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: