Archive for category AZresidency

After many days of work, stress and fun, we seem to have managed to pull through 10 projects to showcase at O Espaço do Tempo! The exhibition opened yesterday, 12th July at Convento da Saudação and will remain in exhibit until the end of the month.

We also have a mini-site with bios of the authors and descriptions of the works, temporarily hosted here. Not only of the works present at the exhibition but also a few others developed during the residency that couldn’t be exhibited by one reason or another. Check them out!

Big thanks are in order to everyone at O Espaço do Tempo for the opportunity we had, and all the in loco support to our needs, you rock.

2 days to go until the exhibit opening of the Audiencia Zero Labs residency at O Espaço Do Tempo!

A few folks seem to be missing in action. Mauricio is back with some news from Interactivos to lend us a hand on pending projects. Mónica and Pedro are still working on B-wind!. Margarida working on his robot Freddy. Victor Silva rehearsing his The Last Words of Dominico. Victor and Marco working on Discardable Beauty. Guilherme finishing his Róbotica Criativa works. And me finishing up Meta Gen Haiku. Catarina and Joel should also show up tomorow with their Micro Dérive.

Website with more info on the presented projects should go online soon. In the meantime if you should show up on Monday the 12th July in Montemor-O-Novo for the exhibit. We will have 7 projects installed under exhibition until the 31st July, and 2 liveacts presented on the exhibition day 12th July.

In the meantime we’ll leave you with some important t-shirt quote material we have recently acquired:
“48 horas são 6 dias de trabalho, em turnos de 8 horas”
“Eu só faço projection mapping quando estou bêbado”
“Não tens pincel para isso. Vai antes de rolo.”
“Queres falar ao telefone? Fala aí! *slap*”

You thought we we’re dead. But the nerds in black were never gone.

AZ Residency at Espaço Tempo has resumed it’s course on the 14th June 2010, and we’ve been kicking it real with some hardcore project dev for a whole week now! Our main aim is to get all of these projects kicking and screaming on the 12th July for the big opening of the exhibition.

Catarina and Joel have spent their week fidling with some heavy duty MakerBot 3d printing trial and error. In between random python re-learning fast courses. They managed to pull out some awesome hacks, such as a makerbot microscope to observe bacteria and printing a nutella jesus on a toast.

Random project quotes include:
“if you believe, it will work”
“how big should we make jesus?”
“there is a bug in your LED”
“we have scientifically proven that yoghurt is not printable”
“only two jesus toasts and already out of nutella”
“what kind of jesus do you want?”
“there is a guy coming by on monday to get a jesus on a toast”

Meanwhile Francesco and Mariana been hard at work on their ant tracking project. Marco drawing some more Suicide Girls for his secret projection art installation project. Ricardo working on his thesis. Pedro and Mónica working some more on the RTiVISS (Real-Time Video Interactive Systems for Sustainability) project. Vitor upgrading his version of Attic Tesla / Last Words of Domenico performance. Margarida working on her arduino based reactive robot.

Myself and Tiago arrived yesterday night and been hard at work in our own projects aswell. Me preparing a release version of Gen Haiku, helping out with the webdev side of things on the iCookie fast-hack project and conjuring some evil plans for world domination preparing a liveact for the opening day of the exhibition. And Tiago working on his bus GPS tracking system app.

I arrived to Residência AZ with a very simple project in mind called Bloop. This project explores the idea of “enfo” – unnecessary/useless information and information overload on the web, looking particularly to social networks.

Fishes don’t speak, but they communicate between themselves. For humans, this is an invisible process which is at the moment completely insignificant for us. Who cares about what is a fish saying to the other or even if he’s complaining or philosophizing alone? The project doesn’t intend to put fishes talking but instead to use their actions to dump random messages to twitter. This work plays with the metaphor of the glass house and observes this very own moment of social networks incrustation.

In order to develop this work, an improvised structure was built using some objects available in the kitchen and all over the residence space to track 2 fishes inside the aquarium. The computer vision setup was made using 2 cameras and values of x and y of each blob (fish) were available to calculate the distance between them, When a minimum distance value was reached a random message was sent to twitter profiles, Bloop_a and Bloop_b, updating its status. A different perspective of the work using two fishes was also develop but this time with the intent to create a fake personal profile. Here an algorithm searchs all over twitter for messages with certain key words and post them into fake profiles controlled by fishes interactions. Thus, each profile presents a line of interest and shows up as if some person could be behind it.

