Skyberries and Voidmelons or Voidberries and Skymelons

Automata

I attended a class on automata tinkering and learnt how to make automata! These are some I made:

1. Star
2. Bus and mushrooms
3. Tentacle and biscuit
4. Lightbulb moment (mind controlled)
5. Vending machine creature
6. Sound automaton
7. New friend
8. Hands
9. Boat automaton

Sound art

I attended a class on Sonic Arts 2: Interactive projects, and some of these are inspired by that. I also bought a Bare Conductive Touch Board and used that for a lot of projects.

10. Beer mat – When you touch the (very crude) beer mat, sounds of a pub can be heard.
11. Twigs – I painted twigs with conductive paint. How close you are to the twigs indicates how much to transpose the sound by in Max and the sounds stop if you are not close enough to the twigs.
12. Automaton – I used silver foil and a Touch Board, so that it makes a sound when the parts of the automaton touch.
13. Lobster – We learnt how to detect colours in Max, so I made it so the recording of me saying "lobster" gets transposed depending on how much red is detected.
14. Potato – Potato says "hello" when you touch it.
15. Viaduct- Shouted at a picture of a viaduct and it shouted back. When the sound level is high enough, an MP3 is played of me saying "echo".
16. Mirror – Mirror that tells you that you look nice today. Touch Board connected to a light dependent resistor, so it plays an MP3 when you get close to the mirror.
17. Musical ballpit - Limited version of the musical ballpit in my living room and using Max for colour detection.
18. Goat - The goat that roars when touched.
19. Jellyfish - A jellyfish made from fabric, wool and conductive thread. When you touch it, sounds of the sea can be heard.
20. Door - Door with a cat door knocker and a piezo, connected to a Touch Board. A cat sound can be heard when the door is knocked on.
21. Lion roar – Scared my niblings with a lion roaring when they clap or shout loud enough, using a touch board and a sound detector.
22. Wink drum – I used FaceOSC and Max, so that when I wink, it plays the sound of a snare drum.
23. Space invader - A space invader cross-stitched in conductive fabric. When you touch it, it plays a sound.
24. oscHook + Max - I used the accelerometer on oscHook, so that when I tip my phone up, different notes are played in Max.
25. Other jackets - When you touch the old jacket, sounds of me putting on other jackets can be heard.
26. Tribute to E.J. Moeran - If you walk close to the baptist chapel, you can hear sea shanties.
27. Village map - If you touch the main road on the map, the sound of a motorbike can be heard.
28. Photo of the village - I loaded a photo of the village into Audacity and edited it, with recordings taken in the village added in.
29. Red balloon - I painted a balloon with conductive paint and connected it to a Touch Board, so that when I touch it, 99 Luftballons is played.
30. Max, drunk and random - Using Max, I used the drunk function to choose notes, and also to choose location of circles, and the random function to choose colours.
31. Sink and toilet - Sounds emanating from my sink and toilet.

Tinkering

I attended the Tinkering World Tour MOOC style sessions and these are some of the things I made inspired by those:
32. Face - Animated GIF face made of train tickets
33. Scrap craft friend - 1
34. Scrap craft friend - 2
35. Pinwheel whirligig
36. Box - Scratch alternate reality
37. Poster for imaginary pet
38. Scrap craft friend 3

Location based apps using Processing

39. I used Processing for Android to write a small app that displays, "Hello, World!" on my phone if I walk to one particular location and then another particular location.
40. Processing, walking and circles - draws circles on the screen depending on which direction I walk
41. Processing and walking again
42. Location and sound - frequency and amplitude of sine wave change depending on latitude and longitude. (Sounds change depending on where you walk.)
43. Faster playing music - Plays music faster if you are walking faster

Things I made during NaArMaMo that didn’t fit into the other categories

44. Belisha beacon
45. Pickled onions on a marble run
46. Space invader cross-stitch
47. Collage
48. Happy Eater serviette on a plinth.
49. Glow in the dark space invader cross-stitch
50. Petals and a skeleton leaf
51. Chalk - A piece of chalk.
52. Catching stars - Trying out video sensing with Scratch and trying to catch stars.
53. Splodges - splodges of paint.
54. Painted circles
55. Tate Modern
56. Cut-up Piem

Photo manipulation

57. More Belisha beacons - using Mirrorlab
58. Altered building - using Mirrorlab
59. Glitched Viaduct - Glitched with Audacity.
60. Flower in the sky - using Mirrorlab
61. Mirrorlab patterns

Other

62. Map flower
63. I created a Piem generator for NaNoGenMo. Piem generator - A Piem is Pi+poem, a mnemonic to help remember Pi, so each word has the corresponding number of letters in it to the digit in Pi. For example, I was taught at school, "How I wish I could calculate Pi" = 3.141592. I wrote some code in Python to generate Piems.
64. Crackers - Crackers did not arrive in our Christmas supermarket order, so I made some myself.
65. "Drink me" tags for small bottles, Alice in Wonderland style.

