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.