Genuary 23 - Vegetation

The theme for the 23rd was abstract vegetation. Instead of drawing abstract vegetation, I decided to get vegetation to make sounds! I found a suitable specimen on a street corner so took it home with me and connected it up to a Bare Conductive Touch Board and to Max, so that when I touched the leaves, it would make sounds.

Video on Flickr:

Genuary 24 - Pseudo-random numbers

Day 24's Genuary prompt was to create your own pseudo-random number generator, and this proved difficult!

I tried:
1. Using an Arduino and a sound detector and putting it in my fridge. There wasn't enough variant of noise for that to work. I also tried it in my freezer, next to my boiler and also running water in a bath, but still didn't have good results.

2. Attaching the Touch Board to a radish. With this one I had issues with filtering the data enough to get good results.

3. Using a light sensor. I put it in front of an episode of Eerie, Indiana, and got some okay numbers with this.

4. Using a EEG headset and thinking about squirrels. I knew this wasn't really random as fairly easy to influence by concentrating more, but decided it generated a range of numbers, so would do.

In the end, I used the not very random numbers to determine the size of circles in this picture and found there was enough variation that it looks okay:


It was an interesting exercise to think about how to generate pseudo-random numbers, but think I might stick to using a computer or rolling dice in future.