Explore by making

Last class I came up with a number of ideas I want to try out:

Collaborative / semi-democratic creation

This thought comes down to exploring how we make decisions, but I wanted to start with something simpler — just exploring an interaction where a "thing" is created in a semi-democratic way based on people's choices. It's a grid of cells, where each cell can be either black or white, and the way it's decided is dependent on how many times it has been black or white before (or: how many people before you have chosen to make it this or that). This happens for each cell each time a session starts, but it happens at the cell level and not the grid level so you almost always get something new that is this semi-democratic combination of other people's choices. So inadvertently, piece by piece, we all end up contributing to an "agreed" object.

Feel free to participate in this link!

I have also added sliders for controlling the scale and blur amount because it really changes what you can see emerge from the grid and having sliders makes it easy to experiment with.

Further experimentation could include:

1. Testing different grid sizes (it's 7x7 now, but changing that has huge implications on the affordance and that's worth exploring).
2. Mental exercises of trying to translate this idea into other mediums? What form could this take? It's currently very (too?) abstract.
3. Letting each user see what the next user is going to see in real time, so that it would be something you take into account while making your decisions.

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Induction amplifier

Another thing I want to experiment with is building my own data-collection device — an induction amplifier — that's detecting electromagnetic fields (EMFs) generated by nearby electrical devices. All electrical devices, when they operate (i.e. are on), create electromagnetic fields around them. These fields are essentially invisible waves of energy produced by the movement of electrical currents. The induction amplifier has a coil (copper wire) that can pick up these electromagnetic fields. When the device is near an electrical source (like a power outlet or phone), the changing EMF induces a small electrical current in the coil. The tiny currents generated by induction are too weak to hear directly. So, the induction amplifier takes this weak signal and amplifies it, making it strong enough to be played as sound through speakers or headphones. As I don't like being noisy and I also need to somehow collect those sounds, the way I'm doing it should allow me to connect it to a Zoom recorder directly. The sounds aren't particularly nice, they are more like humming or buzzing but from what I've seen in the past they vary a lot which is useful in terms on data analysis.

I'm interested in recording different environments, different devices, seeing the range of things and experimenting with different sensitivity levels. However I'm not sure I'm particularly interested in the sound itself, but in the data it carries. So the next step after gathering samples is to analyze them using Fast Fourier Transform, which is way of breaking the samples down into specified number of buckets, from which one could analyze and compare the different frequencies. This could allow me to visualize the electrical signals that the original objects emitted.

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This exploration might take a while though. I have ordered the parts I need for the circuit because the shop at ITP doesn't have them, and I hope once they arrive I can get it to work without too much trouble (this is not my area of "expertise"). The analysis and visualization could be done in P5 / OpenFrameworks... I might want to try TouchDesigner because it's a good opportunity to learn this software.

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Other ideas I wanted to explore but are a bit vague right now

1. Can degradation be something that enhances a digital experience? What does degradation of digital assets mean? Physically or virtually speaking? How can we embed some form of digital decay into our internet habits and what would be the significance of this?
2. Magnets! I kind of want to experiment with the possibility of data-driven magnetic pieces - so interplay between physical force and external data. But I also kind of know this will be very hard to control and will probably not work the way I imagine it to.
3. More data collection devices! If I have one that collects electromagnetic fields of electronic object, I might want to look into collecting other kinds of data too. I think the point is collecting data we don't really see or experience with our senses, then mapping or translating it into something that we do. But it's not just for the sake of it, I think it'll be interesting to compare different object and environments based on all those things we can't really experience that are a part of them.

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Response to a peer's progress update

I wrote an email to Angel Wong regarding her latest progress update:

I think both your ideas are very interesting and are worth exploring / pursuing at this stage. 

As for the first idea — a lot of women have complicated relationships with their mothers. Some more so than others. I personally have a difficult relationship too, but over the years I've found that learning how common some of it is brings a little bit of comfort and helps navigating it more easily. Anyway, I guess the point I'm trying to make is that doing a personal project about your own relationship is something that many others can identify with even if their experience is different. I feel like sharing your own story, or crafting an experience that is based on your experience, can be an incredibly powerful and evocative experience. I would try to think about what it is I want my audience to feel and then work on possible storytelling angles to achieve that. I also think that aiming to create a series of small objects is a great idea and will allow you to represent different facets or different "small" ideas within a theme. Will they represent different emotions? Different events? Stages in your relationship? Deciding on this "limit" might be beneficial in creating a coherent and strong series.