FMP

test

http://www.rosscairns.com/portfolio/emotional-text/

After the advice I got the other day from a guy at Waterloo I decided to take a detour to Charring Cross station on my way home from work, it proved to be a bit late to get anything from them but contrary to what they said at Waterloo there are no Solari displays stored at the station to his knowledge, he gave me the card of the Duty Station Manager who I have emailed but he will be away until the end of this project, but for my own personal interest I wanted to get in contact with him so I am currently waiting for his reply.

Today after the site visit for the GDNM end of year show I went via Waterloo to get home, rather than just sit for 30 minutes doing nothing, I went and found a member of staff who directed my question the the Station Reception where a helpful member of staff informated me that the Solari displays which were taken down were disposed of as he was working when they were sitting in the skip outside the station. He did recall some members of staff taking their home station’s flap with them but nothing was kept due to space constraints.

The time was not of waste as he suggested that I go to Charring Cross and ask there as they keep stuff like that in a mini museum of stuff they have, so when I am next in London I will check that out.

I am off to Farnham tomorrow to use the laser cutter, and with any luck will have my mechanical parts, the parts which should assemble into a 52 character set of letters…

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ0123456789 £?!@/:.,#$()’” (the final character will be a special one, either blank or a white card).

This is a mockup of the split-flip displays I am trying to create in Flash for my FMP.

So far I have managed to work out how to make Flash CS4 / Flash Player 10 perform 3D rotation around a point so that the flipping looks real, next I am going to create a film strip like this running from A-Z, 0-9 and ? @ £ $ ! , . / : ” ‘ ( ) punctuation marks.

In my efforst to build a split-flip display I discovered that the old ones National Rail used to use were refered to as Solari and the last one was from Liverpool Street Station, here is the email from my house mate who’s dad used to work for the railways so has friends who still work there now…

From: Claire Ashfield

Subject: FW: hi

Date: 7 April 2009 23:14:53 BST

To: Tom Lynch

I spoke to Tom (Guy from National Rail) this evening, he said that the last station that had Solari was Liverpool Street but that too has changed to another system.  On the matter of new systems the latest LCD systems are to be found at St. Pancras Thameslink station and St Pancras Eurostar station. Tom said if your friend (me) wants to discuss station information systems with him to let me know, I will contact Tom, get his details and your friend can then contact Tom.  Tom, by the way, is a Senior Signals and Information Systems Engineer.

Please let me know if this of interest.

xxx

From: Claire Ashfield

Sent: Tuesday, April 07, 2009 12:55 PM

To: Brian Ashfield

Subject: hi

Hi again, do you know of anything else that’s used to show information?

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<ADVERTISING REMOVED>

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<ADVERTISING REMOVED>

Over the Easter weekend I have been working on one of several parts of my final pieces, the moving message display, and I have managed to near enough complete it today.

Link to Maplin

The display was bought from Maplin, I managed to get a discount of 5% because it had a slight mark on the display which I haven’t noticed since so I bought it for £75.99 (from £79.99) at the Maplin on the Strand.

Its very bright and comes with drivers and software only for Windows so I used my parents computer to try and reverse engineer it by monitoring the data it sent using the Windows program I knew I would be able to work out how it worked and make a Mac equivalent using Processing.

Eventually I worked out how it worked, it sends a message to the display in side tags… <ID00> is the first tag and the last two digits determine which display will be responding, in this case 00 means all displays, mine is display 01 and if you address each display directly you get a confirmation message back so I used <ID01>. Each command is then ended with <E> and there are various types of data to go in the middle.

I discovered through experimentation that unfortunately when the command is sent to the display it creates something called a checksum which is a way of adding up the values of all the bits of information sent and creating a short number which the display at the other end then checks to see that it adds up too, any errors and it will send back an error message to the computer.

I discovered by searching the first bit of code in google that other people had tried to make this display work too and while some encountered no checksum others did, which made me realise there must be several displays with the same communication protocol.

