Flagons Den

I have bought and read (it’s only 130 odd pages) Bruce Sterling’s Shaping Things and this has added some additional depth to my piecemeal concepts of his work enormously. The concept of Spimes - smart intercommunicating objects which herald an age of transparent sustainable production - is not as far fetched as it sounds. The advent of IPSO and IPv6 means we are already seeing objects and systems which communicate - and through the use of RFID we could see the ability (with the development of readers admittedly) to triangulate the position of tagged objects and through each objects unique IP address find out about that object’s status and taxonomy.

My project will deal with the interim - the use of RFID now - to tag objects and create a living archive of folksonomic histories, and instead of archaeology of ancient artifacts create a collection of data surrounding the commonplace, the detritus we collect in this consumer culture we are consumptively embedded within. The disposible objects we amass act as mnemonics to our existence - catalysts for memory and the containers for memories and associations - and often the inherent and adopted meanings of each item are internalised. By tagging these objects and creating their own webpage and IP address I will be able to publicise these associations and make manifest the connections they create within my own social strata. As these objects are so disposible - they could easily be classed as ‘ephemera‘ a term usually reserved for short lived insects, phenomena etc.

Therefore I will call this aim of archiving and elevating these objects ‘Ephemerology‘ to signify the future-possibility of everything becoming an entry in an archive - thus elevating all real time objects into artifacts. In my archive so far I have tried to pick at random - but for some reason - items which seem most interesting for this purpose are often broken/defunct or obselete. Which denotes that the object itself serves no other purpose other than as a mnemonic device;

1. A clockwork robot with no key that was a gift
2. A superceded mobile phone which contains the SMS records of my daughters birth
3. A Spectrum 48k which I have kept since I was 11
4. A Jazz LP bought from Haight & Ashbury, SF - still in fine condition but replaced by iTunes

As each object has personal associations for me - I will include this in the webpage but I will also ask as part of the installation why a visitor has decided to scan a particular object and what it means to them - allowing a more organic development of a folksonomic archive. Perhaps each object can be tagged semantically also - creating a tag cloud of referents for those who interact with each object. This tagging and re-tagging can create more stories and associations with the objects - especially if visitors post links to outside pages and associations.

Completely change tack and rethink your whole approach.  And guess what? It works! I have sacked off the colour tracking after many hours of effort but little positive results to try instead the reactivision software. I found it pretty hard to find my way at first, as they are determined not to give you any examples - and the supposed patches supplied for max tried to open in photoshop!

reactivision fiducial markers

I was able to remove the concerns about tracking colours and ambient light due to the easy camera calibration setup in reactivision - the markers were extremely clear to see but I couldn’t figure out how to take that info into MaxMSP - I had the TuioClient Object installed and it was giving me reams of numbers but I didn’t know how to unpack it to make use of the data.

After some serious forum digging I found an extremely helpful post (here) which had a working patch using the TUIO interface into MaxMSP - Thankyou!. I was able to utilise the patch and incorporate some of the functionality into my existing paintsounds app substituting the jit.findbounds object to capture the x and y input for the data captured from the fiducial markers.

I have assigned a sound and drawing patch for four separate fiducial id’s, capturing x and y info for pitch and velocity and the rotation for the duration of the sounds. The addition of a fudicial object triggers the sound and starts the drawing loop and the removal stops the the loop. I used two more for other functions. One clears the lcd screen and the other triggers a vocal sample which can be sped up or slowed down via rotation.

Once I figured out how to get the fiducial markers data into MaxMSP and Ableton the results were pretty impressive and very straightforward to implement. I will now add a few more samples to play with, make the markers more engaging and tangible and make the glass top of my light box opaque - and hopefully that should be the project completed (bar the paperwork).

Well, I have hit a wall with my project. My problem was parsing the colours to a jit.findbounds object so instead I created four of them with a min and max bounds for each colour - red, green, blue and yellow. The objects picked up the various colours and sent an x and y variable to a drawing subpatch which would draw the paths of a tracked object and play a sound accordingly - which works lovely but only with a movie or animation.

screenshot of patch working with an animation

When I then used a webcam - the tracking subpatch couldn’t find anything. I tried ramping up the colour and brightness with a jit.brcosa object but this became messy and only really found red colours.  Even after adding a suckah and then recalibrating each jit.findbounds to match the colour tracking still didn’t work.

I thought it must be down to the variance in ambient light - so I attempted to build a lightbox to ensure a consistent level of light under all conditions.  The design was to have a light and webcam inside a box with a glass top - the objects to be tracked would be lit and seen from beneath and so would be easy to calibrate.

wooden box

box interior painted white

light and webcam installed

lightbox completed

It looked great, unfortunately the outcome was awful. The light reflected into the webcam and bleached out most of the image, causing the tracking patch to miss the objects. I tried to diffuse the light with cloth but the light problem persisted. After a few tense hours, I then tried a new tack. I used an anglepoise lamp and webcam set up above the lightbox with the jit.brcosa to raise the brightness and contrast which made the colours closer to pure RGB.

