Experimental Performance Hybrids

X-Rated Super Mario

2011-03-09T16:51:00.001-05:00

Alaska's bad Genes

2010-01-26T21:26:00.006-05:00

When two of the most horrible, unethical and irresponsible specimens the human race can produce appear at the top of the food chain we can easily deduce that gene disease is spreading in Alaska. Were Sara Paling and Lisa Murkowski separated at birth? Or is total disregard for the future (and present) of the human species a typical Alaskan trait? Eskimos have had time to adapt to subzero temperatures through thousands of years, but apparently more recent opportunistic invasive species like Palinians and Markowsians have suffered a serious brain freeze that has only left their greed organs intact.

This arrogant woman (take your pick, they are interchangeable) is using the power entrusted to her by her "constituents" (read oil companies, dirty power plants and other offending industries) and supported by her "fellow republicans" to prevent any measure that might protect the environment, our health and that of our children, not to mention the rest of the animal kingdom and every other species from certain destruction were she to prevail.

Maybe the very dim witted Pat Robertson has a point. God is punishing the human race for having given birth to defective specimens like him and the above mentioned abominations which are of course loudly and openly applauded by a "broad swath of industry, agriculture and energy lobbies" which are afraid any E.P.A regulation might cut into their obscene profits, GOD FORBID!

The Supreme Puppet Judges of America

2010-01-23T13:56:00.008-05:00

It won't cease to amaze me the stupidity of a system that allows a bunch of decrepit right-wing fanatics, so called "judges", to destroy one of the greatest countries in the world by letting themselves be, very profitably swayed, by the profiteers that rape and ravage our land for the benefit of their bank accounts, their "stakeholders" benefits and the will of politicians intent on grabbing the power to curtail what we so arrogantly tout to the rest of the world, freedom and democracy.

Disguising their vomitive decision as "freedom of speech", they, with their supine ignorant vote, have managed to enthrone what is simply hate speech, hate for the future of children for generations to come, hate for the land, hate for the health of our planet, who in the hands of greedy corporations will simply be depleted and destroyed in record time, if they get their wish, since they in turn will be able to pick and choose their limp representative puppets to govern us.

I say if they get their wish, because, if we were in almost any other country, people would be in the streets by the millions, putting their lives on the line to bring down these arrogant fools who have already shown their utmost lack of respect for the human species.

Theirs is not just another legal decision, but a deadly blow to a democracy already failing, corroded as it is by the powerful interest of banks, religious right wing fanatics whose media empires mush and blend in thoughtless pulp the minds of the ignorant and hapless masses under their spell.

Am I mad? no, I am furious, mostly with myself, for having believed in the possibility of a better world, and having brought children to this world with the hope for a better life. Unfortunately, moving to a better, more respectful country, with a better, more open and most importantly, more intelligent dialogue is not a solution, but certainly to be considered, why? because the decision of these blind idiots affect not only this land but the globe as a whole.

They have, with their stamp of approval to rape, given permission fo the polluters, destroyers and economic terrorists of our world, carte blanche to do as they wish, since obviously we won't be able to exert any more influence abroad after this, the most deleterious decision, taken by public officials, elected by the power of money, since Bush's imbecile and well orchestrated decision to do, whatever it took to shape our world for ever. I am sure, dim wits like his or the likes of the Palins, the Limbaughs or the Pat Robertsons of this country must be very proud of their accomplishments.

It shames me to be part of this limp and weak society that allows itself to be abused in such obscene and unjust way, without even making a stand.

REBOOT!

Help is in our Hands

2010-01-14T23:03:00.000-05:00

From the book: Solidarity Will Transform the World by Jeffrey Korgen

There are some points in life when every other thing is secondary. This is one of those moments, when millions of people are terrified and with a very grim future ahead.

We are all connected. Our group is like a family, we will work together for months, in some cases we will make friends forever. Our fellow student Christine Irvika, is from Haiti, let's hope that her family is well and let's keep her in our thoughts. She is part of this family.

In two days more than 4.5 million dollars have been texted to aid in this disaster. We can help right from where we are.

Call 90999 on your cell phone and text "HAITI." You will be charged $10.00 on your phone bill, the money of which will go to the Red Cross.

If you want to send goods instead, this is one suggestion, since it goes directly to the closest point of contact (their neighbors in Santo Domingo), "official aid" always takes too much time at a time when hours make a difference:

The Centers of the Company of Jesus in Dominican Rep. (Santo Domingo: Bono and Alberto Hurtado Center; Santiago: Center Bellarmino and CEFASA; Dajabón: Border solidarity) has established an aid network to help the victims of the earthquake in Haiti. They are accepting the following :

FOODS:
- Can Kidney beans
- Can sausages - Can Sardines - Can Tuna - Saltine crackers
- non-perishable Milk - Fruit juices in non-perishable containers - Nonperishable Foods.

MEDICINES
- Oral rehydration serum - Gauzes - Cotton - Analgesic (acetaminophen, ibuprophen) - - Elastic Bandages - Antitetanic Toxoide - Human antitetanic Ganmaglobulina - Antibiotic (amoxicifilina, in suspension and/or tablets) - Antiseptic (type yodopovidona, or type soap of clorhexidina) - sanitary Towels

Please send no clothing
You can send your contributions to the following addresses:

- Bonó, c. Josefa Brea N. 65, Mejoramiento Social, Santo Domingo.
Tel.: 809-682-4448. sjrmbono@sjrdom.org
(You need to activate Javascript to see this web.)
www.bono.org.do

- Centro Alberto Hurtado, Av. Jiménez Moya N. 37, (al lado de
Inazúcar), Santo Domingo

In Search of the Lost Time

2009-12-14T22:27:00.008-05:00

Charon and Psyche

I know well that many will disagree about the use of the time of our lives. Who am I to talk about this? There are many ways of visualizing the passage across the Styx, that well respected scenic river that takes us to shores beyond the everlasting fog.

I find this visualization by EA (yes, Electronic Arts, my old employee) rather amusing and interesting. For those of you who are interested in the most popular sport in the world, (no, not baseball nor your mis-called football, the one you play throwing the blimp with your HAND?) but yes, fútbol, football or soccer it is. According to FIFA football is actually played by more than 240 million people in about 200 countries.

Just to set the record straight I would like to mention that when I proposed to design the very first football computer game (for the Commodore 64) at Electronic Arts, they dismissed it as not very commercial. In fact one producer, who shall remain nameless asked me in his infinite cubiculed ignorance, if I could design some more "action" into the game, such as killing or at least maiming other players...no comment.

Well, fast forward to 2010 and here we have the game called FIFA 10 and the visualization I was talking about, called FIFA EARTH. It shows, arguably in real-time how many games are being played and have been played since its release a little over a month ago. So far, as I write this, the counter reads 136, 826, XXX (to fast to pin down, so by the time you check it I am sure it will be a very large number.) That makes for more than 2,000,000 soccer video games played every day! Do you understand my Proustian title now?

This visualizations is quite complex and immense, using streams of data not only from played games but also geo-located Tweets about them, real or virtual, and everything else related to the sport or of interest to fans. Consider for example that last year about 2 billion video game matches were played. How is that for a not very commercial game? LOL! that remark is up there with "I predict only a handful of computers will satisfy the requirements of the world" or something to that effect.

A Tetra Drachma from Athens, 450 B.C.

Not that I had become rich if I had done that first football game (which was completely designed with AI and all), but I think at least I would have one or two silver pieces to pay the price of traversing the by now, very polluted waters of the mythical river.

The Eye Writer

2009-12-14T22:01:00.001-05:00

Tempt1

We live in interesting times, no question about that. Plague, famine, kids killing people in remote villages from their drone playstations in Las Vegas, sipping RedBull. It is quite difficult to know how we can provide an ounce of balance to a ton of misery, so that ounce must be something really special to rescue our impossibly damaged spirit.

The influx of very damaged very young humans, the broken byproduct of that biggest business which is war, ends up in the landfills of society, the eternal superfund from which some people pick up the pieces and try to put things back together, albeit in a very different way. A leg here, an arm there, an eye or two, perhaps a brain? Can we pull us back together?

I will call him Luis

While searching for an appropriate picture to help me cut through the fog I had trouble finding one of the millions of miserable children which survive doing such a thing, because Corbis Corporation, the photo "service" owns most of them. I wonder, do those children get a percentage directly deposited to their pig accounts?

I guess you get the point. What triggered all this diatribe was me thinking about what we do on a daily basis, our "job" in other words. Do we really do something useful, something that tips the balance and creates a positive change? I think one of the reasons that the Open Source movement is so important is that it is a sort of groundswell, difficult to perceive because it is so pervasive and widespread.

But this movement, so dangerous to the monopolists of the world will tumble the most arrogant of them. There is no corporation, not even the most technically sophisticated that can evolve as rapidly as thousands or millions of people working together for a common cause.

As a little sample, I offer this movie about such an endeavour, one that ends with a call to hackers all over the world to collaborate, in this and any other way that might become the glue that binds us together again, into our cyborgian future.

The Eyewriter from Evan Roth on Vimeo.

Open Frameworks, F.A.T., Graffiti Research Lab, graffiti legend Tempt1 and of course EyeWriter got together to produce that ounce of energy for each and everyone of us...

Here is the how to and all the good monopoly-breaking stuff for those DIY's among us. Keep on DIYing...!

Ευγένιος Σπαθάρης και Σωτήρης Σπαθάρης

2009-05-20T14:27:00.012-04:00

Angel Who Recites Poems for the Death of Heroes

I intended to write a note about Eugenios Spatharis (Ευγένιος Σπαθάρης), since it is him that revived an ancient art for a new generation, including those who only saw the shadows projected on the television cave. But I though better to step back a few years, to understand where all this comes from and have perhaps a better idea of where it is going.

In his Memoirs, Sotiris Sphataris (Σωτήρης Σπαθάρης ) Eugenios's father, relates, with painful honesty, the events in his life and time that made him, what I consider, a master of one of the most important expressions of visual storytelling, since our beginnings as cave dwellers until this time of new media, convergence and interactivity, words and phrases which lose meaning as rapidly as a passing shadow.

Behind the White Screen is a perfect title for his memoirs. A screen which not only represents the canvas of the artist, but the medium through which art and life truly interact with those lucky enough to be entranced by its magic.

Sotiráki, as his mother called him, had a life worthy of a Greek tragedy or a Charles Dickens novel, of extreme poverty, abuse and misfortune, of daily beatings by a drunken father who used him as a beggar since he was 5 years old.

But then one day a white screen went up in town. Some oil lamps were lit behind and as the shadows danced and played and fought, a door opened in Sotíris heart that never closed again. And through it a whole spirit of a people came alive and multiplied in thousands of other hearts and minds.

In Plato's dialogue between Sócrates and Glaucon, the allegory of the cave represents a world devoid of ideas where fiction reigns supreme in lieu of reality, a perfect allegory for today, where virtual reality or VR is touted as the new world, where we, as the chained people of the cave, even farther away from the exit, are to spend the rest of our lives, our cones and rods tickled by the bits and bytes that illuminate our fool's paradise.

But from its royal beginnings in ancient China (Han Dynasty), shadow puppets brought stories to life, reflecting the wants and needs, the hopes and fears of people, from emperors to beggars. The shadows liberated people from the chains giving voice to the silent, joy to the sad and fear to the mighty. The cave was opened for the common people and like a virus spread all over the world.

They came to Greece during the Ottoman Empire and as is common with all theater arts, involvement with it was considered a disreputable profession, akin to prostitution whose practitioners were regarded as the lowest of the low, even though on the other side of the screen, people of all walks of life and fortune would enjoy their characters played and mocked, disrobed and challenged.

As a young kid in love with shadow puppets and its Karagiozis character, Sotiris had to suffer many a beating, simply for being them. In a time when a mother proclaimed that she would rather see her son dead and buried than becoming a puppeteer, Sotiris love for the art surmounted every obstacle in his way, in a truly odyssean fashion. And so a living legend was born.

His art did not die with his passing in 1972, it lived in his son, Eugenios Spatharis which carried the tradition until a few days ago, when he also traveled on, May 10, 2009.

The light still burns behind the white screen, waiting for the shadows to appear and the show to begin.

The Birth of a Notion

2009-05-18T22:56:00.003-04:00

It is quite refreshing to see and hear here and there little voices accumulating like streams coming from our inner well, in route to the Great River we call life. There is a saying in Spanish: "cuando el rio suena, piedras trae", which I would try to translate as: "when the river sounds (or sings, or roars), stones bring". Any language, saying, or poem gets lost in translation, but there is that other language without words, which is expressed in a warm handshake, not the business lock which signals our enslavement to terms, but the one that simply proclaims our human nature.

My friend Douglas Rushkoff made this little film, which in its simplicity (production not withstanding) communicates in a very direct way, a longing, a hope that maybe, just maybe, enough rocks tumble down the river in unison to recover the lost sense of self which has been stripped from our bones and soul or whatever you want to call the consciousness emerged.

Here it is for your tickling pleasure, thanks Douglas

Life Inc. The Movie from Douglas Rushkoff on Vimeo.

Our Earth

2009-04-19T14:46:00.009-04:00

In this age when, rather late, politicians still argue if we should cut military budgets to dedicate a pittance to saving our planet and our species from destruction we could look back 30 years ago (in fact we could look back centuries and find the same concerns, albeit more timely) when visionary and designer, poet and engineer, R. Buckminster Fuller stated that we must work together as a crew if we are to survive on our planet, "spaceship earth." (from where his quotes are taken)

Bucky, as he was known, worried about the lack of education and understanding necessary to effectively take care of our planet and its dwindling resources;

...Because our spontaneous initiative has been frustrated, too often inadvertently, in earliest childhood we do not tend, customarily, to dare to think competently regarding our potentials. We find it socially easier to go on with our narrow, shortsighted specialization’s and leave it to others---primarily to the politicians---to find some way of resolving our common dilemmas.

...I must observe also that we’re not going to sustain life at all except by our successful impoundment of more of the Sun’s radiant energy aboard our spaceship than we are losing from Earth in the energies of radiation or outwardly rocketed physical matter. We could burn up the Spaceship Earth itself to provide energy, but that would give us very little future. Our space vehicle is similar to a human child. It is an increasing aggregate of physical and metaphysical processes in contradistinction to a withering, decomposing corpse.

But as John Denver sang in "Seasons of the Heart":

It’s hard to tell the truth
When no one wants to listen
When no one really cares
What’s going on
And it’s hard to stand alone
When you need someone beside you
Your spirit, your faith
Must be strong

What one man can do is dream
What one man can do is love
What one man can do is change the world
And make it young again
Here you see what one man can do

"Think of it. We are blessed with technology that would be indescribable to our forefathers. We have the wherewithal, the know-it-all to feed everybody, clothe everybody, and give every human on Earth a chance. We know now what we could never have known before-that we now have the option for all humanity to "make it" successfully on this planet in this lifetime. Whether it is to be Utopia or Oblivion will b a touch-and-go relay race right up to the final moment."

