So a bunch of us started a project yesterday as part of the Hacking as a Way of Knowing workshop. Ours is, of course, the best project. We have motors that drive a reading of a fax carbon based on a “knowledge radio” on the Day of Digital Humanities.
Today was the first day of the Hacking as a Way of Knowing e-waste fabrication workshop. Above you can see the text from a fax thermal printer roll projected onto a wall. (At least I think that’s what it is.) Below is an Arduino connected to a a speaker. Stéfan has working on taking a RSS feed and triggering events so we can connect stuff to it to create cool stuff.
We got talking about why fabrication is taking off. Turkel has his lab. Matt Ratto at the Univerity of Toronto has a lab (with a great name – CriticalMaking.com. Some of the reasons are:
From Steve Ramsay’s twitter I discovered goosh.org – the unofficial google shell. What an idea! I’m not sure what I would use it for, but it seems dangerously close to brilliant.
At the end of the week I’ll be going to Toronto for what I expect will be one of the most interesting workshops ever. William J. Turkel at Western has organized a hands-on workshop on Hacking as a Way of Knowing to reflect on electronic waste and data about the environment. The short description of the purpose is,
This three-day workshop will explore the theme of E-waste and environmental data. Working in small groups, participants will be given the task of hacking some typical consumer e-waste to create reflective technological assemblages that incorporate ‘nature’ in some form while calling one or more of our basic assumptions into question.
This is not so much about building something, but about thinking about how fabrication (hacking) is a way of thinking through AND in this case we will be thinking through the environment and all the waste around computing. I suspect I’m going to be embarassed by how much I waste.
I just blogged about the interface ideas in Stranger than Fiction from MK12. Turns out they were behind the interface for MI5 in the latest James Bond – see UI’s from Movies – Quantum of Solace and see the response from MK12. For images from the movie see NUI Group: Quantom of Solace images.
Calen H. sent me a link to a very funny YouTube video on Opera Face Gestures. The idea is to control the Opera browser by making faces. Almost good enough to be implemented.
From Peter O and others the amazing YouTube remix, THRU YOU | Kutiman mixes YouTube. Alarmingly good music.
And from Peter R a link to Extreme Sheet LED Herding. Flock remix.
Neave Imagination (…big wobbly elephants) is a lovely Flash toy that works great on a large screen.
Play with the big wobbly lines and you’ll soon have an active imagination.
Try his other toys – many are beautiful and they work on a 30″ screen.
My colleague Stan Ruecker has been create short online movies of humanities computing software tools he is involved in like the Mandala Browser and the Digital Profiles rich prospect browser. These are in the tradition of videos like A Vision of Students Today from the Digital Ethnography folk. There is also the TEI Encoding of Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues. Neat idea – we should get more comfortable with YouTube as a way of conveying ideas.
The Taco Lab who are probably best known for the Siftables (small cookie-sized tile computes that sense each other) shown at TED have a blog with some interesting posts like this one on American Shanzhai?. Shanzai literally means “mountain fortress” or the hideout of bandits and it refers to pirate activities like hacking cheap copies of consumer goods (that are heavily marked up.) It is now beginning to refer to a creative subculture of improving or altering electronics outside state (and IP) control. Thus the image above is from the Taco Lab blog and is a example of this creative shanzai – in this case a cell-phone/cigarette pack whose value is in its uniqueness. This got me thinking of all the open projects out there that make it easier to hack things like: