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Physical Computing_Insomnia_DRAFT_Part2

Photosensitive sensor test 2

Photosensitive sensor test 3

Arduino - Processing test

Maze test 1

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Interaction Instruction:

Put on the mask (with photosensitive sensor in it), and stick a piece of prepared paper/card on one of your eyelid.

Maybe lie down ???

Start the program, there’s a maze on the screen. Click mouse to start the journey. (Journey automatically generate of manually direct TBC)

Keep your eyes open as wide as you can. If you get to relax and loosen your eyelids down (ie you are getting sleepy), the path in the maze will change, as a result, your journey would become more difficult, or even get a bit mess up.

If you close your eyes entirely (ie you fall asleep), the entrance and the exit of the maze will be closed, the journey will be blocked and lingering in the maze.

Image of the journey will be saved before the programme exit. And that’s a representation of your mind in the anxious insomnia experience. 

(TBC)

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PhysicalComputing_Insomnia_DRAFT_Part1

I have to figure it out now.

I don’t wanna leave it tomorrow.

I can’t fall asleep.

How can I solve that problem?

What should I do?

How about…

…

… !

I can’t fall asleep!

What was the thing I thinking just now?

Damn I have to figure it out now.

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This project is about developing an interactive system for participants to experience the feeling of people suffering from anxiety and insomnia. By raising participants awareness of the action of keeping their eyes wide open to ‘stay awake’, this system detects participants eyelid movement by a photosensitive sensor and visually reacts as affecting a journey in a maze, which is a metaphor of anxious minds manage to keep awake to figure out worries before falling asleep.

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Being an anxious insomniac is like fighting with your eyelids - The body was eager to sleep, but the mind was restlessly running in your head. The mind kept running until it fell into the border between consciousness and unconsciousness. Then there were moments that your mind getting slow down and wandering in a mist. However, in the next second, your mind suddenly came back and took over the steering-wheel again, driving you to run through the troubles before falling asleep. Then it fell into the border again……This process would loop over for a few minutes, or a few hours, until you were not able to keep your eyelids up anymore. And once fell asleep, the mind would be lost and lingering in unconsciousness, the worries would not find the way out of your mind……

Mental issues like anxiety, depression, and insomnia as one of their symptom, are common issues for many people - even more pervasive among artists. However, creating artworks to express or communicate with others about mental issues is a positive way to relieve the situation. (Reference of art healing) 

And as Merleau-Ponty described in Phenomenology of Perception, human perceive and understand the world through their bodies. The more habitual, familiar behaviors are more deeply interlaced with our intelligence, memories, and experience. So in this project, the physical interactive experience focusing on the eyelid movement control, is coherent with experience related to sleep, or torture (like the scene in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange). And it would be an effective and stimulating form for people to sympathize with the sense of being in between tension and relaxing, to resonate with the anxious insomniacs. Through such experience and outcomes, participants might reflect on these mental issues from different angles.

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Experiment Process

Eyelid test 1

Eyelid test 2

Flex sensor test 1

Flex sensor test 2

Infrared sensor test

(TBC)

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Week 2_Responding to Algorithm [draft] [#digitalkeywords] by Tarleton Gillespie

My mind map of the week 2 reading material Gillespie, Tarleton. "Algorithm [draft][# digitalkeyword]." Culture Digitally (2014)

What is Algorithm? Tarleton shown us the definitions of Algorithm in four different aspects:

Algorithm as a technical solution to a technical problem - a logical series of steps for organising data to achieve a desired outcome quickly.

Algorithm as synecdoche - in a more sociological angle, it’s a kind of socio-technical ensemble, part of a family of authoritative systems for knowledge production or decision-making.

Algorithm as talisman - it’s like a trick for information industries, to persuade the audience that the product, or saying the designer/corporate owner makes objective, legitimate decisions.

Algorithmic as committed to a procedure - In general, everything that is driven by and committed to algorithmic systems is algorithm.