— R. Buckminster Fuller 1980

The ethics of computers

2008-08-17T22:29:00.008-04:00

Only six years ago the New York Times announced that a Japanese laboratory had built the world's fastest computer, ..."a machine so powerful that it matches the raw processing power of the 20 fastest American computers combined and far outstrips the previous leader, an I.B.M.-built machine." (That is 35.6 trillion mathematical operations per second)

As is true of the robotics field as well the Japanese machine reveals very different ethics and commitment than their US counterparts.

The Japanese government financed this computer to be used at the Earth Simulator Research and Development Center in Yokohama ..." to analyze climate change, including global warming, as well as weather and earthquake patterns. "

"By contrast", the article says, "the United States has predominantly focused its efforts on building powerful computers for simulating weapons, while its efforts have lagged in scientific areas like climate modeling."

Forward 6 years to June of this year and true to the double exponential acceleration towards the singularity suggested by Ray Kurzweil, CNN announced that engineers from IBM and Los Alamos (sounds a bell?) have designed a computer capable of sustaining 1,000 trillion operations per second.

Can you guess what this computer will be dedicated to?

It will be used to help maintain the nation's nuclear weapons stockpile

So while most of the supercomputers around the world work towards solving some of the most urgent problems that we face, the US government through its military establishment keeps its accelerated pace towards our destruction.

It's Show Time

2008-08-06T04:21:00.006-04:00

Am I ready yet?

Finally the expected moment when breaking a leg is the least of your worries, it is in fact a welcome omen!

I decided to post a slideshow, given that there are many pictures of different moments, from the preparation before the show to pictures showing the actual marionette, since many people believed that it was a pre-made video agains which the performance took place.

As I had discussed with my mentor Deborah Aschheim, this was going to be an experiment to see if the concept worked. The concept being that The Creator represented, among other things, an omnipresence that we took for granted, whose reality was ignored. The pervasive surveillance and control that is now an accepted state in the life of so many people who fail to question some very basic assumptions.

This presence whose control was embodied by the environment itself could become simply entertainment, a surface to which we have become fully accustomed and to which we in fact give our compliance voluntarily.

So perhaps conceptually the experiment worked, since as a "show" it was considered fascinating by most of the audience I had a chance to speak with. But I think that I would like to eventually construct a full scale marionette as originally planned (5 mts. tall). I am more interested in telling a compelling story that can directly connect with the stored archetypes that we carry in our brains and , because of scale and the amazement associated with seeing something so out of the ordinary, our defenses are suspended, letting the images and sounds seep undetected into our psyche.

Later on, perhaps,we will encounter in our dreams or nightmares, or worse in our waking reality, images,facts and ideas that evoke that inexplicable and uncanny feeling of the loss of our mythical innocence. Optimistically I would hope that this would result in recognizing like Pink Floyd says "the writing on the wall".

The Creator was born in Germany as a concept, or rather as a nightmare that my wife Lorena had. As artists we become attached to the object of our creation, even if it represents something as terrible as to what a post-apocalyptic scenario suggests. We treat the creator and the creature with loving care and feel both awe and compassion for them, or perhaps for what they represent. A loss of our own humanity.

It is fitting, and part of the mystery of our lives that we simply accept things as they happen. The performance took place in Linz, of all places. Linz, the birthplace of Hitler bears everywhere you turn and in spite of the efforts to conceal it, an atmosphere of sadness which even the clowns and street performers and musicians who entertain tourists and passerby s fail to diffuse. At our graduation ceremony, Virgil Wong had invited a pair of these street musicians to perform for us. It was interesting to see how the director of the Institute felt so uncomfortable as they sang beautiful but obviously sorry laden songs filled with nostalgia for what is not, sang in a language which nobody spoke but which everyone understood.

Ir Rays

2008-07-04T01:47:00.004-04:00

A few posts before I mentioned our amazement at the strength and penetration of the infrared LED's that we are using as the beacon for our performance. I just took a screen grab of what the webcam was recording as proof that I was not seeing visions. You can clearly see the veins on the hand. I really like the shot. It reminds me of the photograms of László Moholy-Nagy

"The reality of our century is technology: the invention, construction and maintenance of machines. To be a user of machines is to be of the spirit of this century. Machines have replaced the transcendental spiritualism of past eras."
--László Moholy-Nagy

The Small Bang!

2008-06-29T01:32:00.007-04:00

Here the Creator is kneeling down since the high-torque spine servo is not powered up.

It has been quite an ordeal to get to this point. In fact a couple of years to be exact. But finally the creature moves, and not only moves but seems to have a life of its own. I will not post video until after the performance but I am very excited by what I see. Philip and I crack up laughing every time it moves because it is so life-like.

But come to think of it, what is happening (philosophy purists will probably disagree) is that life in fact has been transferred and conserved as energy in a different form. This is not something new to me. I consider any work of our hands to partake of this mysterious force that we call life, otherwise how would it inspire us or elevate our spirit?

When I see a painting (in reality, not a reproduction) by say, Vermeer, the emotion I feel is a product not only of the formal beauty, but of being in the presence of time standing still, a few years of someone's life (which just happens to be a master) condensed and trapped like a genius in a bottle. I, the recipient of this gift, am the vehicle necessary for this alchemical process to occur. I release the energy contained in the matter of the painting.

The order of the particles, held by resinous mediums, crystallized by the passage of time which conform the external appearances of the scene resonate and I believe connect me in the most direct form with the creator of the work of art, in the same way that we are in intimate connection with the writer that is sharing her thoughts and life experiences with us.

This is, has to be, an energy transfer that could probably be calculated by an Einstein, but I prefer to simply shed a tear of joy when I find myself in front of the work of art. That is what art means to me.

In case you have not seen a previous post this is what the Creator's creature looks like. Here Lorena is getting some exercise and getting fit to withstand the wild and strenuous performance ahead, after all it is all her fault since she created the Creator. Playing god or goddess does not come cheap. You can see a little animation here

The OZ connection

2008-06-29T01:15:00.004-04:00

The software is finally (well...) done. I mean it is totally functional, does what it is supposed to be and it is absolutely beautiful to look at. The design is old-school, meaning lean, efficient and therefore aesthetically perfect on my book. Thanks to Philip for never being satisfied. In fact every day there is some internal change that makes it run faster or adds even more functionality.

I will provide pictures of the UI in full operation as it grabs puppet positions, controls lights, sounds etc. It feels a bit like those old music sequencers which were so intuitive and logical and therefore easy to use, yet produced any result that your imagination demanded. This is the case.

These are some current pics of the UI before anything is loaded. The puppet figure is just a place holder until the cameras, both for tracking and for position display are connected.

This last shot shows the tracking grid. All the application is done modularly so that everything can be customized, such as the resolution of the grid which in this case represents the size of the stage, basically 6x8 meters. Every cell triggers different responses from the Creator based on the performer actions and timing.

Out of Sight

2008-06-28T23:40:00.008-04:00

A few more days and we will be driving up the east coast to NY. I hate to think of all the gas we will burn, but I am sure it will be less than taking a plane, no to mention the cost. Nowadays it is impossible (and this is good) to do anything without minding the consequences in the bigger picture of life as we know it. I feel that finally a swell of inconformity is rising against the many tyrants that rule our world, including our inner one.

Back to business. The weight of the eyes proved too much for the tiny springs, so I decided to encase the spring inside a sturdier one and on top of that I put a couple of coats of latex to hold it together and still be flexible. That proved an overkill. The eyes became too stiff and did not respond to the movement as expected. So I carved them from an ultralight foam, and gave the a few coats of liquid gesso. After sanding them they had just the right look and weight to be supported by the tiny springs.

On the left the amputated wooden eye vs. the light foam eyeballs shown at the end of the spring. The toothpick became the optic nerve and it is passively string-controlled for the basic position and orientation of the eyes. They work beautifully and add a lot of expressiveness. The strings are connected to the end of the neck, so that when the Creator bows its head or kneels, the eyes "relax", and when he stands up they perk up very nicely. As everything puppetry and theatrical, their exaggerated irritation is understandable, given the great effort to see and make sense of an utterly absurd world.

The focal point of the entire universe of the Creator is ultimately its creature. Regardless of the external appearance, which only a parent would love, the important thing is that which radiates from it and communicates its presence. This electronic soul is extremely simple yet fascinating. We started creating the tracking beacon using standard IR (infrared) LED's. We were having problems achieving the necessary brightness to be detected at a long distance. On top of that, since the creature moves around the stage wildly shaking every part of its body and sometimes lowering its head it was important that the beacon be visible in all circumstances. Adding the half-pong ball (sanded to paper thin) helped the angle spread of the light but we thought that it would cut the light considerably.

And indeed our first tests confirmed that. So we bought the super-wide angle IR LED's in the hope of solving the angle problem and still retaining the strength of the light. (see the previous post on that here)

Now comes the ignoramus part, which if we had done a little more research would have been avoided. All the webcams we tested have an internal filter that blocks IR, not exactly sure why (have not had a minute to explore that). So we proceeded to dismantle the lenses to remove such filters. (unfortunately we were so engrossed in doing so that I forgot to take pictures of the process!) This tested every sense and the steadiness of our hands, not to mention memorizing the order and orientation of every microlens. In fact, in the case of our wide-angle camera shown previously, after removing the IR blocker, we had to rearrange all 9 lenses and spacers in any imaginable way until we hit on the right one. Philip which has much better eyesight ended doing the final assemblies and it was nerve wracking to watch, almost like a brain surgeon removing a micro tumor.

The original beacon, which we will use as a backup since it is even brighter because it has more LED's to begin with.

Well, then we were up for a big surprise, in fact we are still amazed at what we saw. First of all, the camera with the exposed film in place (to filter most of the visible light) not only saw the light, but it was as bright as pointing the camera to the sun! At this point we realized that both the standard LED's as well as the wide-angle ones work practically the same. You could turn the beacon even 180 degrees (in other words showing the back) and the camera would still see it very brightly.

But then we were in shock. By holding the IR device in our hand we observe something amazing. We could not only see the light going through our hand, we could see every vein as well! very much like x-rays, except we could not see the bones. Again, the surprise was such that I forgot to take pictures of this, but tomorrow I will. We even put the thing inside our mouth, but the cheeks were way to thin for the strength of the light. This immediately brought questions about the safety of this light which we had not considered.

So I have been reading papers and reports by organizations such as The International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection, but have found little indication of danger at that level. However, although LED's are classified as IR-C are supposed to have a minimal penetration of the skin, while IR-A which is labeled as hazardous is said to penetrate the skin only a few millimeters. So something is odd here. More food for thought.

A Tale of Two Masters

2008-06-14T23:51:00.011-04:00

First napkin sketch of the user interface

The intermediate stage of the motion control system has closely followed
the original concept although of course it has been greatly improved.

I would like to quote from the introduction to my Master's Thesis "Roboethics and Performance":

"Being as we are at the verge or perhaps in the middle of that threshold or bifurcation of our own destiny, it is hard if not impossible to observe with parsimony the course of action. In that liminal state where turbulence becomes organized into myriad eddies and flows and the “singularity” approaches, every theory or hypothesis seems to have some validity since the information or data we analyze is particular to our point of view and seldom encompasses a bigger picture. Gregory Bateson , reminiscing about the Macy conferences, goes further by suggesting that we never know the world as such. He states that “We are our epistemology” since we only perceive and understand the world through what our sensory apparatus allows.

However the birthing environment of the open network where data itself acts as a “controlling agent” is beginning to show a pattern that is itself fed back into the system, and once the critical threshold is achieved, some theorists suggest it will give raise to the emergence of a machinic consciousness.

The ability to enhance our body and mind utilizing radical nanotechnology beyond therapeutic practices, and the recent advances in bioinformatics and prosthetics as Katherine Hayles suggests, opens the discourse about the posthuman condition. All the “ecological variety” at the dawn of this new era, with the consequent interbreeding, is creating an explosion of possible species raising profound ethical questions and forcing us to rethink our position in the evolutionary sphere."

As some recent studies of the brain suggest*, there is not one but two control centers of control and command which work independently and actually incommunicated from each other even though both work towards a common goal.

The software that Philip Forget and myself have designed works as one of those control centers. The other stems from the independent actions of the performer which by interacting with the environment under surveillance by the Creator produces a synergistic feedback loop.

I am very excited by the software part of the project. It is in my biased opinion the best tool that I have seen in robotic puppetry control (not that there are many, mostly in research projects like mine). Although at first some closed systems were briefly considered, like National Instrument's LabView, to control servos based on image processing and other sensor input, the price and steep learning and development curve ruled it out early on, not to mention my dislike of anything that is not open source.

When Philip learned that I was using the MAKE microcontroller to drive my project and suggested that we use Flash as the controlling software I was right off skeptical. Not having used Flash in a couple of years I was not aware of recent developments.

He was of course referring to FlashDevelop, which is an open source ActionScript 2/3 and web development environment which integrates seamlessly with the Adobe product. This has allowed us to implement exactly what we wanted in a record time and in a very efficient and elegant way.

Our system is essentially a motion-sound-image-video-light sequencer/controller, driven in this case by image processing, but could as well be driven by any other sort of input. The heart of the system is a MAKE microcontroller which is directly controlled by the software right out of the box.

The screen capture above shows the position editor on the left and the corresponding key frame editor on the right. Each position is a collection of expressive movements achieved by "training" the marionette and recording the position, travel and speed of a group of eight servos. The sliders on the top right control or feedback both position and speed for each individual servo. The block below house the smaller sliders for light control as well as the sound control. The placeholder image is an automatic capture of the marionette position.

When played, the timeline runs thorough all the movements, light states and sounds that correspond to such moment of expression. The modules missing in the screen above are the library module and the main GRID which is the area under surveillance by the camera and which triggers actions defined by both timing and position of the performer or other beaming object (the performer wears an infrared beacon).

It is our intention to release the software once completed as an open source project under Creative Commons.

*Washington University School of Medicine (2007, June 21). Brain's Voluntary Chain-of-command Ruled By Not One But Two Captains. ScienceDaily. Retrieved June 15, 2008, from http://www.sciencedaily.com /releases/2007/06/070619134802.htm

The Cyclopean Eye

2008-06-14T18:02:00.010-04:00

The tiniest springs I could find in my "this could be useful" parts bin

The eyes are an important means of expression of the "soul" of a person, animal or character. The only external organ that connects directly to the brain through the shortest possible path.
The eyes of the creator move nervously as he scans its surroundings. Its world. They are animated by a simple spring mechanism that responds to the smallest movement. I did not know it was going to be so challenging to do this, except that, as we have found out, scale matters. And the smaller the scale the more critical the elements become.

The springs proved to be too weak to support the weight of the eye,
so I added a coat of latex to strengthen and stiffen it a bit,
but it proved to be a little too much so I ended up burning the latex away.
The residue that it left iwas just the right amount.

Lorena irritating the eyes

Of course the real "eye" of the Creator is up in the sky, or rather the ceiling in this case. This cyclopean eye that sees and controls everything is more and more a pervasi and accepted fact of life, in our streets, our buildings and even our homes, not to mention the "real" and inaccessible eye in the sky who observes and analyzes our every move, both as a species as well as individually when the need arises.

