asli sevinc

I haven’t been writing at all to my blog! Mostly because I’ve been too busy with my thesis, my thesis blog and other things. This week I’m attending a workshop lead by Alberto Tognazzi on a parallel project with Barcelona. Their website and documentation is here, only in Spanish though. It’s a project that will bridge New York and Barcelona through local narratives, music and sound, public interaction and intervention using mobile devices. I’ll post the final product of this exciting, week-long workshop at the end of the week!

Instructions:
Go for a walk.  At each intersection, flip a coin to decide which direction to walk.  Observe things around you, go into buildings you walk past.  Record your observations.

E8th and Broadway

The guys on the window washing crane aren’t cleaning the windows of a 20 story building, they are painting over all the windows with white primer
Rafiqi’s halal cart in front of B of A has been upgraded to a brand new red van.

Mercer and Waverly

We are spotting lots of construction.
The crane/cherry picker is bright blue, it make Asli smile.
The italian place looks closed.  The door says they are closed because of “technical difficulties”
Alsi notes a bike that looks like it is melting into the ground.

Mercer and next block

Corner is pretty boring.  The facade of the building kitty-corner to our position is ornate and nice to look at.  Going inside to investigate the building

Inside building

Department of Economics, the outside of the building looks old but the inside looks modern with nice chairs.
There are still a few old ornate pillars from the original building decor.
The interior of the building is as big as the block.  It didn’t seem that way from the outside.
Mike realizes that he has been in this building before - for the Future of Infrastructure final presentations.
We walked a block inside the building without flipping a coin.
The guards are much happier in this building.

On Broadway and West 4th.

Everything is about construction in New York.
The scaffolding has a big first level then lots of tiny upper levels.
Notice a water tower on a distant building, it looks old and like it is about to fall over.

We notice Todd trying to sneak up on us.  After we see him, he looks confused and runs in the opposite direction. Amazing.

Inside leather shoe store on Broadway

Too many colors
Too many shoes.

Mike likes “kid” mini green cowboy boots.
Asli likes the pink Doc Martens and the fact that there is no loud music playing in the store.
There is nothing much.

Crazy flame shoes with huge buckles.

Back on Broadway

We notice that there are water tanks on almost every roof we see.
We also notice one roof with plants on the top.

Broadway

Ugly more modern brick building.  Is it NYU dorms, I think so.
A lot of cool looking buildings
Guy with a shaved head and cool looking beard
Tiny graffiti on top of a building
First cobblestone street
Yellow balloons outside and around a clothing store: Why?

Alley on Bond Street

Inside a dirty alley, no one’s here
5 cars parked back to back, blocking each other
Lots of fire escapes
Windows with metal shutters that look like old dungeon doors
Lots of unused dead space in New York that artist could use as studio space
Pieces of trash bags and caution tape stuck between thorns of old barb wire
2 people come inside the alley and we leave

Blick Art store

Things on sale
Little boxes of different toys. Mike plays with one and gets the ball inside a tiny bucket inside the box
Book: Ice-cream; Contemporary Art and Culture, lip magnets, (fake) puzzle clock, Make your own comic kit
A little overwhelming
Giant foam core
Lots and lots of art supplies and stationary
Tiny little plastic containers for storage and projects
Mike gets metal lids to do laser etching on them
Book: Designing Sustainable Packaging
Lots of magazines

Bond and Lafayatte

Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapelle rip off mural (Creation of Adam)
Gold surrealistic sculptures on the fire escape of a theater company building
Giant add with LeBron James

Lafayette and Bleecker

Very busy corner with subway stop
Girls with super bright turquoise tights. Shoes have holes that made it look like she had matching shoes.
Hardware store

-=-=-= the end =-=-=-

Sarah and I worked on this week’s assignment together and oh boy, did we run into problems! At the end it worked because we had a lot of debugging help from Rob. Here is a short list of things that went well:

1. We paired our XBees and were able to chat, hurray!
2. We realized our first photocell was broken.

We spent 4 hours on our own to debug the rest but with no success. During office hours on Monday, we sat down with Rob and tried a ton of things to debug the project. Here is a long list of what went wrong:

1. Sarah’s XBee breakout board had two pins soldered together.
2. Although I was using two 1.5 volt batteries to power up my breadboard, I was using this step-up battery holder and actually giving 5 volts to the XBee! Which of course meant that my radio wasn’t sending anything the whole time.
3. Sarah’s XBee wasn’t configured properly on the API mode.
4. I had configured an extra digital pin for the LED, thinking that it was the main problem.. Well I was wrong. If you send an extra packet that the other XBee is not expecting on the other end, then it gets confused and it doesn’t accept any packet.
5. Our voltage divider was not set up properly. We were using a 10 ohm resistor, but after we tested with a multimeter, it turned out that I had to use 200k resistors.

One and a half hours of later, our Romantic Light Sensor worked! Mind you, none of the problems we had were code-related; all were caused by a problem related to either electronics or configuration. After we completed the first project, it was a smooth ride to getting the Romantic Light Sensor with Feedback working.

Conclusion: XBees are not easy creatures.

Here are some not-so-great pictures:

When the photocell is receiving light, the red LEDs are off. Not romantic enough.

When the photocell is covered both the romantic and the feedback lights turn on.

For this week’s assignment, we had to make a buzzer that only works with a secret code, which works only if you press 5 times consecutively. Here is the video:

Doorbell for insistent visitors from My Journey on Vimeo.

For the creative part, we made a laptop thief alarm! The buzzer goes off when you leave your laptop alone and someone tries to steal it! The laptop sits on a custom pressure sensor, so it sets the buzzer off, which you carry with you, when it’s lifted up. Here is the video:

Mac Attack Buzzer from My Journey on Vimeo.