After a lot of experimenting with it I finally got some code which would send a message to the display nearly all the time without issues. However I still had to send it Twitter messages so I made another program which listed them out to the screen, once I had a small prototype working I could get it to send them to the message display. After some work last night and today I had a Twitter Message Display which works nearly all the time without issue however some times the display gets confused and will keep sending error messages back so I have created a system where it will send the whole message again and again till it works rather than just giving up.

The only problem is at the moment it will work through 20 tweets from the public timeline and then just stop so I need to work out how to get more.

The code:

import processing.serial.*;
int message_no = 0;
String message;
int state = 0;
boolean ready = true;
Serial display;
Twitter twitter;
int num_messages;

void setup() {
display = new Serial(this, Serial.list()[0]);
twitter = new Twitter("username", "password");
}

void draw() {

if (state == 0) {

try {
java.util.List statuses = twitter.getPublicTimeline();

if (ready) {
if (state == 0) {
display.write("05");
ready = false;
} else if (state == 1) {
display.write(outputMessage());
ready = false;
} else if (state == 2) {
display.write("06");
ready = false;
} else if (state == 3) {
println(message_no + ": " + message + " - display updated!");
delay(1325 + (message.length() * 90));
message_no++;
state = 0;
ready = true;
if (message_no >= num_messages) { exit(); }
}
}
}

[quicktime]http://www.tiletoy.org/media/videos/word.mov[/quicktime]

This bus stop advertisement shows when ski conditions are good by blowing snow up into the sealed glass container.

I have managed to get Tweets from the Twitter API and format them into a readable format for web display, planning to make a map of them next. 1. Get Tweets/

As promised I managed to map some Tweets onto a Google Map. 2. Mapping Tweets/

One of the first stages of my FMP schedule was to apply for ALF and today I received a letter from UCA granting me this money so now I have a good amount from UCA to build my FMP project.

Thats right! 3005 is done, few, now time to sleep ready for the next one!

This is a place holder for my presentation.

[Read as a PDF]

These are images from books which I have looked at to share, mostly images but a few text pages aswell if you can read them, I scanned them at 72 dpi because I am an idiot.

This discourse review will look at a whole range of the art and design field, which produces all types of output from print, to digital and installation work. This work can be interactive, static and animated. This review will not just look at one area of design but will brush through multiple areas. These areas are in no particular order: New media art, digital art, interactive art, software art and device art.

The these terms are all well defined in Wikipedia if you require a definition, with the exception of device art which was coined by Machiko Kusahara and is better known as physical computing, which is defined well on Wikipedia.

There are many artists in this area of design, too many to name, here are a few:

United Visual Artists
Troika
Universal Everything
Jer Thorp
Lady Ada
Moritz WaldemeyerRon Arad
Jim Campbell
Michael Cross

The list could go on for pages and pages, however the point is that while this may be a relatively small area of design there are a lot of well known artists who are taking an interest in this area of design, or are just starting out, people have been creating personal projects in this area for a long time but it has not been until recently that these ‘geek projects’ have been used in a more wide spread manor such as there is now. With the commercialisation of this work, that is to say, now people get paid to do this, the amount of time and the diversity of these projects is able to grow and so rather than rough prototypes these projects are allowed to flourish to completion.

Despite the commercial aspect of this area of art and design many people still experiment at their own leisure in these areas for personal development, or just for fun. However companies such as Nokia, Addidas and Sony are taking a real interest in how a project like this could launch their latest product or promote their brand.

As with all forms of art and design there are those who write about this area too, however just not in the numbers currently that some areas are written in, three of the best books in this area are: Troika’s Digital By Design, and Lucy Bullivant’s Responsive Environments and 4dsocial: Interactive Design Environments. In addition to these books there are also many magazine articles written such as the recent article in Creative Review discussing Universal Everything’s Forever project for the V&A.

While some of the writing in these books and articles is quite interesting, it is frequently quite dry or repetitive, just regurgitating the same information as the artist had already provided, and it is perhaps due to the digital nature of this form of art and design which causes this regurgitation, because, most artists explain their work well and in some cases provide video how-to or making-of videos it is hard for the author of these publications to find anything new to ask or write about.

