My first encounter with Alternative Party, demoscene get-together was a nice surprise. Quite impressive event with geekiness, dedication and pure laid-back fun. I did demonstration with Koelse in bending and electronic noise, great fun. Tried also streaming video from phone to Bambuser from sunday ceremonies, bit useless footage, nice service though.

Random niceness:

sunlight vs children of the night

Reprap

Janne Pulkkila / Radioactive music (scroll down)

… and a wonderful software from Kitchen Budapest Animata

Pop-up landscapes project started properly when Teresa and Pedros from LOK workshopped in Finland. Intensive week started with a few days in Suomenlinna residency in Helsinki where we defined the common ground for our working. Overwhelming, but highy educative for me was to open up and deconstruct abstractions behind architectural mechanisms. Some excellent examples from existing work was shown, few examples below.

From Suomenlinna we travelled to Turku to meet Turku2011 coordinators and present Pop-up for potential collaboration with them. Next stop was Turku University Geographical department and a discussion with Dr. Niina Käyhkö explaining us some academic threads behind landscape research in Finland, most inspiring session. From Turku we continued to Kemiönsaari and three days of concentrated writing and modeling the first drafts for Pop-up experiments.

Project description

Pop-Up Landscapes is an intermedia art and research project about interdependence and survival. The project is currently at an early stage of conceptual development and will be realised in various stages, over the coming years (2008-2011). The core aim of the project is to create a public intervention which connects two landscapes together (e.g., Finland and Portugal). Within this intervention, people can explore their interdependencies to each other and their environments. Alongside the proposed public interventions other outputs will include exhibition, workshops, DIY project templates and publications. The project has been initiated and is lead by artist-researcher, Teresa Dillon (IRE/UK) and realized in collaboration with designer and media artist Tuomo Tammenpää(FI) and lok Arquitectura (PT/ES).

LOK: Instant Oasis

Polarproduce: Come Outside


Santiago Cirugeda / Urban Prescriptions

Pachube is a web service for routing dynamic data-feeds between user-made input&output nodes. I can for instance start to feed by home temperature to Pachube and someone somewhere can use that in realtime for pitch control. Why, why not? Or I could grab the price/oil barrel feed from those available and make a twisted connection to my radiator for anticpating the rocketing electric bill.

Configuring Pachube with Processing and Arduino with Firmata seemed first bit overwhelming after a quite a break from these apps. But it went surprisingly smoothly. Strangely enough, my biggest problem was just to upload the Firmata to Arduino. I’m using one of the earlier Arduinos and just loaded the latest software (012) which produced some undefined reference to timer0_overflow_count. After random googling, just a bit older version (009) uploaded the Firmata smoothly. The Pachuino example file worked nicely, some hassle with port forwarding with our ADSL and the pipeline between my tiny LDR and the world was clear.

Our “School” took part of ENO treeplanting day and we planted four oaks on our yard.

Sauma -exhibition opened at DDC with TileToy in it. The show will be open until January 2009 so plenty of time for that this time. We, me and Dan, are still looking for opportunities to make the needed next generation prototype, the one that could actually be manufactured. Waiting for that, some new nice design interventions have been added to Sauma show:

Bugia by Arihiro Miyake

“Tanssitossut” by Aamu Song & Johan Olin

Fireplace by Ilkka Suppanen

(photo: Nathalie Aubret)

Pixelache SummerSchool’08 took place August 7th-9th in our Kimito-Dojo. Ten creative minds played two day and nights with solar panels, analog electronics and hacked toys. The rainy days prevented the planned garden soldering but we rewarded ourselves with an assault to local flea market and among it’s goodies. The result: avant gardened singing horticulture, solar powered dinosaur, lullaby-toy on acid among others. Thank you very much Nathalie, Ami, Juha, Toni, Pinja, Jari, Richard & Robert, top job all of you!

some photos from:
Tuomo, Nathalie & Toni

The hectic workshop continued with Konstrundan 08 event and more soldering and solar panels, this time by kids. There was also a strange breed of solar animals spotted in our forest. Do they come in peace, what is their objective, we shall see.

A version of Mouse Labour project is being exhibited at Yrke, konstnär -exhibition in Parainen. This time the detailed recordings of mouse use are presented as high-resolution prints. The show itself portrays artists working in remote locations in South-West Finland and is part of Konstrundan 08 event.

My newest work-in-process, “Playkka” -play prototype is exhibited in Naantali Vanha Raatihuone from July 1st to 15th. Playkka is a play-test -platform to study play process with tangible interface, namely tagged objects. It is a table with four RFID readers, screen, audio and a pile of play items. The current alpha-alpha version does very little but might lead to new discoveries in “smart” play environments. Far from unique approach, the excellent and inspiring research by Timo Arnall and his students to name one source of inspiration.

Process description (in Finnish)
Article in Turun Sanomat (in Finnish)
Video

I’ll be hosting The first Pixelache Summerschool in our school on the magical Kimito-island. Join us for some outdoor electronics with makers, shakers & breakers. Preliminary date August 7.-8. 2008 + the weekend for cultural wonders of Konstrundan. Accomodation?: tent, floor, tree, sauna, shed, Transport?: Save the nature and take a bike to the train and see the wonders of Finnish archipelago. +20% more.

Google map destination.

First experiment of routing 2D graphic with High-Z S-400 CNC mill. The line graphic was exported as generic EPS from Freehand, converted with Cenon to HPGL format which opened to WinPC-NC milling software. Some hassle was with defining machine & workpiece coordinates and the end result was quite a bit off from 1:1. My short visit to Dan’s über-equipped “Polymer Technology Laboratory” restricted me from further studies this time. However, I hope I can get my own CNC building project back on track now.