Final projects from Michael Gurevich’s Interactive Media Design course (PAT 452) will be shown in Design Lab 1 early next week. Students will present their work in DL1 on Monday, April 29 from 3:00 PM to 5:00 PM. Their installations will be displayed both Monday and Tuesday.

Conor Barry, a Master’s candidate in Media Arts, set up his piece entitled “Leave a Message” early Thursday morning. The viewer is prompted to speak into one of six telephones suspended from the ceiling. From Barry’s artist statement:

An interactive sonic art installation that encourages people to leave messages to create a communal answering machine of feelings and thoughts left for whoever wants to listen in.

Pick up a phone and say ‘Hello’. The operator will then ask you to leave a message. Each phone will store 10 messages before replacing the oldest. Or you can just listen.

The recorded messages are played continuously, and can be heard faintly when approaching the telephones. Barry’s installation has already attracted many curious onlookers in the Central Collaboration Area outside of DL1.

Be sure to stop by DL1 next Monday or Tuesday to see the rest of the Interactive Media Design projects!

Filed under: Creativity and Design, Events
Tags: Interactive Media Design
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Today in Design Lab 1, a team of students was working on the functionality of their Collaborative Creative Project (CCP).  This year-long project is part of the curriculum for Living Arts, an interdisciplinary residential community in Bursley Hall on the University of Michigan’s North Campus that brings together 80 undergraduates in the arts, architecture, engineering, and other fields to explore innovation, creativity and collaboration.  This particular project aspires to address the emotional connection people have with light.

All 15 groups look at separate, assigned topics and will have their projects on display this Saturday, April 13th from 4 – 6pm in the Gallery at Duderstadt Center–feel free to stop by!

 

 

 

 

Filed under: Creativity and Design, Electronics Projects, News

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What’s better than a concert? A concert in a library.

The Digital Music Ensemble (DME) brought student musicians from the University of Illinois and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to perform with them remotely in DL1, producing a concert in the three schools simultaneously. The score was composed by Carolina Heredia and the performance featured very special guests Elliot Sharp (in DL1) and Henry Grimes (at Illinois). The event addressed the “problem” of delay in simultaneous internet performance by embracing it, exploring the value of improvising with phrases that were intentionally passed from location to location at the speed of sound. Pictured in close-up below, the sound domes hanging from the ceiling on the left and right enabled the musical feeds from RPI and UI to be focused directionally in the room.

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Hello all…

Its crunch time on the Lumenotbots. We will need to have a manufacturing extravaganza soon to complete the rest of the boards but this Sunday we will be meeting in the Workantile again at 12pm, on South Main Street.

 

We will hopefully have some working demos to show off, finish up some LED strips, and all the little things that still need to be sorted out.

 

See you then!

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Tags: lumenotbot, workantile
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Over the past semester, I have been working on a series of week-long models with a partner from my ARCH 422 studio, Charlie Gaidica. All three of the models were inspired in some way by the goings on in Design Lab 1. Now that the series is over, we will be sharing them and showing how their development was influenced by this wonderful space!

All three of the projects incorporate the same programmatic elements in different sites. Our group was tasked with designing a performance space and the site for the third iteration was the apse at the University of Michigan Museum of Art on central campus. The materials required to make the model were “found objects.” We decided to continue our exploration of the potential of the plastic animal toys we used for our first modeling project. This time however, the model would be scaled down, so instead of working with the toys at a 1/4″ = 1′ scale, we utilized them at a 1/8″ = 1′ scale.

Through this play of scale and reimagining of form, this project aimed to recreate a relatively conventional performance space using unconventional materials. Drawing from such precedents as Greg Lynn and Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate (better known as The Bean in Chicago), we hoped to dematerialize the found objects and “forget what they actually are.” The decision to paint the found objects metallic silver was based on the idea of dematerializing the forms further as well as drawing upon the precious nature of museum objects and the cultural implications of chrome.

Thanks for tuning into this three-part series, hope you enjoyed the models!

Filed under: Modeling, News

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Here in DL1, Robert Alexander and Yohei Kanehara have been working together on some really interesting work about sound in space, specifically the Sun! Here are a few quick questions and answers about his research.

 

Q: Why did you choose to work on this UROP project?

A: I chose to work on this UROP project because I am fascinated by sound, which stems from my background in electronic music production and sound engineering.

Q: Who are you working with?
A: I am currently working closely with Robert Alexander who is a Phd candidate in Design Science. The project is also overseen by Dr. Jason Gilbert. They both are involved in research as part of the Solar and Heliospheric Research Group.

Q: What does “sonification” mean?
A: Sonification refers to the transmission of data through sound.

Q: Why did you choose the sound samples that you are working with?
A: For this particular assignment, I was given the freedom to analyze any data set. However, a large amount of data is required to successfully audify data so I chose to analyse data from one of NASA’s database since it contains an array of large data sets. I sampled data from the GENESIS space probe which collected data on solar wind from 2001 to 2004. I chose to analyze the solar wind’s proton temperature since it is indicates the solar wind type. I sampled data from November 2001 to April 2004.

Q: How did you collect your samples?
A:The data samples that I am working with came from NASA’s database which can be accessed online here:

http://cdaweb.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/eval2.cgi

Q: What is the goal of this research project?
A: The goal of this research project is to explore various sonification techniques to explore solar data in order to isolate interesting moments in data and to gain new perspectives that may or may not have been possible through visual data alone.

Q: What techniques or technologies are you using the develop your research?
A: The main software we are using are Max/MSP, MatLab, iZotope RX, and Logic Pro. Max/MSP and MatLab are used to audify the data while iZotope RX and Logic Pro are used to analyze the data. For this project, I used an audifier in MatLab to transcribe the data set into sound. After listening to the audio file on repeat several times, I opened the audio file in iZotope RX, which creates a spectrogram of the audio file. After analyzing the audio’s spectral content, I opened the audio file in Logic and processed the sounds by passing it through filters, slowing the playback, etc. which gave rise to new conclusions.

Q: What about this research have you found most fascinating?
A: The amount of detail that is discernable in a small bit of audio has fascinated me. The audio files that I am working with are on average only about 10 seconds long. However, if the audio file is looped and listend to repeatedly, many audio artifacts can be detected in that short ammount of audio.

Q: Where is this work leading you?
A: This work is leading to a UROP symposium in April where I will present my findings from throughout the year and share my UROP experience.

Q: What are some of the conclusions you’ve come to?
A: For this project, I have concluded two potential coronal mass ejection events that occur in May and July of 2002. After further investigation, I comfirmed that these events were CME events.

Q: What is something you have learned from your UROP experience that you would like to share with others?

A: I would like others to become more aware of the field of sonifcation. I think it is an overlooked practice in the field of scientific research. If combined with visual data analysis, I believe that sonification can provide a useful narrative to data sets.

 

Yohei’s presentation, pictured here, was on some of his most recent data:

Congrats Yohei! Keep up the great work!

Cheers,

DL1

Filed under: Audio Production, News

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Lumenotbot public workshop at All Hands Active in downtown Ann Arbor at 5pm on Friday 22nd of March!

No experience required to be involved in the manufacturing of our Lumenotbot boards!

The workshop will start at 5pm and we have the space until 9pm.

 

525 E. Liberty Street, a small doorway that leads downstairs.

 

Fun Times!

 

Also we have Studio 6 installed on two computers in DL1 now, an avr programmer on its way.

 

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Over the past semester, I have been working on a series of week-long models with a partner from my ARCH 422 studio, Charlie Gaidica.  All three of the models were inspired in some way by the goings on in Design Lab 1.  Now that the series is over, we will be sharing them and showing how their development was influenced by this wonderful space!

All three of the projects incorporate the same programmatic elements in different sites.  Our group was tasked with designing a performance space and the site for the second iteration was at the pool at Central Campus Recreation Building.  The model was required to “hold water” and additions or transformations to the site had to be the product of casting, imprinting or molding.

Inspired by the everyday materials at Design Lab 1, we decided to pursue a model made entirely of sugar, rather than using the typical materials for architectural models–rockite, plaster or concrete.  Using the following recipe, we heated our candy mixture to 300 defrees Fahrenheit and cooled it using a variety of techniques toward different effects.  Instead of opting for vacuum formed plastic molds or complex timber formwork, we used aluminum foil.

1.75 cups sugar | 1 cup water | 0.5 cups corn syrup | 1/8 Tbsp cream of tar tar

Our intervention was a pure material exploration of the implications of sugar-based forms in an architectural context.  Hope you enjoy!

 

 

 

 

 

Keep an eye out for the next post in the Architectural Modeling Series, which will focus on another on-campus intervention to create a unique theoretical performance space through a new modeling technique driven by Design Lab 1 supplies.

Filed under: News

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