Mobile Brighton Guide (David)

I did this basic mobile page called "Where to go in Brighton?" (http://elmundialista.cl/gobuk) copying Facebook's mobile code to fit it to the iPhone screen size. I have to fix some problems with the Google maps compatibility, maybe you can help me. Thanks.

Weekly Route

For this week I decided to track my routes from Saturday to Wednesday. I used it Google Maps and the Map software of my mobile phone to save some locations and use them as a guide to draw the lines later on Google Map.

It wasn't too easy because it is not automatic as maybe would be tracing the routes with a GPS software...

Here are the results:

PING IMAGE (JUST TRACES)

 

GOOGLE MAP VERSION (WITH MARK AND IMAGES)

I feel that maybe it is too much information but it was the task and I think that is useful if you want to understand the traces above. 

View My weekly route in a larger map

2D Barcode: Promoting Latin American Poetry

Hi!

This weeek I created some 2D barcodes using i-nigma. These codes have poetry poems of Mario Benedetti, from Uruguay in English and Spanish. You can red the texts, downloading i-nigma to your mobile to use it as a scanner.

My idea is to do more 2D barcodes related with Latin American poetry and maybe putting them together or distributed in different places... I'm thinking in that.

To see the complete procedure go to: http://themediaexperience.wordpress.com/2010/02/22/read-mario-benedetti-tactics-and-strategy/

 

 

Rhythm Stick contact mic

I know this is a dangerous precedent, but I was listening to Andrew last week, and he mentioned that if you take a piezo electric transducer (PZT), wire it up as a contact mic, connect it to a recorder and turn up the volume, then they can be noisy in a musical way.

I found this interesting as I have made contact mics from time to time, and had not noticed the background noise particularly, so I decided to have a look at this, to see if there is a way of reinforcing this aspect of the output.

This confection is a PZT which I stripped of a plastic protecting ring, and soldered up to an unbalanced mono audio jack lead. The springs are extended, to partially isolate the PZT, and to apply some stress to the PZT to trigger the cell. The pins are hammered into a solo rhythm stick, and the soldered lead is taped to the stick to support the joints.

When connected up to a mini amp, the mic is quiet until the springs start to ring, after which the circuit will start to feedback. It is possible that the stripped PZT could be used as a cheap replacement to a microphone in surveillance systems where the presence of a noise is required to trigger the attention of a video system.

Ru

Brighton Grand Prix (Montecarlo) - David

New York

Hello all, for this weeks walking task I decided to use New York as my guide. I have never been to NY and thought this might be a good chance. I chose five tourist spots and set out to find them, documenting each with four photographs -

A. Central Park -

B. Carnegie Hall -



C. MOMA -



D. Rockefeller Center -



E. Times Square -

Brighton & Santiago Routes: From train stations to ???

The basic map is a route from Mapocho Station to bar "La piojera" in Santiago, Chile.
Mapocho Station used to be the main train station of the country and now it is a cultural centre and bar "La Piojera" is one of the most traditional Chilean bars full of tourists and local people.

I decided to work with this map, wondering if I was going to arrive to a bar too in Brighton... so, let's see what happened.

You can compare the area in Brighton and Santiago looking to the photos in each icon.


View Route Santiago-Brighton in a larger map

Beijing in Brighton

task for last week

hello everyone,

i followed the map of my hometown tianjin in china, there is a main river in my hometown. i just followed the route of the river and walked in brighton. i started from the brighton station and walked down queens rd, then back to the crossing and walked up to Dyke Rd, then turn to western rd, upper N St is just correspond the first left fork on the map of the river. Church St is the first right fork of the river, then the river diverse to two branches, so then i walked to

clifton terrace.

Mapping the Space

For this weeks task of exploring Brighton, while following a different landscape, I have used a map which details the quickest route t0 the goal of the maze at Hampton Court (link to maze on Google Maps).

A great guide to garden mazes is here, and the route I followed looks like:

The rules I followed in recreating the maze in Brighton were:

I started by the gates of the station on Queens Road, looking down to the sea,

I walke the map, and followed the next turning which matched the direction of the turn indicated on the maze map (left for left and right for right),

I ignored the different angles and the distances indicated in the maze map, and treated the two small chicanes on the "upsloping sides" of the map as full corners, and from here I set off down Queens Road.

The maze has many angles which are more acute and obtuse that the largely grid system of the streets of Brighton, and the street lengths are far longer, so while the goal of the maze can be reached quickly, tracing the route in Brighton took one and a half hours.

I soon realised that I didn't have a clue where the goal would fall, and the path looped back on itself very quickly, with the path running in a clockwise loop around the junction of North Road and Queens Road.

Walking across the front of Churchill Square, I suddenly thought that following the map would guide the route off into the sea. Walking passed Russell Square this looked very likely, only for the route to run along Russell Road, behind the Brighton Centre and away from the seafront. I never got to walk along the seafront.

Later, after a loop around the church on Dyke Road, just as I thought the path would run bck to follow Queen Road and run back into North Laine to finish, a right turn along Zion Gardens appeared, and following this led along towards the Clock Tower and took the path south into the Lanes.

The final loop of the path the route followed was along Ship Street, left and left again to travel North up West Street, and left again leaving the Goal of the maze as Fabrica and the corner of Ship Street.

Working with processing

Yesterday I decided to try some experiments with Processing following basic tutorials. I worked with shapes, colours, images and movement and with blocks with links.

Here are the images. I'll try to upload the files.

mobile processing test

here is the first test of mobile processing to create a mobile visualiser to excite and entertain bored gig watchers.

After originally being unable to get any files uploaded to my K800i, I realised that I could use bluetooth on the phone and my macbook, and let the software sort this out for me, so now I can transfer files without losing the location of the .jar file.

The video on the phone is jumpy, and the refresh rate is poor, which may be down to the library being used by processing, or may be down to the code I am running. The next stage is to get the phone to load the colours of the video into an array and to draw triangles based on those colours. The array is easy, but I'm not sure how to interpret the colours as the is no "captureEvent" method in the mobile processing library.

KMZ-CAST

For this week I wanted to continue experimenting with GPS, Google Latitude and now Google Earth. So, I exported the history of my trip from Brighton to London (recorded on Google Latitude) to Google Earth. Then,  I created a file of this trip as a "pod-cast", so it is a "kmz-cast".

The idea is to enable this file to be downloaded by people to view it on Google Earth. Of course this is a simple trip but with this experiment I can try to make a different map on Google Earth and upload it to my site so people can download it later and maybe learn with it or play.

Press the image to download "Trip from Brighton to London"

Sound-Art

For this weeks experiments I used Processing together with the Ess library to make some art generated dynamically using sound. All of the pieces displayed use FFT to break up the sound into different frequencies and volume level to determine various aspects of the composition. The images presented are snapshots from the applet, which generates fluctuating and shifting imagery depending on the current sound being played.



All of the experiments were variations along the same theme and utilising the same data, however the compositions were altered by changing parameters such as shape primitive, colour, and position of the shapes, allowing them to be controlled by different aspects of the sound input for different effects. A certain degree of randomness was also involved in order to make the images a little more aesthetically interesting. These all take live input sound from the microphone so they are interactive pieces which can be played with and manipulated.



Complete code at-
http://experiments-in-sound-and-vision.blogspot.com/2010/02/sound-art.html

hardware hack part 2

Hi Again,

this was the first hacking experiment I looked at, and is related to the idea that a piezo electric transducer can be used as a contact mike, as any percussive activity the transducer is in contact with will create a current, with a waveform which is sympathetic to the original sound. A simple set of instructions can be found here.

For this experiment, I wanted to look at if the transducer could be used to trigger a media file in flash, and wanted to have a feedback mechanism do avoid the need for a user to flatten their finger tips by hammering repeatedly on the capsule, so I added a red LED into the circuit. The brightness of the light is related to the amount of pressure applied to the transducer.

Ru

hardware hacking part 1

Hi,

thought of this as a experiment after an early seminar, where the re-appropriation of hardware in a new case was discussed.
This is a Playstation eyetoy, which uses a standard chip set and can be used with a PC with a logitech driver. This one has been used on a PC for the last 5 years.

The camera is mounted onto a single PCB, and I am looking for an interesting case to fix it into.
Not really mobile, and a bit creepy, depending on what you use the camera for, but I thought I should post it incase it inspired someone else to find a new use for a piece of computer junk you have laying about.

