Michael Ang

Found Connections, my group project for the ITP Winter Show got blogged on networked_performances. Neato!

There’s certain gear that I would love to have. Here’s the list so you can see just how geeky I am:

• 3-axis MMA7260Q accelerometer breakout board from Sparkfun
• 4×5 Graphire Tablet (yay, Suzan got this for me!)
• A new digital camera (my Powershot S230 is kind of tired)
• A video camera (small, 3CCD, NightShot)
• 4 channel USB or 8 channel Firewire audio card (might get this with Ilteris)
• 1500+ lumen projector (might get this with SKIM Industries)
• A grab bag of Luxeon LEDs and stepper/servo motors
• A nice temperature controlled soldering iron
• MAudio Trigger Finger
• Korg MicroKontrol
• Binaural microphones
• Sony RH10 HiMD portable recorder
  

My first semester here at ITP is nearly over, and I’m finally putting together the documentation for some of my projects.

Spatial design:

• First week colour assignment
• Motion assignment (blinky lights!)
• Tensegrity assignment
• Found Connections testing (as posted earlier)

Applications of Interactive Techology:

• Blue Ribbon video (7mb .mov) - In response to a lecture by Vito Acconci we took 40 feet of blue fabric and carried it around the city
• Pictures from M5 bus trip up Manhattan

For my very first Pixel by Pixel class with Danny Rozin I attempted to duplicate an 1889 self-portrait by Van Gogh using only coloured pushpins.

Here are pictures of Van Gogh by Pixels on the floor at ITP. The pics could be a little better — the piece does better with more diffuse lighting. The first assignment in Pixel by Pixel was completely not based on the computer, and was perhaps one of the most satisfying. I showed it in class without explaining the origin, and after a few seconds people got it. Neat!

My good friend Jesse was kind enough to donate his oscilloscope to our campaign to saturate the world with blinky lights.

I used it to test out my ADXL210 accelerometer that I’m using for Smash Your Computer. Here are the ADXL210 construction pics.

For my Spatial Design project my group is building an installation to overlay graphics representing the relationships between the characters in the TV show Lost on top of live video of the participants.

It uses ARToolkit, OpenGL and C/C++. Here are pictures from our testing session.

Here at SKIM Laboratories (Suzan, Karl, Ilteris, Mang) in the East Village it looks like a projector is in our future. Partially so we can play at doing projects like Body Movies by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer.

It looks like Rafael is fond of the High End Systems DL.1 projector. Who wouldn’t be? The Orbital Head is also interesting — it’s a moving mirror attachment for existing projectors. Once we get a projector I see a stepper motor project in my future. Also I need to look into the Sony HAD camera with nightshot.

I’m looking for a 3D sound API in C/C++. Cross-platform is of course nice. I found OpenAL which purportedly works on Windows, OSX and Linux. The tutorials don’t seem that scary, but I’m not really looking forward to doing threads in C++ again. Basically I want something where I can output to quad sound.

If anyone knows of an decent API, please let me know!