A very wide angle camera (76 degrees) was the choice after a good deal of research, and it proved to be the right one. I like that it is flat and although the base actually sucks if you are going to use it on a desk or a monitor it is perfect to tape to the roof and adjust the angle precisely. I needed a wide angle because the ceiling at the venue is not very tall and the camera must cover at least a 10x10 mt performing area, the world of the Creator, its Tartarus.

HP 2 megapixel camera, 76 degrees FOV

Related to the eyes or rather vision system is the light. Not the infrared light that the camera detects and processes but the actual "stage lighting". For quite a while I thought I was going to have to finagle a small lighting system form the theatre department at my university but since that was not very promising I started looking around for solutions.

I must say I am very happy with the outcome. I bought some inexpensive 12 LED flashlights at the local supermarket and hacked them (literally) so as to keep only the front portion. The advantage, in this case, of a cheap Chinese product is that it was very easy to solder to it, unlike more sophisticated models. The beam is extremely bright and is easily controlled by the microcontroller. So I have 4 "spots" with different color lights (a color filter on the LED's) to dramatize the scene and automatically create different moods according to the moment.

I got the plastic flexible contraption to where I attached the light base from one of my many "possible useful things" boxes. I wish I knew what it is or where it came from, maybe someone does becasue it is extremely practical for this and I am sure, other, applications. I suspect that it might belong to some fluid dispensing system.

The following are the very first tests with my new lighting system. I love it! absolute and precise positional and intensity control.

The Eyes of the Poet

2008-06-14T17:15:00.006-04:00

One of the films that most impressed me when I was a young aspiring filmmaker was undoubtedly Un Chien Andalou and its memorable eye-slicing scene was particularly impressive to me. Whenn I was seven years old I had had my left eye cut by a piece of glass thrown to me by a childhood friend which required seven stitches right next to the pupil. This event changed my life forever and I believe in a positive way as I look back (pun not intended).

First of all the impact on my psyche was considerable. Since all eye operations occur with your eyes wide open, it is inevitable to see what it is being done, even if you are under total anesthesia, like I was.

The surgeon did not believed me at first when I told him that I had seen all the operation until I started describing in detail what I saw. This images were burned in my mind in a very permanent way, and for many years, until my young adult age the sequence of events (the operation itself) would run unannounced like a silent film of yore. When this happened I had to immediately stop whatever I was doing and change to something opposite of that, for example if I was alone I would try to find people, the more the better, like a crowd. But when I was in a crowd or a party and the film started to run I had to immediately find a place where I could be alone. Only then would the operation fade and let me go on with my life. Then one day this vanished never to come back again.

My sight never recovered and so I would see very clearly with my right eye and completely out of focus with my left, since the stitches distorted the pupil. This became extremely useful when I was a cameraman, since I did not have to close my left eye when shooting like everyone does. The main reason you would close the eye that is not looking through the viewfinder is to prevent confusion as to which image you are supposed to be seeing. The view from the lens would never be the same as the naked eye and therefore the mix of both images would be very disturbing to some people. However, my two vies were so radically different that I was able to use the out of focus image to my advantage. The left eye could (barely) see that which was outside the frame and therefore I would be aware of something that was just going to happen around and could pan to frame it or to avoid it.

Back to the creatures eyes and the relationship with all of this. I, and apparently Lorena, my wife, as well have lived and still do in a close relationship with the dream world, which as you know is not always your "dream world" since nightmares and surreal events can be pretty scary. It si just that we have both decided to turn these experiences into the stuff of art, bringing this parallel universe into the "real" world for other to see.

The touch of the Godess

2008-06-14T00:41:00.007-04:00

The credit for the Creator's flesh and blood must go to Lorena, who with her hands brings to life the creatures of our nightmares, the future that we have already created even if we ourselves are not quite there yet to suffer the consequences, but getting very close...

Plasticine, plaster gauze and Papier-mâché is the skin of its face

Make up time

Hmmm, definetely some resemblance...

The Creator gets its make-up treatment. It was eerie to see how it resembled the original Creator's head, that you can see in the background. It was like seeing a clone emerge from another dimension. And God said, "Go ahead and multiply!"

Re Cycle beneath the wheel

2008-05-22T22:06:00.011-04:00

The Creator stage in progress

People, myself included, talk about reducing our "carbon footprint", a term about to disappear from overexposure the same way any word repeated over and over loses its meaning as it is replaced by noise. At the same time we blog about it, consuming terawatts of carbon producing power exacerbated by the inefficiency of bloated operating systems, the apparently innocuous white screen of Google, by the energy consumed by the avatars in virtual worlds that need to be kept virtually alive by the server nodes and the computers around the world that hum incessantly without any hope of ever being silent.

Our self-made society has plugged a cannula into our collective vein, to transfuse itself into the mind of the machine, which like a life support system we cannot disconnect, or at least we think we can't, that is, until the plug is pulled by the system itself when no longer needs any more information, other than the one it itself generates.

WW II direct interhuman syringe.

That is the story of The Creator with which we are trying to portray, using puppetry as a transference medium, the stark reminder of our self-dependency. Who or what controls who or what?

On to the practicum.

Since I detest plastic and the many woes and sickness that has come as a result of its indiscriminate use, I try to target it as a primary candidate for recycling, which is just a palliative approach to the real problem. In any case, I took the vacuformed package of the "energy saving" bulbs that we use nowadays, and just as I was about to send it into its recyling path, I noticed a form which reminded me of ancient alchemical apparatuses which I needed to create for the robotic-marionette stage. So here is the process:

The background, built over the "hardware cloth" is semi-translucent, with the most translucent parts being the "genetic" containers which will transmute common information into a panacea.

A digital projector, fed with data generated imagery will fill up the vessels as well as create the fluid digital environment where the Creator lives.

Here is the very first test as seen from behind, where I am trying unsuccessfully to line up, scale and correct the angle distortion. As you can see I missed the mark by a few centimeters. I am now in the process of positioning the elements as close as I can to the target, given the limitations of inexact everything.

Chakra

2008-05-22T20:26:00.006-04:00

Nowadays it has become fashionable to "go green", like trying to patch a dam when it is about to burst. We have forgotten how, not too long ago, recycling was for many simply a way of life. But perhaps that is just because some of us grew up in a very different circumstance. People today would say that we lived in misery or poverty, therefore we were forced to straighten a bent rusted nail instead of simply buying a new one.

For me that was what made my life extraordinary. My grandmother, who had taken a "poverty vow" (go explain that to someone living in a consumer society!) lived a life where everything around her had a purpose and had to be taken care of. Since I grew up with her it was natural for me to learn and understand how to create with what the world around me, particularly our shelter, provided. To what others was a miserable shack, to me was a magnificent castle, full of adventure and stories, constantly morphing through the tension between entropy and our creative survival.

I tell all this (and there is so much more to tell) because that was, among everything else I know and care about, the root and the source of my current work. In that privileged environment where the fruit of our labor and our play (is there any difference?) both fed us and entertained us, I learned to make my first puppets and my first theater. My audience (beside my grandmother) were the three or four kids that survived in the vicinity of our house.

I say survive, because in their case even I, in my young age could tell the difference between my life, where every stone, stick or piece of paper was an immense treasure, to be enjoyed and shared and their miserable existence from which they could not possibly escape on their own.

Hundreds of years of oppression and slavery had transformed them into nothing more than a basic self-consuming organism that labored, like a fungus, to produce what others needed but without being able to make use of it themselves. They were the kids of adobe and brick makers and yet they could not build even the smallest adobe house to defend themselves from the extreme elements. Why not? think about it. If you were starving, would you build your house out of bread?

They lived in cardboard shelters, made from discarded boxes (they smeared the cardboard with asphalt to fend of the tremendous storms that are typical of the high plateaus at the center of Mexico, above 2,240 meters) just big enough to cover their bodies and not much more.

I remember, as one of the first tragedies that I witnessed in my childhood, a fire, produced by their simple kiln, that consumed their "house" in just a few minutes. I watched from my side of the river how they just stood helpless, since there was nothing they could do. The water they used for their adobes had to be carried in buckets from the river (more like a big sewage that came from the big city) and this took the majority of the day of my small friends who had to carry the heavy load.

After that I never saw them again. Perhaps something else happened within the cardboard walls that made them move away from that patch of dirt to another.

I guess this memories are prompted by the tragedy of the millions who have lost their homes and their lives. In their case, the solidity and the weight of their shelter crushed them to death, bricks and water, wind and fire. In the kids of my childhood it was the asphalt, which protected them from the rain, which burned their cardboard shacks in a flash. But they did not lose their lives just then, they had lost it many hundreds of years ago and continue to lose it under the empires who dominate the world through terror, so that their fat children can become obese with the food that the others don't eat, and their governors, kings and presidents can rot in gold and riches and trillions of petroleum dollars tinted with the blood of thousands and hundreds of thousands of people before they themselves die their solitary death.

So then I am here, putting up a sort of morality play, told from the point of view of the machine which will survive us and carry with them the good and the bad programming of the species that preceded them.

Chicken Coop

2008-05-04T01:07:00.005-04:00

After thinking for what seemed years, about what the material for the background for the stage should be I decided to use something called "hardware cloth". I must admit I had never heard such term until I described what I wanted to a person I know at my local Loew's store. He immediately said, "you want hardware cloth", I said "no it must be metallic!". So he simply lead me to the garden area and noted that it was just a sort of "chicken wire". So that was exactly what I wanted, but did not know the name, so now you know too.

Hardware cloth

It is pretty sharp and can cut you very nicely if you are not careful. I did not use gloves because I had to bend the ends and the gloves prevented that, so it took quite a while to do it without bleeding to chicken death.

Here it is already cut and tried for a good fit. I like how it seems a natural fit to the rest of the stage. The idea is that not only supports the materials and "stuff" that I will put there, but it also acts as a grid with all the connotations that the word has in terms of media. Once I project from behind (over a translucent substrate) it will look, or so I hope, as a kind of coarsely pixilated environment, very apropos with the theme.

IR Beacon

2008-05-04T00:06:00.004-04:00

This is the first finished beacon. It has 24 IR (infrared) LED's. The idea was that, since the tracking camera must have a wide angle in order to see the entire stage (which is about 6x6 meters, much smaller than I expected) from above, we needed an array big enough that would be easily tracked.

What I did not realize was that the angle of the LED's that I got was extremely narrow, so that when the performer lowers or tilts her head (the beacon is on top of her head) the LED's practically disappear. So we came up with the idea of using a diffusion dome to spread the light. That of course is half a ping-pong ball which happened to have the exact required diameter.

The ball was too thick and did not let enough light through, so I sanded it until it felt like a turtle egg, if you ever touched one. The solution worked, however there was still a considerable loss of light.

So I started to look for new LED's. This time I made sure that the lens of the LED would be wide enough to allow the free movement of the performer's head. This is what I found:

Ultra Wide Angle IR 850nm

These LED's are awesome. We could not believe how wide they emit light and how bright they are. You can almost turn the away from the camera and you can still see them!. So they will definitely do the trick without the need for a diffuser. We will use a set of ten which has the added benefit of resulting in a much smaller device and, because it is IR, it will be invisible to the audience.

I bought them form the guys at NaturalPoint which have a wide (yes, intended) variety of optical devices, mostly for motion-tracking. A set of ten cost me US$ 15 which is about half of the price of "cheap" LED's at RadioCrap.

So now we will design and burn another circuit and probably use a coin battery instead, to make everything really compact and unobtrusive to wear.

As soon as the UI (user interface) is ready for the tracking and motion-assigning program I will post pics of the UI and the tracking screen which is a lot of fun to see in operation.

How to solve it

2008-04-23T21:27:00.009-04:00

My apologies to George Pólya for quoting the title of his jewel of a book, but "How to solve it" made an indelible impression on me when I read it decades ago. I wish I had had him as my math teacher instead of the monster that expelled me from his class for having the nerve to record his "lectures" (which I did not understand) in what must have been one of the earliest portable recorders (the size of a worker's box lunch) that my dad, a very forward thinking man gave me as a present so I could use technology to help me in my studies. This wicked teacher foamed (he became redder than he was and I remember his veins bulging in his neck) that my intent was to make money with his awful expositions, when my only intention was to listen to it again at home and review the parts that were unintelligible to me. Remember it was the time (1960's) of slide rulers and solving logarithms, square roots etc. with pen and paper! and teachers which threw solid wooden rulers at students if they failed to pay attention.

In any case, this is how I went about it:

The two control strings for the head (1 and 4) allow it to not only turn left and right, but as I said before to tilt sideways and bow as well. In a traditional marionette these strings are played like an instrument, varying the tension, twisting and plucking.

When the marionette needs to kneel or jump etc. you are not really concerned with this since the entire body, head and all is balanced by your hand, which uses your own personal embedded experience as a subject of gravity to effect movements which prove extremely hard to program convincingly. Imagine for example that you want the character to tilt his head slightly in an inquisitive way while bowing and kneeling at the same time. If you try to break that into individual movements performed by individual muscles of your hand, fingers and arm you will picture the complexity of the apparent simplicity. Don't forget that I said tilt his head in an inquisitive way!

So, in my dream I must have followed some of the principles Pólya suggests to poor souls in distress, like for example:

Look for a pattern
Draw a picture
Solve a simpler problem
Use a model
Work backward
Use a formula
Be ingenious

The 'head' strings reach the horn which would turn the head left and right and you would think that is where the strings should end. Then I visualized (and this is what comes from the dream) that the strings at that point corresponded to my left hand fingers twisting them while my right hand controlled the other movements in unison.

So I let the strings continue on to the other 'hand' which would pull or let go to let the gravity do its thing. The combination of these elements (including the most important, gravity) give you a very rich and expressive palette of head "language". This of course I cannot convey simply by pictures, but I will eventually post a video of the movements.

The 'other hand'

I continued raiding my wife's sewing supplies and used this perfect and beautiful spool, which I epoxied to the servo horn (you can still see behind the spool the gray irregular shape of the rock hard Apoxie that I used. Need to refine that.)

There was another problem, which because of its apparent simplicity tends to be forgotten until it is too late. Remember the analogy with a string instrument. So it is that you must tune the strings of your marionette to the perfect tension which allows precise control while at the same time giving gravity and inertia room to infuse the movement with the illusion of life.

Easier said than done. First of all the strings are very thin and usually waxed or Teflon coated to prevent fraying. That makes tying and untying knots practically impossible. Then consider the awkward and tight places where the strings are connected. Finally, size. Things that are very easy at a human scale become wickedly difficult in Lilliput.

Bowl of Sushi by Hiroshige (Edo Period)

My love of sushi came to the rescue. Chopsticks! the bamboo sticks have the right diameter, are pleasant to touch and sight (and taste) and its transversal structure provides the friction necessary to prevent the 80 lb. Teflon string from sliding. This was my prototype but although it stopped that string diameter from sliding, my preferred string is .006" Fireline, which is a braided bead thread very strong and resistant to abrasion (it is used to weave the smallest glass beads). This string just went through my tensioner like a water snake.

So I refined my prototype incorporating an opposing path that effectively holds it in place. And what is more important and the reason for this exercise, it is easy to adjust as needed, to tune the strings of the instrument.

Tension is good when needed

Sense and sensibility and the Oneironaut

2008-04-21T23:45:00.008-04:00

Visualizing the user interface for servo control

The nervous system is the current step (by step). Working on the sensors and on the beacons has given me a clearer understanding that there is nothing I know. Still very very far from The Docta Ignorantia.

Here is our microprocessor stack composed of two Make boards which were our final choice. The boards are highly integrated, very easy to interface and simply well designed. The only drawback was the limitation of 4 servo ports per board. I decided early on that 8 motors were as many as I wanted to use, both for practical and symbolic reasons. Four is the symbol of man generated by the trilogy which comes from the duality contained in the unity (bear with me, it is a stream of thought). 8 represents the power of the king in chess, and the queen in all her potency and (coming down to earth), I could only afford two Make controllers anyway! So, there. I had to do it with only 8 motors, period.

Then came the IR beacon circuit. That was a lot of fun to build although it took a lot of trial and error to do it with kitchen stuff. DYI instructions stipulate in no uncertain terms that you should use glossy inkjet paper and ONLY print with a laser printer, then iron transfer into the copper plate. Well, after many frustrating trials, botched plates and burnt fingers we (Philip and I) decided to try swhat you are not supposed to do. Went to our local print shop and had the circuit printed on their glossiest color laser paper with their fancy color printers. That worked beautifully. It transfered absolutely perfect the first time around. The entire coating of the paper stuck to the plate, and I am sure more than one has though that was wrong, but after soaking it in warm water the paper peeled off like a decal and left an impecable mask.

So here is Philip, which was the instigator of the whole DYI circuit idea cooking up the circuit with a coctel of muriatic acid mixed with hydrogen peroxide. In a few minutes our circuit was done. As usual he is multitasking with his totally hacked IPhone.

Guess where Philip is from...

Philip in my studio dremelin the circuit holes while Castro look approvingly at our socialist methodology.

He got a kick out of my retro-futuristic glasses. You look awful in them, but they have a variable focus that allows you to magnify minute stuff or read a newspaper across the room.

This section needs proofing and revising...tomorrow, after I give my class and deal with insane bureaucracy.

After dealing with the obvious and easy choices, like the arms (4 motors there) I realized the problem. My monster servo would lower the body, yes. But what about the head?, the shoulder strings? (they allow the marionette to turn the upper part of the body to face in another direction). They had to be lowered at the same time! otherwise I would need many more motors and complex programming to synchronize all these elements.

So the idea of the elevator was born, with all its ancillary problems, weight, friction, balance, stability, randomness, etc. At first I built tracks to guide the (square!) rods up and down. These rods (quads?) support a platform that houses the 3 remaining servos. The problem is that the head has more than one degree of freedom of course. It not only has to turn left and right, it also has to tilt sideways and bow as well. Or pitch, yaw and roll if you will.

All these simple motions are trivial (if difficult to master) in a marionette. Then I had the shoulder controls to turn the body around; how to do all that with 3 servos and control the wanted nuances?

After about two weeks (which is the time I have not posted!) I stumbled upon the solution, where but in a dream!. It is pretty obvious that we work as hard in our oneiric universe as we do in our waking world.

Next morning I skeptically went to examine the contraption with the suspicion that, like many other "great ideas" conceived in la-la land it would turn to be impractical, impossible or just plain turdy. It actually took me a while to connect my ideas with the reality of the mechanics, something was missing which I had apparently forgotten. Then, all of a sudden I saw it! make one of the servos perform double duty.

I cannot even explain how I visualized it. It was so obvious, simple, and yes, elegant. The only bummer is that I feel it did not come from me but from the collective unconscious debris. I just picked up the pieces.

I will post some pictures to explain how it works.

The Exoskeleton

2008-04-07T12:26:00.006-04:00

I have been literally immersed in a virtual reality. Working at a small scale forces you to adjust your senses and perception of self. Then you suddenly realize that somehow your fingers are too big, your body too clumsy, your eyesight not good enough to deal with a Lilliputian world. Fortunately our cyborgian self comes to the rescue and we make use of the many attachments and extensions that makes us makers of things, creators of our own destiny. (I might believe that someday...)

All the mechanics are functioning, at least by hand and in individual servo tests. It has been very hard to deal with some problems, most of which have to do with balance and friction, not of the marionette which is very fine, thank you, but of the mechanical elevator that raises and lowers most of the machinery so that the head can turn, the body express and the arms move while at the same time the Creator changes its position , kneel, stand up etc.

This problem is not so evident at first, specially if you are used to manipulate a puppet or marionette. Since your hand has a mind of its own it is hard to consciously realize tha amount of intelligence that it has to deal with all these complicated maneuvers. As you move the "plane" controller, pull the strings etc, you hand raises and lowers automatically and compensates this movement by tilting, rolling or yawing the controller.

Arm control assembly

Potentiometer as high precision encoder

However, when you have a fixed structure that supports the controllers it becomes evident that you need more than one motor to actuate on any given movement, because each movement influences the rest. Of course, as Dwiggins taught us, you should let gravity do most of the work, since she knows all about the laws of physics, but then there is the issue of correspondance, economy, efficiency and why not, elegance of design. Simpler is better. The complexity of simplicity.

Detail of the servo with its sturdy mounting plate

Assembled arm control with lead counterweight

Lead counterweight and potentiometer encoder

Give me a big enough lever...

2008-04-07T11:37:00.004-04:00

The real servos finally arrived! here is the Hi-Tech HS-805BB Mega Giant Scale Servo being tested. I simply attached one of the many great horns and plates that it comes with to my fish-line spool, using its own screw and voilà! 19.8 / 24.7 kg*cm (4.8V/6V) of torque! It is temporarily held in place with straps as you can see because as you can imagine the square holes of the Vex plates don't line up with anything but their own stuff (I promised I would stop bitching about it!)

For the rest of the controls I am using the HS-645MG UltraTorque Metal Gear Servos that have 7.7 / 9.6 kg*cm (4.8V/6V) of torque, very much on the safe side.

On the left of the picture you see Vex's red optical encoder which I planned to use to determine the position of the continuous rotation motors that lift the arms, but again, not even the extremely versatile Make controller could recognize the simple signal. I am sure it can be done but why waste time. I ordered a set of high-res 10 turn potentiometers that are not only more precise but can "hold" the last position even when the power is turned off.

Divide and conquer?

2008-04-07T10:15:00.005-04:00

That seems to be the design philosophy of the VEX guys. I promise (well, a weak promise) that I won't waste more time bitching about their horrible "close source" design decisions. But someone has to say something. Of course I used their stuff to prototype my project since I had bought 5 or 6 kits with the hope of actually using them for the final project. Now, to be fair, their nuts and screws are first rate and I have no complaints, as well as their cute chain transports if you use their square shafts of course, but the rest...

It was obvious pretty soon that the electronic/hardware side would not work due to their very flimsy nature and weak linkage (or lack of it). Take their servo for example. Not only is it far from standard, so that you cannot mix with any other brand, but it lacks fundamental elements like a horn or attachment plate of some sort so that you can drive something more than their absurd square shafts. Guess what, you cannot even screw anything to it, you can only use their "clutch" (the small cylinder with a short square stub) to attach another square shaft to drive any square holed device! BTW the clutch and therefore anything attached to it, will simply fall off if you turn it upside down. Am I missing a screw here?

You cannot see it in this next picture, but those arms or extensions that I need to drive the limbs of the marionette with have as much strength and stability as an apple stuck on the tip of a drinking straw and balanced on the edge of a glass, can you picture that? perhaps David Copperfield could use such a trick. The main reason being that as I explained, the servos connect to anything else through the wimpy clutch mechanism that cannot stand any side pressure, only direct transmission to a wheel at the most.

To be fair, after a great deal of literally hacking away with a saw, drilling and cutting and bending, I was able to put together a somewhat functional scaffolding for the stage. If I had the money I would simply make everything from scratch out of aluminum and some steel pieces. And, yes, chuck those servos away. I opened one to convert it, I was so shocked by the poor craftsmanship inside, probably built on a Chinese sweatshop (badly soldered by hand), that I just closed it and proceeded to order a set of excellent Hi-Tech servos.

Snap to grid

2008-04-07T09:29:00.006-04:00

Serious construction begins. This has to be, want it or not, the last stretch of the building process for the Creator stage.

But before I begin this section I want to share a tip that I take for granted, but friends that see it are always amused by it. You know that when you work on a project involving dozens or hundreds of small pieces, screws, washers and what not, things like to go amiss. Lost socks pale in comparison, specially when you lose a servo screw that you won't find in any hardware store (unless you live in the Bay Area, how I miss that!). And ordering a screw or two online just does not cut it.

So, I use a big magnet block (which I don't remember where I got) and simply and literally throw all those little pieces at it, even from quite a distance and it just snaps them as they try to go by. Sometimes I am working on an odd position, (upside down ?) and as I disassemble something, which happens more and more often as I try to refine my design, I start collecting all these little pieces in my hand and mouth that are eager to disappear in the cracks of the floor or my stomach. Well, just toss'em up like a chef flipping pancakes towards the magnetic field and , snap! they are not going anywhere.

Now, mind you that this is not a very powerful magnet, like those neodymium or ceramic magnets that you find in hard drives otherwise getting a washer back would probably be impossible, but it is strong enough to hold quite a bit of stuff. Sometimes you cannot even see the magnet anymore, just a weird nut screwy sculpture. I'll add a pic like that so you can see it.

Starman

2008-03-23T03:29:00.003-04:00

. ________________ Sir Arthur___ (AP photo files.)

Linkage represents power, status, success of one sort or another. Of course this has always been the case, particularly in the animal world, but I suspect in the uni-verse at large as well.

That is how our brain becomes conscious, how memories evolve and how life flows in the eternal dance of chaos and order, the breathing that holds the secret of our own existence.

When I think about the present state of technology, in this world of social networking, global communication, interplanetary travel, WWW,VR, SL and all these some basic, some quite indispensable parts of the life on planet earth, I remember, from the billions of people, one, whose influence and vision, some would say aura, inspired the creation of so many things that now we take for granted.

A person that inspired, through his writings, a Tim Berners-Lee to invent the World Wide Web in 1989. Who in 1945, proposed the idea of communications satellites that could be based in geostationary orbits around our planet, an idea laughed about by the official science of the time. After all he was only a writer.

A writer for whom spacecraft, asteroids and even a dinosaur has been named. A writer whose ideas, that is, the ones that have not been realized yet, are still considered far fetched even today, the stuff of dreams or sci-fi.

His hundreds of books and thousands of short stories constitute a cloud, a cluster or galaxy of links, of neuronal connections, of firing synapses that influence the world and will continue to do so for perhaps millenia, since his ideas travel as we blog, beyond our solar system into the universe he so lucidly dreamed about.

Who is this great human, whose passing through has barely been noticed in obscure obituaries as if we had nothing lost ?

Perhaps we have not, since he gave us more than we can take in generations to come. Besides, as he himself, quoting Rudyard Kipling said:

If I have given you delight
By aught that I have done,
Let me lie quiet in that night
Which shall be yours anon:

And for that little, little span
The dead are borne in mind
Seek not to question other than
The books I leave behind.

._______________________ From The Appeal

Thank you Sir Arthur, the world can or could be a better place because of you.

Command and Control

2008-03-12T11:51:00.006-04:00

The recent integration of the Make controller with Flash, its scripting language and image processing capabilities, solves many of the problems I was dealing with, from the choice of microcontroller to the controlling software.

The program currently reads the position of the performer on stage and even the distance from head to ground, all with only one cheap webcam as an input device. There is so much information that can be acquired through image analysis that effectively eliminates the need for a variety of sensors that I had planned to use.

The only limitation is the amount of servo ports in the controller. I will have to daisy-chain at least two, to handle all the servos I think I need.

The servo that supports the weight of the marionette most of the time needs much higher torque than the ones I have. I have not calculated the minimum torque yet, but need to do that ASAP to order it and start testing the software that Philip and I are designing. I am very excited and happy with the progress so far. At first I had my doubts that the solution he proposed would work, but now I see it can, and in a very simple and elegant way.

The two sizes of spools we currently use (5 and 8 cm diameter) happen to be just perfect to provide most of the travel that I need without using continuous rotation motors instead of standard servos. This simplifies programing. We found out by testing a variety of "identical" modified servo motors that the speed of rotation, given equal parameters, is quite different, which implies writing routines to address each one of them to synchronize, a royal pain!

The fish-line spools with their bushings in place

The only continuous rotation motors I need are for the arms since they travel a much greater distance.

What was I thinking...

2008-03-12T11:07:00.017-04:00

Just to finish the pulley rant, I created a template to drill the round wood pieces that I bought (99c/bag) at the local craft store. They seemed perfectly round in the bag...

Much to my surprise (am I new? or what!) they were far from round, I found out when I tried to fit them in my template. To make it short, I sanded them enough to fit, drilled and glued them together. As I was venting my frustration for not finding proper pulleys, my wife who works next to me in the studio, asked why I did not use the spools that she uses for her beading or the ones that I use for stringing (fish line) the marionette.

DUH!

I must be very tired, been sleeping 4 hours max for months now. why didn't I think of the spools which were in front of me? So, here, I have a steady supply of the perfect size/weight spools.

I only needed to create bushings to adapt to the servos, real servos that is, not the modified ones by Vex which of course have a "proprietary" square shaft that only fits their kit stuff, I still cannot get over their lack of foresight and integration with the rest of the world. So much for Open Anything! Dean Kamen, you know much better than that!

I created the bushings with an aluminum rod that happened to have the right diameter.
I drilled the shaft hole to attach the Hi-Tech servos I will probably use, notched them to hold the adhesive better and epoxied them to the spools.

patterns in the weather

2008-03-08T00:53:00.007-05:00

A nonsense name for a nonsense week. I feel like I am under my own non-disclosure agreement since for my own protection I must keep quiet about a change in the weather. Can't see a safe haven yet...

So as it is true with all our daily activities, some things take precedence at the expense of our own life. And that to me is very expensive indeed.

On the banal but also symptomatic stage of the general deterioration of ethics and quality in our world and in particular where I live, I received a large package on the mail that I had no clue as to the contents, since I did not remember ordering anything as large...

Since I don't have a lathe or access to one at the moment I thought it would be easy to find the small pulleys that I urgently need for my project. As it happens, one of the most difficult things to find have been the pulleys or sheaves needed to raise and lower the marionette's articulations.

Why this is I don't understand. No robotic store or company, specially at the "hobby" or craft level carries such a useful and logic device. Can someone explain?

After much searching I finally found a place that purportedly had what I needed. Based on their description I bought 6 little sheaves to test. Here is what I got!

A ridiculously large box with 6 little pieces of crappy malformed plastic. Supposedly this place, whose motto is "Leaders in Education" wants to lead students, in step with the current government mandate to the lemmings paradise.

