zero pressure

a feature of my experience this week has been a tenable feeling of what my comfort zone is as i’ve been feeling very much outside it.

after our day of hosting i got back to making with much gusto on the tuesday.

my day began with accepting something very unexpected.  the load sensors i’d ordered were not on next day delivery as promised, they are coming from hong kong instead.

i took a gamble and bought some bathroom scales to hack.

arriving in the mill i once again missed the window of opportunity to get inducted on the vinyl cutter.  i cracked on with the work connected to trying to make the maker bar more understandable and accessible.

the first aspect of this is the remaking of the a board to communicate what the maker bar is for the visitor, especially the first time visitor.  i’ve seen so much conscious dissonance on the faces of visitors and i am driven to improve this for future visitors.

my plan is to add to the prepared board the words we need to get over what the bar is.  interestingly while working on how to make the words, the words themselves have evolved to include some more maker language.

across two separate days i’ve prepared the boards and investigated word production other than vinyl.

the next stage of the visitor experience is the maker bar menu.  when we began the residency the bar had one activity to do and this was different for every single time the bar was open.  i saw this as potentially unsustainable.

the menu follows up what the a board says.  it lists the process, materials and projects that the visitor can become involved with.  it also takes the opportunity to highlight the other processes available to try in the workshops.

to maximise the space on the changeable menu the header has been moved onto part of the physical form of the menu.

my favourite image of the week is this one of the letters sitting on the base of the laser cutter

my other project of the week has been to create a method of sensing a person.  this is for my re-imagined snee snaw project.  the bathroom scales are for this.

having played with 4 load sensors to create a load cell earlier in the residency i feel i know and understand how it works and it made it easier to hack the bathroom scales.

put simply my plan with the scales was to remove the lcd and circuit board. this leaves the assembler board for the load sensors.  to this i  attach new header pins and connect  to a hx711 amplifier unit.  this connects to an arduno pro-mini.  the pro-mini also has a bluetooth hc-05 board connected to it.  the whole set up is powered by a usb power pack.

i successfully made the hack.

the value for the scale is broadcast via bluetooth to isadora.  in isadora i noticed how the value rolled over ie got to 255 and went back to 0 and kept increasing.

i did some testing and discovered that isadora can only accept 0-255 on the serial connection.  using a test sketch i worked out how to use the arduino map feature to ensure that isadora receives values between 0 and 255.  on reflecting about this, i think that the big bang interactive would benefit from the map modification as well.

with the research confirmed and uploaded to the pro-minis. i now have two person sensors.  their output in isadora can differentiate between the masses of the persons.  maybe i need a posher word than sensor ….

at the beginning of the post i mentioned comfort zone and my feeling of being out of mine.

the origin of this has been to do with wether or not i could achieve a way of sensing mass of a person and feed this into isadora.  it’s the basis of the snee snaw (re-imagined) actually working.

the feeling has also been further increased by the need to create the maker bar interpretation things.  interestingly in an art context i think this would be mediation.   personally it feels like mediation as i need the visitor to know something.  interpretation to me speaks of someone else making sense of something for them.  i’m actually after the visitor making up their own mind about it rather than reacting to it.

having made the mass communication work, my out of comfort experience has been reset so i can begin the next phase of edging into discomfort prior to feeling ok again.  this rather implies that if i am to truely make something i will feel uncomfortable.

at the height of my recent discomfort i went for a walk.

during the walk i tried to consider what visually the out of comfort zone would look like.  i arrived at this.

it is sometimes very difficult to use verbal langauge to describe a feeling and i get how visual language is so strong at doing this.  years after graduating it finally makes sense !

so using the same location to describe visually what inside my comfort zone is …

i’ve often remarked that all days are big days and some are bigger than others.  today at the mill we were joined by becca, the maker ed representative in the uk.  a maker and practioner herself, she’s currently an ma design student at goldsmiths in london.

https://twitter.com/andrewsugars/status/757552389066989568

i’ve been able to handle the day of talking much better than i did at the beginning of the residency.  i can’t say for sure why this is, however i do know that i feel more assured and confident as a maker at the mill with ongoing projects and deadlines to meet.  this feels really good as i can look back and see the journey to this point and feel proud of where i’ve got to and have more ambitions now than at the beginning of the residency.

