Crafting with current
drillr: art generator


coordinator: Yaniv Steiner
when: january 2008, 1 week
with: Laura Bordin, Giuseppe Burdo, Lorenzo Cercelletta, Giuseppe Cosmai, Valentina Venza
where: Iuav University of Venice, IxDLab2
what: art generetor
why: because it’s fun


This workshop, on physical computing, was run by Yaniv Steiner. It started by hacking toys, and ended by asking students to design and prototype devices which automatically took changing data from the internet and manifested this data physically through the behaviour of domestic equipment.


high to very high
High to very high is a wonderful device that allows you to connect the Arduino board to a high voltage electric machines. In our project it is connected to the Arduino board (ground and 13th pin) and provides a plug for the drill.
drillr
Drillr is an art generator besed on Flickr activity about contemporary topics. Different pictures tags generate different behaviour of our painting machine.
prototype
We built a wooden structure to hold a syringe filled with coloured ink and we attached it to a drill, replacing the drill bit. The more the drill rotates, the more the syringe lifts up, according to centrifugal force. This generates different ink paterns on a canvas placed around the painting machine. For safety reasons, the machine is accurately fixed to the floor, and someone is ready to switch off the electric power that moves the drill.
code
The real application should work using flickr rss feeds: everytime a picture with a certain tag is posted (in our example we used “love”, “war” and “party”), our software switches on the drill communicating it different behaviours. Our prototype works with commands from keyboards (”l” for love, “w” for war and “p” for party), simulating the rss feed. We developed two codes: one for Arduino and the other one for Processing. The former is directly connected to the drill while the latter shows the pictures on the screen and sends to Arduino the right instructions.
download: arduino and processing code
more information: nastypixel, interaction-venice