User:0902492

Joëlle's Wiki

As a 3rd year graphic design student with a pretty 'commercial' style and mindset in terms of my own design practice, I picked Digital Craft to broaden my horizon. I've done some open aanbod and electives in the Interaction Station before and really liked the technical part of it.

So this quarter it was time to challenge myself some more. I had a few goals in mind:

• experiment with different techniques
• make something physical
• work on coding (Python)

Workshops

I quickly discovered that the workshops were actually a great way to check the first item of my list: experimenting. It isn't just for experimenting with different techniques, but also materials. Like with any experiment the workshops are a trial and error type of thing. Sometimes things are quite easy to pull of but more often they're not. But that makes the satisfaction of getting something to work only bigger.

Wireless LED

This workshop we worked with pretty basic materials as you can tell from the picture. Nevertheless we had some struggles making it work. I worked on it together with Jeroen and Sanne and after double-checking everything and adjusting some things we got it to work.

A wireless LED made out of some copper wire, a resistor, NPN transistor and a single AA battery.

And then tere was light.

SDR dongle + Gqrx

Played around with this small device one for quite some time. Setting up the dongle wasn't the hardest part, just plug and play. But finding the right settings with the Gqrx program was a bit more difficult. I first of tried a bunch of things myself, it made me more familiar with the interface and how it worked but I couldn't get a clear signal yet. After some research on Google I managed to listen to the radio (something I don't really do much anymore ever since Spotify).

Screenshot of what tuning in to 102.FM (Qmusic) using the dongle and Grqx looks like.

When I went outside together with Jerry and Mattijn things became more exciting (again also more difficult). This time we were trying to find some 'private' channels. After quite some time I was suddenly tuned in to what seemed like two truckers talking to each other. I recorded a part of the conversation. Listening to the two making some small talk and gossiping about work was actually pretty entertaining.

The office with a view of Jerry, Mattijn and me.

We attached our antenna's to a street lantern. We hoped it would work as an amplifier so our range for picking up the signals would become bigger.

It's serious business as you can tell from Mattijn's face.

Imaginary Radio

For the Imaginary Radio we had to come up with something for the 1800's. We had the idea of placing an installation people could enter in Amsterdam. Inside the installation would be a small projector which would play a recording of Paris on loop. Meanwhile there would be playing live audio imitation the sounds of the video. This way we created some sort of the first '(not-so-)live stream' for that time. People could really experience both visually as well as audibly what it would be like in a foreign city hundreds of kilometers away.

We had to further work on a concept of a different team. Their concept was that a souvenir you took home with you from a different country would be able to unlock certain memories of the place you took it from. We decided to take a matryoshka doll and implement it with a NFC chip. Unfortunately we didn't had one at that point in time, so we decided to use a QR-code instead. It needed to be a bit secretive so we placed a small QR-code on the bottom of the very last matryoshka doll. If you scanned the QR-code you would be taken to Kproxy, a website that offers a free anonymous web proxy service. Through that site you would be taken to a, in this case, Russian security camera in public space which is linked to the place you supposedly bought your matryoshka doll souvenir.

Part of the sketching for different ideas.

WdKA meets MICA

Pirate Radio. That was our assignment. Did any of us ever build a FM transmitter before? No. Did we knew how it worked? No. Was the site containing information on how to do it in English? Hell no. So it was basically just trying things out, looking at images online and getting some help from the Interaction Station.

The first version of the FM transmitter was built on a beer coaster.

Setup/behind the scenes for the exhibition.

We had one half of the team focussing on the technical part and building the FM transmitter. The other half of the team focussed on the conceptual side. But we were also talking to other groups and discussing what they were doing and how it would work out if we, let's say, combined certain elements or ideas. As real pirates do we 'stole' something from another team. The Intergalactic team was focussing on sending the most frequent asked questions on Google to outer space. We decided to take their questions and let chatbot ELIZA answer those questions.

At first things seemed slightly overwhelming and confusing. But we figured it out together.

Early morning exhibition.

Micro radio stations have a long history of connecting people within communities, often serving as platforms for talk shows where people can call in to a host with their personal questions. With the creation of the Internet and the consolidation of information, people are increasingly turning to online search engines to answer their most personal questions. These platforms provide individuals with the feeling that they have been heard, without human interaction. Pirate Radio aggregates the most frequently asked Google search questions, responding to them using the Rogerian Method (a psychotherapy technique that answers questions with questions). Micro radios’ legacy included answering questions posed by community members. What does it mean when a bot answers frequently Googled questions? I must say that the overall experience was great and it was cool to see two groups of complete strangers from different countries work so hard together with a limited time frame and make some cool projects.

Personal research

This part of my wiki is basically a collection of interesting things I found online, research, sketches and ideas.

Oscilloscope art

An oscilloscope, previously called an oscillograph, and informally known as a scope, CRO (for cathode-ray oscilloscope), or DSO (for the more modern digital storage oscilloscope), is a type of electronic test instrument that allows observation of constantly varying signal voltages, usually as a two-dimensional plot of one or more signals as a function of time. Other signals (such as sound or vibration) can be converted to voltages and displayed. If you create waveforms (sounds) using a computer and feed these to the oscilloscope you can actually create some pretty nice graphics out of it as seen in the images below and here.

An oscilloscope displaying a 3D cube.

Example of the images you can create with waveforms.

Theremin

During our concept brainstorming for the FM transmitter we made together with the MICA students, someone mentioned the theremin. The theremin (originally known as the ætherphone/etherphone, thereminophone or termenvox/thereminvox) is an early electronic musical instrument controlled without physical contact by the thereminist (performer). It is named after the Westernized name of its Russian inventor, Léon Theremin (Термéн), who patented the device in 1928. The instrument popped up in their mind when they were thinking of a way to interfere with a signal to distort it and create new sounds of that distortion.

Someone playing the theremin.

Example of a theremin schematic.

Human Antenna

After that someone else mentioned the Human Antenna made as a Design Academy Eindhoven graduation project by Florian Kräutli in 2009. Instead of interfering with the waves that the antenna will pick up you actually become the antenna yourself. This way you can decide what and how the signal will get picked up.

Connection from the carpet to the radio and speakers.

Someone being the 'human antenna' on the carpet.

My Radio

This part of my wiki is dedicated to the bigger individual project. Because of time I wasn't able to make it into a final product just yet so I definitely want to continue with it in the next quarter (Q10). The concept of this project will be explained below.

Concept

 I love Spotify, but I'm frustrated by their playlists that are based on emotions and moods. They are too static to me. Music is the one thing that is
 supposed to capture your emotions in a way nothing else can. Another great way to express your emotions is through colors, so I decided to 
 create a RGB-radio. It combines the tactility of an old school radio with digitally listening to music in a simple and intuitive way.

So a quick recap. These were the most important elements to my concept:

• communication
• emotions
• interactive
• personal

Research

Of course colors are related to certain emotions and feelings, and it's not as subjective as you might think at first. After extensive research I managed to create an overview with some colors and the emotions that are most often associated with.

Emotions associated with colors

Color	Meaning
Red	Love, passion
Orange	Playful, energetic, fun
Yellow	Happy, friendly
Green	Nature, stable, peace
Blue	Serene, trustworthy, calm
Purple	Luxurious, mysterious, romantic
Pink	Sweet, cute, romantic
Grey	Depression, lack of energy

Version 1

In the first sketch version of the RGB-radio I took on a fully digital and online approach. The user was supposed to drag the cursor around in the color wheel. With the slider on the bottom you could change the saturation of the picked color.

Screenshot of first version of the RGB-radio.

The songs used in the first version where a personal selection from different playlists I have on Spotify. Below you can find an overview of those.

Songs personally associated with colors

Color	Song
Red	Boys II Men - End Of The Road	Al Green - Let’s Stay Together
Orange	Coldplay - Life In Technicolor ii	Will Smith - Miami
Yellow	Club Kuru - Tonight	Young Franco, Blair de Milo - Don’t You Want Me
Green	Jett Rebel - Green	MGMT - Electric Feel
Blue	Coldplay - Midnight	Ludovico Einaudi - Divenire
Purple	Jamie xx, Romy - Loud Places	Drake - Weston Road Flows
Pink	Beyoncé - Crazy In Love	Kelis - Trick Me
Grey	Kodaline - All I want	Bon Iver - The Wolves (Act I and II)