These books and articles will be of great help and importance in the FMP because they will offer guidance and inspiration, for example in reply to the Creative Review article one person wrote how the V&A Forever project reminded them of a large screen saver, which is obviously not the intended meaning of the project, so it will help to remember that not everyone sees things as you do. Additionally a lot of inspiration can be drawn from looking at other people’s projects which is exactly what led to this FMP brief.

ISBNs:
1851774815, 0500514380, 0470319119, 0470090928, 3899552172

URLs:

http://pieces-at-random.com/2009/01/13/va-forever/

http://www.designassembly.org/2008/12/11/va-forever/

http://www.creativereview.co.uk/crblog/va-forever/

http://troika.uk.com

http://universaleverything.com

http://uva.co.uk/

http://ladyada.net/

http://blprnt.com/

[Read as a PDF]

Students at NYU have created a 120 foot long computer display which is built using a large number of digital projectors in alignment. The display is a window into a virtual world which responds to external stimuli such as sound and vibration. It is able to sense a clap or a stomp and translate it into an action in the virtual world such as birds flying away from the loud sound of everyone clapping in the room.

[Via Gizmodo]

[View as: HTML or PDF]

This API allows access to various bits of information including all their news articles back to 1981, which has allowed this artist to create a few spectacular images using the processing language and this API.

[Source]

[Read as a PDF]

[youtube]fIdm_g8sX1A[/youtube]

[Via Dan]

[Read as a PDF]

I will probably need an internet connection at the show, and if we are unable to get one via the uni I may have to buy a 3G USB data card.

Here are the options…

There are for 1 month or less minimum plans.

O2 – £30 + £2 a day for 500MB (0.5p per MB) or £7.50 a week for 1GB (1p per MB)

Orange – 30 day plans only (fail)

Vodafone – £40 + £15 per GB (1.5p per MB) – Pay as you use

T-Mobile – £40 + £2 a day for 3GB (>0.1p per MB)

Three – £50 + £10 for 1GB (

This was a paragraph I didn’t want to throw away but I didn’t think really fit in the Design Proposal, I have edited it to make sense out of context of the rest of the proposal…

Twitter the API allows for two separate areas of interaction, the first area allows you to interact directly with the end users account, their tweets, followers, and their followers messages, the other area allows the widget to search through all public tweets and access pre-compiled data sets such at the last 600 most recent tweets and the top 10 current trends (most popular words).

Title: Adventures in API

Project Summery: This project will explore internet based Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) through the creation of physical and digital interactive art and products, the project will access online services such as Twitter, Flickr, Digg, Facebook, BBC Backstage and Google Maps to create a interactive project which will be displayed at hand in and at the end of year show.

Format: The project may take any format which suits the design solution however it should include an interactive element, whether it be overt or not. In the past access to information on the internet was only via the standard interface provided by website owners however, more and more frequently large websites are offering free access to their data for others to produce what is commonly known as a mash up or widget.

Mash Up: A mash up is the combination of two or more services to produce a hybrid service which interfaces with both services and offers new functionality to one or both of the services, these mash ups sometimes collect extra information from users, and sometimes offer their own derivative APIs. An example mash up might use the Twitter API to collect information about tweeted messages within a 5 mile radius of a point selected in the Google Maps API which allows you to display map data in your application and add pin points for each tweeted message at the exact place it was written.

Widget: A widget is a small, single purpose application. Many of these widgets access databases of some kind, some times using APIs, widgets are common on modern computer systems and mobile phones, and generally are used to provide access to a website using a customised or improved interface. For example built into every Mac is a Yell.com widget, this widget allows users to search the Yell database and get telephone numbers from the database right on their desktop without having to load the whole site.

Project Description: This project excites me as I find the possibility of mixing art and these data sets very interesting, I can imagine no better outcome from this project than for people to be standing around my work, interacting, engaging and enjoying it. I would love to see people work out that it is using an API for example Twitter, and start trying hack their own messages into the system by posting their own messages to the live system.

