[Badlydrawnbas]

Originally Posted by evanplain

A recent installation that I was part of at Concordia University in Montreal in collaboration with Hexagram and the Topological Media Lab.

My piece is a typewriting machine. It was listening to another project - a steam machine - and collecting sound data from its drops of condensation on a contact microphone. The data was sent to a computer which analyzed it with Max/MSP and wirelessly sent the information to my computer running Max/MSP and Arduino. At a certain volume the software would trigger a pulse to be sent to a piece of shape memory alloy (SMA or "muscle wire") - which would activate the "pincers" to complete the circuits on a 1987 Brother electronic typewriter keyboard circuit. Hopefully that makes some sense... but here are some images that might help.

The installation


Projection of the print-head


Detail of the "pincers"



My makeshift workshop for the week.


The circuit that was the guts to the project.


Some output that I got. It is fairly arbitrary right now, but I just got the device working. So now I will work on some coding and try to implement some kind of order or disorder into the output.


And a shot of the entire room. It was pretty impressive what we were all able to pull off in one short very intensive week.

INTENSE!!