted of a group dealing directly with the mass of rope already in place, another group working with servo motors and systems that were to be introduced into the rope-organism, and another group dealing with the electronics/electrical systems. I decided that I would throw myself into what I perceived to be the most difficult task (for myself as I knew basically nothing about circuitry and electronics). I felt it would be a good way to learn, especially having Alan Macy as our team leader. Alan is an electrical engineer from California and has incredible patience in helping people understand the very basics of electronics and circuitry.

In this smaller group I met a guy named Josh Cotten from SOM Chicago. Josh is a really talented guy and he specializes in parametric software and scripting (is that right Josh?). Throughout the day Christine Macy, one the Workshop organizers, began to develop some flower petals using LED's and conductive fabric. We were also introduced to "muscle wire" or Shape Memory Alloy (SMA) or Flexinol or Nitonol... or as I like to call it; "Happy Magic Wire" - an alloy which shrinks roughly 3-5% of its length as an electrical current is passed through it and returns to its original length as it cools.

Josh and I saw an interesting opportunity with the idea of the venus flytrap-like petal and the muscle wire. We took off in our own direction and began to draw up some leveraging systems, with the help of Alan, so that we could create the jaw of the flytrap. You can see (below) our first crude prototype of a scissor-like lever system made out of 3 pieces of stripped bamboo that was lying around. I wish I had better images of the original prototype, it was nice in a very primitive kind of way. It was fashioned together using tape, a bull clip, a nail, and the muscle wire - and it actually worked.


The next prototype was much nicer in materials and hardware (although we were still limited in what we had to work with. We quickly drew up some pieces in Illustrator and went down to the laser cutter to fabricate them. Emanuel, the Professor whom runs the fabrication equipment, was incredibly nice in helping us out and had a lot of interesting stories to tell us. It was both Josh and I's first experience with the laser cutter and we started with lexan - which Patrick tells me is extremely toxic and that I've probably cut 5 years or more off of my life in doing so. Awesome!

The idea here is a simple lever system in order to exaggerate the movement of the muscle wire - as it only actually shrinks about 4% of its length. The top-jaw and the stem are fixed in place and the bottom jaw is the only component which moves.


Here you see a detail of the construction of the fulcrum. We were limited in the hardware that we had to work with, so the bolt is obviously far too long for the overall width of the piece. You can also see the simple system for holding the top jaw in stasis - the top screw and piece of piano wire. Basically, a piece of piano wire ties in at two points, on the stem and on the top-jaw.


Here is a better view of how the muscle wire is tied to the apparatus. It is attached by screw to the stem and runs down to the bottom-jaw and is fixed as close to the fulcrum as possible in order to achieve maximum amplification of the 4% movement.


We worked out a couple of kinks in the design and then drew up the final pieces in illustrator to be laser cut. Here are the drawings.



And, just like that, we have all of these precisely cut pieces of acrylic ready to be assembled.


Josh and I took a quick walk to "Pizza Corner" and grabbed some donairs. They were delicious and I recommend anyone going to Halifax should get a donair from the King of Donairs (they also have really good and HUGE pizza). Here is Josh, happy from the donair.


Part of the final piece. We were able to get some better fitting hardware.

We ended up making 4 new pieces. Here are 3 of them as well as the start of the "hoods" or heads of the Fly Traps, in which Amanda Yakiwchuk devised. We didn't have much time to really develop the head and I think Amanda did an awesome job with them. They are constructed from silver conductive fabric.


Here are Josh and Amanda discussing something. Josh seems to be demonstrating the form and action of the Fly Trap.


This next image is the "tongue" of the Fly Trap. It is a piece of copper conductive fabric with LED's running around the perimeter - a continuation of the piece that Christine Macy started to play with earlier in the workshop. The way that this works is that one leg of the LED (anode or cathode) is taped to one piece of fabric with conductive fabric tape. That piece of fabric is then affixed to the acrylic tongue, which insulates the two pieces of fabric from each other. Another piece of conductive fabric is the affixed to the opposite side of the tongue and the other leg of the LED is the taped to that side. The conductive fabric is then able to distribute a charge from a single source to all LED's.


Here is Amanda assembling the tongues.


And, finally, an image of the final piece integrated (physically only...) into the installation. It is kind of unfortunate, but without the help of the software and wiring experts we were unable to get our piece to work within the context of the installation. But we do have video of the Fly Trap in action, just below. Even though we didn't have it completely integrated it was still an amazing experience. It was pretty interesting being thrown into a body of work that I was very unfamiliar with and to still be able to create and produce an object that actually worked.



Here is the video demonstration of the Fly Trap. Amanda is holding the Fly Trap and Josh is applying the electrical current in short pulses to the muscle wire. With the correct power applied and the right duration of application, the muscle wire can last about 1,000,000 cycles.

ACADIA Conference 2007 - Halifax

Last week - Oct.1 to Oct.7 - we traveled to Halifax. By "we" I am referring to the Dedale grad students; Candace Fempel, Darcy Fraser Macdonald, Gregory Rubin, Marnie Gartrell and myself. We were joined by fellow graduate students Matthew McFetrick and Amanda Yakiwchuk. The trip consisted of a 3 day Workshop (more on that later) and a 4 day Conference. The emphasis was on interactive architectures. It was a very interesting trip that involved a lot of rope tangling & untangling, circuits, NITONOL, laser cutting, pub crawling, networking, hostel swapping, lobster eating, used bookstore-ing, hoodie discrimination (long story) and drunken flying.

Brother AX-18 Vivisection - Continued

So I've had the typewriter in this state for a while now, but it was left gutted on my desk last week while we were gone to Halifax. Here are some more photographs of the vivisection.


More images of the printer carriage. This time completely removed from the plastic housing of the original body. The device is starting to take on a much more machine-like characteristic as its old skin becomes stripped away.


Closer side details of the printer head.



A shot of the underbelly of the print head. Here you can clearly see the stepper motor (the golden cylinder near the top of the image) which controls the hammer action of the print head.


Another shot of the underbelly. Pictured here is the stepper motor (the silver cylinders at the bottom of the image with wires extending from it) which controls the movement of the print head across the guide rail (across the page, essentially).


The circuit board removed.


Here is the bottom tray of the original casing. All that remains is the power supply. Yes, I did cut myself.


Detail of the power supply still in the bottom tray.


Couple of details of the power supply completely removed from the bottom tray.



Everything is now removed from the original casing.