The first week of the project will be spent experimenting with the APIs to see how I can access them and what I can get out of them and possibly cross-reference them (mash up). The next week will be spent experiment with the various physical and digital outputs that are available to use such as lights, sound and actuators and digital applications like Processing, Open Frameworks and VVVV. The third week will involve rapid prototyping of different idea and this will be done until the half way point. During the second half of the project I will develop the strongest prototypes into a few final solutions, at which point one will be selected to be produced full scale, based on the strength of the idea and the cost of implementation at full scale. This final idea will be implemented in the last 2-3 weeks of the FMP.

[Read as a PDF]

This is an interesting video on internet use now, and what we can do to make our country better using its resources.

Film Website [Source: Ben L via DSS]

[youtube]LlqU1o3NmSw[/youtube]

1. FMP Design Proposal
2. Discourse Review
3. A2 Boards (2x)
4. Project Presentation
5. Production timetable and costs

COMPLETED!

This is the first copy of my production schedule, not sure what to put in the few weeks up to the final build, perhaps I am being optimistic about the other weeks at the beginning.

This project will visualise in physical and/or digital form a live internet data set/source, and will take the form of a installation, which will be presented at the end of year show.

NB: Obviously it will need to be presented prior to the end of year show in order to be marked on this.

These were two ideas I came up with after Claire wrote them down, and she also asked me questions to get me thinking….

1. The next is the name of my favourite book ever, not because of the fact its got my name but because when I was a kid we bought this book as an old on the library didn’t want anymore and I remember reading it many times as a kid and its basically the story of Thomas baking a cake for is parents and serving it with orange juice, the illustrations are what I loved the simple bright images. The best bit was the orange juice and the green sauce pan which my Gran actually still has to this day.

2. Photographers rights have been affected by a newly passed law prohibiting the photographing of police officers and some other things too, I thought I could make a photographers rights video in a motion graphic way to show what you can and can’t do now as a photographer. Visually I was thinking of…

[vimeo]3061178[/vimeo]

[youtube]U0FAaah8jgY[/youtube]

[youtube]jJTLL1UjvfU[/youtube]

[youtube]MChlT0GvFPM[/youtube]

This is a list of APIs from Wikipedia, its not all of them its just a list supported by a mashup site but its quite an extensive list, for idea generating purposes, outside of my Twitter only list so far.

UVA – linky

Monolake – linky

UVA/Light Fantastic – linky

64 balloons make an 8×8 grid of height controlable lit balloons, they illumination is controlled along with the height as a kind of visualisation of the sound being played/created by the artists. This is a highly physical and visual VJ set.

TweetDeck is a simple mac application for Twitter which provides a desktop experiance for the Twitter service, you can group people in to columns so you can effectivly read tweets in your own customised list, and you can use it to reply directly to those people, its great for dealing with massive volumes of Twitters at once.

Source

For a U2 gig, UVA were asked to create a video display for the hanging curtain of LED balls used throughout the gig, their repsonse was a camera based system which gathered video loops of the audience and played it back during the performance of one of the songs. They also created other video content for the show.

[quicktime]http://www.uva.co.uk/wp/wp-content/projects/u2/u2web.mov[/quicktime]

Source

This piece was installed in the V&A’s John Madejski garden in Winter 2006 it used the humans as an interaction element, creating audio and video output, as people walked through the space each column would respond to you.

It seems like recently whenever I go to do some research for my blog every project comes back to this one, Volume, I really wish I had been aware of this so I could have seen it when it was in place. Its such a simple idea but very effective, I would like to see them have used it in other ways though, for example taking the concept of Monolith one of their other projects where it repels you using its light and sound effects which become more and more imposing the closer you are, it could give personality to each column.

Source

This was one of several UVA pieces showcased at an international lighting products show.

Source

This installation was held in Tokyo to mark the opening of UK-Japan 2008, it was a responsive floor which processed the kinetic energy of the visitors into audio and visual responses on the floor. This installation is brilliant it makes me want to play with it just looking at these images, and reminds me of being a kid and playing on those interactive matts which play music when you stomp on them.

Source

This 4m x 4m cube of light consists of 27 1m x 1m smaller cubes which are constructed from lit batons which illuminate in response to sensors under the floor. It was very popular and had to be kept up for another 6 months after the original installation was due to end.

