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

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.

Edit: Indeed, as pointed out in this thread, I also followed the instructions blindly and managed to replace the working firmata included in Arduino 12 with older version. Now all seem to work nicely: Older Arduino (Arduino Extreme 2 I think) + Arduino 12 + Processing 1.0.1

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.