Tim Stutts: ITP Project Blog

Min

A small modular programming language similar to Max or Pure Data, but designed as an educational and creative tool for children. Min involves much fewer objects ( maybe 25 ), but these objects have unique personalities, so that kids can associate a virtual object with a real world counterpart. A sequencer for instance–built in Max using a metro and counter object–is built in Min using a cartoon clock, whose face can be modified from the traditional twelve points to accommodate a range of numbers.

Travelog

Travelog involves a community of individuals, who look for user-generated content and share their own media-enriched experiences relating to their travels. Travelog.com is a social networking site providing users with travel documentation tools that overlay a user’s video clips, audio and images onto Google maps, utilizing preexisting methods for uploading user-generated content, such as Youtube and Flickr. Aggregate maps are generated by overlaying multiple user maps, so that travelers might see where their route will intersect another user’s route–to facilitate a meeting point, or where two users had once crossed paths–to facilitate a recollection. Statistics regarding routes most and least traveled are also gathered and represented visually.

Ad Hoc Brooklyn Bridge

AHBB is a wireless network of Xbee radios attached to moving bodies and strategic locations in the city, forming an Ad hoc bridge between ITP and Greenpoint. Sensor data (to be determined), travels down the line, is logged at each point, and culminates in a path visualization that examines the adaptive nature of a wireless protocol in an ever changing environment.

I’ve uploaded some stills from the latest Conveyor Player Game. Charley and I recently took the game to Seton Hospital for testing game play for children with disabilities. The game now features six object categories ( animals, colors, transportation, food, numbers, and letters) , each with six associated objects, that the player pairs together to earn matches. Each correct match is accompanied by an exploding star ( or “spider web”, as one child referred to it as ), encouraging dialog, and a jumping box. Incorrect matches play the phrase “try again” with a sideways nodding box. There are sound effects for the belt, objects landing on the belt, exploding star, correct match, incorrect match, and winning. Music plays at the start menu and win phase of the game. The final version of the game will be available for play freely online within the month.

I aim to explore the inherent out-of-the box software artifacts found within User-Generated content and how and to what end these elements are embraced or disguised in various communities of practice. Examples range the gamut, from the factory fonts of “lol cats” on icanhascheezburger.com, to the perfection-obsessed photography groups on flickr.com. Along the way I will distinguish–capital aside–the differences between technical/aesthetic approaches to making amateur and professional content, and cite current instances where each has tried to become the other, pointing to such specifics as band profiles on Myspace.com and user-generated, corporation-backed advertisement campaigns.

PM2 is a C++ application that parses MIDI data from music projects created in Logic Audio and visualizes the data in 3D through OpenGL. The result are intricate graphics depicting subtle automations within music that are often overlooked by more traditional, subjective VJing approaches. PM2 is Midi visualized in 3D space.

This piece is a collaboration between myself and Rui Pereira for the Computational Forms course final, to debut at an ITP film screening this December.

View initial video here. 

Problem 1. Create a 30 x 30 mesh using a two-dimensional array of Vec3D’s. Then create a function that draws your mesh as a wireframe. (Be sure to use “const int” variables represent the width and height of your mesh, instead of hard-coding it always to be 30 x 30.)

Problem 2. Create a function that draws your mesh a solid surface and sets the color of each face according to the simple lighting model discussed in class.

view full-size image of swimming sea creature here.

Problem 3, 4, and 5. Create a function that makes a mountain out of your mesh. Create a function that produces waves in one direction (along x) in your mesh. Create a function that produces waves in two directions (along x and z ) in your mesh.

source code:

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Artists involved: Tim Stutts, James Daher, Keith Conway, Youjeong Paik

a glowing collective mood indicator is influenced by several satellite individual mood indicators throughout a space, providing a unique emotional playground for light and sound.

