SteamSHIFT’s MDAT Blog

General Thoughts

Thinking about my work, it has occurred to me that the way I work is as a hacker. By this I mean someone who uses existing materials and disassembles them, at least in part, in order to reconfigure them, often incorporating other unrelated materials, with the purpose of creating something new. I am often drawn to particular materials or processes because of the cultural meaning attached to them.

There is a general ambiguity around the term hacking but a general definition sounds positive in describing: ‘any process of knowledge where data can be gathered, where information can be extracted from it, and where in that information new possibilities for the world produced, there are hackers hacking the new out of the old.’

Wark - Hacking

Whether the material is steam, or computer, the politics imbued in (or for that matter the physical characteristics of) a shipping container, or a historical materialism (or any other) methodology, I seek to explore the ‘material’ and how it might relate to other ‘materials’ that also catch my eye. In this respect, it could be seen that my methodology is from a postmodernist school in the sense that postmodernism is often perceived to be predominantly concerned with collage, juxtaposition and the interplay of context.

Postmodern scholars argue that such a decentralized society inevitably creates responses/perceptions that are described as post-modern, such as the rejection of what are seen as the false, imposed unities of meta-narrative and hegemony; the breaking of traditional frames of genre, structure and stylistic unity; and the overthrowing of categories that are the result of logocentrism and other forms of artificially imposed order. Instead, they value the collage of elements, the play and juxtaposition of ideas from different contexts, and the deconstruction of symbols into the basic dynamics of power and place from which those symbols gain meaning as signifiers. In this it is related to post-structuralism in philosophy, minimalism in the arts and music, the emergence of pop, and the rise of mass media.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism

However, in contrast to this statement, I feel that it is not possible to sweep away the old in favour of the new nor to reject ‘imposed unities of meta-narrative and hegemony’, partly because there are fundamentals that do not change; human nature is a constant (both good and bad). It is from this, perhaps peculiar, dialectical standpoint (perhaps in some ways none too dissimilar to the intellectual contradiction that Walter Benjamin encountered between his Marxist and Kabbalistic views) that I am seeking to frame my practice.

Cocoa and Objective-C

In order to do further work integrating Serial, MIDI and Quartz Composer technologies, it is necessary to ‘get my hands dirty’ with some real programming; and although Processing etc. do provide excellent frameworks, being able to work with OS Xs frameworks has additional benefits. For example, there has recently been published a template for creating custom plugins for Quartz Composer (the visual technology I am most keen to develop with); perhaps it would be possible to create a Serial-In plugin for Quartz Composer; or one that allows Nodebox animations within QC.

Additionally, as any Cocoa / Objective-C application inevitably involves some C/C++ programming, this should help my understanding of these languages for use with programming Arduino / Atmega Microcontrollers

MIDI input and recording with Arduino

Arduino Forum - ‘midi in” project….

The idea that I have for my final project (post more later) involves recording MIDI either directly on Arduino or onto another storage medium with an Atmega Microcontroller of some sort. This will obviously involve quite a lot of research into how to do this best

Positioning

Where is the work positioned? Who else is looking at these ideas / technologies? How does this build on the work that I have done already eg Histories and Futures - how does it extend that work?

(More later I’m sure!)

Pocket Computer

• Works with most SD cards, size is not limited (but MrMidi can only use the first 32MBytes of it)
• Real MIDI files (Format 0 only) - recording and playback
• Maximum of 255 files, they must be in the root directory of the card
• Displays the file names - long names are supported
• File delete is possible (it can delete any file from the root directory)
• 256 byte input/output buffer and 8MHz clock for high performance and precise MIDI timings
• Lyrics are displayed (when contained in MIDI file) - cool!
• Variable speed (+/-15 steps) and transpose (+/-24) while playing a file
• SD card bootloader - just format a SD card, copy MM.BIN onto it, insert it and switch ON!
• MIDI channel mute for each channel
• Menu for setting up drum channel, lyric display, repeat modes and channel mute
• Settings are stored in non-volatile EEPROM on-chip
• IR remote control (RC5 protocol), a Philips videorecorder remote for example. Or get a programmable remote and use code 257.