making does make me happier.

having had a break from the main makes i’ve improvised with photo and video makes to add to my day.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BIS1gR-DaT_

https://youtu.be/q2wO3evG9wM

after writing yesterdays post i found myself being drawn into considering the snee snaw programming again.  despite the alteration in how i thought about the how the work was made there was still something that i really felt uncomfortable with.

i’d made a choice about how to use the osc data within the arduino sketch.  this method got the led control working quickly however as i progressed to wanting to do more, this method was starting to create more problems than solving them.

yesterday i radically altered the led control method and as a result reprogrammed everything i had done up to this point.

the net effect is that i now believe the programming of the functionality i want the work to have will be easier to achieve.

i slept better last night.  after a week of hight temperatures i’ve become adjusted and tired enough to have a sound nights sleep.

the physical form of the work needs to be considered, designed and made.  i feel the need to take time off from the programming to consider the physical form.

when i bounced around on the first day of the residency talking about me and my work i really didn;t expect to be actually working on realising the re-imagined snee snaw.

on the first day i was hyper with nerves and covering it mucho mucho bouncing.

so here i am half way through the time and yesterday i think the pushing to find a solution to how to make the snee snaw work again became a little closer.

as part of trying out the museum of making i once again set up my makerspace in the body of the museum with a really good view of the museum and all that would occur there.  it proved a good place to observe the interactions at the maker bar too and the conversations around the epidiascope.

the work done on the snee snaw yesterday was really good.  i challenged my own thinking about the concept of how it would work as i was finding that when attempting to programme the concept i had no way into how to start to make it work.

i skipped around the space while i contemplated the core concept.

the skipping was punctuated with conversations with both museum staff and visitors stopping to find out what i was doing.  i had several offers of help and this felt really rather good.

a regular feature of the residency are the informal happen almost anywhere maker chats.  these for me are one to one in which i share with and listen to one of the other makers in residence.  these chats are always helpful.  yesterday one of the chats was considering the seating concept for the snee snaw.

with the core concept of the snee snaw re-negotiated i feel happier about progressing and being ready to show the work in august.

before the mill opened i had an opportunity to show the contents of my residency box to the mill’s marketing intern.  one of her roles is to update the silk mill tumblr site.  we chatted about my practice and she explained how what i did wasn’t as easy to get as the practioner who works in glass.  having an array of objects that i’d made allowed her to get more of a comprehension of the dynamic range of interests in making that i have.

in an other chat prior to programming i checked in with the workshop manager about which workshop processes would be appropriate to create the loose parts for the steam tot brief.

as he played with the quickly generated shapes something quite unexpected happened.

i made a connection between the creation and playing with the loose parts and the big bang interactive.  with the interactive i programmed various variable conditions with which the visitors played with and created something based on their play.

i was seeing almost exactly the same happening with the three loose parts in the hands of the workshop manager.

this was a big moment on my understanding of what my intenetions are how the ideas i explore in the programming world do have a place outside of the coding window and it’s deployment.

i went to bed feeling i’d had a good day and felt excited at continuing the development and pushing to complete.

i’ve been working from home today.  the emphasis has been on establishing the osc control between the main isadora programme and the arduino driving the neopixels (individually addressed rgb leds ).

in the finished work the neopixels will communicate the relationship between the participants movements to each other.

i’ve worked with the neopixels and osc before at a much lower level.  in this re-imagining of the snee snaw i’m pushing into realms of relational maths not investigated by myself before.

i’m at proof of concept stage with it.

the figment festival want the snee snaw to be apart of it and trying to make sure that the principles of the new components are in the majority understood before officially committing to submitting the idea.

cautious maybe.

on monday i was asked how my day was.  i replied “frustrating”.  today has been similar with me experiencing again the transition from working to not working with the ensuing head scratching and working out how to make it work again.

it is a test of resilience and commitment to keep going when there appears to be nothing wrong yet the thing still doesn’t behave as i’d expect.

experience tells me in these situations of unexpected behaviour to concentrate on finding a way around the problem as often the problem is such that i don;t know where to begin to actually understand it.  i’d rather get it working with a workaround than picking at it for an unknown amount of time to get to why it stopped working.

i might find that tomorrow the thing actually works again anyway.