Braccio ++ (Arduino, Max MSP)
The project consists of generating the movements of an Arduino Braccio + robotic arm. This project lies between engineering and art. The gesture of design is the most striking aspect of the project as well as the “mechanical” versus “artisanal” duality resulting from this movement. The gesture is dependent on a motorized mechanical impulse, but it can only recall the human gesture by its analogy with human joints (shoulders, elbows, wrists, etc.) and the creativity aspect. The idea is to compare the mechanical aspect with industrial type motor noises with that of the noise of the brush rubbing on the paper.
The Braccio++ will use a brush to ink a paper with random movements coded in an “Arduino Nano RP2040” microcontroller. The movement list is sent from Max MSP to the Arduino via an OSC connection. Piezo microphones will capture the noises of the motors and the brush on the paper using a Zoom H5 in “Audio interface” mode. The noises collected will be processed with Max MSP with simple effects of echoes and reverberations.
Hypermediacity (Pure data and Processing)
Inspired by a text by Katherine Hayles (“The Transformation of Narrative and the Materiality of Hypertext”, 2001) and representing it by splitting it into fragments which appear randomly on a screen and descend until they disappear at the bottom of this latest. At this moment, a letter chosen at random in each sentence that disappears triggers a sending of coordinates from Processing to Pure Data with the OSC protocol where a sound system is produced. I come back to the representation of events, occurrences in time a space of “hypermediacity”.
Montreal crime (Unity and Max MSP)
The purpose of this research-creation project is to question the use of data/metadata and their visualization by including them in a representation diverted from the usual infographics. The representation of statistics in connection with the concept of an open city is a pretext for offering an experience to spectators by emphasizing the importance of rendering. This is an exploration of open data made available to citizens in the concept of a smart city aimed at exploring the representation of data, their categorization, their scrambling and their positioning in the territory.
A data file lists criminal acts, their categories, including their date and location in latitude and longitude coordinates. Another file contains the coordinates of the polygons of the police district stations. Greenwich is the zero point of longitudes and latitudes in the real world and also in the program of this project. The first type of object will be the criminal act (blue spheres) appearing in geographic coordinates over the days and according to a random altitude; the second type of object (red rectangular parallelepipeds) will represent the layout of the geographical perimeter of the sectors of the police neighborhood stations.
Carousel (Processing)
The project interprets the relationship between a space location and temporal occurrences. It evokes the cone of light, a notion of special relativity explained by the mathematician Hermann Minskowski at the beginning of the twentieth century that represents the space-time in the past and the possible future for an observer at a time to a specific point.
What is proposed in these dimensional evolutions, it is to find at repeated intervals the photographs intact, but oscillating between the reality of the landscape elements present in the photographs towards the effects of superimpositions, cuts and geometric shear crisscrossed. We are then spectators of landscape transformations caused by nature (weather conditions, sunlight, reflections on the ground, on rain or snow) and by the urban human presence (motor vehicles, runners, walkers, reconstruction of the kiosk) regardless of the photographer’s action. The eye is returned to the centre of the work. The everydayness of images then explodes with their manipulation by computer coding. We are witnessing the reappropriation of the cosmic dimension of our daily lives.
Carousel project, photographs
A sample of photographs taken between 2015 and 2019 on Olmsted Road in Mount Royal Park.