In the first two days I was dedicated to computer vision issues and also to the communication between processing and twitter. For the second perspective/project I was coding a small routine in order to communicate with twitter api, search for tags and update each profile status. During the third day (Wednesday) the projects technical issues were solved and working as expected but the fishes seemed not to like their new home and problems came with that. In order to create a good environment for them, I ran over local shops searching for a new aquarium and water treatment products. This task took a lot of time, not because we were in Alentejo but because new ideas arrived within group interaction and new material needs came to complicate more the situation.

By the end of the week, a team formed by me, Ricardo Lobo and Mauricio worked hardly on the Piano Cocktail, an original idea by Boris Vian . The results obtained were enough to celebrate during the last eve and make everyone, or almost, drinking trough the divine mechanism.

Some moments were odd and I found myself imagining and making bizarre things as The Wig’on’wheels:

New ideas came up and they’ll be worked out in the next residence.

This was the last image I have from Montemor-o-Novo, by the way, a wonderful place to work and to get inspiration.

Yesterday’s late night hacking session managed to deliver some results. Baco’s Mechanism was complete and so, to celebrate, refreshments were in order, plus waking up to join the party anyone who was already asleep. The troublemakers delivered a personalized rendition of the classic, also previously abused for remixes, Vitor Espadinha “Recordar é Viver”.

Today was a sad day, everyone who was taking their time getting up was also woken up with a new personalized rendition of Vitor Espadinha’s “Recordar é Viver”, payback is a bitch. We packed up and headed down to a local restaurant for the last meal of this week’s residency. With promises of returning in June for 10 more days of collaborative hacking.

Day 6 started pretty late. At 10 o clock we had a mini makerbot workshop to replace a broken extruder piece, but most folks were still asleep from staying up till late working on the Piano Cocktail, so only Catarina and Guilherme managed to attend and fix the broken piece.

Late arrivers João, Vitor and Mécia arrived shortly after while i tried to finish up some work on the haiku generator and Mauricio was working on the keyboard mischiefs with Catarina. Guilherme was already gone, he had to prepare his work for the Talk Show piece downtown. A little while later Mónica and Francesco decided to join us in discovering where Blackbox was actually, we got abit lost but managed to all arrive on time.

The piece was pretty great! Well produced and performed! So props to the ones involved was in order and back we went to our residency for some food and project pushing. Guilherme and Catarina still messing with the Makerbot; Mónica blowing plants; Filipe, Ricardo and Mauricio finishing up the Piano Cocktail; Luis and João working on the meal tracking ballet system; Pedro helping out Jorge with his Arduino issues; and me trying out a couple new remixes of the remix.

Before dinner we also had a short visit from a few performance related folks, seemingly guests from our host and friend here at Espaço do Tempo, Rui Horta. They seemed pretty interested in our adventures with the new technologies, especially in terms of networking and open source mentality.

There was no catering on Saturday aparently, so things were abit more erratic but it all worked out in the end. We managed to organize a nice dinner event with nearly everyone present, and proceeded directly to judging the world famous Vitor Espadinha “Recordar é Viver” remix compo, participating was me, Sérgio and the proclaimed winner mister Pedro Ângelo.

90′s electro night proceeds as i type, everyone seems to be happily working on their projects and/or enjoying their refreshments. It sucks hard that tomorrow is the last day already. As a curiosity note, it seems 95% of the folks here at the residency use Mac’s, even if one of them does have Linux installed.

Yesterday’s dinner didn’t go so well. We went to pick up a few doses of “Mistos de Porco Preto” (means something like Mix of Dark Pig in English) at this local restaurant which we had scouted on Tuesday as serving pretty well. But we had an unfortunate surprise, they under-served us half our dosage. So a new quest had been unlocked: to retrieve our fair share today or raise havoc!