I imagine, they consider children or students simple ignorant people who do not deserve to touch anything decently made that might, just might teach them something. That way they learn to accept as a fact of life the terribly poor quality of life that education (with few exceptions) in this country provides to the millions, ground and trained through the system to accept mediocrity as the norm.

After all mediocrity and ignorance make good cannon fodder.

I ship the crafts I or my wife make all over the US and the rest of the world. One pound, Priority Mail costs $US 4.80 ...the shipping of these few ounces of bad plastic which cost US$ 1.50/each, cost US$ 7.oo for a total of US$ 16.00 I guess the huge box accounts for the "handling" fees.

I understand this post is a waste of everyone's time. But it is also part of the project. SO back to a more positive track I decided to build my own pulleys with wood. I will have to shape them with a sander given the lack of a lathe, but that will be OK.

Stage Hands

2008-02-22T14:15:00.008-05:00

Assembling the motion section and adjusting the elements so they fit.

I love that time when you have to finally begin working on the stage for a play. It means the performance is imminent (unless the producer pulls out!). It is also time to listen carefully to the director, designer, performers, lighting and sound people and stage hands and riggers to make sure all points of view are represented and taken into consideration. (if only it was like that in real life...)

Since the hole pattern in the VeX system is not really well designed (unless someone proves the contrary) I had to notch and cut lots of pieces so that they overlapped correctly in the configuration I needed. As I said before, I think the engineer/s who designed the system probably did it with a preset number of projects in their mind.

I would go back to the drawing board. It seems strange to me that in this age of CAD and relational tools, they could not test at least a few thousand combinations and optimize the design for that. So anyway, the metal is soft enough that it doesn't take that long to adjust.

The Vex control modules, servos and power supply.

Except for Lorena, who is the human performer, choreographer and costume designer for the project and who makes sure her needs and demands are met:-), the rest of the crew is me with occasional help from my friends, like Philip who is working on a Flash interface to control the microprocessors and sensors. I have my doubts about the speed of the image processing functions in the new Flash, but it is worth a try.

For now I am using VeX to build the stage support and to prototype the motion and control system. Ideally I would like to use a faster microprocessor, perhaps Propeller by Parallax which is a multi processor where each one of the 8 processors can operate simultaneously giving you the ability to respond in real time to performer actions, which is what I need to do.

Easier said than done, since programming is not my forte, but my friend Philip, who is in his final year in Architecture, loves coding and we have done great work together. I need to complete the prototype so that we can start programming and optimizing. Everything simpler, easier, faster. Like Ars Electronica 2006 theme said, SIMPLICITY - the art of complexity.

The Creator's new feet

I am also getting so much more familiar with the marionette I've created, since while you are whittling away at blocks of wood and dealing with joints, balance and many other issues, it is difficult to meet the creature on its own terms. Although it is not awake yet I can already see a bit of its character. This is an experience which every puppeteer, or for that matter any artist goes through as it transitions from production to contemplation or analysis and finally to understanding or appreciation.

This process is not so familiar to the engineering folks, since for them, in the majority of cases, everything must be defined or though in toto in advance and there is usually little room for improvisation

Gimme Shelter

2008-02-18T01:58:00.008-05:00

Time to create the scaffolding for the Creator's shelter. It will hopefully be as functional and form(ally) beautiful as it can be. In trying to find the right tools and materials I bought some Vex kits when Radio Shack decided to chuck them. So in a way I got a good deal. From a tinkerer's perspective though I wish I had my (very) old Meccano, which from an engineering point of view was a lot more versatile I believe.

The problem with the Vex "system" is that it is not really integrated. It seems to have been designed, not as an optimal modular construction set, but rather limited to some preconceived ideas as to what you should do with it rather than let you decide, as the Meccano system allowed.

I find it very limiting for free form design. Take this example. To construct the very simple structure I needed required me to use ALL 5 kits! and I am not even close to be done.

When you think of which is the most useful and common structural element in construction, I am sure that the majority of "architects" or engineers would agree that it is the humble angle, strong, simple and functional. Well, guess what, the entire Vex kit comes with a whooping 3 angles! yes, that is 1,2,3! But what were they thinking?

This forced me to construct the main columns with rails (of which there are quite a few) which prevented me to attach the rest of the support elements in a simple way.

The kit does come with lots of elements that might have some use in some specific project but it is the least useful grouping of parts in any construction kit that I have found. There must be a reason behind this, and it is probably very sound, like ka-ching! Almost any project will require you to buy extra hardware, at a very steep price, and you can bet (and would win) that the "dedicated" hardware kits bring a completely unbalanced set of elements as well, so that you do keep on buying. Bear in mind that I am not building anything exotic as you can see from the pics.

The structure is 80 cm. tall and 33cm wide, making it a harmonic rectangle area. Of course it is not exact, since it never occurred to the designers that anybody migh need , want or know about such things as harmonic proportions.

String Instrument

2008-02-06T22:42:00.001-05:00

.

Here is the Creator waiting to have his nervous system installed. The secret to a balanced marionette lies mostly in the stringing that controls it both internally and externally.

The strings that hold the different parts of the body from the inside act as ligaments as well as nerves, that stabilize and enable the parts to move in relationship to each other. By transferring forces and movement information through the spinal string, which is the case with our body, it keeps us balanced and acts as a conduit through which our brain controls our movement.

In the case of a traditional marionette, that brain or intelligence comes from the learned hand of the player of the strings, the puppeteer.

In this case it will be the computer or rather the microprocessor, together with the sensorial system that feeds it information about its environment, that will make the equivalent of conscious decisions as to what to do and when.

The other part, the involuntary movements, the character, arise from the structure that has evolved from interacting with the laws and forces that constitute the semiotic "liquid" in which the creature evolves.

This evolution has produced the structural support (skeleton) and the relationship between the systems that allow both us and a marionette designed under those principles to act and respond accordingly, with or without consciousness or awareness of that which ultimately controls us.

This sequence was produced simply by lowering
the spinal control until it no longer supports the body.

Hip Gnosis

2008-02-06T22:05:00.000-05:00

Do and learn. The hip and waist proved to be not only very heavy but also out of proportion. Looking back, this happened because I scaled the entire original schematic to simply make it taller without really thinking through the proportion of the individual body parts.

So, here I go again. I redesigned both hip and waist and decided to use pine wood instead cutting the overall weight considerably by almost 300 g. My servos will thank me!

Since I was going to start from a wood block this time, I was able to drill the holes in a more controlled fashion, sort of, because some of them traversed the block at extreme angles. But overall this fact alone made the parts fit better. Molding the parts with Apoxy was fun and quite easy and fast, but not the right solution in this case.

Here you can see the difference in size and weight, of the old and new hip-waist combo. Of course the scale change rippled through the entire puppet since I had to also modify the torso and the legs. I know I must do the same with the arms, which I am putting on hold for now because the wood is so amazingly hard. But it will happen.

The Beauty of the Fall

2008-01-27T23:05:00.001-05:00

The beauty of the Püterschein system is, as you can see in this picture, that the puppet assumes very natural positions with no human intervention. I just cut the string that held it up and it fell on its knees just like that! A true predecessor of inverse kinematics!.

It seems like it is praying for arms, looking intently at the cut rods that will give it the expressiveness it needs.

I cut an old broom stick to use for the arms, thinking that it was pine and it would save me some time if it already had a round shape. Ha! I don't know what kind of wood it is, but it was hard as oak and I have gone through a whole set of carbon steel blades just cutting it down to shape. It has taken me three full days to get them ready for testing! So much for saving time...

You can see the Creator now just standing naturally, again with only spine support. I did not pose it, other than bringing it down to contact a surface. Can't wait to have the entire body functional. In case you are wondering the "feet" will be (at least that is the plan) two slim inverted cones. We'll see how it behaves. As for hands it will have none in this iteration, since it will be all dressed up and have very long sleeves like the human performer in an earlier post:
you can see it here and in the original design so you get the idea.

This is a detail of the hip and waist rigging that holds and constrains those parts as the marionette flexes and moves.

After three days, a few cuts and sore muscles overall, the arms are close to ready. I've tested them and they move gracefully and have the needed range. Under the torso you can see the channel I gouged out to make room for a couple of screw eyes to pass the string that connects it to the waist and hip.

Next task: the HEAD! this will be interesting since it will have a wooden core or "skull" and it will wear a "self animated" mask, a fancy way of saying it will have some springs to react to any movement of the head. If I have time, which I doubt, I would like to put a micro-servo on the latex mask so that it can have a range of expressions in addition to the eyes. Lorena, who designed the original creature does not like the idea. Perhaps she is right. The simplicity of the spring solution, which we have demonstrated on performance gives such a varied range of expression to the Creator's face that adding more might be less. So there!

The Power of Tools

2008-01-23T17:47:00.000-05:00

I started the Creator's torso by finding an appropriate block of wood. I had intended to use pine since it is soft and easy to carve, but I had none of the right dimensions. My only option was cypress, which I like a lot for its color and its pattern, but is is considerably harder and demands a lot of attention to the direction in which you can whittle it. That means you have to be really careful to follow the pattern of the rings and watch when it changes direction if you don't want your blade to get caught and possibly damage the wood, specially when you approach the final surface.

A very important thing when you carve, specially at the beginning when you apply a lot more force to approximate the shape you need, is to be able to hold the piece securely. There might be other techniques and of course you can improvise, but if you have access to the magnificent and versatile Jorgensen clamps, use them!

If it had been pine I could have done it with a set of X-Acto knives without much problem. But for any hardwood you need proper carving tools, I have found that Warren Tools 1 are an excellent choice. I have had my "traveling set"for over twenty years or more when I bought them to carve my first "professional" puppet out of basswood. I've kept that set like a treasure through many life changes and moving from continent to continent. I have lost many things but not this little box. True, there are finer and more expensive carving tools out there but here you have a balance between price, quality and workmanship.

I talk about tools often because I think that tools and the art they enable are inextricable linked, "...where form and function are most closely related as a way to understand and influence our most basic aesthetic and ethical decisions". 2 I also think that great tool design can only be achieved by someone who has mastered his or her craft and realizes the importance of the interface between your mind and the object you intend to create.

Whittling is not done much anymore since the advent of power tools, the same way that cooking (and eating!) has pathetically been replaced by TV dinners specially in American households and definitely in student's dorms. TV watching has taken the place of meditation and your organizer has replaced your capacity to memorize. All I can say is that the magic of discovering the shape that lies inside that block of wood as you approach its delicate surface is one of the greatest rewards.

At this point I need to refer back to something that Michelangelo mentions in one of his letters about the fact that he does not really "create" the sculpture (and remember we are talking about pieces like the Pietà and David among others) but simply uncovers or reveals that which is already present in the stone.

When I first read this as a young aspiring artist I took it as false modesty or as some sort of metaphor, but later on I found other references that made me pay attention, like the time when he goes to the Carrara quarry to look for a block to carve his Moses, and upon looking at the huge block of marble he says very disappointed something to the effect of "...damn! he is sitting down!" (he had already planned and sketched Moses standing with the tablets).

Some of Michelangelo's supposedly "unfinished" pieces, like the "Awakening Slave" or "Atlas" seem to me perfectly done and finished, and they clearly show the process of discovering what is "already there".

Now, this can be interpreted in a number of ways and I don't pretend to analyze nor can I offer proof that he meant it that way, but I can offer my own experience which I would like to share even knowing that some people will think me crazy.

Many years ago, me and my great friend and extraordinary artist Fernando de la Jara, entered a competition to create a monument for a fallen pilot. We decided to do an obelisk but with a twist (literally) that turned as it grew as a Fibonnaci series. The main body would be marble but the very top would be made with alabaster, and the shape of a human form rising towards the sky would be carved inside so that it would look trans lucid as the sun entered the zenith.

Well, my task was to carve a model out of plaster to present with the proposal. So I started by making a block inside a milk carton, traced the bottom square and the rotated and smaller square at the top and proceeded to carve away. First of course big chunks to approximate the overall shape and then as it got closer I started of course to be more careful taking occasional measurements.

A long time passed and I was by then taking very thin slivers of plaster since the form was already evident. But suddenly, after removing one more sliver a very distinct surface appeared, the quality of which you would not call plaster. This surface was very smooth, the color was slightly warmer that the cool white of plaster, more like ivory. First I thought it was a patch of different texture due to the mix, but I just kept "peeling" away the very thin "skin" that covered that layer. Of course in some parts I had to whittle out more to get there.

I was so surprised that I called my friend to verify that I was not simply fatigued. But we concluded that that in fact was the actual surface of the final shape that we were after. So I continued the process until all of the extra material was gone. I did not have to measure like I was doing at first, all I did was carefully shave until I found that surface. When I finished I had the twisted obelisk that we had planned to do. I know how absurd this sounds, how could that piece "exist" inside a block of plaster? I do have some rational explanation, but for now I will leave it at that.
to be continued...

Notes:
1- The blades are made with high carbon tools steel. I find they hold their edge for a long time before you have to hone them. Of course it depends in the hardness of the wood you carve and the angle at which you "attack" the wood. They sell at any woodcarving supply place.
2- From my paper "Roboethics and Performance" which I will put up in Lulu after graduation in July. Krems rules prevent me from publishing before that.

Poser

2008-01-21T20:55:00.000-05:00

The Creator's lower body as it stands today :-)

Even thought it is a far cry form being even close to finish, the Creator has already began getting an attitude. I had to re-drill some holes to balance the parts but overall feels good. It stands straight when held by the "spinal cord" and it seems very easy to make it move in a very natural way, as expected. After all I am following the master's instructions.

The picture on the lower left corner shows the back of the hips where you can see the misalignment of the channels that lead to the waist stays. It really bothers me but it does not affect the performance, only my self-esteem! Maybe the Creator gets a hip replacement operation some day.

Balancing act

2008-01-21T14:00:00.000-05:00

The hip and waist assembled for balance

So far the hardest part has been to drill the holes through the Apoxie and line them up correctly. That sent me back to examine very carefully old unfinished puppets from Dwiggins archive. I learned a valuable lesson: the holes must be drilled BEFORE you shape the form (DUH!), otherwise lining up and holding the shape correctly in different axis becomes almost impossible. That means that the use of Apoxie for main body parts is not the best solution, since it would be a real waste to create first a block and then cut and sand it down.

That said I am very pleased with the look and feel of those two parts, which strike me as very "Japanese" in some way. The only un-japanese thing about them is the misalignment and lack of precision of some of the through-holes on the back due to the reasons explained above. No excuses, (Julie Taymor would be very upset).

The fondest memory I have after enjoying many days watching the construction of a Japanese Tea House by a master carpenter was how every single piece of assemblage, including those that would never be seen by anybody, were as perfect as the main "public" pieces. The sculptural quality and the loving care and treatment of the most humble of materials left a permanent impression on me. I have a long way to go.

Next in line is to attach the legs which are already temporarily assembled and test the lower body for problems. If everything goes well then I'll shape the legs to give the Creator that sophisticated look that I am sure it craves:)

On my knees

2008-01-20T12:46:00.000-05:00

There are so many ways to make legs and knee joints!

This is my first pass, I don't think will be the last until it is finished, polished, assembled (the hard part) and tested. I am using white pine, it has quite a bit of resin, which makes it hard to carve and sand but also means it is stronger.

At least it is not as hard or life-critical as the prosthetic knees that biomedical engineers have to fashion for their patients!

I used some of those knee models to make a sculpture and as we found out, it was the hardest and most exotic material (titanium-vanadium_+some other ellements I don't remember) we could ever work with! It was worth it, and also gave me an insight as to how strong and durable future cyborgs will be.

Brad Smith (left) and myself after sweating it out to create the sculpture from conception to delivery in a record three days! Now, why can't I work as fast for this project?

Brad and myself created this sculpture as a recognition gift for Dr. J. Crayton Pruitt, who had just donated 10 million dollars (das ist recht!) to the Biomedical Engineering Department of the University of Florida.

Dr. J. Crayton Pruitt, as pleased with his gift as UF was with his! 1

So we thought appropriate to use some of those vanadium knee parts to serve as the pivot point of the sculpture, the rest of which consisted of beautiful alabaster that slowed light as it absorbed it, as only alabaster can. The wood base was made with an exotic Brazilian hardwood and the plaque was made from aluminum scavenged from the Aerospace Engineering bin.

These are some examples. Imagine the possibilities!
Assuming you have the tools to make a dent or solder the critters.

1 He must have liked the sculpture because ever since then we receive (Brad and I) a yearly crate of delicious Florida wine from his own vineyard. Thank you Dr. Pruitt! :-)

Waist and Hip

2008-01-18T17:51:00.000-05:00

The waist unit is finished except for the holes and restrains that will attach it to the hip. This piece was so much easier because I did not let the Apoxie harden and I was able to model it with my hands almost to the exact shape, so it only took a bit of sanding and polishing. On to the legs.

Not quite Brancusi

2008-01-17T23:50:00.001-05:00

After cutting most of the extra epoxy with the trusty old Dremel (the new ones are plastic crap!) I proceeded to sand and sand away from 80 to 1200 grit until the shape fit my template.

The hip is now smooth and polished and feels great to the touch. I think I will use it instead of wood since I think it has the proper weight. Once assembled I will know if the total weight is not too much for the medium servos that I plan to use.

After finishing this stage of the hip I will need to drill and install attachment points for the legs and the waist, which is the next piece.

Sculpting the model

2008-01-17T00:26:00.000-05:00

Although I will probably use traditional wood for most of the body, I want to try to make models of the parts with Apoxie Sculpt and Apoxie Clay, some of my favorite sculpting materials for small models, prototypes or part replacements. The only drawback in this case might be the weight, but then maybe not in the case of the hip which needs to be heavier since it is the center of gravity.

I left the ball of clay harden a little too much and so after whittling away for a while I finally gave up because it went past the "leathery" state which is so pleasant to work with.

Now it is up to power tools to pick up. I'll do that in a couple of days when it has harden enough and does not gum-up the blades or the sandpaper.

I really like the line of Apoxie products. I recommend them to my students and I use them frequently. They are easy to work with , extremely durable and have good mechanical resistance. Not to mention shelf-life!.

I found a couple of containers that had a bit left and had been "lost" for over three years. They were on the humid and very hot environment of the Florida swamp. That is just the opposite of what they recommend; 'refrigerated and dry to extend shelf life'

Well, other than being a little harder at first, after kneading it for a few minutes they came back to life and behaved as expected.

Now, if they only gave me a discount for the plug :-)

Püterschein Time! state of the art

2008-01-14T23:10:00.000-05:00

OK, so now, after careful consideration and encouragement from my mentor, Deborah Ascheim 1 the robo-puppet has gone from 5.5 meters to 45cm, quite a change in every respect. But I am liking it more and more.

Now I am in the process of re-designing the body and I can take advantage of the superb Püterschein 2 system described by W.A. Dwiggins 3 in his 1939 handbook "Marionette in Motion." published and authored by Dwiggins under the pseudonym "Hermann Püterschein"

The basic and extraordinarily simple idea is that when designing the mechanics of a marionette, you consider gravity as the only force operating on it, and that "...your function with the string is simply to control the motion that results from the pull of gravity.

Based on one of Dwiggins models as a starting point I proceeded to modify the proportions, center of gravity etc. to fit the Creator's body.

This sequence shows the progression from the original proportions of a female marionette body based on the Püterschein system and the modifications it went through to achieve the desired proportions. Figures 1-3 show the position of lead weights in the shin and the pelvis (grey markers). In figure #4 you can see (red dots) the alignment of the different parts of the body. Once the parts are constructed but before they are completely finished each one needs to be counterbalanced so that with minimum effort and resources (servos, number of strings) the marionette can achieve a maximum of expressivity.

This of course is a gross simplification but it is the starting template from which the basic blocks will be cut and shaped. After that a careful balance needs to be achieved between all the parts so that it actually let's gravity do most of the work.

This is Lilith, one of the many characters built and rejected by W.A. Dwiggins, although it is...perfect.

From: "a complete experimental Theatre in Miniature; the Dwiggins Marionettes" by Dorothy Abbe.4
the most beautiful and comprehensive book on the master's work:

1- Deborah Ascheim is an interactive installation and interdisciplinary artist that works with light, based on a long standing interest in networks: neural, electronic and social. She has an upcoming exhibition at beautiful Laumeier Park, check it out.

2- The Püterschein system in which Dwiggins describes in detail his own system for construction marionettes is a very hard book to find, since it is out of print or very expensive. I have the fortune of having a beautiful facsimile of the original produced by Dorothy Abbe and it has proved to be an invaluable resource for my project.

3- I find that Dwiggins work, considering the scope, quality and influence on the design world, is grossly underrepresented, on the web. The link I offered above which is one of the more complete (at least it mentions that he was a puppeteer in addition to an influential book and typography designer) attests to that.

4- You cannot underestimate the importance of Dorothy Abbe. If it was not for her and the extraordinary effort of many years that went into producing one of the most beautiful puppetry books ever, the world would remain in ignorance about the work of a Master. As a typographical designer and former partner of "Bill" at the private Püterschein Hingham Press, she was privy to one of the great kept secrets in the history of puppetry. The marionette collection, the private theatre, tools, diagrams and plays designed and created by this exquisite crafstman .

The Control Device

2008-01-14T20:45:00.001-05:00

After having explored different systems and constructed some prototypes (that you will see later) I found a very interesting paper by a group of researchers at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. The paper describes a very similar project in terms of actuation that has proved invaluable in understanding, among other things, the relationship and computation between the number of strings required and the degrees of freedom (DOF) desired.

I've since then contacted Professor I-Ming Chen of the School of Mechanical and Production Engineering at NTU, who very graciously offered to release their design so that I can integrate it to mine and suggested a possible collaboration as well. Thank you Dr. Chen

On the robo-puppet, the wires that would normally go to the handheld device, (sometimes called airplane control due to its cross shape) are driven by a series of servo motors, which wind or unwind the strings to achieve the needed posture. We will call the strings the actuators.

There are three different functions the strings perform.
a) support or constrain/reference.
b) movement control
c) special effects.

Since the puppet is basically stationary within the world (it does not go anywhere except your mind!) the support strings have a simple function and will probably only have an up-down movement. The reference string, will allow the puppet to bow and stand straight. As it name implies all other strings reference this string. This is taken from traditional Chinese marionettes and is called the backbone.

The motion control strings control the head and the limbs. Because the character makes ample and sweeping movements with his arms I originally considered controls mounted on swinging devices, which would function as the plucking of the strings do in traditional marionette control.

However, since the rig needs to be portable as well as easy to assemble, not to mention cost considerations I have opted, at least for now, for a linear extension that can be easily detached and does not need additional motors for swinging. An added benefit of this solution is that it provides faster response. It contemplates stationary arms in the control device, which go as far as the limit of the puppet movement. The servos at the end of the arms would control a wire loop that simulates the string plucking of a puppeteer.

3D simulation of control rig showing linear extensible arms and servo driven pulleys

After consulting with Dr. Antonio Arroyo 1 and Dr. Eric M. Schwartz I decided to add additional loop controls at the waist level to increment the degree of expressiveness of the puppet’s body language as well as install spring and/or elastic counterbalance and damping devices to minimize the inertial deviation of the limbs as they move rapidly into position.

My first basic prototype

Once the system is in place, the puppet, the control hardware and the software, it is necessary to train the puppet by establishing neutral, initial and target postures that can express meanings and range of emotions. This is similar to the numerous cell or keyframe elements that a conventional cel animator or “claymator”2 would have to prepare to follow a script. These groups of keyframes (one for every joint) would be called upon according to the response required by the sensors and their interpretation by the neural control program 3.

Some of the considerations that must be taken into account to perform the initial set of calculations include:

- The number of links in the system
- The link length
- The mass
- The center of mass
- The inertia moment
- The joint viscosity

1- Dr. Arroyo is the Director of the Machine Intelligence Lab (MIL)at the University of Florida and it is my designated mentor for this project. Dr. Eric Schwarz is Associate Director of the MIL at the University of Florida and gives me advice as a mentor as well.

2- Clay animation is one of the many forms of stop-motion animation where the clay is hand-shaped for every frame to achieve the illusion of movement. The term Claymation was popularized by animator Will Vinton who used it as his trademark. However it is now commonly used in the English language to refer to clay animation.

3- Input /Output into a simple neural net.
The input to the system consist primarily on tracking (image and pattern recognition), on the information provided by the ambient sensors, such as movement, light, sound, proximity, etc. This input is correlated with the matrix representing the mindset of the puppet; his “vision of the world”
The output affects the actuators (motors, sounds, lights), ambient displays and control systems.

The poor man's space-age materials

2008-01-14T19:19:00.000-05:00

Although I do not need such strong composites as I was previously using due to the downscale of the puppet I still want to go through the discovery process that I found very valuable as a DIY "instructable" as they are now called.

I must mention that I still plan to use the material I prepared, except now I will utilize it to carve and build the entire body of the robotic-puppet instead of just the limbs.

Original requirements.

Regarding the construction of the limbs, a promising construction technique came from an unexpected source. A Near Space article 1 on boom construction for near-space aircraft and ballonSat 2 frames and rigs described a simple, inexpensive and very strong method for a lightweight composite boom, which I adopted after some preliminary tests.

The following pictures show some of the materials that I am currently using to construct the limbs of the Creator. After some comparison tests with other methods and materials, I have found this to be the optimal structural material that will comply with the many requisites of the performing object.

Limb Test Construction Process

Limbs are currently made of a composite material consisting of 3/4” extruded polystyrene foam sandwiched between either 1/34” triply birch plywood, and/or 1/4” balsa wood. Styrofoam, as is commonly known, has a high compressive strength foam very resistant to water penetration which is a consideration in a high humidity environment such as Florida where we currently live and work (the swamp!)3.

Weight-strength-cost are important considerations. Given the size of the puppet (approximately 5.5 meters) and the fact that it will be controlled via servo motors, it is imperative that the structure be as light as possible and at the same time be able to withstand the forces applied to the different joints.
The puppet must be easily assembled and disassembled for transportation and performance and be able to survive the abuse associated with these events.

The foam and plywood are glued with 5 min epoxy and held together between 2x4’s to distribute the pressure evenly.

I use Jorgenson’s wooden pressure clamps and can’t say enough about them. These ingenious clamps can vary the angle of pressure precisely. Using almost any other type of clamp will result in the sandwiched elements sliding out of alignment due to the viscosity of the glue while drying.

I found that both the birch plywood and the balsa wood, when epoxied to the styrofoam have an enormous resistance to fracture, you cannot break them with your hands alone. The difference is in terms of surface, since the plywood is smooth and hard and the balsa is very soft and easily damaged.
In terms of weight they end up the same due to the different thickness-weight ratio. At every joint an additional element like a plastic or metal tube or bushing that will support the axis, bearing and constrain the joint must be securely attached.

So far I am satisfied with the light weight and rigidity of this construction technique.

1- Nuts and Volts, September 2006, p.78

2- BalloonSAT Basics
- Sounding balloons 1200-1500 grams filled with helium
- Rise to altitudes over 100,000 feet
- Parachutes attached to payloads
- Modules include:
- Communications - flight and ground, radio, TNC and GPS
- Science payloads – weather data, Geiger counter, particulate sampling, ozonesondes,
- Imaging payloads – digital or analog cameras
- Flight Computer – data transmission or storage

3- Talk about humidity. Since we moved from the Apple to the swamp we have had to deal with 80-90% humidity on any given day, excluding storm or hurricane season where nothing applies! Since my "dirty workshop" (where wood cutting, sanding, spraying etc. happens) is located on a shed in the backyard, even though I insulated the whole structure, humidity seeps in at an incredible rate. I bought a pump-dehumidifier and the thing extracts around 5 gallons of water every 24 hours! If it not were for that essential piece of equipment you can imagine the state of materials and tools. In fact, what prompted me to buy such a thing was the sorry sight of my precious tools rusting and everything else deteriorating no matter how much you clean and oil etc.

This is the "clean corner" of the "dirty-shop"

The most absurd thing is that nobody sells dehumidifiers in Florida! on the contrary, they sell humidifiers!!??? what is up with these gators! Can't wait to go to higher ground :-)

The construction of the character

2008-01-14T17:04:00.000-05:00

Throughout pre-historic and recorded History, tools and the art they enable are inextricably linked. Synergy being a basic principle of all interactive systems points to the study of tools and technology, where form and function are most closely related as a way to understand and influence our most basic esthetic and ethical decisions.

In this performative event, emphasis is put on having the technical design aspects of the piece be one and the same with the artistic process. I am, after all, selecting the equivalent of the canvas, the pigments, the color scheme and laying down the fundamental materials with which to enable the alchemical reaction that constitutes the creation of a work of art. By choosing to enable the function that follows the form, I hope to find the primitive elements that when combined, emerge as more than the sum of their parts. Having set a goal to achieve in a span of time and place I am more interested in the steps that we take and the moment we live in the present.

This and the following posts are simply a record of a process. Sometimes we get lost in the details, as we should, only to emerge with a better understanding of the intricate relationships between form and function. As a disclaimer I should mention that although I don't purposely endorse some of the products that appear in the pictures, I find it a very valuable information about the craft. I remember as a young cinematographer interested in SFX, how I studied trade magazines, with a magnifying glass in hand (or in eye?) to try to discover what materials did so and so used in some film or theater piece that had amazed me. So these following posts will serve the same purpose.

The expressionistic head is not supposed to be seen in flat light like this but in a very dramatic and dark (as in moody) illumination

The head of The Creator was originally modeled in clay. Two plaster-gauze layers applied as a base, followed by 3 layers of papier-mâché, pretty standard stuff. Although very resistant and easy to control mechanically by hand, this method of construction proved to be too heavy for the servos I intended to use, given the scale of the puppet (5 meters high).