Mood Base uses a Zigbee radio protocol, where a coordinating Zigbee, housed within a large orb placed on the floor of ITP, sends out a steady stream of repeating numbers (1,2,3,4,etc.) to a call-and-response network of radios is hand-held enclosures within close proximity of the base station. These enclosures, when called, send out their current mood status, determined by a potentiometer controlling pulse (excitement level) and another controlling negative-positive (blue-green), on built-in LEDs and also to the Mood Base, where they are summed into a more complex light display, and sound projection (low drones with changing harmonics), both indicative of the collective mood. The light programming will be controlled by Arduino and the sound generation will be controlled by Max/MSP. Users experience Mood Base in a darkened space, standing around the base station and beaming out their emotions to the group.

Mood Base plans to debut at the ITP Winter Show 2007.

http://apple20.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2007/11/04/apple-set-to-disable-iphone-apps-again/?source=yahoo_quote
I found this news pretty disturbing.  Mac OS has many built-in features and applications that assume a lot of functionality and features for its users, but that’s never been a problem for anyone who wants to go about things differently, because they could always just use a third-party application in conjunction with the built-in applications that meet their needs.  Until now.

When the iPhone was released many people remarked how, “it’s just a little a computer,” and I think that speaks to freedom one experiences on the device, even more so than the obvious defining hardware set-up that we think of as a computer ( a screen, a hard drive, a user interface, etc. )

Can you imagine if Apple released an update to the Mac OS on their desktop computers that wiped out all the third party applications, even those that aren’t harmless to the flow commerce?  Or eventually banned applications developed by the SDK that didn’t meet the Apple agenda?

I think that as innovators we have a real problem on our hands.  Sure. The iPhone can run user-generated web applications, so long as they run in the Apple-sanctioned web browser, Safari, but that’s just one layer.  A fellow student recently said that “if it weren’t for Adobe, I would switch to Linux.”  Its times like these when I feel like making that switch myself.

In an attempt to diagram relationships within my social networks, I’ve become interested those friends who exist in multiple networks, friends I’ve met through an acquaintance, and friends whose relationship exists primarily through myself as a liaison; outside a clear social network. The reason for the specificity, in addition to my personal interests, is due largely to the clustered redundancy within in social networks which are difficult to diagram due to the overlap. So I focused on the above mentioned anomalies, and came up with the following list of relationships that extend beyond the cluster, several of which I’ve incorporated into Figure 2:

- family: mom
- first colonial hs (former school): amanda s.
- u miami (former school): gary, kabir, sarah
- calarts (former school): tim k., miah, emory, jory, dane, ron horwitz, lee, casey
- smith college: amanda s., gloria, melody
- hollywood industry
— lowry (film editorial where friends have been employed): sarah, gary, tim k., casey
— danetracks (studio of calarts alumni): dane
— technicolor (studio of calarts alumni): ron horowitz
- la friends: tim k., miah, gary, kabir, lee
- itp (current school program): emory
- apple the grove (former employment): arik, nathaniel
- apple fifth avenue (former employment): arik, anita

Other connections of interest were those friendships established outside a social network altogether, friendships established through an individual encounter in physical space, a connections within several degrees of separation through an individual unknown to me, and finally a connection largely due to the efforts of a single individual. The latter example, where my mom connects me to a job through a bed and breakfast owner in rural Virginia, whose son is an architect, who designed a studio facility for Warner Brothers and knows the head of post-production, who in turn passes my resume down to the head of audio post-production, who then puts me in touch with a sound editor, who I eventually worked with on a game project (!), is diagrammed in Figure 1. The Kevin Bacon effect was recently proved to be more complex than previously thought, though the connection I’ve cited at least follows its person-to-person model, spending less time within level social clusters; as we now know to be the effect’s primary mode of connection.

- encounter in physical space: michael capio –> anita
- physical encounter after internet introduction: sara bader, jory
- connection with middle party unknown to me: kabir, kabir’s sister, kabir’s sister’s roommate*, kabir’s sister’s roommate’s boyfriend ( my dad’s co-worker’s son!)
- physical encounter due to one individual’s effort: me, my mom*, thomas’s mom, thomas, head of warner post, kim wahl, gregory hainer.

Problem 1. Create a function called drawWireframeCylinder that takes as input a radius (float), a height (float) and a number of steps (int). The function should draw a series of circles stacked vertically as specified. Draw vertical lines between the circles to complete wireframe effect.

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