At the lab i had no idea what happened during the morning since i slept until very late, but right after lunch everyone scattered off to handle different things:
- Sérgio and Francesco still busy documenting their ants project.
- Tara with the plastic PCB experiments.
- Jorge putting the finishing touches on his VJ mixer frame.
- Mónica pushing her wind/fan project into a first protoype.
- I pushed the genhaiku abit closer to version 2.0
- Luis arrived to the residency to work on his meal tracking idea.
- Ricardo and Filipe went on a magic journey to the local “sawmill” store to get the last parts for their piano cocktail.
- Mauricio gave us a workshop about tiny solar robots with BEAM circuits.
- And Catarina hacking some keyboard interfaces

So for dinner we went to reclaim our lost dosage of Mistos de Porco Preto and managed to succeed in our ordeal! Quest complete! We also took the wonderful opportunity to shop some essential refreshments for tomorrows farewell party.

Back at the residency we had visitors from a local juvenile theater group, we gave them a quick tour round up of all the stuff we have lying around and the projects people have been working in. Which went pretty well, they were all pretty marveled and excited with all we had going on, asking how they could do their own and spend the rest of their lives doing what we do. Which made us happy.

The rest of the night was spent attending Mauricio’s workshop and working on some entry for our fast music remix compo of Vitor Espadinha’s “Relembrar é Viver”. Results should be available tomorrow.

Today we haven’t done anything at all. Nah, just kidding. We seem to have grown well adjusted to our new home, the days are almost routine and the nights grown more social, everyone seems to be so tired that work on projects after dinner doesn’t quite work out as imagined.

New ideas for projects still pop up every other second but we’re now slowly starting to focus more on specifics. Pedro seems to be nearly done with the OSCBus link to Pachube. And Francesco seems to be polishing up his ants project some more, atleast it was rumoured that we can already get some inputs from both the fish and the ants for our promised audio mischief sessions. We haven’t quite managed to have some of those yet, but we definitely will. We should also probably connect it to AssaultCube, just to reuse late night gaming pwnage from our gamer residents.

Sérgio managed to get the hall lights also synced up to OSC so it’s now clear that complete and total world domination is eminent.

Filipe has been busy with his secret new projects and also pet-sitting his fishies, who seem not to be doing so great, probably new water tank related, so they’re getting a new one tomorrow!

Jorge been busy all day building a frame for his VJ mixer, it’s looking good by now, just wish my brain could already be able to filter the dremel sound by now!

Catarina and Tiago tried to assemble a new breed of TV-B-Gone’s, but seem to have failed miserably so far. Hopefully tomorrow they’ll succeed in a little more than just finding all the possible ways that it won’t work and we’ll have something more to show and tell to the world.

The bioplastic sample tests have been somewhat neglected but we promise we’ll report something back about them. Guilherme has returned to the residency and seems to be working on some evil plans for world domination for his robots, we hope to have some follow up info on that in the next few days aswell.

Meanwhile Tara has been pushing forward her plastic bag fabric PCB ideas with a few speaker circuit tests.

All in all it seems that the daily project meetings have settled down to lunch hour. Which fluctuates. And excursions to the random local shops are now common atleast twice a day. This carefully devised and heavily pondered time management scheme is easily enabling us with the latest cutting edge technology, which allows us to put together something as exquisite, brilliant, innovative, revolutionary and so righteously dedicated such as this:

The breakfast table side projects meeting seems to have jetlagged slightly to lunch hour. Cold water morning shower is truly revitalizing but i wouldn’t want an encore tomorow! Despite the early shock some folks clearly fueled with their sleep deprivation managed to come up with a few other project ideas to add to our pool. Among which we seem to have a top secret facebook junkies clothing line and a not that top secret Boris Vian piano cocktail idea revamp, for the drunkards in us all to rejoyce aplenty about (related electro valve experiment documentary picture below).

So an excursion to the local city store was in order, visiting random local Chinese stores, hardware stores, textiles store, pet stores, electronic materials stores.
BTW, you should know that using a multimeter to pick a zipper at a textiles store might get you kicked out!

Also, musical christmas cards + cheap earplugs + silicone + skills = contact mics + hydro mics + led + cute paper leftovers for our collage club! Be afraid!

Meanwhile, in a land far far away, Tara has been very busy ironing a few random plastic bags to create a DIY PCB prototype and successfully unravelling many distinct ways on how it will defnitely not possibly work! Plus discovering an advanced paper printing technique. Follow up should come within the next few days. We hope.

Tiago Serra and Jorge Ribeiro from xDA have also arrived tonight, so our dinner plans also involved a little brainstorming on all of these ideas and more top secret ones TBA. Meanwhile here is another random silly photo: