Question 1:

The rudimental mechanism of the pressing device was to judge among the two components who pressed each of the buttons in front of them ten times the fastest. Meanwhile, we are using button switches, which was basically the simple connect and disconnect of the flow. In such way, we were catering ourselves to the machine, communicating with the computer in its way. Using the analogy of from “How the Computer Sees us”(2004) by Dan O’Sullivan and Tom Igoe where desk computers perceive the users as creatures with one finger, two eyes and ears, the low level game we built might sculpture the players’ images as the one only organ, namely fingers, with merely enough strength to press buttons. Thus, to increase the computers’ perception towards human movements, so as to increase the man-machine interactivity , we could replace the button with a switch that could capture more changes proceeded by human activity. In this case the switches were the “transducers to convert between the physical energy appropriate for your project and the electrical energy used by the computer”(O’Sullivan & Igoe, 2004) and improving the transduction process could bring the game to a higher level. Hence, I propose a new switch that could intake sounds of patting as “inputs” (O’Sullivan & Igoe, 2004). As the players pat on a random hard object, the switch would hear the sound and connect the circuit it controls. Thus, with the new switches, the game turns into a race of speed-patting, that is whoever pats most quickly wins. 

Question2:

The resistor was used as a pull-up resistor or a pull-high resistor. + 5V power was  connected to give the pin a high-level current by default; Switch pressed, the current turns to low level. 

Question3:

On reading “The Arduino Way”, I found the core of its mechanism of producing electronic artifacts was efficiency. The way of Arduino was the pursue of lowest cost in time, material and money, one of the major ways of which was to compile ready-made products from others to produce your own products. A very quintessential example I could find was the artifact built by Shyu Ruey-Shiann, One Kind of Behavior. The artist was inspired “within the landscape of nature, languid movements of opening and closing of the hermit crab’s shells, a stark contrast to contemporary society where things move at high speed.”(2014) She utilized iron buckets, circuits and sensors, as well as other ready-made equipments. It detected natural movements to generate corresponding sounds with the drumming of the iron buckets. It was the an artifact of low cost while it was creative and interactive enough, which was to the spirits of the “Arduino Way”. 

Documentation:

The first two task was rather easy where I met no trouble, because all I have to do was to follow the steps, building circuits and finding the corresponding sets of codes.

Recording for Fading

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Recording for NEVER GONNA GIVE U UP

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IMG_2347

Recording for the Race

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In the building of the race circuit, we met trouble in building circuit. The bread board in the blueprint presented was not the of the same size of ours. Thus, we had to rebuild it based on the logical connections of different elements. It was hard, but following the left-to-right rule, we made it. 

Schematic:

Ruey-Shiann, Shyu. “One Kind of Behavior”(2014). hello circuits. https://hellocircuits.com/2014/08/03/one-kind-of-behavior-by-shyu-ruey-shiann/

For me, interaction was the perception and execution of indications from one another. The closest analogy to it would be the a dialogue. By understanding the object’s words, the subject gives corresponding reposes and vice versa. In short, as Crawford proposed, it should be as “a cyclic process in which two actors alternately listen, think, and speak.” (1) So in the case of human-machine interaction, unlike common understanding, I consider it as that people, after having the machine proceeding their indications should respond in an understandable way for machine. Even if it was the end of conversation, we, the human, would wave each other goodbye. Thus, to the machines, we should do the same, presenting them with the rudimental respect by responding in a comprehensive manner. Sadly, a negative example against my definition was what we made in the recitation class, the circuit accepting one-off commands from human, which is shown hereIMG_2285, though I have to admit I have defined interaction upon very much of a narrow sense.