To be honest, this reading made me feel like everything in our society could be algorithmic: products we use daily like Facebook, Spotify, Tinder, Instagram etc. Everything related to statistical data is algorithmic. And we can’t really run away from those “number facts”, even when we made decisions by ourselves, we consider the social norm that generated ethnographically, as well as the one generated by algorithm.

When something is algorithmic, it’s a formalization of social facts: make them into “measurable data”, and make the social phenomena “clarifiable”. So there would be always problem and solution. Like certain conditions leads to certain result, like the "if/then" logic in the technically defined algorithm.

But is everything measurable? Does every problem have its corresponding solution? When we think about something organic, something emotional. Algorithm seems a bit stark and inhuman. Like nowadays some people would like to see their body (organ) data to estimate their health situation. When we say ‘you’re out of shape because your body fat percentage is too high’, it still sounds reasonable. But when we say ’you’re angry because your epinephrine/heart rate number is raising too fast’, it sounds not communicating anything at all. (‘You’re angry because your friend didn’t answer your phone’ sounds a bit more communicable.) So seems generally, algorithm is not very useful for something organic and emotional.

(However, if via algorithm, we applied those organ data to generate visual/audio/something people can sense with, it’d actually function well in these emotional communications.)

To prevent people from falling into a confusion that everything is algorithmic, Tarleton also talked about what is not algorithmic:

something done subjectively,

something done by hand,

something can only be accomplished with persistent human oversight,

something is limited by context, etc.

So I started to think about the examples. The first few things I came up with is photography, painting, telling stories. Traditionally, these are very subjective and creative behavior. They are more about personal experience, personal aesthetic, intuition, and perception, rather than logic and statistical numbers.

However, another extremely contradictory example crossed my mind: Botnik, a community of writers, artists and developers using machines to create things, fed the seven Harry Potter novels through their predictive text keyboard, then it came up with a chapter from a new Harry Potter story: Harry Potter and the Portrait of What Looked Like a Large Pile of Ash

Then following this clue, I found another AI writing example: Director Oscar Sharp and AI researcher Ross Goodwin used a recurrent neural network called long short-term memory, or LSTM for short to write a film script, and made the film Sunspring, for Sci-Fi London, an annual film festival that includes the 48-Hour Film Challenge. The process was quite similar with Botnik’s Harry Potter. They fed the LSTM thousands of sci-fi film scripts, some random seeds from a sci-fi filmmaking contest including a title (sunspring), a piece of dialogue, a prop and an action, and an optional science idea, then the AI started writing the play.

Although such ‘AI writing’ are just reflecting on and simulating the human-written texts we’ve fed them, there’s actually nothing ‘creative’. But I have to admit that I found some of those contents are unpredictable interesting, or even ineffably poetic to me. So I guess the random composition created by the algorithmic could be organic, emotional as well (depends on different people’s different interpretations).

In summary, as Tarleton said in his Algorithm [draft], the advantage of algorithm is its democracy, systemisation, and we also concern that it might be an extension of Taylorism, it might be too stark and inhuman. But from some computational art works/ practices, I saw the ineffable human side of algorithm, and I think that’s what we are working for, breaking the boundaries, collaborating with the machine, and showing better humanity.

Reading materials:

Algorithm [draft] [#digitalkeywords] by Tarleton Gillespie

Harry Potter: Written by Artificial Intelligence

Movie written by algorithm turns out to be hilarious and intense by Annalee Newitz

Illustrations from Megan Nicole Dong

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My mind map of the week 2 reading material Gillespie, Tarleton. “Algorithm [draft][# digitalkeyword].” Culture Digitally (2014) Proper writing WIP.

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w2_OF Graphics and Path Experiments Process

Task:

Recreate a painting in openFrameworks.

Learn to create straight lines, curve lines, polygons - through exploring ofGraphics/ ofPolyline/ ofPath etc.