This installation reacts to how close people are to the screen, when you get closer the ’sticky notes’ become visible and as you step away they dissappear, this forces people to interact with the device simply by their presence. Additionally there is a screen at the end which allows you to add your own content to the screen, and the device can be themed, so as it travels from event to event it can have new themes created so its always evolving.

Source

This is similar to one of the ideas I talk to Claire about, it uses the geocode on tweets to locate them on a map of the world, this one marks them with a blue dot on a map of the USA during the Obama inauguration, it also allows you to filter by two words and assign them a colour red or blue, so you can have good / evil in blue and red or Obama / McCain for example. It also allows you to scrub through the time line so you don’t have just a static image you can see quarter hourley snapshots of tweets across the united states, the image above shows Jan 21st 2009 – 12:00pm EST.

I like this method of showing information, on the map and the way you can do red vs blue comparisons.

This person has also created other similar Twitter visualisations using processing and the Twitter API.

Obama Inauguration Twitter Map | Source

This installation was the winning entry in a competition to improve this space under the bridge which was considered unsafe before.

I like the way this space has been reused to make some thing out of an otherwise uninteresting and potentially scary place to walk at night, or in the day.

This is in Amsterdam.

Source

[quicktime]http://www.lozano-hemmer.com/videos/pulsepark_newyork.mov[/quicktime]

This installation was created in the centre of New York in the Madison Square Park and allowed participants to have their heart rate read by the installation and converted into a pulsing light. There are 200 lights around the perimeter of the park pointing inward which illuminate the space, and the heart rate of the current visitor is shown by pulsing all 200 lights on and off at once, after the lights continue to pulse, but instead of all pulsing once persons beat it shows the last 200 beats, one on each light, with the most recent at position one, gradually over time they are pushed down the list until they are lost off the end forever..

This is a piece created by UVA for a Kylie Minogue music video, they used optical fiber to create the patterns which were illuminated using controlled lighting in time with the beat of the music.

I like this again because of the lighting but mainly because of the synchronisation between the music and the video.

Kylie Minogue – UnitedVisualArtists

This idea involves a high power projector imaging the contents of a tweet onto the side of London’s buildings, because it is projected from almost the exact place you are viewing it, the shapes align and you can read the text on the buildings but from any other roof top in London it is obscured in part or completely because of the different depths of buildings and viewing angle, the tweets are searched live from twitter and filtered down to be as personal as you can make them. – At the end of year show from the roof of the brewery.

Searched Twitter for “I am”: http://tinyurl.com/db7btl its coming back with loads of stuff, may be able to use it for my FMP

For my first option, I will use Twitter’s search API to find tweets by all users in a certain area, using the GPS tag information posted with the tweets, then using a computer program I will calculate the mood of that persons tweet by searching the tweet for keywords which are in a database assigning a number between -10 and +10 to attribute mood to that word. The system will then average out the moods on each tweet and assign a number using mood colours, on a simple level it would be Sad to Happy but could use other ranges too…

Sad                                                                                                  Happy

-10 -9 -8 -7 -6 -5 -4 -3 -2 -1 0 +1 +2 +3 +4 +5 +6 +7 +8 +9 +10

Red                                        White                                               Green

So for the sentence, I hate him, he has ruined my life it might detect hate as a -10 and ruined as -3, -3 + -10 = -13 / 2 = -6.5 which may be a orange/red colour.

The users would interact with this by controling the search location on a Google map and using physical sliders to define a search range which is netrual giving a full range of emotions of biased towards an emotion such as anger.

The results would be shown in a grid of colour changing orbs which reprisent a live feed of the twitters.

This installation by Troika (its Troy-ka not Tro-kia, anyway) is again located in Heathrow Terminal 5 and was built using large EL or ElectroLuminescent display technology, Troika have created a typeface and display whcih show the time in various places around the world, the idea is to link the location with far away places.

Again I like this because of its use of light in interesting ways, and its large scale.

All The Time In The World – Troika

For this project Tinker it! used balloons connected with a simple LED connected to a fading circuit so they faded on and off, these were hung from the roof of a building creating a ambient glowing effect during the events course and were given away at the end, and could be seen all around London that night. 120 were made for the YCN Live launch event which also featured custom RFID tags for each guest, the tags were sent out on the invitations and could be used to tag things as you explored the event, those tagged items were later sent via email to the guests mailbox.