This project, which includes schematics and bootloader code may give sufficient information as to how to build a basic midi recorder

Arduino playground : EEPROM-Flash

Hidden Powers - storing data in Flash and EEPROMThere are three types of memory in the atmega8:

Flash memory: it’s a rewritable non-volatile memory. This means that its content will still be there if you turn off the power. It’s a bit like the hard disk on the arduino board. Your program is stored here. The ATmega8 on the Arduino board has 8 KB of Flash memory, with 1 KB taken up by the bootloader. This memory supports at least 10,000 writes.

RAM: it’s like the ram in your computer.its content disappears when you turn of the power but it can be read and writter really fast. The ATmega8 has 1 KB of RAM.

EEPROM: it’s an older technology to implement rewritable non-volatile memory. It’s normally used to store settings and other parametres. The ATmega8 has 512 bytes of EEPROM. This memory supports at least 100,000 writes.

This taken from the arduino forums may be useful:

let’s take the mc14067 (http://www.onsemi.com/pub/Collateral/MC14067B-D.PDF) as an example this is an 16 channel analogue multiplexer. i’ve use this a lot of times.

connect pin 24 to 5V and 12 to GND. then connect a 10K resistor from 5V to pin 15. this is powering the chip and enable the switch that lets you pick which input to read.

now connect pin 1 to analogue input 0.

now we need to tell the chip which channel we want to read. this is done by connecting 4 digital outputs to pins 10,11,14,13. By using a combination of digitalWrite commands you can set the input channel to read.

all the other 16 pins are inputs where you will connect up to 16 pots (or any analogue sensor)

the code will look like this:

	for (i=0; i <16; i++) { 
		# write i in binary on 4 output pins  
		# this selectes the input 

		val = analogRead(0) 
		# store val somewhere or send it on the serial port 
	} 

now the cool part is that if you hook up one of these to each analogue input you can have 96!!!! analogue inputs

zero yen house

Consider a row of homeless peoples’ houses built on an urban street in Japan. If we look at these houses from an architectural perspective, we can discover many of the capabilities and elements in their architecture. These houses are built on a shoestring budget by diverting and recycling the rubbish thrown away on the street. In this respect, these houses are built out of the resourcefulness of human nature, not by purchasing power. I call them “Zero Yen Houses.”

At the present day, one may say that self-constructed houses do not exist in the dwelling area of the city. Almost all houses are commodities to be bought and sold. Moreover, from an ecological point of view, once a typical house is constructed its use does not change with time yet its building materials transform into garbage for the landfill. Under these condition as such, “Zero Yen House” gives some indication of the possibilities of future architecture. “Zero Yen House” is constructed with the materials mostly collected from the street. In other words, it gives a different perspective on discarded items thrown away as surplus materials of urban living. In addition, relative to the fact that current home-purchases generally cost millions of dollars, “Zero Yen House” costs just a few hundred dollars at most. The importance is that they are made by one’s own hand. This does not mean the dwelling is simply a box to live in. Instead, the dwelling is built as an extension of one%u2019s own body. Therefore, the house shapes are each respectively different. No universal prototype exists for these houses, and this differentiation from typical architecture is important. In the nature of things, I think that each dwelling is different spontaneously.

“Solar Zero Yen House” is a dwelling I found built by an elderly man living along the Sumida River bank. Its construction inspired me as an architect to think about energy use for our future. A small solar panel, about the size of one mat, is installed in the roof of the dwelling, so energy is completely provided for. This demonstrates the possibilities for new architecture and new types of construction.

Zero Yen House is a primal (archetype) urban architecture, which is different from vernacular settlement construction we see around the world, and is it different from modern and contemporary architecture designed by architects.

kyohei sakaguchi
www.0yenhouse.com

Somehow related … not sure … we’ll see!