Ru

notes form today's seminar

situationist
http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/314
http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/
http://www.nearfuturelaboratory.com/projects/drift-deck/
http://project.cyberpunk.ru/lib/burning_chrome/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_Wood
http://www.ballardian.com/crash-homage-to-jg-ballard

lost example

I had this working last week in the seminar, but I have had a tweak with it, and I think it looks nicer now.

import processing.video.*;

int numPixels;

int pixelSize = 20;

//Movie myMovie;

color myMovieColors[];

Capture cam;

void setup() {

size(1280, 756);

// If no device is specified, will just use the default.

cam = new Capture(this, width, height, 30);

numPixels = height / pixelSize;

myMovieColors = new color[numPixels * numPixels];

// To use another device (i.e. if the default device causes an error),

// list all available capture devices to the console to find your camera.

//String[] devices = Capture.list();

//println(devices);

// Change devices[0] to the proper index for your camera.

//cam = new Capture(this, width, height, devices[0]);

// Opens the settings page for this capture device.

//camera.settings();

}

void captureEvent(Capture cam) {

cam.read();

cam.loadPixels();

for (int j = 0; j <>

for (int i = 0; i <>

myMovieColors[j*numPixels + i] = cam.get(i, j);

}

}

}

void draw() {

//if (cam.available() == true) {

//cam.read();

//image(cam,160, 100);

// The following does the same, and is faster when just drawing the image

// without any additional resizing, transformations, or tint.

//set(160, 100, cam);

for (int j = 0; j <>

for (int i = 0; i <>

float r = random(-10,10);

fill(myMovieColors[j*numPixels + i]);

smooth();

rect(i*(r*pixelSize), j*(r*pixelSize), pixelSize+5, pixelSize+5);

}

}

}

This takes the live stream from a video camera, and uses this to plot rectangles which reflect the colours of the stream.
Russell

Analog-Mobile-Music

For one of this weeks experiment I decided to try something out from Nic Collin' book Homemade Electronic Music. Basically I bought a telephone coil from Maplins (£4.99 - looks a bit like a stethescope) which can be used to pick up electro-magnetic radiation given off from circuits and the like, and plugged it into a mini battery powered amplifier in order to sonify the electronic noises and bleeps given off by my mobile phone. I then recorded these into renoise and exported them as a wav.

This experiment interested me as it allowed me to make sounds using my mobile phone in a non-conventional way. Picking up the hidden sounds that the mobile phone gives off, and creating sonic output from usually inaudible sources. The noises made by the mobile phone are always in some sense there, giving off signals which our senses cannot perceive. In this experiment the inaudible, hidden elements of a device, utilised primarily for its audibility, are foregrounded, giving us a new perspective on mobile technology.

Rhizome - Sampling 1

This is from

http://rhizome.org/editorial/3287

Sampling #1 (2009) - Eva Paulitsch and Uta Weyrich

By Ceci Moss on Monday, February 8th, 2010 at 2:00 pm.

Image of Sampling #1 from flickr user 7pc

Since 2006, the two artists have been collecting films from mobile phones in the public sphere. It is the mixture of amateurish documentation of your own life, of a direct, unhampered view on your own reality, of unmotivated, unguided camera movements as the expression of boredom but also of directed little scenarios that aroused our collector's instincts. Paulitsch and Weyrich are accepting all films into their archive uncensored. This is increasingly developing into a fascinating document of our times, to a sort of evidence-gathering on and siting of the present. Above all, however, it resembles a bizarre album of weltering digital imagery.

For the exhibition YOU_ser 2.0 in the ZKM | Media Museum, the two artists make their mobile film archive accessible for visitors via mobile tagging. The mobile films are concealed behind the colourful QR codes, which visitors can decipher with their own WLAN-mobiles or with the mobiles provided by the museum. In this way, the content of the films Paulitsch and Weyrich are collecting on the street and publishing on the Net returns to the private sphere and into the medium where they originate. The video blog serves to show new extracts from this archive and offers a platform to films currently being collected.

-- FROM THE DESCRIPTION OF "SAMPLING #1" FROM THE EXHIBITION "YOU_ser 2.0: CELEBRATION OF THE CONSUMER"

Google Latitude: Mobile experiment

Hi!

Well, Monday was a completely mobile day ehehehe, so I decided to try Google Latitude, a Google programme that connects with the GPS of your mobile and register all the places where you are. If you enable that to be public you can share your location with your Google Friends... I tried it and here is the registration of my trip of Monday, from Brighton to London and moving in London.