I like the idea of using RFID to tag elements here, and the use of the balloons is some thing we are already exploring in our end of year show plans but again excites me because I love any kind of lighting control, such as this, however computer based control is more interesting.

They used a round knob fitted to podiums as an interface for content to be browsed on large screens.

YCN Live – Tinker it!

This installation by AllofUs is in the Science Musuem and is designed to sense when people (kids) sit on (or as AllofUs points out jump on in most cases) the computer keys, when the pressure is sensed it responds using sound, light and vibration to engage the participants in the basics of Morse Code.

This installation is particularly interesting to me because it looks at an area which I would like to investigate as a possibility for my final design.

AllofUs.

This installation is an interactive display of 64 lit batons, the lighting responds to one of two inputs, the kiosk inside allows people to put a colour on a sensor and have it travel around the installation. The outside element is an Oyster card reader which allows passers by to put their Oyster card onto the reader and have it convert the numbers held on the card into a unique colour which again travels around the installation.

Inside Kiosk

The colour sampler is on the left, and a book of colours is provided to the users, also acts as another Oyster card reader for internal users.

Forcefield – Tinker it!.

This is one half of the Cloud an installation created by Troika which consists of over 4,500 electronic mirror dots that are individually controlled by the computer, the technology comes from the old style train information boards used at stations such as London Waterloo as recently as 2008.

I really like this installation because of the sound it makes, the combined noise of these 4,500+ dots sounds like rain as they flip back and forth. The noise combined with the cloud like shape and the shimmering effects simulates a rain cloud.

The installation is held in London’s Heathrow Terminal 5 which is quite fitting considering it is an electronic cloud, it is located in a large atrium with 2 sets of escalators either side, which allows you to rise up towards the Cloud as you use the escalators.

Cloud – Troika

Thanks to Ricky for sharing this with me via Facebook, see the link below for a video of the sculpture in action

Kinetic Sculpture

Another hand out today to help us understand the Discourse review a 500 word document we have to write as part of this module, the following is the hand out sheet followed by the 1hr excercise we were set to produce the discourse review in three’s for one of the three’s projects, ours was using Tom Fiddimore’s project.

Hi, just thought you may find the links below useful. Also a book, called, Responsive Environments by Lucy Bullivant you may find useful (http://www.lucybullivant.net/).

http://www.interactivearchitecture.org/

I have also uploaded a pdf ver of Andrea’s presentation.

http://shakenvac.com/uca/new_media/Responsive_Environments_arch_re.pdf

Links,

Listening Post, Ben Rubin & Mark Hansen,

Video, http://real.ny1.com:8080/ramgen/real3/0003DAFC_030122_130333hi.rm
Website, http://www.earstudio.com (in the projects section)

Christian Moeller,

Audio Grove;

Website, http://www.christian-moeller.com/
Video, http://blizzard.he.net/~cm4/media/movies/22_audio_groove_T1.mov

Camera Music/Kinetic Shadows

Video, http://blizzard.he.net/~cm4/media/movies/cm_T1.mov

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Body Movies, Relational Architecture

Website, http://www.lozano-hemmer.com/
Video, http://www.lozano-hemmer.com/video/bodymovies.mov

Mark

Shakenvac.com | <Telephone Number Removed>

Today I had a tutorial in the office with Laurie, and Ben was there, I was explaining my idea when Laurie roped Ben into it as I had been talking to Ben previously about my project, one thing led to another and I ended up pretty down on the whole module so far, then Ben suggested I take a look at a book called Cyber Reader and perhaps I could use one of the articles in that book as a basis for a project proposal. I returned later and after talking for a bit I ended up suggesting using data sources and filtering and defining them into my project, I may still come back to this book for inspiration…

In todays lecture Ben asked us to come along with a sense of where we want to be in 5 years time, I wasn’t sure so he asked me I enjoyed, in life and my main response we design so we looked at what design I liked my prime examples were UVA, Troika, Universal Everything and AllofUs and we made a project proposal using their visual styles in about 15 to 30 minutes and it has helped me begin the whole FMP process.