Whereas our development in technologies, to say, new media, developed, the definition of man-machine interaction have a rather obvious tendency towards Crawford’s theory as well as mine. A decade ago, the definitions might still be out of reach in certain fields, but nowadays, we are able to satisfy the standards. Manovich, in The Language of New Media,  also pointed out sci-tech’s intermittent impact on man-machine relation, which were that “a new media object is subject to algorithmic manipulation”(27), as new media could be mathematically represented(27). He put forward the quintessential case where the media access was actually subjected to increasing automation, which resulted in the growing comprehensive ability of machines towards human activities(34), say the NLP(Nature Language Processing) used for searching engines. As technologies developed, the import and export of the machines developed, which could be seen from the artifact “We Spoke of the Same Bright Moon”(《我们共诉一轮明月》, https://www.manamana.net/video/detail?id=1930184#!zh).  It was a visual reality game where a system was created as another world in media, a poetic craft from the authors imaginations. Everything that should react as in the real life, react the same way they should react in in this world existing only in digital dimension. The water waves as the users steps on; the guiding gold fish goes the way you go; the light changes from different degree and different time. (临Lyn, n.d.)

Moreover, they even included specific guidance for each step floating at front as the users proceeds. Certain moves of the user might trigger the guidances to emerge. The machine, or more specifically, the program of the game, understands the moves made by human and could react to them in a understandable, thanks to certain principles from the physical world that the game followed, while human, on receiving the emerging information, say, the guidances, react also in a understandable way for the gamete program. The case can’t explain my definition of interaction better. 

To sum up, interaction consists of the triggering move by the subject, and plural responses from both sides, the subject and the object, as well as, the stress-worthy ending indication from either side. 

1. The Veldt:

In the fiction, George and Lydia, as a couple with three children, had drown themselves in a manually-automatic world, where labour was done by robots and delusions created by machines replaced physical traveling. (Bradbury, 1950) Thus, they decided to press themselves into real life again(Bradbury, 1950) , I considered which was caused by the lack of physical contacts with real-life matter. What impressed me most were those delusional screenage, consisting of the veldt, the heat, the lions and even forests. And the closest products, in visual electronic device industries nowadays are the VR contacts or lenses. They both indicated that in the future, people will be living in a fake world whose emphasis would focus on visual productions. Thus, to make the world more fake or, should I say close to the real world, I want to propose a new supplement product for those VR equipment mentioned above, which is the “Real Gloves”, applying certain feelings to hand corresponding to the visual scenes in the visual devices and sound devices. The problem expected from this product would be that people would consequently be wholly drowned in the world of the fake, because as physical feelings attend the visual arts, the visual world would finally not be able to be separated from the real world. 

2. “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”:

In this fiction, Le Guin described an imagined city Omelas, where people’s values and emotions were strictly defined within common moral standards. Thus, individuals ought to be defined by others to be happy, instead of being happy as the way they felt. Thus, I thought of an air projector used for communications as a node for social platform like instagram or WeChat. In this device, people can create their own image to be shown to others and say whatever they want without limit. Before it starts projecting, it will emit some fogs and smokes  in the air for reflecting lights from the projector and create a physical communicational scene in front of users. With more people joining a conversation, the images correspondingly increase. In such way, people socialize in any images they want. Meanwhile, as they can say anything they want, there isn’t any standards for any one’s emotions or mindsets. It’s a world with no limitation. The closest product or concept to it would be the Metaverse. It was another cyber world where people say whatever they want and dress in whatever they like with minor limits from any cultural ,religion or physical limitations. I would define my product as another manner realization of the concept of Meta verse as most popular way to satisfy it nowadays was through VR. The problem of such platform would be that it might provide an environment for the porn industry and other yellow industries to thrive. As this platform was no limitations. 

3. The Plague:

In this fiction, the main character worked as a “corpse” cleaner who worked for 2 years to clean up infected people seen as corpse. The infectious virus was silicon-based so people infected would gradually turn into stone, but even if they turned into stones, they weren’t dead. Instead, they proceed normal life operations in slow motion as a different form of life. And as the virus spread further, the whole human society changed into the world the creatures of this form. The slow movement slow movements of the new forms of life stroke me as hard that our life here in Shanghai is so rushed and intense. What if we could put ourselves in a space where we could be totally cut off from the outside world and enjoy our life in a comfy pace. Hence, I suggest the Moving Space. It was a large bag of 2 layers of plastic, between which was an interlayer vacuumed by the vacuuming machine at the bottom. Therefore, when the bag was pumped up, people inside will hear no sound from the tense world outside. Also, the inside of the bag could be paint the way the user likes so they also see nothing but an environment cater to them. So far, all I could found that are of similar functions would be the noise cancelling ear buds or hotel bed rooms. As they, to certain degree, provided an environment partially cut off from the familiar world outside. There was a serious problem still. There might be situations like emergencies, to say natural disasters in the environment where people use the Moving Space. Danger could be directly happening to the users in such situations. 

(The videos are in those short Links starting with IMG. Click & Find)

Before we proceeded the construction of the circuits, we tried to understood the rudimental structure of the bread board that was distributed to us beforehand. With the help of both professors and the assistants, we caught hold of that the board was symmetrically build while each side was made of 2 parts, dividing by a blue line, of which, one was for the plug-in for the rudimental power supply and the other was for the build-up of the circuit. 

Then came the fist task, to build the simplest circuits for the buzz to buzz in human control. Simple as it is, it didn’t sweat us to know how we should cascade the whole circuit. Whereas, after finishing the circuit, the buzz did buzzed, but was out of control, because it could buzz forever with power turned on, however hard we placed our fingers on the switch. Thus, we called the assistance to come   and she explained to us how the switch built. Basically, there were four legs on it, the upper parts of the were connect to one another in a intersecting way. So according to this special structure, we rebuild the circuit and manage to tell the buzz to buzz whenever we wanted.

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On completing the first task, the second task was rather easy. As was shown by the abstractive map of the circuit, we needed to add a parallel connection to the circuit from the first task. There were two fatal details required our extra attention. First, the head of the added loop should be connected before the switch to the power supply. Second, the LED would only work if the head and tail of it were in the correct sequence. The longer leg, the head, to the positive pole while the shorter leg, the tail to the negative pole. Thus, the second task was done. 

Task 3 was comparably difficult as it has the most complicated circuits with three route of flow in parallel. The difference between the third connection added to the second one was that it had a potentiometer between the LED and the usual resistor. By turning the screw on the potentiometer, the resistance of the whole trail changed, which resulted in oscillation of the luminance of the LED. As the second LED and the buzzer started from the same node, the light shone as the buzzes screamed, while the third LED was always on for changing. Moreover, we built an even more special equipment to replace the switch, an Aluminum clip. By pressing, we could simply control the circuit. 

IMG_2286

Question 1

The resistance of the the potentiometer, freshly plugged in, was unknown while the LED do need a resistor to lower the current of the circuits. R1 was acting as an insurance for the LED not to get burnt out.

Question 2

Question3

I had to press the button on the switch to keep the buzz buzzing and that through the switching of the nut on the potentiometer, the illuminance of the new LED in Task 3 was able to be changed. I consider it as low level interactivity. From the degree of Boolean Property, I think it belongs to human-appliance singular-direction interaction where human have over all control of the circuit while the circuit responded as they were told to and contracted to, instead of catching the movements from human body. 

Question 4

Interactive Design have managed to create the basic blue print of the art work, by finding out what human organs the electrical devices the need to catch the movements of and what types of devices that can fully respond and show the intention of the design and how much space or freedom that can be given to artist of specific fields to manage their expressions of their art works. Whereas, the Physical computing was also of great significance, because it catch hold of the import and the export of interactive informations, during the procedures of of both of which, the accuracy is highly required. Lieberman in his speech told the story of the a graffiti artist who was paralyzed but successively managed to precisely put forward his work by eyes movement and there are cases where people can move the things they drew to their wills. (2010) Interactive media art need not only the unlimited imaginative ideas of great artistic minds but also the very precise capturing and expressing of movements from Physical Computing.