programming | studio any

John Paul George & Me

Mon, 06 Apr 2015 18:11:20 +0300

John Paul George & Me is a collection of interactive wearable musical instruments for kids. Each T-shirt represents a specific instrument and all together form a rock ensemble. Through the seemingly magical clothes that produce sound by touch, the project brings to children an interactive musical game, encouraging and stimulating their musical interest as well as collaboration with each other to perform music. The project was developed by textile designer Selina Reiterer and computational designer Constantinos Miltiadis for exploring playful applications of smart materials and interactive wearable technology.

The project includes three T-shirts, a microcontroller with a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) module, and a mobile app.
The three individual T-shirts were inspired by and designed after the standard rock trio representing a guitar, a bass, and a drum set. Each shirt has a distinct pattern, based on the attributes of the instrument it represents, which each shape forming a uniform conductive region sensitive to touch. The patterns were silk-screen printed on plain T-shirts with electrically conductive paint, a flexible, washable and non-toxic chemical mixture.
In the back of each garment is a removable pocket with an Arduino microcontroller that receives touch signals from each shape through conductive thread.
The touch signals are then sent wirelessly via BLE to a mobile application which triggers different audio samples corresponding to each garment-instrument. Multiple T-shirts can be connected to a single mobile device, or each band member can use their own. The device can be connected with headphones and external speakers to amplify the sound output.

Additional information

“John Paul George & Me” was exhibited at the 2015 Maker Faire in Rome.
The project received the 2^nd prize in the YouReshape wearable technology competition (archived) in August 2015.
It was featured at the Materiability Research Network at John Paul George & Me (Materiability Research Network), and the Bare Conductive Blog at Bluetooth Connected Musical T-shirts (archived).

Credits

Video credits

Kids: Beda & Vasco
Filming: Anna Maragoudaki & Achilleas Xydis
Editing: Anna Maragoudaki
Music: Constantinos Miltiadis

Project credits

Selina Reiterer (textile design & material research)
Constantinos Miltiadis (electronics & app development).

Developed in 2015 at the Chair for Digital Architectonics (née Chair for CAAD), ETH Zurich.

Vector Raster Bleep

Fri, 07 Mar 2014 17:15:18 +0300

VectorRasterBleep is an interactive installation developed as a playful interpretation of a baroque garden to the digital-virtual domain. The garden is conceived as the Queen’s antidote to boredom, a playground open to stimuli for subverting the normality of everyday life, and a gateway to the fantastic and phantasmic. Wearing an electronic suit, the Queen escapes to the garden to explore its wonders. Its physical dimension is a space –any generic space– tracked by infrared sensors and populated by machinery. Its virtual counterpart, however, is a live phantom that transforms continuously to reflect the Queen’s desires while she strolls the generic space.

Technical information:

Wearable suit with 20 LEDs, a speaker, and an Arduino microcontroller with an XBEE wireless module
Kinect motion tracking sensor
Custom software for motion tracking and interactive graphics generation developed in Java
Projector

Developed in 2014 for a course taught by Mihye An at the Chair for CAAD, ETH Zurich.

The geology of the Geology of Morals

Sun, 06 Oct 2013 18:13:41 +0300

The project is an abstract constructive take on the concept of double articulation introduced in the chapter “The Geology of Morals” from the book “A Thousand Plateaus” by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (2013 [1984]), which describes the interplay between form and substance of expression on one hand, and form and substance of content on the other. Here, the notion of double articulation is applied to the book chapter itself by exploring computationally the correlations between its linguistic expression and the stratification of its textual substance. As a video essay on the ‘quantification of writing’, the text of the chapter was analyzed computationally to infer abstract relations and densities between text atoms, and was then rendered into indexes, dimensions, colors, and shapes.

All numbers, colors, and shapes were generated through computational processing of the text in the chapter “Geology of Morals” (Deleuze and Guattari 2013 [1984]). The sound was produced with the modular synthesizer software Aalto by Madrona Labs.

The project was developed in 2013 for a philosophy course taught by Vera Bühlmann at the Chair for CAAD ETH Zurich.