Chris O’Shea over at Pixelsumo posted info a few days ago about the new Arduino Bluetooth Module which is finally available from PCB Europe for 80€. You program it through the Arduino interface and then upload via Bluetooth. Then of course you can communicate between your mobile phone and your new toy using Processing Mobile. More detailed information can be found on Massimo Banzai’s blog [link], which is now part of his new company Tinker.it!. Good news. Very good news. Keep on truckin’ Monsieur Banzi. Just keep on truckin’ !
More just-in-time-for-ENIAROF portraits to give you an idea about who is behind this project, what sort of things we’re interested in, as well as a glimpse of some of the work produced at the Atelier Hypermedia. This time we’re featuring Antonin Fourneau: inventor and organizer of ENIAROF, researcher at the Atelier de Recherches Interactives (ENSAD), and hacker/artist/coder working in the field of video games.
Here is one of my favorite works of Antonin, which he developped in collaboration with Erational for the FAN project at Villette Numérique 2004:
It’s a mini foldout Ping Pong table with two Gameboy Advance consoles connected to each other via a local network (cf. GameboyPong). The ball is then sent back and forth across its « net » via the digital network connecting the two consoles. This fed into Téléférique’s concept of FAN, which created an actual/virtual mix somewhere between « PC Tuning » (cf. JackyPC), Origami, and networking.
The Gameboy Nucleus explores many of the issues we’re interested in at the Atelier, and is basically a physical externalization of the interior structure of the Gameboy. Each of the components you see here (Music Box, Woodpecker Toy, Button, …) are externalized forms of internal registers in the Gameboy. By connecting them up you activate or change the state of these internal registers, and thereby affect the internal algorithm. Although I have been speaking in my writings and workshops for many years about the spatialization of algorithms and the externalization of code, I never actually thought of it in such concrete terms. It really is fascinating to see how he designed it. I also find the drawings just as interesting as the actual working forms: it’s interesting to see how he created physical forms of counters (« i++ »), loops (« for(;;) »), randoms (« rand()% »), and so on. It’s quite lovely to hold code in your hands like that.
Here is a photo of one another work from about the same period, one of his contributions to ENIAROF, the Pince Vocale (scream to get an origami robot out of the onscreen « factory » game and into your hands):
Since September 2005, Antonin has been at ARI in Paris, where he has been expanding this work into a whole series of game console manipulations, some of which he presented at the Tokyo Dorkbot in late September:
One of these works, the Noisy Nucleus was also featured as one of the installations at this year’s Festival Emergences(note: as mentioned previously here, ENIAROF was given « carte blanche » at the festival this year, as a sort of bar-room entertainment between musical acts; a role we were — for once in our lives — happy to fill, given the nature of the project). The central idea to the Noisy Nucleus is that the output of one video game or console (joystick, video output, sound, etc) can be used as input into another video game. He basically hacks into the protocol of various game peripherals (SNES, etc), and creates a transcoder/recorder, allowing signals of one machine to pass into another. For example, while playing streetfighter you can also be mixing a breakcore soundtrack
Click the above images for this Quicktime video clip taken from Antonin’s presentation at ARI.
Finally, for this year’s Arborescence, he and Jankenpopp built a series of ENIAROF-style video game consoles. Two of Antonin’s proposals are worth mentioning. The first is a street-fighter with only one joystick: you basically fight against yourself. In the second, the « jump » button has been connected to the video output of Donkey Kong: whenever you jump the screen goes black; and since you have to jump a lot in Donkey Kong, this makes the game very hard to play:
Here’s a YouTube clip of the modified Street Fighter:
And then finally, comes this year’s ENIAROF, which Antonin is frantically preparing as we speak:
I will mention this later on the blog as we get closer, but if you happen to be at the Chicago Art Institute at the end of the week, Antonin and I will be giving a webcast presentation on the last wednesday of this month (11:00 am). This is part of our cross-atlantic teaching collaboration. We’ll see if we can record that somehow and put it onto some podcast (haven’t gotten around to making one yet).