Although not directly inspired by it (in fact we had never seen this particular piece before this research) it was interesting to find this other mask creature designed by Jean Cocteau which uses similar materials and constructions techniques and embodies a similar tragic spirit.

Jean Cocteau and his mask for Oedipus Rex1 and The Creator's child

Since we have reversed the relationship puppet-performer and the puppet will be 45cm high, weight and servo power is no longer an issue. This has changed considerations such : weight and mechanical resistance, safety and ease of casting, machining etc. not to mention price! (I am very pleased with this last item:-)

The question now becomes if the physical scale alters in any way that other "construction of the character"?

Stanislavsky: "...the actor learns what he must discard, what in himself he must overcome, which of his personal traits can serve "as building material for the construction of the character."2

Although the physical character is "small", the psychological impact will be expressed by projecting a large real-time video of The Creator as it controls its World. That will be the test of the scale decision.

1- Arthur King Peters Jean Cocteau and his World, The Vendome Press, NY, 1986 p.95 This mask was created for the 1952 Paris production with Stravinsky.
2- "Stanislavsky in Focus" by Sharon Marie Carnicke, p.163, Routledge 1998

The Creator character

2008-01-14T14:34:00.001-05:00

The puppet is being constructed as a marionette. This approach allows for a rich and varied kinematics1 and dynamic behavior2. Mechanically it resembles a cable-operated rigid body (such as a complex crane). The puppet consists of a series of joined rigid elements, which correspond to the simplified mechanism of a human body.

The non-verbal language of the puppet is constructed as a neural net of three simple primitives that control gestures (limbs, hands), speech (the puppet “vocal chords”), and expressions (body language).3

The essential role of these primitives is to build a vocabulary of behaviors4. The combination of these primitives can give rise to more gestures with different meanings and evolve complex behaviors by sequencing, superposition and inhibition5.

The mechanical design consists of determining the number of limbs, type of joints, degrees of freedom (DOF)6 of the joints and other movable pieces. It is not defined yet how many strings will be used to control the marionette, but probably between 8 to 12 will be enough, depending on various factors including number of segments of limbs and cost and time of development for both software and hardware.

1- In physics, kinematics is the branch of classical mechanics concerned with describing the motions of objects without considering the factors that cause or affect the motion. By contrast, the science of dynamics is concerned with the forces and interactions that produce or affect the motion. The term "kinematics" derives from the Greek word ______, meaning "to move".

2- The basis of kinematics is the choice of coordinates that describe the position(s) and/or orientation(s) of object(s). The time derivatives of these coordinates correspond to velocities and accelerations. An important component of kinematics is differentiating position to obtain the velocity or acceleration, and vice versa, integrating velocity or acceleration to obtain the position. Another key component of kinematics is converting between different sets of coordinates that describe the same motion. Both of these components are fundamentally mathematical methods, and are not based on physical principles.

The simplest form of kinematics is the description of point particle motion (translational kinematics). The description of rotation (rotational kinematics) is more complicated. The state of a generic rigid body may be described by combining both translational and rotational kinematics (rigid-body kinematics). The most complicated case is the kinematics of a system of rigid bodies.

In all of these cases, the most useful choice of coordinates may be determined by constraints on the motion, or by the geometrical nature of the force causing or affecting the motion. For example, it may be convenient to describe the motion of a bead constrained on a circular hoop by its angle on the hoop. Similarly, it may be practical for calculations to describe the motion of a particle acted upon by a central force using polar coordinates. (Source: Wikipedia)

3- Emotions as expressed by “matchstick” body language.

The question here is: how much visual information is needed to express character? Even though I have done motion capture sessions a number of times, it does not cease to amaze me the amount of “personal” information that is actually registered by recording the markers placed on our basic joints. Without the benefit of face expression, body shape (other than general proportions) and other elements that would seem to convey a great deal about a subject, the identity and some key “personality traits” can be immediately deduced or understood by the visual combination of a set of lines in motion.

Here is an example. Years ago I had to capture the movements of the entire team of the “A’s” of Oakland, then World Baseball Champions. I used a recent invention by a small startup called BioVision which used 4 cameras to record the position of reflective markers set at the joints of the player’s limbs as well as other locations like the chest, shoulders etc.

Reflective markers for motion capture (Source: Brunel University, London)

The position of these points of light were correlated with an initial calibrating position and sent as data to the program, which triangulated and calculated the 3d position of such markers. These positions were then transferred to a stick figure consisting of the same number of limbs and joints. The movement could then be played back. At the sight of the stick figures moving, my coworkers, who were all baseball fans, were able to tell immediately the identity of the character long before it made a move that gave away his role. Sometimes just the stance, the gait or a slight movement of the “body” would carry the personality, which was familiar to the observers.

Motion capture data applied to stick figures (Source: University of California, Irvine)

This experience made me think about what it is that constitutes that personality. How do we express emotions and how do we “read” other people? It seemed that by stripping away all the particular characteristics of the physical body except the basic proportions and movement (time-displacement or space-time of the body) we could convey the story in an even more direct way. The empathy and identification was, in fact, enhanced. By establishing a direct connection with some part of our psyche or perhaps our animal brain, it gave new meaning to the phrase “judge of character”

4- McNeill, David, Language and Gesture, Cambridge, University Press, 2000

5- According to David McNeill there are four kinds of gestures that are usually distinguished:
Symbolic gestures represent some widely recognized conventionalized meanings with body configurations and movements. For example, a thumbs-up gesture indicates agreement.
Deictic gestures are those that point objects in the environment with arms and figures. They may also be used to indicate unseen, abstract or imaginary things.
Iconic gestures are some pictorial gestures intuitively representing physical entities in the world.
Metaphoric gestures represent abstract objects or concepts.

6- In mechanics, degrees of freedom (DOF) are the set of independent displacements that specify completely the displaced or deformed position of the body or system. This is a fundamental concept relating to systems of moving bodies in mechanical engineering, aeronautical engineering, robotics, structural engineering, etc.

A particle that moves in three dimensional space has three translational displacement components as DOFs, while a rigid body would have at most six DOFs including three rotations. Translation is the ability to move without rotating, while rotation is an angular motions about some axis.

Creature in Performance

2008-01-14T01:58:00.000-05:00

Here is Lorena trying out her Creature creation in our very cramped rehearsal studio (we wish:-). Click on the image to see her sweat off a few pounds. No kidding, that is the actual speed at which the Creature moves!

Theater and performing arts are collaborative in nature. In this work as in many others I collaborate with my wife and partner, Lorena Paola1, an accomplished actress and designer on her own right. Our points of view are sometimes diametrically opposed and this means we must find the focus where those points converge in a “pivot of interest”2 as a means to stabilize the vision enough to be perceptible and understandable at some level to an audience that stands in for the community of the “theatrum mundi”3, where we express the cultural and political concerns of the self in relation to the world.

By bringing into the stage streams of everyday actions by people willingly or unsuspectingly captured by the panoptic4 gaze of our modern “society of control” as building blocks of the Creator’s alchemical process, we intend to establish the idea that all actions are performance and the implication that by performing those actions we long for the long lost promise and plenitude of eternal life.5

1- Lorena Paola is a multifaceted artist, working in theater as an actress-director-playwright-choreographer. She is also a sculptor and a glass artist, costume, mask designer and model-maker and is involved in every facet of production for her theater company “TeatroNuestro” of which she is President.
Lorena studied acting in her native Chile, Photography in Munich, Germany, Music Theater and Dance at “Steps” in New York and Jazz at Broadway Dance Center. She was Drama Instructor for the Hispanic Cultural Heritage Center in Miami and acting instructor at New World School of the Arts.

As a playwright her work has been performed in Pappenheim, Germany, at Florida International University in Miami as well as at the Digital Worlds Institute where she wrote, choreographed and acted in an international collaborative piece with Chile.

Her last play “Workshop of Dreams” was premiered as part of the International Theater Festival in Puerto Montt, Chile in July 2004.

2- Fernand Léger wrote that he wanted “to conceive of objects as the pivots of interest, objects so beautiful that they have enormous spectacle value.”

3- In Calderon’s “Gran Teatro del Mundo”, he has the world itself state that it only obediently executes that which, although brought about or created by it (the world) the miracle belongs to the actor that enacts his/her given role. There are no spectators in Calderon’s play. Each of us is an actor, and thus responsible for our own image and creation.

4- The Panopticon is a type of prison building designed by English philosopher Jeremy Bentham in the late eighteenth century. The concept of the design is to allow an observer to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) prisoners without the prisoners being able to tell if they are being observed or not, thus conveying a "sentiment of an invisible omniscience." (Wikipedia)

5- In Lacan’s essay about the “mirror stage” (le stade du miroir) he describes the process of identification with an outside entity as "insufficiency to anticipation – and which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality that I shall call orthopaedic – and, lastly, to the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject’s entire mental development" (Lacan, Écrits (rvd. edn., 2002), 'The mirror stage', p. 5).

Once the instrument is created...

2008-01-14T01:49:00.000-05:00

In most of my work I look for the synergy between art and the science of materials, technology and other disciplines. Nowhere do I find more inspiration and practical wisdom, as in the writings and sketches of Leonardo, whose brilliant engineering mind created the scaffolding for some of the most enduring artifacts of our world.

In particular, his studies on the “anatomy of machines” has been instrumental in providing me and countless others with detailed explanations and solutions to the many problems associated with complex mechanical and “life-like” movements required in robotic-puppetry work.

In his Trattato degli elementi macchinali, (Madrid Ms.) Leonardo goes into great detail analyzing a great number of mechanical components which he regarded as the “organs” of machines. In a series of superb illustrations of such mechanisms we can see and study not only the solutions but the process of creation of his extraordinary mind.

Studies of cervical vertebrae and base of skull
Royal Collection (RLW), 19021v; K/P 62v

Leonardo applied the same systematic analysis of machines to human and animal bodies thus abstracting and clarifying principles of geometry, movement and force, using quantitative methods to study their performance and deriving from such studies innumerable mechanisms which are a constant source of inspiration and function, in many cases as a conceptual blueprint, like this anatomical drawing of the base of the skull, which resembles the gravity and elastic driven mechanism of my puppet "Pancho" leg joints.

Creator and Creature

2008-01-13T22:30:00.000-05:00

These animations originally showed the scale of the Creator and Creature. It was not an accurate representation of the environment that I intended to create but a sketch to give some idea of the relationships.

After a reality check based mostly on finances and time-constrains and after careful consideration with my mentor, I decided to reverse the relationship, that is the Creator is now the smaller figure and the performer or Creature is life-size. This does not of course solve the complexity of the proposition, but at least makes good use of the economies of "scale":-)

A very interesting and valuable result of this decision is that the Creator's metaphor is more accurate as it better represents the post-apocalyptic homunculus which he was always meant to be. As it diminishes in size, like all electronic and robotic devices do, it will exert invisible control as it becomes the Environment.

The term homunculus appears to have been first used by the alchemist Paracelsus. He once claimed that he had created a false human being that he referred to as the homunculus. The creature was to have stood no more than 12 inches tall, and did the work usually associated with a golem. However, after a short time, the homunculus turned on its creator and ran away. The recipe consisted of a bag of bones, sperm, skin fragments and hair from any animal of which the homunculus would be a hybrid. This was to be laid in the ground surrounded by horse manure for forty days, at which point the embryo would form.

The Laboratory

2008-01-13T22:04:00.000-05:00

Image source: The Vital Machine, A study of Technology and Organic Life by David F. Channel, Oxford University Press, NY

The Creator's laboratory was inspired by De Viribus Electricitatis in Motu Musculari (1791) Luigi Galvani’s experimental apparatus and machines for the study of animal electricity.

The narrative occurs in a lugubrious laboratory, which resembles an alchemical dungeon/post-apocalyptic prison. The beakers and flasks, which we see in the background receive external "live" data streams and act as “time containers” and communication channels with a world that has been, is or could be. They represent both the Creator’s experiments in creature building and the raw material for his ongoing projects.

Inside the beakers and flasks that crowd the claustrophobic environment, float homunculus in various states of development and raw digital materials from which the Creator takes the elements for his creations. This “digital clay” becomes part of the DNA of the creatures and as such has unpredictable consequences once it is “released” into the world.

Some of these beakers and flasks act as “time containers” in that they show scenes of a world that has been, is or could be. As the digital bits and pieces of this data flow through the communicating vessels in the laboratory and recombine, some nightmarish visions appear projected through the frog-like creature and other specimens that hang in the background. They represent the Creator’s experiments in creature building. Occasionally, the creature’s muscles twitch, in a sort of digital-galvanic response to the influx of information, and excrete the contents into the surrounding area as processed media.

Galvani (1737–1798) was an Italian physician and physicist who lived and died in Bologna and who discovered that muscle and nerve cells produce electricity.
He coined the term animal electricity to describe whatever it was that activated the muscles of his specimens.
He regarded their activation as being generated by an electrical fluid that is carried to the muscles by the nerves. In the same manner, the electronic "fluid" flows through the network and feeds the Creator's mind.

METATRON III

2008-01-13T21:59:00.000-05:00

The Creator inhabits a symbolic world where every line, every color and every shape or form must mean something. The Creature needs to adapt to this world. It uses the elements around it to communicate concepts such as moods, feelings and desires.

The center of the Metatron, where the Creature is conceived by its Creator is made of light. In a rough schematic form I am representing it by the color wheel in the center.

As the Creature moves about the Metatron and intersects or interferes with certain points, colors, directions of travel etc. the Creator interprets it and (hopefully) reacts accordingly.

METATRON II

2008-01-13T21:51:00.000-05:00

The geometry of the Metatron is used as a computable control surface to determine the position of the Creature at all times. This positional information is used among other things to control the gaze of the Creator and respond to the actions of its Creature.

There is a primary and secondary color coding that on the one hand simbolizes the nature of communication between the Creator and its Creature, that of the wavelenghts of light, which act as channels of information.

The external circles represent the limits of the world both physical and as a symbolic construct. There is nothing beyond those limits but the void, the forbidden territory.

מיטטרון

2008-01-13T21:36:00.000-05:00

The floor plan of the Creator's World is a Metatron’s cube, which is in a way a two dimensional expression of the tesseract. Like in Alchemy, it serves a similar purpose of establishing the boundaries as well as the regions within which the Creator creates its Creatures.

Metatron is primarily the name of a primordial Angel in Judaism, and some scholars suggest the name means ”keeper of the watch” or “one who serves behind the throne”. In early kabbalist scriptures, Metatron supposedly forms the cube from his soul. This cube can later be seen in Christian art, where it appears on his chest or floating behind him.

Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus)
by Salvador Dalí (1954) Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Metatron's cube is also considered a holy glyph, and was often drawn around an object or person to ward off demons and satanic powers. This idea is also present in alchemy, in which the cube was favoured as a containment circle or creation circle.

The Tesseract Hypercube

2008-01-13T21:26:00.000-05:00

The universe of the Creator consists of a tesseract, which acts as a frame of reference for the fourth-dimensionality aspect of the work. It represents the mind of the Creator and in practical terms establishes the spatial boundaries as well as the symbolic structure that contains it.

