Gretton Explorers – a day at Gretton Primary School

The final part of my commission for Fermynwoods Contemporary Art was to spend a day working with Year 1 and Year 2 pupils at Gretton Primary School.

Working blind with people and place that I hadn’t met before and also up against a forecast for torrential downpour, I armed myself with a large rucksack filled with explorer-y things, a story about having been sent to explore Gretton and some mild consternation that my explorer equipment hadn’t been delivered yet.

With the pupils’ expert assistance we did some excellent exploring that was sure to make Yasmin Boss extremely proud.

Pictures, pictures, pictures…
Those marked (JS) courtesy of James Steventon, Fermynwoods Contemporary Art.

The group decides that we need a map before we can start exploring and everyone settles down to draw a mapbit of something interesting/important in the village

The group decides that we're going to need a *really* big piece of paper to put all these mapbits on. Next job is to work out where all the mapbits go...

But how do we get from one mapbit to another? (JS)

Paths, roads and other details added to the gaps in the map. (JS)

A few of the girls hang behind at breaktime because they think they've figured out what the recently-delivered devices are. (JS)

Explorers set out to walk to some of the places on the map. (JS)

Using all our senses...

A confused Nikki The Explorer needing some things about the village hall explained to her. (JS)

The Pocket Park: many things to discover and examine. (JS)

Walking through the tunnel with the GPS devices to see what effect it has. (JS)

Explorers in the tunnel. (JS)

Small child. Large rucksack.

Discovering that drawing a line of where we've just been is actually quite difficult. (JS)

Recognising where home is on the device-drawn traces is even harder...

Recognising places. (JS)

My home-made GPS gadgets get the thumbs up. (JS)

Because - regardless of age - that moment when the LEDs come on is always a good one... (JS)

Investigating dark places and their effect on the gadgets we made. (JS)

Success!. (JS)

Someone puts forward the hypothesis that the trace from the GPS module placed on the windowsill is the way it is because of all of the excitement in the room when we were making our gadgets. (JS)

A great day and a really nice group of people to work with.
Thanks to Garmin for supporting the day through the loan of several GPS devices.

My Flickr set of photos from the day is here.

Possibility Mapping (heavy object and built environment)

It is only through our interactions/collaborations/experiments that we show up.

Change the assemblage and a different set of possibilities emerges.

Can we explore differently in order to reveal new possibilities?

Through the use of new tools, do we get a new world to interact with?

How do you arrive at the places that are not yet mapped?

Observations and questions arising from the Live Feeds research programme led by Spurse, NYC 2011

Possibility Probe (heavy object and built environment) is a starting point for asking questions and conducting experiments. A direct response to the trend of making mobile technology smaller, lighter and more discreet; these objects are unwieldy, heavy and broadcast to all within hearing distance.

Cumbersome – a burden if not shared – these Possibility Probes resonate with the built environment that they are carried through. Like a drum or a heart, they beat faster the more they are surrounded by the fabric of the city, slowing as space opens up around them.

How you carry them, where you carry them and who you journey with will all affect the possibilities that emerge and the unseen qualities that are revealed to you.

More images on Flickr: photo set | slideshow

Possibility Probes hit the city centre

Yesterday we started the And Miles to Go Before I Sleep… gallery installation in earnest ready for tomorrow’s opening event.

After sorting out lighting, arrangements, power and cabling, all 3 Possibility Probes have now been assembled. Mona and I took one of them out around the city centre to see what it was like.

Mona gets her first Possibility Probe experience. She seemed to like it...

All looked very promising in terms of the object functioning as it should and there was much observing, thinking and discussion around some of the questions and associations it raised.

First up, we do like the materials. Seems there’s a hint of a coincidental Beuysian theme going on with a few of the works in the show. Now seeking a coyote for the opening…

We also liked the physicality of carrying it around and how it affected our awareness of what was around us.

As well as trying a few different ways of carrying it, we also put it down and stood away from it a couple of times. We like how it is still audible from quite a way off and are curious about how it conveys a different feeling depending on how it is placed.

For the opening tomorrow night the tubes will be ‘re-experiencing’ a journey through the city and then on Thursday we’ll be conducting more experiments with them to see what possibilities they open up. (Sign up here: http://heavyobjectbham.eventbrite.co.uk/).

Test-driving the possibility probe

I like this moment in a project – where the idea made real is first taken out into the wide world and your visions are (hopefully) shown to be roughly on target and, if you’re really lucky, whole new avenues of exploration are opened to you.

Test-drive a-go-go

This morning Pete and I took the Possibility Probes (I’ve sent off the marketing copy, so these things now have a name – Possibility Probes is part of it) out for a test-drive.

Most targets have been hit:

• To be contrary to the light, cuddly, empathy-evoking bundles from the initial Colony playtesting (this project is an oxbow in a much larger, meandering research series)
• To be a little bit uncomfortable and unwieldy, but not too much so.
• To be audible.
• To be felt.

The one main area for improvement before the public get their hands on them is to improve the response to landscape.

Not bad for a first iteration, though…

Thanks to Pete for being a willing pioneer and test subject.

Tinier GPS

After an enforced absence from the Margaret Street workshops, I’m bracing myself for a final push to get some serious making done in preparation for an exhibition coming up at the end of April.

Although I’ve not been able to get at the woodwork equipment, I’ve not been idle and have been working away at improving the code and GPS set-up that I’ll be using to animate the objects I’m producing.

I’d like to say I’ve built on the improvements I made whilst in New York, however it’s probably more accurate to say I’ve torn it all down and started again from scratch…

Here’s the kit I’ve been using up until now:

1 x Arduino clone (RBBB); 2 x bare bones Arduino clones; 2 x GPS receivers; OpenLog

Having initially tried and failed to satisfactorily read from the two GPS receivers via serial, I’d switched to using multiple Arduino units communicating over I2C. All built off the tutorials and examples made available at the wonderful Lady Ada site (and a lot of help from other generous people!).

A year and a lot of learning later, I thought it would be worth a second attempt at a one-microcontroller set-up. Having used Mikal Hart’s TinyGPS library for the Chin Up Chapeau, that seemed a promising way to go. And here’s the result:

One RBBB Arduino clone alternating between reading two GPS receivers via TinyGPS and SoftwareSerial (also based on work by Mikal Hart, available with V1.0 of the Arduino IDE).

I’ve been testing it over recent weeks and the results are a very close match to the lines I was getting with the original original set-up using two PDAs and mscape.

A walk through the city centre earlier today (click for larger version)

It’s not all about cutting things out, though: I’ve also added in a transistor to control a solenoid. Tomorrow I plan to insert it all inside a large wooden drum and see what happens…

Phoenix playtesting sessions #2 & #3

Due to low turn-outs, these sessions were more testing than play, however we still had some very big smiles!

By Thursday I’d made some units that communicated with each other via XBee radios. They remain happy whilst still in range, but once separated you have a short grace period in which to link up again. After that an alarm goes off.

For the first of the two playtesting sessions it was the first time the units had been taken outside, so we wanted to get a feel for what sort of maximum range they have. Not until after having experimented with corridors and lifts, first.

Faraday Cage: third floor.

Maplin’s carpark wasn’t big enough, so we moved on to the ring road and then the St George’s retail park. You can just make out the person carrying the other unit in the distance…

Range-testing in the biggest carpark we could find...

For the last session we headed into the city centre and experimented with corners, pillars and mezzanines in various streets, theatres, shopping centres and multistorey carparks. I’m afraid I was so engrossed in what we were doing that I totally forgot to take any photos!

Next step is to expand this out to a group and start working with range information to see how that affects the coalescence of a group moving through the city.

Residency at Phoenix Square, Leicester – participants wanted

23/02/2012: Updated with this eventbrite link.

Next week I’ll be the third and final resident at Phoenix Square in the series that started with Engagement Party and The Institute for Boundary Interactions.

My blurb has yet to make its way onto the website, so here’s the skinny:

Over the next few months, a range of artists will be living, working and creating brand new artworks at Phoenix Square, taking inspiration from this unique cultural building and its surroundings…

Nikki Pugh is evolving technological creatures that affect the way you navigate the cityscape.