Still in preparation for ENIAROF 0.2, and while we’re waiting for things to start, my collegue Ben Chang over at the Chicago Art Institute sent me to Tale of Tales’Realtime Art Manifesto [link]. He suggested it in relation to our DOGMeNIAROF, and indeed there are many similarities. But they’ve got even better slogans: « Do not render! », « Be a dictator », « Interactivity wants to be free », and other semantically ambiguous slogans. And then there is the last one, which ties in very well with the whole ENIAROF philosophy: « Develop a punk economy ».
In fact, on this last idea is absolutely something that inspired ENIAROF. We’ve been talking quite some time in the Atelier about punk rock, and how it developped not only its own community but its own economy. Of course it got co-opted, but I remember fondly as a youth things such as the Gilman Street Project (which still exists I’m told), along with MAXIMUMROCKNROLL which was always payable in cash. The shows and magazines were cheap, but you still paid for them. They were also easily sneak-in-able and photocopyable, which brings us also to digital distribution and filesharing. These two things are not mutually exclusive. Often, my students confuse anti-globalization with issues of monetary exchange (of any kind), whereas it’s far more instructive to look at the economies of scale rather than getting bogged down on whether or not to pay people for stuff-you-want™ anyway. They looked at me a little screwy last week when I suggested that it’s a good idea to sell your music and software for a few bucks. We were discussing these issues in relation to the recent Microsoft XNA Game Studio announcement for independent developers. They just snickered, « sure iTunes is cool, but it’s always cheaper on Emule ».
« Sell your games! »
All that said, I disagree when it comes to Tale of Tales’ « Game art is slave art » : « Make art-games, not game-art. Game art is just modern art – ironical, cynical, afraid of beauty, afraid of meaning. » I don’t know who they’re referencing here, but I can think of a few, and if so, I don’t agree. While I’m sympathetic to their attitude there, I think there is still a lot of fun to milked out of irony and cynicsm. It’s a little too easy to embrace the populist spirit 100% – down with sophistication and all that hogwash. That’s why I like the ENIAROF spirit – we can be highbrow and lobrow and whatever. What I personally find so interesting about the emerging Kaiju-culture is how it’s both cynical/ironic and fun. Like money and sharing, these two terms are not mutually exclusive.
Update: I forgot to mention that Tale of Tales exhibited their Endless Forest at the ZeroOne festival this summer. It looked very pretty but I didn’t really have time to play with it, unforunately.
This is a work that Manuel Braun developped for his Diplôme Nationale Supérieure d’Arts Plastiques in June, and which has just been exhibited in Toulouse at the Centre régional d’initiatives pour l’art contemporain. It is a 5 x 5 pixel array made out of computer fans. Each fan represents one pixel which together make a very singular display. On that display runs an artificial life program based on Coway’s famous Game of Life. It‘s a beautiful work, quite mesmerizing and yet very simple. When Brigitte Bosch from the bbb gave me « carte blanche » to select the work of a young multimedia artist for an exhibit she was preparing, I chose this work — principally because I wanted to defend a certain tendancy we currently have been exploring in the Atelier Hypermedia : i.e. the move away from purely screen based work by introducing visual algorithms increasingly into the phyiscal space. But I was also particularly happy with this work having watched Manuel’s research over the years on the infinite variations one can inflict on the idea of the « pixel ». I felt with this work that he had evolved from the research stage into a coherent phase plastique. And finally there is the fairly obvious (and humorous) reversal of the role of matérial/mimetic component, a sort of digital form of the old support / surface debate.
I don’t usually talk about other people’s work here, using this blog mostly as an easy form of communication. But I probably should talk more about my students’ and former-students’ works, as their work is so influential to my own, especially given the very particular structure of the Atelier Hypermedia. I’m also mentioning it here because this work was the first final-year diploma installation to use Processing and more importantly the PicoIP Processing library Stéphane Cousot and I developped last year for Jean-Pierre Mandon’s PicoIP project. When I look at the work we were doing with Macrodobe’s Director and the work we’re now doing with Processing, I think the change was definitely worth it.
