Dimensions and Rejection

This is a mega update.  I have made little ones for John Cairns’ Digital Culture class but have really neglected to create one that focuses on my current direction in the program (which is a huge left turn).  I’m just going to go in chronological order from the last time I made a post outside of Halloween fun and my attempt at cultural satire.  I shot footage for this little video a few weeks before my last critique on October 22nd.  It gives a little taste of what it's like to be in my studio.  Time seems to slip into interesting directions.  Around that time I was having studio visits with a lot of people.  Nicole Gibbs (Project Manager to Ann Hamilton), Victoria Fu, and Bev Fishman (Head of Painting, Cranbrook), each had their own way of telling me to break out of habit and explore harder.  They each suggested that I minimize my use of color in order to restrict my intuitive abilities and allow concept to surface.  This trend was repeated during my critique.  I felt that I had been making steps across new ground involving canvas but it still doesn’t hold the energy  that my more confortable applications of mark making on paper have.

The canvas paintings did however influence me into a new place.  The above painting holds an old spirit that became buried in the chaos of the new.  I used to paint works that involved heavy focus on negative space and how that space can be imagined into something of dimension like this one.  So I thought, maybe it is finally time to make them dimensional.  I wasn’t sure that I would make it to this place this semester but it looks like I am completing part of my initial application proposal.  

On the 28th of October I raided the fabric closet for a piece of stretchy cloth and came up with this concept.  It is constructed out of a piece of plywood, 1/8th inch steel wire, the fabric, and staples.  I was rather happy with how it compared to my 2D work as it seems to just slip right into the lineage.  So what was next?  I initially thought that I was going to attempt to make a 4 x 8 foot piece that would be covered in this gesture and then I lifted the sheet of ply that I was going to make it with and after long thoughts decided that it would be best to make a bunch of little ones.  I had discussed the approach with Gordon Lee and we thought it would be interesting to create a-symmetrical forms like my concept but in the end I think I wasn’t ready to rip that far away from traditional painting.  The first few weeks in November I was heavy in production.

Pretty early in production I decided that I wanted to design an LED lighting setup the would light the sculptures form two sides. Initially it was going to be a programed sequence of colors that would interact with the surfaces of the sculptures but then over the head of creating an idiea for a final project for John's class I decided that I wanted to make a device that would allow the veiwer to make the color choices in real time.

I stopped at eight for a bit knowing full well that I was going to have to make one more because I couldn’t come up with a way to arrange eight in my head.  Final project time comes around for John’s class and I dove head first into Arduino microprocessors.  I had no idea what I was doing.  I was pretty confident in my ability to plug and play like a set of Legos but I had no idea how to read let alone write the codes required to drive sensors or LEDs.  After a trip to the hobby section of Micro Center I stayed up and figured out how to make a few things happen.  This video shows some of those early tricks.  I made LEDs blink a lot and then eventually figured out how to make a sonic sensor turn LEDs on based on distance.  I really wanted to make an interactive piece that detected a viewer's presence and then displayed different LED patterns based on their distance from the art.  Maybe I will try something like that in the future.

Eventually I fell into literacy with the Arduino but I was having issues. The trouble was getting multiple processes to talk to each other and in my case making a ColorPAL color sensor drive NeoPixel strips was becoming a challenge.  I managed to merge the basic sketches and was left with erratic data and a sensor that was not putting out correct data to the LEDs.  My thoughts on this matter were that the LEDs were dragging the program down.  Basically it was taking too much time to make the LEDs light and was falling behind the rate of the sensor reads.  So, John and I got together and did some brainstorming and messing around with the code.  We managed to get the code to create correct data reads but it was still lagging.  This meeting really pushed the ball over the edge.  Thanks John!

In the end this code was going to be heavily altered in order to make it controllable by the viewer.  I wanted two sets of LEDs to be controlled by buttons, A and B.  At this point I had to dissect a few different sketches in order to create button functions that told the LEDs to change to the color that the ColorPAL reads at the instance of the button press.  First I figured out how to do it on one button and one LED strip and then when that worked I went for two separate button/LED channels and here is how it works.  Party party party!!!  The next step is where I find myself now, upscaling my design and making it installation ready.

The idea here is to have two strings of LEDs running up the wall to the right and left of a 3 x 3 grid.   Veiwers will get to select a pair of paint swaths and scan them with the sensor in the box.  The lights will then change to the color in the scanner at the press of a button.  More on this in another update before critique.  I'm having trouble getting a stable current from the wall and my LEDs are not behaving...