Webcam and lamp above diffused lightbox.

However - I still cannot get the tracking to work properly - only a stuttering bit of red and blue. Which is infuriating. I will speak to Dan Livingstone once more tomorrow and hopefully he can help me - or put me out of my misery!

That sums it up nicely…

I was under the impression that the most pictures the catcam could take was about 190 - but I underestimated it’s capabilities immensely. Today I left in running in the car and it took 760 photos! This is a record so far - due to the randomness of the camera’s performance the number of pics can be as little as 4 or 5 if there is some sort of glitch.

I filmed an entire gig with the hatcam the other day and the display said 240ish pictures, got home and the memory disc had corrupted so I had to reformat it and lose all the data. Swine! It adds an element of chance as to what is recorded - which is actually kind of cool. Obviously not at the time, but in hindsight when I consider the fallability of my own memory - the concept that my memory’s digital augmentation is equally as inconsistent adds a nice touch of authenticity to it. A sort of humanity.

I am off the grid - literally speaking. I’m in a farmhouse for a week in the middle of nowhere near Honiton. Don’t try finding it…

Horshayne Farmhouse

Combination unbranded logo

I have replaced the “un” with the sticker logo idea so we can take that through to use as a sticker still and remain within the same branded identity and I have also added a masking tape nod to the uni logo. I also changed the N for a nike letter and the D for an adidas letter to utilise stronger brand fonts.

This works as a compromise between the two popular logo choices and should hopefully be the finalised choice. We shall see…

Also Becky, Graeme and I did another walkaround in the exhibition space and we have a pretty good idea of the layout - just need to see what everyone requires space wise to ensure it will all fit in together.

I have finally got the idea for my final year project nailed down - an archive of RFID tagged objects chosen from my belongings which each have their own taxonomy and personal history/connections. I will contact an archivist to make sure the data is recordedn and archived in the correct manner online and add the functionality for additional user generated comments.


The concept would be a tactile display where users take each object and scan it to reveal it’s webpage - showing all the relevant details, history and associations and links to the network of connections from that one object - people, places, photos etc. Highlighting the personal provenance of each item and also allowing comments, and further links to be made.

I am having a mare with this colour tracking motion capture - the cv.jit library has such little tech support for the tracking objects that it’s less than useless. Mining through forums and previous projects has raised more questions than answers and currently I am creating a theramin by waving a blue book at the i-Sight camera - which is fun but predominantly pointless. So far the huge sticking point is the ability to parse the RGB to a jit.finbounds object with a suckah. I can see the values for each and I’m using the $ syntax to try and set the min and max values dynamically from these float number objects but - no dice. I cannot find anyway around it - which makes me know it will be a really obvious thing to overcome - but after hours of staring at a patch it becomes more and more indecipherable.

I tried EyesWeb but after downloading and putting the appropriate files in the designated spaces it wouldn’t work - maybe it’s another anti Intel Mac thing. So now I am completely stymied.

Anyone who wants to post an easy ‘how to’ fix in the comments feel free - Help!

I am having concerns about how to play out the narrative/story of the catcam pics. Should I deal solely with it as a straight life logging tool? This seems a little narrow-minded for the potential it has. It is a means of capturing moments of time - 4D - whilst I move through space - 3D. The movement therefore has to be incorporated to transmit the concept of passing through these moments - rather than just a flickering timelapse style. Saying that; a timelapse is deconstructing time too, especially if there is an actor/agent in the footage moving at a vastly reduced speed. Thus creating contrast and a commentary on the passage of time - especially if the rest of the shot has lots of movement.

I made a catcam timelapse of crossing the ferry and driving home - the ferry crossing when I was static is a great contrast to the otherwise hectic movement through space, even though you can see the movement of the ferry clearly from the background. 

I remember when I was living in London in 97/98 I was going to a club in Soho and there was a woman walking at an animated style pace towards a fixed camera which was taking timelapse photography - around her would have been a blur of people and she could be seen to move normally if the playback frame rate was right. I’m sure it turned up in a music video.

I have done some timelapse with the catcam and the most interesting thing is the contrast between the milling crowds and the clouds moving sedately by. However there is such a huge amount of this sort of material in existence - it would be better to be more innovative.

I am more concerned with the life logging aspect but maybe in a different way. Say the footage could be usd to convey some sort of recall process? Maybe a mocked up AI program accessed by BCI which allows you to download or upload memories? Kind of like the memory sequences in Strange Days where the recipient could watch the neural recordings of someone else. As the catcam is still images I could make it a bit more disjointed and like the “blipverts” that were in Max Headroom (showing my age now). Like a compressed and more intense memory where a passage of time is made more impressionistic rather than acted out in realtime.

Sounds like I need to mess with After Effects.