Filed under: circuit,code — Douglas Edric Stanley @ 00:11 am
New toy tool! Santa came early this year.
I just received my Wiring circuit board from Hernando Barragán. I couldn’t help myself, so I just plugged it in to see what it does (ok, I checked the circuitboard first to make sure I wouldn’t blow anything). As promised, it’s really well designed, so it works right out of the box. There’s an onboard power light, and an on-board debug LED (very handy, that), so you immediately get what you need: the power LED lets you know you’re on, and after the bootloader delay, the debug LED starts flashing to let you know the program is working. Yes, it comes loaded with a simple flasher program — very cool: plug it in, and it’s already blinking the electronic equivalent of “Hello World!”
There are a lot of things I like about it, number one being that it uses Atmel chips, which means that I can compile off of my Mac with an open-source solution (GCC). Number two, it uses the same FTDI USB chips I’ve been experimenting with on the Gameboy Advance. These chips aren’t all that expensive, and come with free drivers for MacOS9/MacOSX/Windows/Linux that allow you to create a virtual serial port over USB. Using serial ports is easy from a programming perspective, and building USB drivers is not. On the other hand, USB is very handy, especially since you can power the board for light usage over USB. In fact, the “Hello World!” program I mentioned works directly off USB, no need to plug in the power supply; although if you want serious power consumption you’ll have to switch the jumper and plug in an external power source. Most importantly, Macs haven’t had serial ports for years, and about a year ago my Windows junkies over at LOEIL stopped laughing at me when they discovered that their new laptops don’t have them either.
But obviously the key is the Wiring software. And here Wiring is amazingly simple. Download software, load up a sample LED program, plug in the board, push compile (the same “play” button as Processing) and then load it to the board. Reset the board and your program is running in hardware. Wiring takes care of linking to GCC as well as sending the program over to the Atmel flash rom.
After some more fiddling, I was playing around with a servo motor, stepper motor, etc.
At the LOEIL laboratory, we mostly use PIC chips, which are great because they’re cheap. So whenever I’m free, I’ve been learning the PIC chip over the past year, and what I’ve really come to hate above all is the complicated setup process, and the lack of any open-source compiler. I have to do everything on my PC, or on my Mac with patchy emulators. Until now the only serious Mac circuitboard work you could do was with the expensive BASIC Stamp. Some of my collegues also use Basic for PIC development, but I prefer C. Hence my joy in discovering that the Wiring project uses the GCC compiler. It’s C, so it would be a little bit harder for the students than Basic, but I’m not so sure about that, as the real problem is always getting the electronics right and setting up the compiler. Wiring makes all that simple.
In the past, I’ve used a similar prototype board, called the EZIO. (When he was here in Aix a few years back, Chris Csikszentmihályi told me that he had something to do with the development of that board, but he wouldn’t tell me exactly what.) Over the years there have been several other input/output boards like the EZIO and Wiring. The difference here is that you’re learning to work with a real microcontroller, which you can control at whatever level you want. Just like Processing, you can branch off into your own code if you want, or use the pre-cooked functions. It’s up to you.
Filed under: circuit,code,play — Douglas Edric Stanley @ 03:07 am
I’ve been working on an interface to easily connection up Director and the Gameboy Advance, allowing the GBA to act as a joystick to a Director interface, as well as to transfer data between the two entitites. This would allow the GBA to send/grab data online, particularly for an attempt I’m making of adapting the Abstract Machine Game designer for the Gameboy. So far I’ve got Director talking to the Gameboy Advance and sending data back and forth. But my protocol is a little buggy and I sometimes (in particular instances) don’t perfectly map activity on the Gameboy from within Director. I think it’s the way I set up my bitmasks that screwed me up, I’m going to have to start all over, I think.
I’ve got far more information on this over at the PLAY+MOBILE website, although it’s in French (sorry!). But there are more links for you to work off of. I’ve been using an FTDI chip which allows me to plug the Gameboy Advance directly into the USB port of and Mac or PC. I could also plug into Linux, but since Director doesn’t run on Linux, it’s sort of a moot point for me right now.
