In the City: Exhibition crit

Today we had our huge exhibition critique. I get really nervous in critique sessions because I'm still not quite confident with talking to people yet. However, compared to previous critique sessions I've improved greatly. The critique wasn't as scary as I thought it would be, it was nice and casual with a comfortable atmosphere.

Our critique session was shared with other Tom's group. I love how they set up their wall as well. I love the hexagonal arrangement on the left of their wall and how it pops out. His group's work is another favourite of mine, right behind Chris Lee's group.

I saw Ben's group critique session for Star Trak as well because I was keeping an eye on their stuff while they were gone. I love their project as much as I love Chris Lee's. I think their project is beautiful because it gives the stars a voice as music. One of my hobbies is astronomy, so I'm not sure if I might be a bit biased on that. However, I think they did a fantastic job with fabrication and with the idea as well.

There were some flaws pointed out during the crit like how our resin heads physical visualisation was too literal and as a result did not allow for expansion of a concept or idea. I agree with that in the fact that it is a little too literal, and it's too separate to the on-screen visualisation as well. Overall, I think it was a good effort on our part. We worked really hard, even though we didn't get the exact result we wanted the experience in my opinion was a precious one that taught all of us a lot about the process of creating an idea and creating a project from that idea.

I'm already looking forward to gathering my next group together, but for now, let's relax and have a well-deserved holiday.

In the City: 13

The day before our critique session, exhibition style, is here! Let the stress, frustration, and disappointment accumulate. As I write this I actually have a horrible stomachache, but I'm still here because I want this to be over and finished.

We finished up our exhibition pages and our own portfolios first before moving on to set up. I saw Chris Lee's group's finished exhibition space and I was really impressed. I love their set up. It's simple and clean. The headphones lined up so beautifully on that wall. I love their project too, it's one of my favourites in the whole class and I've played with it before. It's the one with the rain music. I will be watching with interest, I have my eyes set on some of their members to assemble a potentially amazing group.

Overall, I'm not sure if our time management in this project was good or not. I know that it would have been better if we set our minds on a good idea and concept earlier though. I think it's a combination of both. We didn't get an idea quick enough and we encountered so many problems that really slowed down our progress. Other than that, I'm satisfied with our performance though there are many areas where improvement is needed.

In the City: Failure 100%

Today we went out to do more visualisations. Before doing that though Emile and Jenna spray-painted our project name "Radio Stranger" on to the laptop box to make it look less intimidating with the heads. I thought it looked fantastic. The heads were painted white too in an attempt to make them look less scary. However, when we took them out I can still hear Japanese and Chinese people saying that they looked very scary and creepy in their mother tongue when they walked past. The funniest one last night when we did Tom's one was a young Asian couple. The timidly asked what it was for, then slowly backed away, and sprinted across the road away from the scary heads.

The radios never worked today, which was a shame considering the huge amount of effort we all put into this entire project and every aspect of it. I wish it would work, but I know it won't because there is just so much interference out there. One thing I value from this experience though, is that we've been through enough crap and problems to form a really nice bond between all members. That I appreciate very much. I even feel tempted to keep this group forever, however, there are still some people I'd like to try out working with to find my perfect pair in collaboration. What I envy in some people is how they have a perfect partner in studio where both people are just so in sync with each other that when they work it's really amazing to see what they come up with.

In the City: Shellac finishing and Tom's visualisation

I added shellac to the laptop case to give it a nice glossy finish to the paint. It gives it a bit of a brown tint as well which enhances the mottled effect of the paint. I'm surprised that the finish looked that good because it's a very old container of shellac I kept from yr11 in highschool.



Also, we did Tom's visualisation at the crossing just outside AUT tower. It didn't go very successfully to be honest. People were too scared to press the button and too scared of the ghoulish-looking heads on a box to approach and interact. Another flaw is that when people wait to cross a crossing, there is never a need to press any buttons at the crossing because the crossing simply does it for you automatically. Also, there was far to much interference from other radio channels for the speakers to work properly. Still, tomorrow, we will try and capture more data for separate visualisations.

I think this was one of the limitations we didn't really think about. When testing the radios in the studios they could work well, because the studio shields off some of the interference. But outside in the open there is little shielding so there was so much interference with our radios that it couldn't work properly. I think this is interesting in this project. How you don't know what's going to work and what isn't. So far it's the most experimental project out of all the ones we've had so far.

In the City: Getting started with exhibition

Started setting up large pages for the exhibition and planning out the exhibition space. This was the possible final plan that Emile and I came up with. We have stills and closeups of our final product and the final product in action on the wall along with the main title with one of our devices on either end of the wall. In the middle would be one of those white cylinders with our physical visualisation box, with the heads on top and laptop inside, on top.

However, James said that the suspended arc of pictures is too much effort for something that's not a huge thing that might not look that good. So in the end we had to think of alternatives for the exhibition set up. We have a lot of space on our wall, so we would need to be careful not to clutter it or to have too much whitespace, but it can be argued that if you put anything in exactly the right spot whitespace can be used to your advantage.

In the City: Melt

Yesterday we went back in the afternoon to hollow out one of the heads. The coat wasn't hard enough yet and required a second coat. So when we hollowed it out the head went all droopy and deformed.

It was decided that we leave the rest of the heads over night to harden up and dry properly.

We came back today and added another coat, and went back to hollow them out as well.

It was pretty cool, the acetone melts away the polystyrene really really quickly. Here's a video of the polystyrene melting from the acetone.

In the City: Resin and time

In the morning when only Emile and I had arrived, we looked over the exhibition brief while waiting for Tom and Jenna. We realised how much work we still had to do and planned out clearly what needs to be done and sorted them out in order of priority.

The first thing on the list was to finish any fabrication related to the physical visualisation. That means building the box and finishing up the heads. Time was running out so we headed up to the 3D labs despite our other team members not being here yet. We can't afford to lose any more time, so we had to get up there and get the heads done as soon as possible.

While waiting for Andrew to teach us how to get the resin ready we smoothed out the heads and Jenna turned up right on time to resin the heads.

The resin mixture we mixed up was too runny. We didn't add enough of a particular powder to thicken the mixture so it ran all over the heads. Too runny. We stuck with that anway for the first coat to see if that would work out. So tomorrow we'll go back to the 3D labs to see if that'll be fine.


Started planning out the exhibition space as well with Emile. This is the idea that we came up with. We have the title, conceptual statement, and images of final product on the wall. In the middle we have the physical visualisation placed on a cylinder and the arcs in the diagram are suspended still images of the developments in our project hung down from the ceiling-- CAD drawings, CAD renders, and so on in chronological order.

Suspending them would be hard, but we're really keen to do it because we want something dynamic that's not just paper stuck to a wall.

In the City: Tom's Head

Today nothing much happened since most people were busy finishing up their reflective journals for Intro to Creative Technologies. So when Emile and I were done with ours we went up to the 3D labs to finish up Tom's head.

That was fun for me again of course, because I really enjoyed carving my own head.

Other than that there was no more work done on the project today.

In the City: Heads

In the morning we couldn't get our radios working. The programming part was nearly there, but not quite. So we didn't have anything to show for the critique, however, we did have a chat with Kim instead about our project.

We still need a core to our project, the theme, the concept. I think that might be what's missing that's making creative thinking a little lost. So after the critique session we went to the interactive room for some quiet working space to think a little more about the project and what it's about for us. The idea developed further as we picked out some main themes. One of them was the strong interaction aspect of our project between people, so we got this idea of putting heads into part of our physical visualisation. The heads will house the servos in their hollow necks and the strings will come out from the mouth of the heads.

Jenna, Emile, and I went to carve them out of polystyrene while Tom stayed back to work on the on-screen visualisation on After Effects and the radios. It was the funnest day of the entire project and I think it boosted our morale. It definitely made me feel more positive and happy about the project.


We'll be making Tom's head on Tuesday. The next stage after that would be to put resin on all the heads and then after the resin has dried and set, acetone would be poured in to melt the polystyrene to make the heads hollow.

I'll admit that after the critique I was feeling really negative and depressed about the project, but after doing a bit of art on these heads I felt invigorated and happy. I think it boosted our group morale too because it was one thing that worked.

It was really really fun for me. I'm hoping that there would be a future project that would be more focused on art rather than programming, but I doubt that would ever happen.

In the City: Strings and beads

We developed our visualisation a bit more and thought about a physical visualisation that we could do.



At the moment we're going to have the four servos on four points of the box, which Emile spray-painted. He spray-painted the buttons as well.

The strings would be attached to the servos, which connect them with other servos, with beads on them to add some weight on it, to show interaction between points of the intersection. So when the servos move the strings would wave around.

In the City: Kinetic sculptures

My favourite is the BMW one. It's so smooth and graceful. Simple too if you ignore the system of motors. All of it is a metal ball on the end of a nylon string. Its grace shows the beauty of BMW cars and their swift, polished movement. For my project I think it would be worthwhile to apply that repeated simplicity by repeating a particular object for the visualisation's body. It would also be fantastic to add movement to the visualisation because it makes it more interesting and real. I think I've mentioned this before, but I like the idea of taking one simple component and then repeating it to create something bigger and more complex.

More inspiration on what to do for output as we're still struggling on that. Looked at various kinetic sculptures to see if we can get a physical output directly from the audio and using the servos to move objects.

In the City: 3D Printed Buttons

A video, made by Emile, of our buttons being printed out

We went ahead with James' suggestion to get small buttons and make a button top for it to make it look like a giant button. I drew them up in CAD then we went up to the engineering block to 3D print them out at Olaf Diegel's place. 3D printing them was amazing! I loved watching the layers of plastic being layered on and gradually a 3D shape builds up. Before the lecture with Olaf Diegel I had no clue that this sort of thing existed so it was interesting for me and let my imagination run wild with various possibilities like printing out a full set of organs to solve organ donor shortage or even printing out new people entirely.

These are our Arduino parts for the project. At the moment we're thinking that we can use the servos to control these arms to move around in a body of water. Within the water there would be marbling paint so that the movements of the water current can be seen. The arms would move accordingly to the audio collected such as volume and frequency.

I also helped out with some soldering for some wires in parts of our circuitry. But there was a miscommunication so I made a mistake of soldering two wires to each plug when there's supposed to be two plugs for each pair of wires. Luckily the problem was easily fixed.