Physical computing

This x-med-k workshop took place from nov 01 till nov 04 at okno, Brussels. It was given by Johannes Taelman who focussed at the artistic exploration of the possibilities of physical computing, of connecting the physical world to the realm of the computer in order to create artworks.

By using sensors and the Arduino interface board (15-20€), we created individually a sound device consisting of different sensors responding to touch and gesture. In fact we made a flat variable resistor made with some wood, plastic, tape and coppertape, connected it to the arduino board wich transformed the analog signals into digital ones which where communicated to PureData or Max/Msp via a USB-cable.

Wiz'n wise Wendy Van Wynsberghe explains how to make the resistor here

The Arduino software is an open-source environment which makes it easy to write code and upload it to the i/o board. It runs on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. The environment is written in Java and based on Processing.

Although both workshops got into the unavoidable universe of electricity and electronics, the approach was quite different in the atelier given by Emmanuel Lestienne at iMAL's 'Ateliers Numériques' last summer. The focus here was rather on programming in Arduino and Processing for control of all kinds of devices such as leds and stepper motors. http://www.imal.org/AteliersArtNum/#st06

As in most of the workshops where you have to cut and solder wires and try to predict future behaviour of the tiny bits inside of them, it's good to have such a faithfull companion as the manual Getting Started in Electronics by Forrest Mims hanging around your neck. In no time it gets extremely popular amongst the colleagues and it transforms you into a civil servant from the local public library.

As a direct consequence of the workshop I put my teeth in The Scientist and Engineer's Guide to Digital Signal Processing by Steven W. Smith in order to find out more about what really goes on in the digibrain. It's a recover operation of knowledge of math and stats, lost a long time ago. You can find the PDF-book here.

Info .X-Med-K. --> www.xmedk.be