Absurdables is a series of instructables that were created for the Rhizomes section of ISCO, in collaboration with Carolina Vallejo. For the series, we added two more (and coming) to the series: An absurdable on how to cry and another one for the recently deceased. Both followed the same aesthetic as our first one and paid homage to literary pieces; the former is by Cortazar and the latter by Bruno D’arcy.

This time, our absurdables didn’t receive as much attention as the our first one, since for one, it wasn’t picked up by the editors and featured. Secondly, it seemed like we hit a point where the series start running the risk of being less interesting and the novelty might very well wear off. I think for this project to be successful, we need to find new literature from various backgrounds, keep working on making them as absurdables, release new ones on a regular basis to keep the community connected and expecting. In my opinion, only after few more absurdables will we see better, consistent results. I think we are onto something here that needs development and effort, so we definitely want to continue working on absurdables together and take them to more absurd/interesting levels.

Instructions on how to cry.

Instructions for the recently deceased.

There was a big discussion in class about whether absurdables is a suitable name for the series or not. I think it fits perfectly, since the name suggests that we are not trying to deceive the average instructables user with this project. From the very beginning, the name shows that we have a clear intention of simply being absurd, nothing else. Therefore, we expect (or hope) to be taken with a grain of salt, and I think the name absurdable is an integral show of that intention.

Absurdables: How to climb a staircase is an instructable that was created for the Remix/Reframe section for ISCO, in collaboration with Carolina Vallejo. The piece is an attempt to revisit and remix a literary piece that gives instructions, in this case a short story by Julio Cortazar, and making it absurd by “literally” following the instructions, executing and documenting them and sharing the results with the instructables community. On top of paying homage to the author and his great short story on how to climb a staircase, our interest in this pieces was to use the existing framework of a community and remixing that framework by introducing new content, one that would also be a remix. The piece has pictures that we took with a DIY feel, our additional comments on each step and picture, and some minor changes to the original text to maintain the overall instructable language.

Here is our instructable/absurdable.

After we published our piece, it got featured by the editors, became popular soon after and got over fifty comments. The scale of the reaction and interest encouraged us to keep working on absurdables and create a series of them with works from different authors as a collaborative project, as well as for the Rhizomes assignment. Also at the beginning of the class, we handed out copies of the instructables to the class and made them work in pairs to follow the instructions step by step. This exercise, we think, was also a very exciting component of the project as it enhanced the absurdity of it.

Cereal is a two-channel video installation that was created for the Portrait of… section of ISCO. It is made of two white cereal bowls placed on the opposite ends of a black table with video projected into them. The first bowl has the video of an obsessive cereal ritual; one that involves little pieces of fruits, different kinds of nuts, different kinds of cereal and unsweetened soy milk. The second bowl has a close-up video of a mouth being fed the cereal, in an indefinite loop. One has to walk from one end to another to see the videos inside the bowls.

My intention with this pieces was to portray an obsessive character by dissecting his/her ritual into edible parts. One that involves the meticulous preparation with her hands, and the other that involves the eating/destruction of the prepared food with the mouth. To the left bowl comes the food, from the right bowl it goes. A circle, a repetition that the character will ensue/pursue every morning, every day, without exhaustion. An important component of the happiness of the character becomes a monotony to the viewer soon after she/he discovers that it tells the story of a cereal ritual.

Bowl 1 video.

Bowl 2 video.

The piece wasn’t as successful as I anticipated, because it didn’t really succeed in portraying the character very well. I thought that everyone would point out to the obsessiveness of the character at first glance, but that was a secondary reaction to the piece. It seemed like the setup was confusing to the audience and they didn’t really make much out of it at first. Only after a few minutes of discussion, some of the themes I was trying to play on were mentioned. (the obsession, the coming in & out) The biggest visual improvement I could make to the piece is masking the video so that it is round and it blends into the round surface of the bowls. Conceptually, I could add different morning rituals to the table and perhaps, remove the mouth bowl, as it seemed like it wasn’t very well connected to the piece in terms of conveying the portrait of a character.

After presenting at the Crit Group and talking to other people about my project and working on it for a while, I realized that there is something incoherent about it. A lot of people have a hard time imagining the connection between the ladders and the patterns. It’s concerning me too. I’m not sure if I know how it’s going to come together in the end. I’ve been programming the patterns I like the most and it’s taking forever and not really moving towards the way I want them to. I’m struggling with the image I have in my mind. Is there any?

Couple weeks later, I’m starting to panic. In two weeks, we’ll have our midterm reviews and I don’t like what I’ve done so far.

I decided to move away from the patterns for a while now. I want to think more about what could be interesting to manipulate by climbing up and down a ladder, using the physicality of the ladder. I came up with new ideas:

• Using Google street view to:

-walk around cities from around the world

-take snapshots and add my images onto them

-recreating street paths from movie scenes that I are special to me

[Street with a View by Robin Hewlett and Ben Kinsley]

[Google Street Views by John Rafman]

• Choose few buildings and take pictures of each floor from outside (from an elevator or fire escape) and as you climb the ladder, you slowly rise up to the top of the building, creating the feeling of elevation

• Take pictures of the city from each floor of chosen buildings (one including IAC) and climb the ladder to the very top

• Take high resolution pictures of objects (books, chairs,  and try to create the illusion of climbing them, making the audience feel tiny.  [Alice in Wonderland]

It’s a Friday night and all I could think about was go home, think about and work on my Big Screens project. Also I really wanted to write these ideas down and take them out of my head and see what they sound like on paper. And to highlight that I’m slowly turning the panic knob on, aaaaaaa!

I’ll keep updating this post in the coming days and weeks..