In geometry, the tesseract is the four-dimensional analog of the (three-dimensional) cube, where motion along the fourth dimension is often a representation for bounded transformations of the cube through time.

The tesseract is to the cube as the cube is to the square; or, more formally, the tesseract can be described as a regular convex 4-polytope whose boundary consists of eight cubical cells. (Source: Wikipedia)

Controlled chaos

2008-01-13T21:10:00.000-05:00

The paragraph below was created in a moment of absolute (well, I am exagerating) despair, since I had just broken my ribs and could not see how I could ever finish the project with the available resources (like...nothing?) But as my ribs healed so did my spirit and I was able to embark on the ship of fools again, this time as a captain of my own destiny (I say this with confidence because I am so damn deterministic!)

These are the basic stage and technical elements that I conceived for the project. At this point, due to difficult health and financial circumstances I will only attempt to create an interactive virtual simulation of the project, and use the simulation to obtain grants or other funding to realize the original idea. (A .pdf with a complete description of the original project can be found here)

What follows are some of the graphic elements and components for the 3D simulation.

It's 2008, start of my report

2008-01-13T20:51:00.000-05:00

Remember when we waited in anticipation for the end of the century and the coming of the new millennium? Well, we are already 8 years into it and have only 82 more to go for the next one, so let's get going.

Graduation date at TRANSART is only 6 months away and that is enough for me to lose weight! what with the very little sleep and the increasing pressure of finishing the crazy idea I started with?

First of all I should say what my mentor told me when I expressed my doubts about even getting close to the result I envisioned, "...it's ok to fail, that is why this is an MFA program. It allows for experimentation sometimes beyond your ability or means", although the comment certainly relieved some of the anxiety (like a pressure cooker I was about to explode and spill the beans all over the walls) it by no means slowed me down in trying to achieve. I remembered what André Breton said: "let's be realistic, let's ask for the impossible"

So here I go. I decided to migrate my somewhat 'static' site to this blog which will now record my footsteps towards an unfinishable goal, which is the nature of New Media and anything that has to do with digital technology.

TRANSART where the adventure started

2006-07-27T03:10:00.001-04:00

There are a few things that put the city of Linz in my brainmap, one of them being Ars Electronica (coming up shortly, August 31, mark your calendars, reserve plane tickets and come up with a good excuse to leave your job!), the other is the OK Center for Contemporary Arts (pronounced O-KAA) where I am currently engaged, to say the least, in a New Media residency program.

All this been made possible by the folks at Transart Institute , who have designed this program.
It seems a long time since I left the swamps in Florida but it has only been a week. However the intensity of the program and the 12-16 hour days of non-stop creative process creates a different time reference. In this compressed time films have been made, installations have come up (and down), and lives have been steered in new directions.

In the very few hours that we have to ourselves I will honestly try to record in this "external memory" device some of the thoughts and happenings that occur not only to me but as a collective of artists and technologists as well as scientists who compose this exciting community.

Murphy's Show will go on forever

2006-05-02T17:35:00.000-04:00

The Show Must Go OFF!!! plus pictures

2006-04-28T14:52:00.000-04:00

the show was awesome, i had a great time. everyone i talked to was so impressed by the show, so good job everybody, its been awesome

heres some pics from the show my friends took....

....nevermind, theyre not uploading, work in progress

I suck!

2006-04-17T13:37:00.000-04:00

You would be upset too if you were me!

2006-04-16T23:53:00.000-04:00

Ouch, it hurts!

2006-04-16T23:51:00.000-04:00

WHen they said "break a leg" I thought they were kiddin'

leg pics

2006-04-09T14:33:00.000-04:00

You talking to me?

2006-03-29T21:55:00.000-05:00

Thanks a million to Rob for sharing his creative and simple solution which translates into great magic.

What is Yoda thinking?

2006-03-29T21:53:00.000-05:00

His microbrain just let's it be, in true wizard fashion. I look forward to the next evolutionary step.

new york pics

2006-03-28T21:11:00.000-05:00

these are the favs of my trip to ny. starting with Rona Pondick, sculptor who uses 3-d printing to scale up and down her body parts to then cast in steel.

Tony Oursler- sculptor/video artist using plaster to create bulbous forms and then projecting video on them to bring them to life.

Inka Essenhigh- Don't know a whole lot except she went to SVA and is a damn good painter.

Tara donovan- Sculptor most commonly using multiples of objects, this one's a little extreme. You think you're in the clouds, but with a closer look realize you are actually being confronted by an army of translucent solo cups. This was about half the size of a basketball court.

Feel the Force...

2006-03-27T20:49:00.000-05:00

The little green man will be here tomorrow (Tusday 28) accompanied by Master Rob. Make sure you are here bright and early to take advantage of his animatronic wisdom.

Snake Charm

2006-03-21T17:56:00.000-05:00

This is a Basic Stamp controlled robot snake created by Dr. Gavin Miller in 1999. Click on the picture to see it move.
He is Principal Scientist at Adobe Systems Incorporated, but does this in his own time. He has been creating this fabulous snakes since the early 90's! He takes his inspiration directly from the critters themselves and explores different types of locomotion and behaviour as well as use of materials and mechanical solutions which are fascinating to explore.
I also enjoy his sense of humor, as in this photo:
which is a clear reference to an icon of the 80's, Nastassja Kinski, photographed by no other than Richard Avedon.

One can easily understand his love of snakes

Yoda and its master

2006-03-04T21:58:00.000-05:00

Rob Hamersma designed this talking Yoda that you can see in action by clicking on his image. We might have a chance to see it in class right after Spring Break since some of you are out this week. He was a student at the Intelligent Machines Design Lab and you should check out his class project, called Micro-Controlled High-tech Independent Putter! mCHIP for short. It is very impressive. I not only like the end result which is very successful but I particularly like the very detailed process documentation from conception to execution. Way to go!
And, no, he is not a web designer :-)

I'm watching yo!

2006-02-24T21:45:00.000-05:00

"To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk." - Edison

Let me get my bearings and you will see what I can do..boink, boink

Suckyphammmoot

2006-02-20T22:54:00.000-05:00

The trunk of the suckiphammmoot about to snort some tasty vibrating furry balls!

Puppet Tree

2006-02-10T01:25:00.000-05:00

Links to the sources and some examples

This is a quick collage of images that reference the 2 parameters we talked about in class: ratio of performer to object (1:many/many:1) and distance from performer to object. An good idea would be to position each image in both parameters as appropiate, except it is quite tricky or else it would need a lot of space to diagram correctly. In any case that most important part is to understand and explain where all this forms fit and how they relate. Some forms of puppetry belong in different categories simultaneously. How or where do your characters fit in this tree?

The power of limits

2006-01-30T21:27:00.000-05:00

1.618 033 988 749 894 848 204 586 834 366...

The purpose of the Experimental Performance Hybrid that you are about to embark upon is to discover and respond emotionally, reflectively, creatively and imaginatively to your own ideas and those of others. There is no better way I can think of to do that than to accept the fact that everything that exists does because there is an underlying structure that supports and/or generates it.
We might no be used to work collaboratively as artists because we have been inclined to think that creativity is a purely personal endeavor. But what we are looking to achieve is synergy, as described by Buckminster Fuller

Synergy or synergism most often refers to the phenomenon of two or more discrete influences or agents acting in common to create an effect which is greater than the sum of the effects each is able to create independently.

The opposite of synergy is antagonism, the phenomenon where two agents in combination have an overall effect which is less than the sum of their individual effects.

So let's try to approach the assignment with a fresh vision and translate that vision into design for performance. Examine Image, Movement, Gesture, Spatial Relationship, Uses of Time, Shape, Repetition, Space and Action. Create a performance born of your own ideas, concerns, feelings, and motivations. And unleash the power of limits.

Xtreme Puppetry

2006-01-26T00:18:00.000-05:00

Who controls who?

The rise of the machines. Arthur Elsenaar & Remko Scha work towards the complete automation of art.

The muscle machine

2006-01-25T23:18:00.000-05:00

Take a look at the work of Stelarc .
Ping-Body

This performance artist uses the net as the interface to his own body. Who said our little Symet was hard? He subverts the notion of control by letting an avatar take over the human body and thus escape from its cybercage.

Hybrid Art

2006-01-25T22:50:00.000-05:00

The strange sculptures of Hubert Duprat

When the mason uses bricks to construct the narrow flue of a factory chimney, he stands in the middle of his turret, and gradually lays new courses by revolving on his own axis. The caddis worm does the very same thing.

Plato, Timaeus

Bring your main processor

2006-01-23T12:54:00.000-05:00

We will start work on the main performance project. For this you must bring concepts, issues and ideas to discuss and brainstorm around. Think about important questions, like: What is this stuff for? What value does it add to our lives? What are the issues most important to you?. If you were a poet and had to say the very last words of your life, what would you say?

"It is still not enough for language to have clarity and content ... it must also have a goal and an imperative. Otherwise from language we descend to chatter, from chatter to babble and from babble to confusion."

Rene Daumal

Symets

2006-01-17T23:34:00.000-05:00

Check these bots, just like the ones we are doing with lots of good info and pics that will inspire you.

Know your friends

2006-01-17T21:49:00.000-05:00

Since we are working with a few new devices on our bot it is a good idea to know something about them to understand what is it that they do. So click away!

The pics above are from the first transistors ever made.

Next comes the capacitor, posibly one of the oldest electronic or electric devices invented. Do you know that you can easily make a capacitor from two pieces of aluminum foil and a piece of paper?
This is a picture of a Leyden Jar, that goes back to 1746, but the ancestor of the capacitor goes even further back to the times of the ancient Greeks!

The resistors are perhaps the simplest of all devices and the easiest to understand, except when it comes to the color codes!, So here they are:

Although we are not using it for it's intended purpose (and that is the fun part) the LED is one very neat device that we will often use.
Then the solar cell, the source of clean almost unlimited power.

And last but no least the motor. The heart that needs to beat in order for our bot to live.

In our case they are electrical, but there are many other types, molecular, nanomachines and other rare species.

Kinesin, a motor protein that transports celular cargo by moving along microtubules

Ready for your first bot?

2006-01-16T00:11:00.000-05:00

I've chosen the "Symet" to be your first "warm-up" project. Symet is one of the simplest BEAM robots that you can build. It uses only a few easy to find parts and it is a good introduction to a solar-powered independent creature. Another great advantage is that there is a site with complete and detailed instructions on how to build it so you can refer to it as well. This project only takes a few hours at the most, so it should be up and running by next Thursday.
Check the list of parts on the link above and get them at any of the 3 or 4 Radio Shacks in town.

Also please check the list of Workshop Materials on the right column. I linked to very inexpensive ones that I have found if you want to order them online. Although we have some of these materials and/or tools in class you will be able to advance much faster if you have your own. You will be glad you have them long after this class.

The "Nice to have" items are for those of you who have more than a passing interest in how electric or electronic things work.

Let the Blogging begin...

2006-01-12T11:25:00.000-05:00

Jolly green trash collection-creation team posted via phonecam

the Soul of the Machine

2006-01-10T00:05:00.000-05:00

The Mechanical Poetry of Arthur Ganson

When you and I use the word design, we use it to mean a complex in which the various components are ordered in respect one with the other. That's a design in contradistinction to randomness. There is a deliberate, deliberate placement and ordering. So I say then that human mind is gradually discovering. If you are looking at a plurality of generalized principles, there is a great A Priori Design of Universe. And the human mind has access to the rules and the design of Universe a little glimpse of it, because as we keep pulling the curtain up slightly we realize that there is a lot more than we don't know.

Buckminster Fuller

Listen

Arthur Ganson is an artist-engineer with a great inventive and whimsical mind. Some of his sculptures remind me of Remedios Varo, a surrealist spanish painter that worked and lived in Mexico City when I was a young student. Her work influenced me very deeply. When I first saw her paintings and her sculptures (made with bird and reptile bones), art, and the poetry of art as a way of life opened before me as a beautiful and misterious way that I was determined to follow. As with any way, you sometimes get lost. When I found Arthur Ganson's sculptures it was like a wake up call to stand up and continue walking along that beautiful and misterious way of poetic discovery and exploration.

Remedios Varo (1913-1963)

If you would like to buy a DVD with most of Ganson's work and the process of creation, you can get it here
Read more about Arthur Ganson at this Smithsonian site.
If you are interested in the work of Remedios Varo (and you should be) there is an Amazon link to the right.

Showtime!

2005-11-26T23:27:00.000-05:00

December 6 from 7 to 8 at the REVE (Old Norman Gym /Digital Worlds Institute)

People, people, one line only, please!!! Those with children can go first. Don't fight! There is room for everyone, well, almost for everyone. Sir, go to the end of the line, you can't cut in, no, you can't bring your chickens, fire regulations, no sir, but you can leave them at the Library, lot's of worms there (sorry). The show will soon begin...

Puppet Motivation

2005-11-23T16:28:00.000-05:00

Hey guys. I just recently stumbled across Jan Svankmajer's stop motion animations and they are really inspiring... you should check them out if you can. He's a puppet artist from Prague who is known for influencing the work of Tim Burton, but in my opinion Svankmajer's stuff is more interesting. If you haven't seen his rendition of Alice (in wonderland) you should!!-- they have it at the library.

Getting there...

2005-11-11T00:36:00.000-05:00

2005-11-11T00:18:00.000-05:00

2005-11-11T00:17:00.000-05:00

2005-11-10T11:05:00.000-05:00

9

2005-11-10T10:23:00.000-05:00

7

2005-11-10T10:17:00.000-05:00

4

2005-11-10T10:11:00.000-05:00

3

2005-11-10T10:09:00.000-05:00

2

2005-11-10T10:06:00.000-05:00

Happy Birthday Tom!

2005-11-08T22:51:00.000-05:00

The High Priest of Calavera and his Acolytes
wished secret wishes for you as the candle of
life gave up its spirit.

Time Flies When You Are Having Fun

2005-10-31T22:09:00.000-05:00

So now we only need to rig them, paint them and make them come alive. Hmmm... let's see, we also need the scripts, sound, lighting and effects, and oh yeah! we need to rehearse!. Right, to rehearse and rehearse again. Are we missing something? let me think...

Performance Night!

2005-10-25T01:20:00.000-04:00

Finally done. After some frustrating rehearsals (what's new) the final performance went without a glitch. Great job everyone who participated. The people in Arizona were impressed and we got some very good feedback. We also learned a great deal in the process. And the piece was so appropriate, what with the Wilma playing Woswo!

Now the performance with Egypt looms ahead. That will make a great triangle, Gainesville, Chile and Egypt, wow! Oops! I almost forgot the audience in Illinois this time, at the Super Computing Conference. So it's more like the squaring of the triangle. Hmm, now that I think of it is more like a pyramid...I guess it's late.

Thanks to Lorena, Natalie, Renee, Andy, Pat, Salam, Anthony in Gainesville and Nicolas, Hugo, Jaime, MariaJose and Joaquin in Chile and to James for channeling the magic to the unsuspecting audience in Arizona and other parts of the world!