To create the oblique quadrangles, I located all of their vertexes in the ‘colorpicker’ processing programme which I got from the lecture. (Trick...) After marking the locations on the image, I use the code of ofBeginShape();  ofVertex(x,y);  ofEndShape(); to draw them.

Then I tried to use ofDrawBezier(x0,y0,x1,y1,x2,y2,x3,y3);  (from ofGraphics) to draw the raindrop shape. (The black shape) But obviously only one bezier curve can’t complete this shape.

Then I tried bezierTo (from ofPolyline rather than ofGraphics) to draw continuous bezier curves to complete the shape. (The red line shape) ***However I didn’t found the way to fill the closed polyline???

/*Test code*/

 ofPolyline line1;

 line1.addVertex(ofPoint(200, 400));           //starting vertex

 line1.bezierTo(100, 100, 800, 100, 200, 400); //cp1，cp2，ending vertex

//then can repet line1.bezierTo(); from the last ending vertex

 ofSetColor(ofColor::red);

 line1.draw();

Then found on the OF forum that people saying if I want to ‘fill the polyline’, I should use ofPath instead. 

So after playing around the reference code, finally found out how to draw the path....It’s similar to ofPolyline, just changing “lineName” to “pathName” for the  definition, and change “addVertex(ofPoint(x,y));”  to “moveTo(ofPoint(x, y));” for setting the starting vertex. “bezierTo” for the drawing is the same.

/*Test code*/

ofPath path1;                                                      //define your path name

path1.moveTo(ofPoint(200, 400));                       //vertexStart

path1.bezierTo(100, 100, 500, 100, 400, 400);   //cp1,cp2,vertexEnd

ofSetColor(0,0,255);

ofFill();                                                                //the color here failed

path1.draw();                                                     //command it to draw 

Later found out how to fill the path shape in the OF forum here. Code:

path1.setFillColor(value);

path1.setFilled(true);

Then here’s the final outcome!!

Btw also found the way to rotate the rectangles: ofPushMatrix()

/*Code for the long yellow rectangle*/

ofPushMatrix();             //Push the current coordinate position ofTranslate(156,282);   //Change the origin from (0,0) to the rect rotate center ofRotateZDeg(-25);      //For 2D rotation Plz use Z degree ofDrawRectangle(0,0,15,450);   //the centerMode rectPos is the translated origin ofPopMatrix();            //recall the pushed coordinate position, origin back to (0,0)

-

Long day...Thanks for reading :D

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w2_Polyline Experiment_1

Use ofBeginShape();  ofVertex(xPos, yPos); and  ofEndShape(); to create straight line polygon.

//The biggest blue polygon----------------------------------   

  ofSetColor(0,0,255);   

  ofFill();   

  ofSetPolyMode(OF_POLY_WINDING_NONZERO);   //what does this mode means?   

  ofBeginShape();   

  ofVertex(0,0);   

  ofVertex(300,300);   

  ofVertex(600,300);   

  ofVertex(300,600);   

  ofEndShape();

Use ofBeginShape();  ofCurveVertex(xPos, yPos);  ofEndShape();   to draw the curvy polygon.

***But I don’t understand how these vertex works???

//The red shape on right---------------------------------------

    ofSetColor(255,0,0);

    ofSetPolyMode(OF_POLY_WINDING_NONZERO);

    ofBeginShape();

    ofCurveVertex(10,100);

    ofCurveVertex(400,200);

    ofCurveVertex(400,400);

    ofCurveVertex(200,400);

    ofCurveVertex(10,500);

    ofEndShape();

Use ofDrawBezier(x0, y0, x1, y1, x2, y2, x3, y3); to draw the curvy shape.

//The green shape on the top left-------------------------------

   ofSetColor(0,255,0);

   ofDrawBezier(0, 0, 300, 300, 300, 600, 0, 0);

Use ofDrawCurve(x0, y0, x1, y1, x2, y2, x3, y3);  to draw the curvy shape. 

***Draws a curve from point (x1, y1) to point (x2, y2). The curve is shaped by the two control points (x0,y0) and (x3,y3) ???

//The yellow line shape on left----------------------------------

   ofSetColor(255,255,0);

   ofNoFill();

   ofDrawCurve(300, 200, 0, 0, 300, 600,400,500);

Ways to draw rounded rectangles.

//Rounded rectangles-----------------------------------------

   ofSetColor(255,0,255);

   ofRectangle myRect;

   myRect.x = 10;

   myRect.y = 10;

   myRect.width = 100;

   myRect.height = 100;

   ofDrawRectRounded( myRect, 10, 20, 30, 40 );  //the corners angles

   //The other method for rounded rect-----------------------------------------

   ofDrawRectRounded(100, 100, 100, 100, 10);

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Week 1_Responding to ‘A Fish can’t Judge the Water’ by Femke Snelting

What’s the relationship between us, the user, and software? Is a software just a tool that we create, and we control it to solve certain problem? How deep do we and the software interlace together? How does software choreographs our life? Do we use software to think?

In ‘A Fish Can’t Judge the Water’, Femke claims that when we use software, we practice it until we in-corporate its choreography. We make it disappear in the background. It becomes a seamless experience. We become one with our extensions.

I couldn’t agree more with her points. We are one with the software. Of course I’m not saying like the half-artificial human creature in cyberpunk films like Ghost in the Shell. But sometimes, it’s hard to tell which parts of our thoughts are spontaneous, and which parts are influenced by the information from the software’s calculation.  

For example, everyone types on smartphone, or types on computer, must have used IME (Input Method Editor). No matter it’s in English or Chinese, or other languages, when you type through the keyboard, the IME will automatically predict and recommend some related words for you to use next. But where are these words from? - One on hand, the software analyses your texting history, and finds out what words combinations you mostly used. Like it ‘remembers’ your habits and preference. On the other hands, the software also analyses the other general users data, and finds out what words are used very frequently by the majority. Then it would push some buzzwords for you when you typing.

That is, in the process of considering how to express your thoughts, the software is unconsciously affecting you. It’s quite ambiguous that the reason you chose this word it’s you really thought so, or it’s you just told by the software. And when you used a buzzword, you increased this word’s ‘popularity’ in the software data. Then this word will be more likely to be recommended to an other similar user next time. This also explains the other point in ‘A Fish Can’t Judge the Water’: Software produces culture at the same time as it is produced by culture.

Instagram (IG) Story is an other perfect example related to these points. When you posted a IG Story, everyone can see it in 24 hours, and you can see who have watched your story. And in story, you could add in any time, location, hash tag information, and even set questions in it. Your audience could fill in the answer in your story, then you could respond to them in your next story, an so on. So is the same when you watched the others stories.

I think these functions in the software are designed because of the culture of open and equal communication/expression. And obviously, people are getting more open and equal to express when they use these software functions. So software produced by culture, and it produces culture at the same time.

And I think this extremely two-way communication/expression really blur the boarder between performer and audience, or like Femke saying, typist and reader. We have fun with things like IG Story is because we are interested in the tension between those two position. (Can’t really explain why people enjoy this kind of tension here. Hopefully I can find some theory about it later.)

To summarise, I really like what Femke says in the end of ‘A Fish Can’t Judge the Water’: We like to cross boundaries, but we don’t want to erase them. We traverse different worlds, we do not make them the same. In fact, we are interested in everything that shows up in the cracks.

Boundaries are definitely necessary. If there’s no boundary, there’s no diversity and possibility. Like I’m interested in arts/design that about the boundary between virtual and reality. But I know I would never enjoy doing something totally digital/virtual. In fact, the beauty is that I clearly know the virtual and the reality is different, but it’s hard to tell when I experience it.