Colony residency: final push

Only 5 more days of the residency at the PM Studio left; I’d better squeeze in another update!

After the first wave of lasering and constructing with Sarah Barnes, there was just enough time to refine the design of the creatures and squeak out enough cuts to make 3 creatures out of plywood (a lot nicer material to work with and handle compared to the MDF I had been using for the previous prototypes).

Cabourg stack waiting to be assembled

Version 9 of the spine has vertebrae that echo the street layout of Cabourg: a French seaside resort and influence in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. I like this as an allusion to the multi-path error phenomena from which the creatures’ movement is derived.

Speaking of their movement, it was a very nice moment when we got this tail moving:

It had been tense moments up until that point because as well as the change in vertebrae material I’d also changed the hose I was using for the ‘spinal column’ and tweaked the positioning of the hole used for the driver cord.

Alongside changes in the overall dimensions, we now had a structure that was a lot lighter and more manageable to carry. It would still be a bit of a weight to carry for any length of time, though, and since I want people to be able to use their hands for sensing movement rather than gripping and carrying, we also did a few experiments with binding the creatures to their guardian:

Hands free!

The process of wrapping up yourself and a creature in a long length of fabric is an interesting one and I think it has a lot of potential for symbolic beginnings and fostering empathy.

Once the 9 days of laser cutting were over (gosh we came a long way in that short amount of time!), it was time to return to the Pervasive Media Studio and tackle the code and electronics once again.

Wait! No! What am I saying?! Once the 9 days of laser cutting were over, it was time to spend a couple of days sanding the edges of all the vertebrae in order to remove the burnt wood and to make them smooth to the touch. The result was well worth it, though.

Sanded plywood vertebrae – much more touchable

After another couple of days soldering electronic circuits, the creatures were ready for assembly with GPS units, batteries, Arduino and the servos that control the articulated tail section. This isn’t yet the final set-up I want to use, but I had a group of playtesters arriving in Bristol the next day and I wanted to get something up and running so that they could have something landscape-reactive to try out.

The night before the playtesting I lay the freshly-assembled creatures out on a convenient table in the Studio and it was borderline unnerving to see them twitching away and generally just sort of quietly owning the place. Y’know, in a good way. In a very good way.

“Colony creatures are having a quick run-through of their presentation for next week’s Lunchtime Talk at @PMStudioUK”

Have we got space for another close-up of some curves? Yes. Yes, I think we might…

…And then play testing was upon us!

I’d invited a crack squad of playful people who I believed would ask me some challenging questions and push my assumptions about what I thought I’d made: Jen Southern, Stuart Nolan, David Morton, Kat Jungnickel, Sam Underwood and Laura Kriefman. I wasn’t disappointed! Much to consider, interrogate and experiment with.

The playtesters get acquainted with the creatures

In the few hours we had we didn’t focus on the landscape-reactiveness of the creatures so much, but there was a lot of exploration of how their forms related to the people carrying them. Here are just a few examples:

The other discovery was that the creatures were a MASSIVE invitation for strangers to approach us, ask what they were and, often, pose for photos with them. This process had started even before we’d left the studio, and once outside they continued to pique the curiosity of young and old alike:

A set of my photos and videos from the day is on Flickr.

This was all very satisfying and followed on nicely from my Lunchtime Talk at the Studio last year where I talked about how I see the things I make as permission givers and invitations for triangulation. Yup, I’m very pleased with that.

This Friday I’ll be giving another Lunchtime Talk at the Studio and, fingers crossed, by then we should be in a position to also try out some of the flocking aspects that Tarim has been working on.

Exciting!

Colony residency: iterations and combinations

The current Colony residency at the Pervasive Media Studio has a chunk of time for laser cutting in the middle. That’s where I am now: learning to use the laser cutter; improving my understanding of the physics and mechanics I want to harness to make the creatures move; and – what’s really interesting – getting new insights into the whole undertaking through having physical objects to interact with.