Nikki’s project ‘Colony‘ is an ongoing series of experiments in which she is developing a group of creatures that respond in real time to the landscape through which they are being carried.

Having already built prototypes that vibrate differently depending on whether they are in open or confined spaces, Nikki will be using radio communication and biofeedback to investigate aspects of flocking and interconnectedness.

Stay tuned for opportunities to become part of the colony and contribute to the play-testing in and around Phoenix Square.

Nikki Pugh is an artist who investigates issues around interaction: how we interact with spaces and landscapes; how we interact with each other; and how we interact with objects. Her practice is located somewhere in the intersection of people, place, playfulness and technology.

Basically the plan is to do a series of experiments involving radio communication and, I think, galvanic skin response readings. You probably know enough about me by now to know that this will mean going out into the streets and trying stuff out to see what happens.

Since I’m particularly interested in flocking and interconnectedness for this residency, that also means I’ll be needing to muster small groups of volunteers in order to try stuff out and see what happens.

If you’re up for spending some time next week exploring the streets of Leicester whilst carrying a small radio unit and with a few sensors attached to your fingers, you can sign up at this eventbrite page.

Thanks!

Making, tangents and edges // Making tangents and edges

After a bit of a delay, and then after a bit of an induction, I’ve at last been able to start on the making! Hurrah!

Still life with visor, nail gun and wood adhesive

I’ll be using my time at the Margaret Street campus through the AA2A programme to explore a tangent of the Colony project.

The two prototyping sessions I ran last year posed some very interesting questions about the experience of travelling through public space carrying landscape-reactive objects. Lots of interesting questions. Lots of interesting big questions.

In the absence of a big interesting residency in which to tackle these big interesting questions, I’ve decided to modularise my research and use some little interesting residencies to explore different avenues of research.

I want to feel that I am really exploring possibilities rather than just making the version of Colony that’s already in my head, so some of the things I’ll be investigating are tangents that may lead me away from the things we’ve previously said are the nice things.

This is how we find the edges (hopefully), and the edges are where the interesting things happen (inevitably).

In the previous two incarnations of Colony, the objects carried have been small, light and kind of cuddly. The vibrations in response to the GPS data were only perceptible to the person carrying the object.

What happens if the objects become large and weighty?
What happens if their reactions are audible to those nearby?
What happens if you are moving in a group with others also making noise?

Dust: tech write-up

Now we’re the other side of Dust and safe from dropping any major spoilers, here’s a quick overview of how the Dust Balls were put together.

Dust balls? Here’s an extract from the explanatory text Hannah’s published on her blog:

The Dust Balls are large fragments of the city. They are formed out of open source electronics, clay, hope and optimism. They begin by introducing themselves to the listeners, and instruct them to point the device in different directions in order to ‘pick up’ stories of individuals in the areas surrounding them. Depending on the timing and direction in which you are facing, different stories will be heard.

They are heavy, and designed to be listened to by two people at once – the weight and bulk of the object meaning that two are required to support it. The two people sharing each experience of overhearing the stories should be strangers.

Quite a design brief there, with some technologies I’d never worked with before (audio and direction-sensing). Fortunately I know where I am with clay!

The finished Dust Balls

There’s a whole other post-worth of talk about the whys, wherefores and processes relating to the clay, but this post is about what went inside the Dust Balls.

Short answer: lots of electronics.

Location, location, location

Once we’d decided to site the Dust event on top of the Vyse Street car park, I spent several hours up there over 3 or 4 visits after work. We didn’t have much in the way of lead-in, but this was time well spent getting to know the feel of the location and details such as how loud the ambient noise of the traffic below is, how busy the car park is at that time and generally getting to know the lie of the land.

View from the top deck of the car park towards Snow Hill station and Colmore Square.

From here we were able to locate the 5 story threads that Hannah had written amalgamating objects and memories submitted by different contributors.

Thread 1: a visitor to Birmingham is reminded of being in love; Thread 2: a man feels like a boy as he listens to a recording of the grandfather he never met; Thread 3: an office-worker battling deadlines and spreadsheet puts a hand to the pocket containing one of his son's toys; Thread 4; a victim runs through the city streets at the feet of the tower blocks; Thread 5: a friend bearing a gift walks purposefully towards the hospital.

Working from a tracing from a fold-out A-Z map of Birmingham, I drew out the segments for each thread and used a protractor to get the bearings for the boundaries between threads. This working diagram was then orientated to North and taped to the table-top in preparation for testing the the next stages…

The compass module

After some research into different options, I decided to use this CMPS10 tilt-compensated compass module. The tilt compensation was important (since we couldn’t guarantee the Dust Balls would be held horizontally) but it was also selected because of the range of communication methods (serial, I2C, pwm) and the documentation and example code available. Given the lack of time and my lack of coding chops, this is the sort of bet-hedging that was required!

It was easy enough to get the compass module working with an Arduino using the example code. I initially tried serial communication, but I couldn’t get this working via the NewSoftSerial library when I came to combine it with the mp3 shield.

The switch to I2C communication required the addition of a couple of pull-up resistors, which I made into a stripboard ‘shield’ that I could plug into the Arduino stack.

This made things a bit more robust for placing them inside the Dust Balls, as well as being a nice convenient modular approach.

I also added in a push-to-make switch between the ground and reset pins. This would allow me to place the the electronics at the back of the Dust Ball where they wouldn’t interfere so much with the compass readings, but to still have reasonable easy access to reset the kit between users.

mp3 shield

The remaining component of the set-up is the mp3 player shield. I used this one from SparkFun, and it worked, although I may well choose something different next time around…

The main thing to be aware of with this shield is the lack of a line out. There’s a headphone socket and somewhere to connect a speaker, but using an amplifier without also adding in protection against electrostatic discharge runs the risk of frying the audio chip. We’ve been lucky so far using portable speakers in the headphone socket, YMMV and you have been warned.

When using these shields you also need to be careful to install the SDFat library correctly (only the ‘SdFat’ folder from the zip file) and ensure you make the necessary changes to the Sd2PinMap.h file as documented in the mp3 player example.

The comments on the product page are well worth a read through too.

Anyway, I got it working eventually…

… et enfin…

The final stack looked like this:

Arduino Uno, mp3 player shield and homebrew I2C/reset shield, also connected to the compass module and the portable speaker. All powered with a PP3 9 volt battery connected to the Arduino’s power jack.

I added in some hot melt glue to protect the soldered joints that were prone to flexing and breaking and also used black insulation tape to cover over some of the power LEDs (I didn’t want the Dust Balls to look like they were powered by Kryptonite!).

Strips of velcro were used to hold the components in place during use, whilst still leaving them removable when required.

The code takes its main functionality from the compass and mp3 player examples, with some logic to select which audio track to play depending on which direction you’re facing and what’s been played before.

As ever, there’s room for improvement, but hopefully there’s enough here to get you started with your own projects. There’s also a set of photos from the make on Flickr.

We will not be afraid to get our hands dirty.

We will make and share our own tools as appropriate.
We will collaborate.
We will be generous.
We will be porousexcerpt from the Splacist Manifesto 2.0

Mapping possibilities

Yesterday I took part in Spurse’s Mapping the Distributed Self workshop at the Guggenheim Lab: “Can we develop a different view of the self—a self that extends beyond our skin, out into the surrounding environment? One that is distributed and woven into the environment?”

At the moment everything’s reflecting back onto Splacism as we try and figure out what it is and what it might be.

Amongst a whirl of kitten carousels and collapsing wave functions, I’m now pondering the opportunities for working with digital tools and materials for creating new ways of perceiving our surroundings and encounters.

Assemblages; perspectives; co-composition; possible states; experimentation; meeting local conditions; mapping as fiction-making; disintegrating tales; the needs of the self.

Can we explore differently in order to reveal new possibilities?

Through the use of new tools, do we get a new world to interact with?

How do you arrive at the places that are not yet mapped?