Mark + Laurie had us in today to do a quick and dirty project imagining we were to do the perfect project for our imaginary person. The idea was to keep it fictional but I couldn’t help but end up making it something I had been thinking about for a while.

Meaning

1. Who is it made for?
   Visitors of the V&A museum, there are two main types of visitors to the installation those who came to see it and those who came whilst it was there, the latter being anyone from English school children from London to Asian tourists from China. The former probably fit the profile of 20 and 39 years old with an interest in art or digital media. They could be students of art and/or design, or employed members of the public, situated in and around the London area. They maybe from any religion or ethnicity and are probably from a well off background, however this is not guaranteed.  

2. What is it about this piece of design that connects it with its audience?
   This piece connects with its audience by allowing them to relax in a quite environment within the tranquil isolated court yard, the screen provides visual stimulation and visualisation of the music which is reflected by the pool of water, in which the screen stands, the reflection is distorted by ripples produced by the occasional thunderous bass played by the screen and fellow guests who are adventurous enough to go paddling in the pool.  

3. Which cultural connections are references
   This is a digital installation art piece, the sound references the classic sounds of the buildings history. The visualisations represent the museum and its contents.  

4. What are its modes of communication?
   It produces an entertaining environment using video, sound and water inside an isolated space.  

5. What is its tone of voice?
   Reflective, calming, introspective, atmospheric, isolated, refreshing, time warping, focused, zen, free, intriguing, abstract, generative, progressive, ambient.  

6. What style is used?
   It uses computer based visualisation.  

7. What stylistic and ideological references exist?
   This piece takes no time to reference others design work however it bares striking similarity in technical aspects to the work of the United Visual Artists pieces Volume, and especially Monolith.

Making

1. Who commissioned it?
   The V&A commissioned Universal Everything to produce this piece, probably with the brief to create an installation piece which utilises sound and visual elements to create an ambient environment.  

2. Who made it?
   Universal Everything – Art Direction
   XL Video – Video Screen
   PostSpectacular – Programming / Software  

3. Where did they make it?
   The piece is intended to be shown at other locations around the world but it will be at the V&A museum in London until February 2nd 2009.
    
4. When did they make it?
   There is not information currently as to when it was first conceived however it was mentioned by Matt Pyke of Universal Everything at a D&AD presidents lecture in October and there are images and discussion about it on Karsten Schmidt’s Flickr profile dating to October also, which would seem to suggest that the project was near the end of development during October as the display began showing on November 21st 2008. Additionally there are pictures on Schmidt’s Flickr profile showing images of the large screen in a warehouse where they are testing the display, obviously showing they are preparing to display the piece and have most of the technical details nailed down (October 10th 2008).  

5. What processes were employed to make it?
   Karsten Schmidt was responsible for the programming of the piece, it was created using  EMF which stands for Eclipse Modelling Framework, a type of XML it is used to generate code based on a structured data model, and it then creates classes which can be used in Java, from this.  

6. What skills were required to make it?
   This project would require creative direction to ensure the end result meets the brief and is visually right. Programming would be required to produce the software which generates the images, and project management would be required to ensure that the piece is delivered on time, but also to ensure that they had things like sponsorship and the large LED display.  

7. How long did it take?
   This is already answered in the last few questions: It is impossible to be sure but It was nearly ready in October and would probably have taken a couple of months to get there so I expect its a 3-4 month job.

Websites

http://universaleverything.com/276

http://vimeo.com/2705911

http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=299050404&subMediaType=Video

http://www.eyemagazine.com/feature.php?id=161&fid=732

http://www.vam.ac.uk/collections/contemporary/forever/index.html

http://postspectacular.com/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/toxi/sets/72157610858699751/

It has begun!

I lost mine in the mess of my room, so this is Claire’s with all her notes on it, sorry bout that…

Today we had the briefing and we were set a task for Friday, Ben has asked us to research an area to help understand the meaning and making areas of the project.

Brief:

This space will be used for my FMP research and production, which is the final part of my three year degree.

Lets hope it goes well *crosses fingers*.

Tom