For this bit I also have Sarah Barnes to interact with, which is feeding in lots of other lovely references and observations!

Using the laser cutter we’ve been able to quickly cycle through several iterations of different elements to the creature structures.

The heartbeat – which will be used to indicate panic levels – was, two weeks ago, a solenoid glue-gunned to a cardboard box. In 6 days’ worth of laser cutting it’s gone from

heartbeat v00: solenoid glued to a cardboard box

via

first attempt at a solenoid mount: it looks so clunky now!

and

heartbeat v01: a much more lightweight structure, pressing rather than tapping

to this much smaller and lighter design:

heartbeat v04: scaled-down framework suitable – I hope! – for attaching to spine vertebrae.

The last week has been all about the spine, though. On Wednesday we attached a ‘tail’ to a servo and were able to see the combination articulating by themselves for the first time (prior to this it had been me tugging on a string).

After spending Thursday morning wrestling with how to skin the structure, we eventually decided that perhaps we didn’t need to and I embarked on preparing the files for a ‘body’ section that would be constructed in the same way as the tail. No laser cutting got done that day.

… but a lot got done on Friday, resulting in this little beauty!

Well, I say ‘little’, but it is kind of huge:

The new torso section joined onto the articulating tail

I have a few concerns about weight, and the consequences of this when the creatures are carried around for a significant amount of time, but the large size of the skeleton is proving to be very interesting in terms of how you relate it to your own body as you wrap it around yourself. It’s very similar to a process of stepping into a role and almost ritualistic as you become one with the structure. We’re now thinking that using a fabric poncho or sling tactic will work well for supporting some of the weight and also bonding you even more to the creature for which you will be a guardian.

Our little forays outside to take photos are also highlighting the creatures’ potential for catalysing stranger:stranger interactions as, even on a deserted summer campus, this one has already initiated conversations with several people who stop to ask questions as they pass by!

I’m really happy with the way all this is evolving: there’s a satisfying balance between proof of concept that I’ve been holding in my imagination for several years, mixed in with delightful little discoveries of the unexpected.

Colony residency: mid-way-ish

I’m currently a little more than half way through my Arts Council funded residency at the Pervasive Media Studio developing my ongoing project Colony.

A lot has happened in 21 days, so here’s a whistle-stop tour of what’s been achieved…

Android phones reporting to a central database

Way back in the first week of July (it seems like such an incredibly long time ago now!), we (Creative Technologist David Haylock and I) were thinking that we were going to build a system where Android smartphones uploaded their positions – and the status of the creatures they were housed in – to a central database. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but a few issues with hardware and a timely dollop of sense-talking from Tarim made us revert back to the logging-to-memory-card system I had been using before.

This freed David up to work on some mapping visualisations, whilst I worked on reformatting the Arduino code into a library-based structure. This has so far evolved from looking like:

openFrameworks based plot of data points

…to looking like this:

Google map based visualisation

This visualisation of the data will be a key tool for supporting post-journey discussion and understanding of what happened. It has already been something of an eye-opener for us as we start to be able to see links between the paths walked, the calculated latitude/longitude coordinates and other data such as Horizontal Dilution Of Precision.

Visualisation showing circles scaled to value of HDOP

A Work in Progress event on the 17th of July saw us experimenting outside with some heartbeats in boxes – carry the boxes into surroundings that are too built up and the heart would beat faster in a panicked state.

Checking to see if being by the harbourside helped

Keep it panicked for too long, and the heartbeat would stop.

Dead

A nudge of threshold values and a quick play testing excursion the next day saw more exploration of different spaces that would otherwise have been ignored.

Last week and this, I’m mostly based in the laser suite at UWE, collaborating with Sarah Barnes on the production of the articulated structures that will be the basis of the animated objects that participants will be carrying around the city.

Working our way through several iterations, we now have some promising looking mechanisms for the heartbeat and for a moving tail.

Next steps are to start combining these into a single construction and to start sending it out into the world to find out what affordances this assemblage might have. We’ve still got a few sheets of spangly lycra to experiment with, too!