Ingress banners

66. Traffic Light Tree
67. Gen X in Canada Water

Last year, I made some Animal Crossing related sound art using Max, but it was this year that it was included in The National Videogames Museum's exhibition!
http://animalcrossingdiaries.thenvm.org/entry/turnip-sounds/

Next year, I would like to make some kind of art installation for EMFCamp, but not sure what.

(Last year's list: 2020.)

Fairytales illustrated with words, lovely intricate creations cut from books. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The Princess and the Pea. Rapunzel. Entire scenes, castles and princesses and such delicate trees, all made from words.

Today I saw Stories from the Enchanted Forest by Su Blackwell at the Long and Ryle Gallery.

Yesterday, I went to Kingston-upon-Thames and found some dead drops, created by digital art students as part of the un/orthodoxii exhibition. The Dead Drops website says "Un-cloud your files in cement! 'Dead Drops’ is an anonymous, offline, peer to peer file-sharing network in public space."

I found the locations of four dead drops altogether - one had been stolen, one had become loose and I couldn't connect to it, but I did manage to connect to two with a laptop and they worked fine. This didn't seem too bad, considering the USB sticks had probably been there for about 2 months. I was able to look at art created by the students, as well as add my own files onto the USB stick connected to the wall.

I was surprised the USB sticks did not have more files on them that random people had added. I imagined it would become like an old BBS with a collection of random files to download, with text files about how to get high on nutmeg, purity tests, sections from the Anarchist Cookbook, the rec.music.industrial FAQ, odd porn, or more up to date, random photos taken with a phone, strange music, weird videos, and so on, but that wasn't the case. Perhaps I will try other dead drops, not just ones in Kingston-upon-Thames, and see what is on them, and if I'm still disappointed, I can always create my own and fill it up with what I want to see there.

I closed the wooden box and it was just after that I heard a tapping noise. Tap tap tap. I opened it again but all that was inside were wires, so again I closed it. Tap tap tap, coming from inside the wooden box.

Some of the exhibits in the Good Wood/Wood Works: Contemporary Wooden Art & Craft exhibition at the Riverside Gallery in Richmond, that I saw last Tuesday, I just wanted to stroke as they looked so smooth and patterns sometimes looked so geometric.

I wanted to take up marquetry then too after seeing the work from the Harrow Marquetry Group.

I wondered how difficult it was to sew wood, after seeing patterns sewn into wood, such as colourful houses.

There were paintings of trees and photographs too, and pictures made from found wood, arranged, and misericords.

"You've entered the room. It looks empty. It looks silent. There is vinyl text on the wall.
Someone in their early twenties hands you this pamphlet and a pair of ghetto-style headphones attached to a small electronic device."

That was part of the text written on the pamphlet I was handed at the Translated By exhibition at The Architectural Association School of Architecture.

I sat on a grey exercise ball, staring at a black image, listening to an excerpt of Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. It was about the Street.

After that, I sat on an old garden chair (see picture), amongst some tin cans and a block of wood, looking at a picture of what looked like the end of the world, while I listened to an excerpt from Girlfriend in a Coma by Douglas Coupland.

My mum and I sat in office chairs and looked at a map on the wall, while we listened to an excerpt from Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem, about Brooklyn.

We listened to other words also, but those are the ones I noted.
--

After leaving the gallery, we ate at Planet Organic, and then headed to the river, where we jumped aboard a boat that took us to the London Eye, and the big wheel towered over us, and then the boat turned around and took us to the west, and we left the boat at Canary Wharf.

The London Ice Sculpting Festival was happening and although we did not get to carve polar bears from ice, as all the sessions were booked up, we did see lions, people, London buildings, and other things carved from ice, already starting to melt.

Friday night involved a failed attempt at the creation of Mexican Hot Chocolate Snickerdoodles.

I sipped a gingerbread soya latte at the station and jumped on a train to visit Bath and Marios. It was Saturday.

I visited the Library of unwritten books, but preferred the unwritten books in Portsmouth I saw and wrote about on August 15th 2004. I wonder if they are all still unwritten, or if some have now been written. Apparently the idea was taken from Richard Brautigan's The Abortion.

Marios gave me a book: The Kicking King in Letterland. I vaguely remember Letterland from my childhood, or something similar anyway. People shaped like letters.

I saw the Fifth Horseman, half horse, half man, with dolls' legs forming a mohican and toy cars forming a spine, and mobile phones and hamburgers and other bits of junk on the horseman's body, like the horseman had arisen from everything that was being destroyed in the apocalypse. It was at the Victoria Art Gallery in Bath, and created by Deborah van der Beek, in an exhibition called Out of old Mythologies.

Marios bought a kite, but I bought Groucho Marx spectacles, having concluded that perhaps I needed them for work. An episode of Eerie, Indiana involved an eye nurse who would brainwash people, so they became like zombies. The only cure seemed to be invoking laughter by wearing the Groucho Marx spectacles. My co-workers do not show any signs of becoming zombies, but I keep them at hand, just in case.

We watched Last Night, which I have seen a few times before, but always enjoy. The world is ending and it's the last night, and the film shows how various characters spend their last night on Earth.

The sun had already set and there were only a few pink smudges left in the sky, but the rain had stopped, so it seemed like it was time for a walk. An abandoned rusty box with a plug attached to it, lying on the ground, near to a river, caught my eye, but I couldn't work out what it was for. We walked upwards, through the mud, past dogs pawing at my skirt, and stopped and looked out over the lights of Bath. Tiny white moths appeared in the darkness, fluttering as we walked.

The sun shone on Sunday, so it was time for the beach. We arrived in Weston-super-Mare to find the sea was far out, too far to walk to through the mud, but there was a sea-filled pool to paddle in. From the beach side of the pool, it looked as if people were walking on the water. I ate a coconut ice-cream, blew pirate bubbles, and photographed the pier, which has been rebuilt after a fire, but has yet to re-open. Marios battled with flying ants and escaped, ice-cream intact. Photos on Flickr: Weston-super-Mare.

Back on the train, looking out the window at the sky, which looked beautiful and pink, and as the train went through Bristol, became full of hot air balloons.

A Yeni Vatan Turkish newspaper sat opposite me on the tram and I flicked through it, briefly.

Memories fade so quickly sometimes, I am surprised.

"According to traditional custom, Aboriginal people are abandoned if they cannot travel," the description of a painting told me, at The Shared Sky exhibition at the NGV.

I looked at star trails and photos of space, that did not look real.

I watched the reflections of people in the window of the tourist information centre at Fed Square, while I waited for someone who was asleep, and perhaps dreaming, at that point.

I saw Tim Minchin perform that night, as part of the comedy festival, and one story he told was of having dinner with a girl named Storm: "Isn’t this enough? Just this world? Just this beautiful, complex wonderfully unfathomable world? How does it so fail to hold our attention that we have to diminish it with the invention of cheap, man-made myths and monsters?" Full beat poem on YouTube: Storm.

A band played loudly in ACDC Lane, as we walked past.

A black-haired girl on the tram, sounding sad and angry, spoke to someone unknown on the phone, "I was jumping around, screaming," she said. As I listened to more and more of the conversation, it sounded as if she had been rejected from a band, and I felt sad.

"We hope you liked our messages", the pavement had written on it.

Do you ever have dreams that are kind of magical, but kind of post-apocalyptic? Maybe there are things that look organic somehow, like they're growing in your dreams, but when you examine them closely, yes, there are brightly coloured crystals and tree branches, but somehow trash is mixed up there too, bottles, mobile phones, discarded toys, weird things, everything feels different somehow.

Maybe in your dream you climb up a ladder and sit and watch over this strange world, or sit on a stool and watch it through binoculars. Maybe you get to the world by walking through a silver tunnel, that appears to be made from sticks and silver foil and moves in the breeze.

Perhaps you dream you're lying in bed and there is a rock hanging over you, or there is a weird mobile above your head, turning, or perhaps the bed keeps moving while you lie in it. These things happen.

My dreams are mostly ordinary, but this is my reality, this is real, at Melbourne's Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, at the current exhibition, The Water Hole by Gerda Steiner & Jörg Lenzlinger.