More photos and videos can be found here:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/nikki_pugh/sets/72157645784475769/
https://www.flickr.com/photos/nikki_pugh/sets/72157645687684097/
https://www.flickr.com/photos/nikki_pugh/sets/72157646221072651/

Colony residency at the Pervasive Media Studio

I’m very happy indeed to be able to announce the start of a residency at the Pervasive Media Studio, Bristol, where I shall be developing my ongoing project Colony.

The residency will be for about a month – mostly taking part in July and August – and leads on from the Place Interfaces lunchtime talk I did for them a while back and conversations sprung from the GPS Orchestra workshop I ran.

An early prototype for a Colony creature

There’s more information on the PM Studio’s project page, but in short I’m developing some landscape-reactive ‘creatures’ and am interested how use of these affects our experience of navigating cities.

I’ve just finished an introductory 3 days in the Studio which I used to suss out my approach for the main chunk of time next month. It was also a good chance to revisit my original aims for the project (first conceived back in 2011) with a few years’ more experience under my belt. This process involved a lot of post-it notes and a few push-puppets.

I’m not sure how the push-puppets felt about this.

Doing a bit of research into how pack animals signal to each other

A push-puppet robot about to reveal its secrets…

These limbs were a red herring

Now we know!

Reassembled components = more learning

Having successfully dissected and reconfigured one of the push puppets, I wanted to see if this approach to applying and releasing rigidity could be scaled up to the sort of size that the creatures I’m making will be. (I’m investigating body tension as a simple way of communicating distress.)

Drilling axial holes in dowel with a lathe

After a morning drilling and sanding dowel on a convenient lathe, I was able to experiment with much larger components and start to see how different surfaces and gravity start to play against each other.

I suspect dowel’s going to be too heavy for my purposes, so I think I’ll try beads next.

Meanwhile I’ve also started investigating use of XBee radios to network all the creatures within the colony so they exchange information with each other.

Lots of pages like this in my notebook as I think that through:

Lines of communication

Protocode

Here’s what my desk ended up looking like:

Traces of thinking, learning and doing

I think that’s as good a representation of the process as any!

A few more photos from the last few days can be found on Flickr.

Many thanks to the Pervasive Media Studio community who have already moved my thinking on a lot, and also to Arts Council England who are supporting this residency through their Grants for the Arts programme.

Place interfaces – thoughts on bubblewrap, bees and lumps of clay

Here’s the audio and visual for the Lunchtime Talk I did on Friday for the Pervasive Media Studio in Bristol. I’m afraid I couldn’t add the wax pods…

In the talk I outline how I first got critical of interfaces and then use 3 recent projects (Colony, Dust and Waggle) to talk around approaches and experiences relating to using physical interfaces to mediate between people and place as well as between people and tech (and people and other people).

And Miles to Go Before I Sleep…

Between the 26th of April and the 11th of May I will be showing work alongside that of Gene George Earle, Trevor Pitt and Adam Smythe as part of an exhibition at the ARTicle gallery space, Birmingham.

And Miles to Go Before I Sleep… is a presentation of four distinct artistic practices. The title is taken from the poem ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ by the American writer Robert Frost. The poetic line acts as a metaphor for the durational endeavour and journey inherent in artistic production. This exhibition presents a pause or moment in that journey and shows us not necessarily completed or finished work, but a transitory phase in the generation and exploration of ideas at a given time.

The opening is 6-8pm on Wednesday 25th April 2012, do come and join us.

On Thursday the 26th I’ll be running 3 playtesting sessions where you can take the objects I’ve made out around the city centre and see what happens.

The sessions are free and take place 13:00 – 14:30, 15:30 – 17:00 and 18:00 – 19:30. Please sign up at http://heavyobjectbham.eventbrite.co.uk/.

ARTicle gallery is at the School of Art, Birmingham City University, Margaret Street, Birmingham, B3 3BX [map] and open Monday–Friday, 10–6pm.

Exhibition of Colony-related work at Phoenix Square

Following on from the residency I recently did at the Phoenix Square digital media centre in Leicester, traces of my work are now being exhibited in their public spaces around the foyer and café.

I understand there’s a short gap over this weekend to make way for an animation festival, but other than that my work runs through until Friday the 30th of March.

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?

Colony Prototyping #2

Thursday came and saw us doing the second round of user-testing for Colony as part of the Platinum showcase.

We walked, stood in smelly corners, manoeuvred in and out of fortified alleyways, got shouted at from cars and stared at from a variety of directions.

It was pretty great.

Moving on from the prototypes I had in March that simply vibrated at random, these prototypes were now loaded with code that made them responsive to their surroundings. Our task for the evening was to find out what that meant when you put that mathematical analysis of data a) into the hands of people and b) in to the streets.

The first group of participants set out to find out how all this works.

Another development since the initial testing was that this time there were two organisms. We’re getting incrementally closer to finding out what it might be like to have that colony of them.

The protoshape I used in March was a “small human sized” pear/water-drop/fish/swaddled baby kind of thing. This had seemed to be an ideal blank canvas upon which to project empathy and from which to project emotions and desires.

Grappling with the over-sized prototype (photo: Pete Ashton)

After a bit of a false start the weekend before, where I had made one that was too darn big, I remade it a lot smaller. And therefore a lot more huggable.

For the second of the two organisms I wanted to try something different, so I added an awkward limb/tentacle thing. Whereas with the drop-shaped blob the feedback vibration motors were very strategically placed along anticipated contact areas with the carrier’s body, the plan for this one was to make something less intuitive to hold and to see how people dealt with it.

A pause at the crossroads

Sash and shoulder; lock and load

Ant probes the streets of Highgate/Digbeth

JV goes for the torso wrap

The photos above show a few of the many solutions people came up with: headwear, neckwear, waistwear and gripped in a variety of different manners. It seemed to me that people were much more inclined to experiment with different ways of holding this creature, whereas with the other … well, this next photo sums up the different modes of interaction very well, I feel:

One blob gets a hug, whilst the other is borne down the street atop of a head

That's not to say that the baby-shape didn't get experimented with too...

A few next steps were identified over the course of the evening:

• People like data. I need data:
  Of some urgency is the need to log the changes in the data as the blobs are carried around. This is very important in terms of me being able to learn more about how this system works and how to tailor the different reactive responses, but people were also asking me a lot if they’d be able to see the traces of their walks.
• Reactive responses:
  There’s a lot of experimenting to be done in order to devise the vocabulary of vibrations (and possibly other responses) that somehow convey a sense of rising distress as the creatures are carried through environments in which they are uncomfortable.
• Reactive responses:
  With the current (no pun intended) set-up I’m limited to having a maximum of 2 vibrating pager motors switched on at any one time. Any more than this and there’s not enough power to drive them and nothing happens – I need to power the motors separately to the arduinos dealing with the data, but still have them controlled by the microcontrollers. I have been pointed towards Darlington transistors.
• Shapes:
  I need to try more of them. More tentacles? Bigger? Smaller? Fatter? Flatter?

Ashley gets his first buzz as he begins his journey with new companion

As well as a selection of interesting interactions with some of the few other people on the streets at that time, I was very pleased at the way the colony organisms provided an impetus for the testers to interact with their surroundings. Ultimately, this is what the project’s all about.

I've no idea what they're talking about, but I'd like to think it's a discussion about the architectural qualities of the local urban environment :)

A reassuring pat on the back for an organism unhappy to find itself in a narrow alleyway with no clear view of the sky

A corner not normally stood in

Not only not enough sky, but a hefty amount of barbed wire between it and you - no wonder they're not happy

A few moments of paying attention to a rollershutter alcove

Many thanks to everyone who helped get the prototypes working in a technical sense, and to everyone who experimented with and offered feedback on how they worked in a practical sense. More photos can be found in this Flickr set.