A fishy time hosting workshops in NYC

November 17, 2025

Last week was the first time I returned to NYC since leaving last fall. Returning felt weird. In some ways, it felt like no time had passed; I was quick to fall back into old patterns. Like catching the B38 in BedStuy to get to school or grabbing lunch from my favorite spots. But also much has changed and everyone is moving on to other things. As it should be, I guess!

With some luck, people still remember me there and were so gracious to give me space and opportunity to … chat about what I love: my current fixations in technology and craft. Feeling very lucky to go to a city and be able to share a bit of myself with people I love <3

Open Kitchen by Material Kitchen

with Yeseul Song @ Interactive Telecommunications Program, November 7, 2025

First stop is no surprise, my alma mater ITP. Over the summer, Yeseul and I have been able to keep our project Material Kitchen alive due to a grant from Tisch Creative Research. Material Kitchen is a resource for sharing sustainable materials for fabrication and art making strongly rooted in community engagement. What this really looks like is me cooking agar agar based bioplastics, trying to do something with them, and then sharing the results via a presentation or workshop.

This workshop at ITP consisted of us talking about our most recent research developing a conductive biomaterial, showing off examples of our past work, and then a live cooking demo of an activated charcoal biofoam. Below are some great moments captured by the fabulous Lily Crandall.

If you are at all interested in the work we talked about, check out the Material Kitchen website or the presentation slides.

Dragtronics: Bubblemania

with Kay Wasil @ NYC Resistor, November 8, 2025

Next stop was my favorite ever hackerspace, NYC Resistor. Long-time collaborator Kay and I had been itching for the second installment of Dragtronics (electronics drag costuming and performance) for some time! Kay had found many great uses for what they had learned in Andy’s bubble gun workshop at OHS some years ago, so we thought we would go for it.

In this workshop, we invited participants from all levels of electronics skills, open to performers and enthusiasts, to get their bubble on. First we showed how to open up the bubble toys. Then introduced the circuit we were building with button control and tested it with alligator clips. We included a little intro on soldering and then let participants pick from a variety of “props” we had sourced to embed the electronics within. This was a ton of fun!

Our slides are here if you are curious to make your own bubble-powered prop!

Keychain Makin’

@ Glub Glub Labs, November 9, 2025

This was a much more relaxed and crafty meetup: a rainy Brooklyn crafternoon between friends, if you will. Basically, Glub mongers Tres and Josh asked me to prepare a keychain workshop for our fishy friends. I came with some samples, some fish-themed mood boards, and a whole bunch of keychain materials and we all got to work. Mostly, people were enamored by the magic of Shrinky Dinks™️. Below are some highlights of my friends de-stressing from their corporate lives and stretching their creative muscles.

Thank you so much for having me NYC. It really is true what they say: I <3 NY!

Screen Time and Makin of Slop Machine

August 07, 2025

Back in March I was accepted into Club Rambutan’s digital residency. As a resident, I became a part of a cohort of other amazing artists and needed to make an art piece to be featured in their next publication. For this volume, the theme was feeeeaaarrrr! It honestly took the whole four months of the residency to get clear on what I wanted to make, but that’s another story. Here I just want to tell you how I made my latest piece, “Slop Machine”.

More about screens than you ever wanted to know

All I knew going into this project was that I wanted to use a screen (make a video sculpture) and enclose it using bioplastics. What I didn’t know at this point was that playing a video file on a screen driven by a microcontroller is no small feat! These are some things I tried out so you don’t have to.

Here I am running the OLED using a Teensy 4.1

Transparent OLED

I started out this project wanting to use a novel looking screen. I had come across some see through OLED screen projects, so I thought that would work well for this as bioplastic is also see through.

OLED screens are commonly used for microcontroller projects. OLED stands for organic light-emitting diode. The first hit for transparent OLED screen from Amazon was from a company called Waveshare that also included the driver board, so that’s what I started with.

It wasn’t very hard to get it up and running. Waveshare had pretty good documentation for getting started with Arduino, connecting the driver to the SPI bus, and some code examples. The screen was kinda cute, but ended up being too dumb and small. It wasn’t really the right size or form factor for the personal device I was trying to build. Also it seemed like it would be a headache to build up the Arduino library to draw images or video onto the screen. I didn’t have that time!

CONS:

Too small!
Library support - not enough to draw image or play video
Pixels are one color

PROS:

See through —> novel
Quick to get working
Cute

Small E-Paper & ThinkInk

At this point I had done some research and was really finding it hard to find a good sized screen (something on the order of like 3” or 4”). I scrolled through the Adafruit site until I came across the E-paper displays (EPDs). They have an interesting look to them, like they’re from the future but they’re not? Like they were thought up by someone living in the past imagining what future screens might look like.

EPDs are commonly used in E-Readers because they reflect ambient light and can be looked at outdoors without the image fading. They use a lot less power than traditional displays because they don’t need additional energy to emit their own light. Also the way the screen refreshes the image has an interesting, gradual fade effect. I found watching this video very informative.

So, I found this Feather board from Adafruit for running EPDs and was convinced that I could replicate the setup with a large and colorful E-paper display. It also seemed promising that the microcontroller was an RP2040, those are what people use to play videos, right?! Adafruit, as we know, has amazing documentation, so getting a small EPD running was no problemo.

CONS:

Screen small
Black and white
Software support to draw images?
Refresh rate

PROS:

Refresh effect is cool
No glare
Feel

Big E-Paper

Okay, this is where things start going downhill. I wanted to get a big EPD with color working just like what’s on this Adafruit product page. Upon some research I decided that must be a 7 color ACeP (advanced color E-paper technology) display and Adafruit’s EPD Arduino library already had an example for 7 color ACeP’s. The first red flag should’ve gone up when I couldn’t find one of these displays to buy on Adafruit’s site. I ended up getting the last large 7 color display from a seller on Amazon. This should’ve been red flag #2.

Once I got my color screen, it didn’t work with the Arduino library. I asked on the Adafruit forum and the response was that the library doesn’t actually support these 7 color displays anymore and that I should look to the display manufacturer’s documentation. This was also a Waveshare display and found that this product had been discontinued!! So it became apparent that this wouldn’t work either…

What I hadn’t understood up until this point was how slllllllloooooooooowwwwww the refresh rate actually was, especially for so many colors. The physics is really complex and some reviews said it could take minutes to clear the screen. This was not going to work for a video sculpture.

CONS:

PROS:

????

Finally, TFT Screen

Okay, once again scouring the Adafruit site, I found this: Qualia ESP32-S3 for TTL RGB-666 Displays. This was destined to work because I also found this great tutorial for setting up a video player and the supported screens were of a good size. I bought myself the Qualia board and this square screen and got to building.

TFT stands for thin film transistor technology where each pixel is controlled by a transistor. I found it really easy to get started with these and got examples working quickly. The screen was really good quality and the system was responsive.

I then shifted to the video player tutorial. I added the micro SD card reader into my circuit and followed the instructions about converting video files. For this tutorial, they leverage a third-party library to deal with JPEGs on the ESP32. I had to work with my videos in the MJPEG format (not MPEG!). I don’t have a ton of experience working with video but I had never heard of this type of video file before. It stands for “Motion JPEG” and is essentially just a sequence of JPEG images.

I ran into a bit of an issue trying to get my MJPEG videos to play at first. The code looks through the items on the SD card and tries to find files that have “.mjpeg” in the file name and then play those. Through some handy debug statements (and shout out to the Adafruit forums) I learned that the Arduino code was trying to play a dot file. Dot files are configuration files that my MacBook automatically creates and each time I added a new video file to my SD card, Spotlight created an invisible dot file too. I was able to get rid of these dot files and video playing with a combination of reformatting the SD and running this command: “sudo mdutil -i off /Volumes/[sdcard name]”

Slowness is not from the gif but the size of the video playing on the screen

PROS:

Looks good, good size
Relatively quick refresh rate, videos still a lil bit laggy
Small form-factor, simple design

CONS:

With the added SD card reader, no left over pins for anything else
Can’t make it wireless (battery operated)

Material

Now that I had a reliable video player I could focus on the form. I made a quick prototype in felt, sewing an EPD and a vibe motor onto a simple, speculative interface. I also tried out a button enclosure on some bioplastic scrap I had laying around.

I cooked two large sheets of my standard recipe agar agar bioplastic. The recipe is as follows:

Spatula
Pot
Baking tray
Kitchen scale
Spoons

1200mL of distilled water
40g of agar agar powder
81g of vegetable glycerin
2 capfuls of white vinegar
Isopropyl alcohol

Make sure that all equipment is clean and dried. Disinfect the baking tray using a paper towel and some isopropyl alcohol.
Pour water, vegetable glycerin, and vinegar into the pot. Use the spatula to stir gently and combine all ingredients.
Measure out the agar agar powder into some container.
Place pot on hotplate. Turn on medium heat.
Take agar agar container in one hand, spatula in the other. Slowly sift the agar agar powder into the hot water and continue stirring, avoiding clumps. This process may take several minutes.
Continue cooking the mixture for approximately 30 minutes over medium heat. Avoid boiling and stir gently to avoid introducing air bubbles into the mixture.
When finished with cooking, pour the mixture into the baking tray. Let it sit to cool + dry for at LEAST five days.

The material that I made ended up being beautiful but just barely working for this project. The sheets ended up much thinner and more fragile than material I’ve made in the past. Also, the more I worked with it, the stickier I feel it became. It was wet! I think this is because I’m still learning to make these bioplastics in a desert climate. The kitchen I was working in was definitely much warmer than spaces I’ve worked in in the past. Also, I’m still suspicious that different brands of agar cook and behave differently.

I feel like at this point in my material experience I should just be able to know exactly what I need to tweak to make a material thicker, or stronger, or less sticky, etc. I’ll be working on that!

Making the video … in After Effects?!

Okay, so the video content was the most daunting part of this project and I put that off all the way to the end. I went back and forth about making separate clips that the microcontroller code would play or create one great, big, beautiful composition. Once I landed on one video composition and started to think about transitions between clips, I couldn’t ignore this sinking feeling that I should use … dun dun dun Adobe After Effects (AE). I had been introduced to the software during my time at ITP but I remember just being confused and the software being hard to learn. But I went for it anyway and treated it like I do when I work with any Adobe software: just googling hyper-specific things that I need the software to do.

First, I started by figuring out exactly what I wanted my video to be (already a huge challenge!). I knew I wanted to include some really simple hand-drawn animations, so I made a few of those on my iPad in Procreate. I also had these film photos of my friends that I had manipulated in PhotoShop (I <3 the absurdity of content aware fill!) that I wanted to fade in and out between. And the last thing I wanted to include were some surreal AI cat videos that would scroll on through.

The process of making this video was super specific to what I wanted to make, but here are some tips and tricks I came across:

Make sure all the video clips/content have the same fps before composing
Used the “Fade out over layer below” effect in AE
I followed this tutorial to get the drawn animation to play on top of the video feed (could not get this to work with text that was black!)
Followed this tutorial to make the scroll up animation
If the video playback on the screen is laggy, re-convert to MJPEG with lower fps and video quality

Here is the final video that I animated and edited together.

Sewing it all together

This was a kind of quick, intuition thing. I just printed out a picture of my circuitry to scale and sketched out curly, spikey shapes to use as a guide for cutting the bioplastic with an X-acto knife.

Then I sewed the screen into place, between two pieces of bioplastic. I also cut some ornamental pieces and sewed those onto the front/back sheets. Lastly, I assembled the circuitry again and sewed the front piece on to the back using a running stitch with the electronics in between. Like I mentioned before, the material I made wasn’t the most strong and I found it becoming more moist and fragile the more I worked with it, so sometimes it needed a break in the fridge.

Final Product

You will have to grab a copy of Club Rambutan volume iv in the fall!

Resources

Club Rambutan

Cohort 4 Creatives

Transparent OLED from Waveshare

Transparent OLED docs

E-paper video

Adafruit RP2040 ThinkInk Feather

Small E-paper display

Adafruit Qualia ESP32-S2 for RGB-666 Displays

Square RGB-666 TTL TFT Display - 4” 720x720

Adafruit video player tutorial

Adafruit MicroSD card Reader

Agar agar powder

Vegetable glycerin

AE scroll video tutorial

AE animation on top of video tutorial

My residency at Signal Culture

February 05, 2025

Signal Culture

While loitering around the ITP floor last summer, I was dumping all my future employment trauma's on my professor Ali. He thought for a moment and and consoled me with a “Would you want to do a residency in Colorado?”. Little did he know that I <3 Colorado. Big time! Nearly six months later I was still unemployed (still am now!) but I just had the best week at Signal Culture.

Signal Culture is an organization that “encourages creation of new work, building of community, and connection to history in the field of experimental media art by providing artists, researchers, and innovators with residencies, resources, and exhibition opportunities”. They offer three different residencies for artists, toolmakers, and researchers. The co-founders, Debora and Jason Bernagozzi, open up their home to multiple residents at once and welcome them to the studios at Artworks. With little idea what I was in for, I flew to Denver to do my toolmaker residency and my time coincided with the extremely talented video artist and lovely Sarah Turner.

I had no idea that both Debora and Jason are experts in experimental media and have traveled the world performing. Staying with them was a dream, so cozy and comfy. Morning coffee consisted of stories of trips to Japan, career mentorship, and sharing of niche synth modules. Their studios are home to incredibly unique synthesizer and video equipment, many of which are the only ones in existence. Technical questions that go unanswered can be solved by a quick call to the inventor of the system, many of which are close friends of theirs. Huge flex!

Some Signal Culture Machines

Since I have little experience in new media art, and none in video, I wanted to write up what I learned about the equipment I saw. Toolmaker residents don’t usually have access to the machines in the artists studio but Sarah was super kind to let me sit in on the training. Like I mentioned before, many of these machines are one of a kind (OOAK), developed by the close friends of Signal Culture, so it was really special to see how they work.

NOTE: I am no new media or video art expert. If what I explain is not right or doesn’t make sense, that is probably why.

All kinds of cameras for live video feed

Video wave output on the waveform monitor (is this just an o-scope?!)

Terms / Acronyms I came across

CRT (cathode ray tube) - a vacuum tube containing one or more electron guns, which emit electron beams that are manipulated to display images on a phosphorescent screen.

TBC (time base correction) - a technique to reduce errors caused by mechanical instability present in analog recordings on mechanical media

CV (control voltage) - a voltage signal (positive, 0, negative) that affects the behavior of another signal; “they do the exact same thing that knobs do”

Key frame - a shot that defines the starting and ending points of a smooth transition

Keying - a modulation signal takes one of a specific (predetermined) number of values at all times; transmit a digital signal over an analog channel

Jones Colorizer

The Jones Colorizer was developed by the one and only synth expert Dave Jones. This module is one of a kind (OOAK) and was gifted to Signal Culture. The knobs are used to key in different R, G, B values. You can dial in other parameters such as clip and softness which can lead to interesting color fringing effects.

NOTE: the pictures and videos of the CRT TV’s have black bars running through them due to the frame rate of my phone camera not matching with the frame rate of the TV.

You can generate oscillator signals to create control voltages that are used to modulate the video feed and you can also patch different video feeds into each other.

Jones MVIP

Screen grab from MVIP YouTube manual demonstrating bit swapping

Dave Jones’ MVIP (Mini Video Image Processor) is a Eurorack module for … processing video. You can dial in all the normal attributes like brightness and hue. It also does specialty effects like bit swapping. Through bit swapping, the video feed is digitized and the user can choose between a number of pre-programmed rearrangements of the bits that are swapped and/or inverted. The hue and brightness controls are still active which can result in these crazy, oil-spill colored images! Soooo cool!

The fifth knob controls the video processing mode. You choose how many color bits the output signal has. It also controls video effects like the degree of pixelization and colorizing with luminance.

Dave Jones MVIP on the left, Dave Jones O’Tool on the right

MIX50 Mixer

I’m preeeetty sure it’s that thing with all the patch cables sticking out of it…

The MIX50 mixer can mix up to 4 channels of video on two different busses; so many options! It has different “wipe” patterns to transition between feeds and other digital effects.

Amiga Frame Buffer

This is a real historical relic and piece of technological history. The software even runs off of floppy disks!

A frame buffer meant to display single images at a time and dump the image. It’s not usually used for moving graphics. The software is used to pick pixels of a specific value and replace them with pixels from a different frame. That’s how we achieved this repetitive, image-within-image, gif-like effect.

Runs off of floppy disks! 🤯 Look at that mouse

Hearn AB Videolab

So the Hearn synthesizer supports up to three video inputs. It has buffer control pots which function as oscillators. You can use these to overlay different video feeds and mix them. There is also a quantizing colorizer effect which maps B/W values to user defined colors. The pattern generator can be used to choose between different waveforms and map to different video feeds. Signal Culture is home to all kinds of unique video equipment, a true highlight is a compact dental cam; can you spot an eyeball closeup amongst the videos?!

Pattern generated with three different video feeds

Bernagozzi Wobbulator

This piece of equipment is definitely OOAK. The wobbulator was initially developed by Nam June Paik and Shuya Abe and made famous for being the tool with the funniest name in the world (this is a really beautiful informative video). Basically three sets of electromagnets are placed behind the screen of a CRT TV. Oscillators fed into the different electromagnets create crazy effects, collapsing the line of electrons being drawn onto the screen. The wobbulaor @ SC was courageously built by Jason Bernagozzi himself.

I mean… r u kidding me?~

Jones Raster Manipulator

This video synth is also OOAK and developed by, you guessed it, guru Jones again. It’s a device for real-time image processing and animation. Below you can see different oscillator shapes modulating the shape of the video feed. A video signal can be used as a control voltage too🤯

So What Did I Do?

After stalking the artist studio, I had to remember what I was at Signal Culture to do. I had two goals:

Hardware updates to interFACE
Learn something about analog sound synthesis

Crimp Life

I brought with me interFACE (obviously) and a big ‘ol wire crimping kit (everything good I do I copy from my friend Bianca). Many of the connections within my step sequencer synth were either soldered in place or precariously jumper-wired together, so very precarious. And in all my time as an electrical engineer, I’ve never learned how to crimp wires and make my own connectors, can you believe it?! I set out to create JST connectors for all my components (pots, LEDs, buttons, etc) so that I could gracefully unplug the top face from the controller board. A bit of the process is below:

First, strip wires and crimp either a pin or socket metal

Insert crimped wires into connector housing

Solder one end of the cable harness to the component and the other end to the board

As usual, a good YouTube video is the place I start when I’m trying to learn something new. This tutorial was very helpful with getting started with crimping wires (this one was good too if you are okay with the guy being a bit of an asshole).

The process of soldering, heat-shrinking, labeling, and crimping connectors to all the components of my synth really took a long time. So long in fact, that I didn’t finish until May of next year when I had to put my “face” back together for exhibition at Currents New Media Festival.

As far as I got by the end of my 1 week SC residency

Another update to my synth that was desperately needing was replacing the “eye” buttons. Originally, I used these large buttons from Adafruit but their push was really unsatisfying and they looked pretty basic. I got a pair of these metal push buttons from SparkFun HQ with an LED ring in different colors. Much more sophisticated and the push gave a satisfying click! One button was momentary to kick off playing a sample and the other was latching to switch to different clocking modes. These will be my go-tos when I need a heavy duty button moving forward!

Baby’s first VCO

I was truly inspired by my friend Bianca to learn to build some analog synth circuits. She recommended this creator Moritz Klein who makes really well-explained tutorials on how to make many different synth module circuits. I decided to start with replicating his voltage controlled oscillator (VCO) circuit following this video.

I scrounged through all the bins in the toolmaker lab and I ended up finding a MM74C14 Schmitt Trigger IC, TL084 op amp IC for the buffer, and the other passives (resistors and capacitors) I would need. This was also my first time “building a power supply” with both positive and negative voltage by connecting two 9V batteries together.

Even with all the music equipment around me I could not figure out how to actually listen to the saw tooth wave I generated but I was able to look at it with the O-scope. I’m pretty convinced I got it working, even though the Schmitt Trigger became toasty to the touch!

Other things I did during my residency:

Look through a lot of the books in the library
Peruse the guestbooks from residents past
My own body check-ins

Future Plans?!

I obviously HIGHLY recommend the Signal Culture residency! I went in kind of blind and learned much more than I was ever expecting. I made some new friends and got to reconnect with some old ones in my old home state.

Since my stay in Loveland, the Bernagozzi’s and Signal Culture have moved back to upstate New York! I would love an opportunity to return as an artist in residence, but til then I will try to wrap my head around their digital apps for video processing and see if I can make something interesting.

A snowy visit to my old stomping grounds

Resources

SC Residency Resources I found helpful/interesting

Signal Culture

Experimental Television Center

Dave Jones MVIP

Dave Jones O’Tool

Amiga frame buffer

What is a frame buffer?

Hearn EAB Videolab

Wobbulator Video

The Vasulka Effect

Resources for synthing

Wire crimping kit

Connector Crimping Video 1 and 2

SparkFun metal pushbutton with LED ring

Moritz Klein videos

The Workshop Retrospective

December 02, 2024

During my time in grad school I dabbled in teaching. At ITP there were opportunities to work as a teaching assistant for undergraduate classes in Interactive Media Arts (IMA) program. My first semester I helped out with Yeseul Song’s physical computing class: hosting office hours, evaluating assignments, and preparing class/lecture materials. What was most fun for me was getting to know the students and mentoring them through project development. Through assisting other classes and developing extracurricular workshops I wonder if I would want to be a teacher some day.

Here are some highlights from the workshops I facilitated during my time in school. I really enjoy collaborating with my friends on conceptualizing the workshops, writing the curriculum, and assembling materials. It is a rewarding process to be able to synthesize concepts into a lesson or activity and be able to share it with others. I’ve had many great teachers in the past who have cleared up ideas that I thought I would never grasp by explaining them in a more approachable way, so I’ve tried to keep accessibility a top priority in most of what I do. I also cherish hands-on learning for teaching technical ideas.

These workshops were a lot like community service work. Many times, we saw a need in our community and took on the task of creating an opportunity for learning. And boy, did I learn a lot!

Dragtronics

Wearable electronics for drag with Kay Wasil, September 17, 2023

Two summers ago, my friend Kay approached me about helping them design a workshop for beginners wanting to get started with wearable electronics. Kay is a super talented drag performer, costume designer, show producer, and has a bunch of technical chops of their own! They regularly work with other performers to make interactive or technological looks👀. We worked together to create Dragtronics, a free, one-day, hands-on workshop for wearable electronics for drag.

To make participation more fair we put out an open call to Kay’s community prioritizing low-income and communities underrepresented in the NY drag scene. We convinced our department to let us host our workshop at school on the weekend and use some electronics workshop resources. We were also donated 20 Adafruit Circuit Playground Express’s by our friends at Bodies in Play and OCAD’s Social Body Lab which helped us keep this workshop free (thanks Kate Hartman!☺️).

Participants trying out Kay’s bubble crayon

We centered the curriculum the Circuit Playground because it is a great microcontroller to get started with hardware. It comes with many built in sensors, has connection points that are easy to sew to, and can be programmed using visual programming through MakeCode which is great for beginner coders.

We wanted this workshop to be an overarching sample of whats possible in the world of wearables and drag. We hoped to build skills that participants could take home with them to apply to their future costumes. We emphasized the value of open source hardware and hoped they might takeaway the skills to continue learning on their own or even share some of what they learned with their friends.

This was my first workshop and it is my favorite. I think Kay and I just work really well together and there was a lot of community interest so we’ve talked about hosting it again in the future🤞🏽. One update for the future is definitely sending out a pre- and/or post- survey so we can tailor the workshop to what’s most interesting to performers and also get a sense of how much of the physical computing ideas people were able to take home with them.

For more information, you can check out the presentation we made for Dragtronics.

Beep Beep Booper

Building a lil analog piano circuit with Bianca Gan and Gracy Whelihan, July 24, 2024

I helped design this workshop with my friends Bianca and Gracy this summer for high school students participating in the College Career Lab program. This workshop happened over two days at ITP. The idea to build this analog piano circuit was inspired by this tutorial from elonics. We prepped for the workshop by making kits: cutting wires, soldering leads, and laser cutting the custom enclosures, ahead of time so that the workshop was plug and play. We had lots of new things to cover in a few hours!

The workshop curriculum covered basic electronic components. We prepared a step-by-step Lego-esque guide to build the circuit. Day two of the workshop, we talked a bit about the laser cutter and were able to laser cut some student designs. We helped students mount their components in their box enclosures and there was leftover time to customize the piano boxes with markers.

Overall, I think this was a super successful workshop. Though we weren’t expecting students to fully understand how the circuit works, everyone went home with a working piano! Not to be dramatic, but I do think this early on exposure to electronic components and how circuits are made can potentially alter a students future. And I think the students had fun! You can hear it in this video —>

For more details, you can find a copy of our presentation here.

DIY Robots

with Bianca Gan and Gracy Whelihan, July 12, 2024

This was a workshop I helped with for a group of high school students participating in a summer program called GSTEM. We planned to make these two crafty little motorized robot designs with two back-to-back groups of ~15 girls. Before workshop day, we tested the robot designs we found online and prepped as many materials as possible: soldered tiny motors to battery packs, cut popsicle sticks and straws, and bent wires.

On workshop day we transformed the ITP conference room into a robot factory. We put down a bunch of butcher paper, plugged in glue guns, distributed pipe cleaners, scissors, straws, and motors. We presented our slide show and all three of us ran around the room to helping students build.

This workshop proved to be a bit challenging. Overall, I think we were grateful to be working in a group to prep and facilitate this workshop. We didn’t have time to delve into technical concepts but I think it is important for kids, especially girls, to see that robots can take many forms and complex mechanisms can be made from simple, everyday materials. Some students seemed to find this process a bit frustrating. The build required crafty approximations and thinking outside the box. Everyone left with a working mini toothbrush robot but not everyone completed the walking robot build. Some students even left their walking robots behind🥺

Overall, I think this was a fun and crafty workshop, great for kids, but leaving more time for explanation and building is crucial. You can find a copy of our presentation here.

Graveyard of abandoned robots

Stupid Arduino

for Blinkers with Jess Shen, February 24, 2024

This was… ambitious: a 50 minute crash course in Arduino for a “Stupid Hackathon” I helped organize. Jess and I are some of the few electrical engineers in our cohort, but this was still a tough task. There was not much curriculum designed for this workshop. The goal was to get people’s hands on an Arduino and build a DC motor circuit so that they could use it in their hacks. We kind of threw participants into the deep end (by design!) however everyone came away with a turning motor! Yahoo!

For this workshop we prepped some Arduino example code and gathered hardware kits (breadboard, Arduino, motor, motor driver, buttons, USB cables, and wires). During the workshop we went around and debugged circuits. One crucial learning curve for us, workshop facilitators, is to hand out USB cables (power) only after checking circuit wiring. Some participant’s first attempt at building the circuit had shorts in it, which is totally natural, but potentially hazardous.

For a look at our super sparse presentation and example code, check out this Github repository.

Workshops Galore at ITP Camp!

November 18, 2024

So this was my second summer working as a camp counselor for ITP Camp, a summer camp for adults where the campers put together their own workshops and teach each other all kinds of stuff. The core memories I have from the previous summer were that camp was kind of chaotic … and so were the campers (respectfully). Counselors were not only facilitating camp and all the various sessions happening day to day, we were also working as staff, manning the fabrication shop and equipment room (ER) checkout. We were spread thin to say the least.

This summer was totally different. A lot of the post-pandemic kinks seemed to be sorted out and the culture around camp was chilled out. With this new found peace, I wanted to use this chance to actually put together some workshop sessions of my own. Here’s an overview of three workshops I developed and facilitated at ITP Camp this summer

Let’s eat (bio)plastic!

All me baby, June 25, 2024

This was my solo workshop debut! In this workshop I facilitated a hands-on and collaborative group cooking session to make an agar agar dessert. This cooking process and recipe ingredients are much like the bioplastics I had been developing over the last year for Material Kitchen, an online resource for sustainable materials. I set up two cooking stations with all the necessary ingredients and tools. The lecture guided participants through the cooking process and gave a brief overview on bioplastics and the work we’ve (me + Yeseul) been doing for Material Kitchen. Participants had fun getting to know each other and the material through cooking and admired our tactile material library. At the end, we shared our desserts and dreamed about the future of sustainable materials.

You can find a copy of my presentation here.

Into the depths of Depthkit

with Cindy Hu and Elif Ergin, June 18, 2024

I collaborated with my friends Cindy and Elif to create a workshop to share ITP’s specialty Depthkit volumetric capture rig with the people at ITP Camp. This rig consists of video cameras and depth sensors which combine to create 3D video capture assets that can be used in all kinds of 3D environments.

We started with a brief history on photosculpture and volumetric filmmaking. Then detailed the hardware of our custom rig and the Depthkit workflow and the structure of the output files. We gave some tips for filming and lighting the subject. We described the post-production process and migrating the captures into Unity (game engine).

The highlight of the demo was when got hands-on, starting with the Depthkit’s lengthy calibration process. It was so fun getting people into the rig and capturing their poses. We edited and exported all the captures, shared them with all participants, and hosted a follow up help session for working with the files.

For those interested, you can find a copy of our lecture here.

Community Mural

with Elyana Javaheri, June 23, 2024

Toward the end of camp, we literally set up a blank canvas for campers to take time to unwind and follow their creative intuitions.

Elyana and I have had big dreams for our camp project since last summer, but when we found this giant roll of canvas, we couldn’t be stopped. We created a mural station, with a bunch of paints and a few guidelines, and let people paint for the next two days. Many campers are on the “ITP floor” all hours of the day to make the most of their time and resources. Allowing people to come together to co-create, with few constraints, was a relaxing and freeing alternative to sitting in technical sessions all day and the self-made pressure of making a project for the end of camp show. Hopefully the community mural can be added to in future years of ITP Camp!

Me, Saba, and Elyana watching the magic happen

Totally Random Weekend at the Open Hardware Summit 2024

May 28, 2024

Shout out to @fongkikid for this year’s branding. This illustrated PCB badge is so cool!

Totally random Montreal

This is my third time at the Open Hardware Summit and, I’ll just say it, it gets better and better every year! Technically, I’m an electrical engineer and have been living under the grad-school rock for the last two years so I am a bit of a newbie in maker and artist communities. The Summit is a great opportunity to connect with other hardware people from all over the world! I have been so fortunate to have been sent to the summit all three times by my ex-open-hardware-company, SparkFun!

This spring the summit took place in beautiful Montreal at Concordia University and LESPACEMAKER. The Summit was broken into two days: first day for talks and second day for workshops. Here is an overview of my experience.

Talks

[Keynote] Danielle Boyer - From Bytes to Bright Futures: The Robots Changing the World

Danielle Boyer is an indigenous roboticist, educator, and the founder of the STEAM Connection which provides free robotics education for youth. She designs robots for her community with her community in mind to equip indigenous communities with tech skills.

Her SkoBot was designed to revitalize indigenous languages that are going extinct due to colonization and assimilation. Language resources are dwindling and hard to access. The SkoBot sits on the shoulder of the wearer and teaches the youth their traditional languages. The SkoBot speaks four different languages that are vital to preserving indigenous cultures and identities.

Erik Contreras - Opportunities in Obsolescence

Erik is a multi-disciplinary artist and designer, engineer, and self-proclaimed dumpster diver whose work involves repurposing E-Waste. He’s from the Bay Area where there’s so much technological innovation but due to planned obsolescence and negligence, a lot of technology ends up in the dumpster. He created an “Office of Hacked Objects” in which he repurposed discarded, obsolete tech by repairing his finds with a touch of his personal style. For his office, he’s created the Arduino Auto Type(Writer), WebCam(corder), and Amazon Echo Answering Machine. His overarching question is: can we instill our identity and artistic expression onto mass produced objects?

Jorvon Moss - Making Robots Lifelike

Jorvon, aka Odd_Jayy, is an illustrator and self-taught technologist. He builds pet robots that express the illusion of life, essentially making robots as lifelike as possible, and the human brain does the rest. His designs focus on biomimicry and designing robots that reflect nature. His newest companion robot is a giant bug named “Digit” which sits on Jay’s shoulder and goes wherever he does!

Guy Dupont - How (and why) to Design Open Hardware for Your Loved Ones

Guy (pronounced guy) is a software engineer by day but the world’s best gift-giver the rest of the time! He’s made many cool, hyper-personalized hardware gifts for friends and family to solve their unique problems with a bit of technology (only if they want that of course). Here are some tips he shared for making the perfect gift:

Good gifts are ones that are “used”, unique, personal, handmade, and autonomous.
When giving a gift, you owe the recipient as much usability as possible because if it isn’t usable, the gift might not get used!
Make something that requires no maintenance for the recipients. Implement some discreet error reporting for when things go wrong (like an RGB LED).
Lean on paradigms/hardware the user is comfortable with, like buttons, knobs, LEDs, screens, etc.
People are usually more comfortable with using software than hardware so Guy likes to build a web user interface to easily configure hardware when updates need to be made.
Make sure that the gift isn’t fragile (or doesn’t look fragile) so people aren’t scared to use it.
Open-sourcing even very specific, personal hardware projects is still important because that information can be an entry point for people trying to get into whatever hardware, software, sensor, design technique you have some experience with!

Kari Love, David Rios, Shuang Cai, Becky Stern - Disposable Vape Batteries: The Why, The How, and the Vape Synth

This group of presenters includes faculty and researchers from NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (my program!). They noticed the amount of trash created from the use of disposable vapes and they came together to think through a creative and joyous reuse of the discarded technology, so the vape synth was born.

In their presentation, team vape synth described the careful process of opening up and modifying the vape. Inside a vape is a battery, air pressure sensor, heat coil, and charge circuit. Through their reinvention, they had the goal to reuse as many parts of the original vape as possible, which even meant using the vape housing. They brought along their physical prototypes and have plans for another version of this vape with pushbuttons and the ability to transmit MIDI data over Bluetooth to be used in an audio software.

Fiona Bell & Leah Buechley - Developing Sustainable Biomaterials for 3D Printing

Fiona is a post-doc researcher at UNM’s Hand and Machine Lab and presented her research in developing an open source material that is bio-based and biodegradable for digital fabrication. She developed this material which she named Reclaym. It’s a biomaterial clay made from her composted food waste. This was a very physical practice as she used her hands to mold shapes with a material that was ever-changing based on what she cooked that week.

To create a biomaterial that is printable, the material needs to be extrudable (requires cohesion, hardness, inelasticity) and have the right print quality (stability, strength, and accuracy). Her lab sourced an open-source clay 3D printer to print biomaterials and create forms that can’t be achieved by hand. She brought in beautiful samples of 3D printed vessels made out of an eggshell paste. Not only can it be printed reliably into rigid shapes, this material biodegrades completely and reincorporates key nutrients to the soil. Developing biomaterials encourages a shift in thinking towards circular models of making and reminds us of the interconnections between humans and nature.

Gracy Whelihan - Psuedo Random Number Generator

Gracy is another member of the ITP community who presented on her graduate thesis at the Open Hardware Summit. She is fascinated by randomness and the algorithms behind the random functions in p5.js and Arduino. In her research she learned that computers are really bad at generating randomness so those algorithms only generate a pseudo random output (which only looks random). True randomness can only be found in nature, so she aspired to harness it’s unpredictability: Gracy used sensor hardware to gather environmental data to create a closer to true random number generator. Using multiple sensors, measuring different environmental data, in different locations she set up a broker to receive all the raw numbers. On a server, she runs some operations to concatenate the values to various lengths to create a seed number for the LCG algorithm. You can contribute your own sensor data following this Github repo’s instructions to make the output more random.

Workshops

Day 2 of the Summit was all workshops, held at the amazing LESPACEMAKER, a maker space and creative community in Montreal. The space itself was really unique. It looked like it operated out of some abandoned car shop. They set up a really nice outside space in front and staged some interestingly decorated work rooms for the Summit. These workshops were enticing and PACKED full of participants!

Léa Boudreau & Galen Macdonald - Dead Bugs & Other Electronic Critters

Léa and Galen lead a very fun and cute workshop on soldering together electronic critters which become kind of freeform circuit sculptures. We were given all the components to put together the analog circuit, the schematic diagram, and some soldering irons. For more info on this workshop, check out their excellent documentation.

Candide Uyanze - Pocket Portal Power Play: Crafting Wi-Fi Access Points

Candide showed a group of us how to create a wi-fi access point using a Wemos D1 mini board. You could use your wi-fi captive portal to share an article/essay/poem, welcome guests to your party, plug your mixtape, promote your event, etc. If you would like to create your own wi-fi access point, you can find a lot more information on this Github repo.

My wi-fi access point with custom SSID name!

Kate Hartman & Olivia Prior - Conductivity on the go: Make your own e-textile pocket conductivity tester!

I didn’t actually get to attend this workshop, but this is a great pic I got of another one of my professors/colleagues from ITP, Kate, co-leading her session on making a conductivity tester for e-textiles. Using a coin-cell battery, alligator clips, and an LED you can easily test if your material is conductive!

Check out more of their work at Ontario College of Art and Design University’s research lab, Social Body Lab.

Darcy Neal - Sensing the World Around You with EMF

Darcy designed these GORGEOUS printed circuit boards and let us populate these badges during her workshop. The EMF Explorer badge lets you listen to the invisible sounds of electromagnetic frequencies over a pair of headphones. As you move with the badge around the electronics around you, the audio frequency modulates based on the EMF that is being radiated. For more info on this project, check out Darcy’s website.

Some other totally random stuff from the weekend

Exciting to see SF products I designed on the DigiKey table!

Day 1 after party at North Star Machines À Piastres arcade bar

Furry wall and workshop schedule at LESPACEMAKER

Nate tells us about SparkFun’s high-precision GPS

Phone booth?! They got rid of these in NYC, totally random!

This was a whirlwind of a weekend and so much fun! Thanks so much to my SparkFun family for making it possible for me to get to Montreal. Thanks to OSHWA for organizing such a great panel of speakers and workshops. I met so many creative and passionate individuals, learned about great applications of open hardware which inspired me to get back to my own projects. I had to scurry back to NYC right after the Summit to return to my graduate thesis project. Here’s a very tired Priyanka, perpetually dreaming of open hardware, developing a synth prototype hours later. Keep on makin stuff and don’t forget to get your projects open source certified!

Watch the Talks For Yourself!

Danielle - From Bytes to Bright Futures

Erik - Opportunities in Obsolescence

Jorvon - Making Robots Lifelike

Guy - How to Design Open Hardware for Your Loved Ones

Kari, Rios, Shuang, Becky - Disposable Vapes

Fiona & Leah - Biomaterials for 3D Printing

Gracy - Pseudo Random Number Generator

OSHWA YouTube Channel

[ITP: Designing Your Voice] Inter-FACE?!

May 06, 2024 in itp: synthvoice

Idea

For my synth final I wanted to make something that could be a part of my thesis, my Body of Work. My thesis is a series of sculptures that depict my body parts. I developed this idea of creating an “interFACE” synth. I wanted to create a sequencer that would play back body sounds and kind of looked like my face.

Sketch

Here are some crazy sketches I did over the course of the last couple of weeks to brain storm what my synth might look like and what it could do.

Recording Body Samples

The first step was recording samples. My buddy Josh lent me his lil mic and I recorded some weird “body sounds” using my phone. This was kind of quick, and funny, and raw trying to figure out what parts of me made the most interesting sounds.

I then trimmed up the samples and converted the .mp4 files to .wav on my computer. I did this using the Apple Music app (RIP iTunes). Be sure to set the import settings to WAV encoder and then click “File” —> “Convert” —> “Create WAV Version”. The .wav version of the file shows up in the Library which can then be moved to whatever folder you want.

Then I used the wav2sketch package to convert all my .wav samples into C++ files which can be stored directly on the Teensy’s memory! Playing samples back from the Teensy’s on-board memory is lower latency than playing back from the SD card reader. It is really crucial that the .wav files are at 44100 Hz and 16 or 8-bits for conversion. More instructions can be found in Jesse’s slides.

Later on I realized that these samples weren’t at the same volume. I tried messing around with gain values in my code to amplify selected samples but I didn’t get the effect I was looking for. I downloaded Audacity which is a free and open-source audio tool and used the “loudness normalization” effect to get the samples all the same volume.

Breadboard Prototype

So my first goal is making an eight step sequencer where at each step the player can choose what body sample is being played. I started by making a four step sequencer using with Jesse’s code as a starting point (and: Teensy 4.1, Audio Shield, a variety of potentiometers, buttons, and LEDs from the shop). Once that was working, I wrote a sketch to map all the body samples to the resistance of the potentiometer. I applied that to my four step sequencer code, then expanded to eight steps, and then added step indicator LEDs. Lastly, I modified my code to add two more potentiometers for volume and speed control. You can find find my test sketches and final code on my Github repo.

I also hoped to be able to plug my face into my brain. After talking with Jesse, I learned I could blink a pin on the Arduino controlling the brain and use that as a control voltage (CV) signal to progress the sequencer. I added this functionality to my brain and synth code. Below is some video and photo proof!

Me building my synth right after returning from OHS24

Important system diagrams

Casting my life away

So I have this dream of making custom knobs for the potentiometers from what are called “life casts” from my own body. This is pretty tricky because I have no prior experience with casting. Originally I had planned on making some casts of my face but casting all those orifices can prove to be problematic. So I decided to try out casting my finger tips first.

After many discussions with my favorite shop manager Phil, we came up with a plan to create an alginate cast first, then plaster positives, then making a silicone negative, and finally on to a resin positive knob. Below are my accounts of the first two stages of casting. This is the alginate I ordered and I mixed 1 cup of water with 3/4 cup of alginate.

1. Alginate mixture starts out pink and turns grey after stirring. It’s ready for molding.

This is the plaster I ordered. I mixed 1/3 cup of water with 1/2 a cup of plaster.

The next steps to make resin knobs would be to use the plaster positives to create a reusable silicone negative to cast the resin knobs, but that’s a project for future Priyanka.

Enclosure Building

Now that I had basically the electrical “skeleton” of my synth built, I could focus on creating the enclosure. I did all of this after presenting our final for the class and my graduate thesis because I desperately wanted to show this project at the ITP Spring Show… idk why I am like this. Between thesis presentations, I got lots of advice from Ian in the shop (man, do I love that guy) and we came up with this plan to make my completed synth a reality. At some point I even got kicked out of the shop because we needed to break down the floor to get ready for the show (ah, the good old days) so I completed soldering my synth together in my Bed-Stuy bedroom.

Parts

This is my shopping list from Adafruit. Along with these parts I used a Teensy 4.1 and PJRC Audio Shield. I also used a full-size proto board and a whole bunch of female jumper wires which I picked up from my local Microcenter. I REALLY recommend these potentiometers I got, they click to an off position which is just so satisfying. However, these buttons I do not recommend, their push leaves much to be desired…

Below is the step-by-step process I took to create my enclosure using the Epilog laser cutter. If you are following along, these files were created in Adobe Illustrator and all my design files live in my Github repo.

1. Grab your calipers! Test cut on cardboard to make sure holes fit the components.

2. Drew a cartoon of myself and added in all the holes for the components of my synth.

3. Cardboard test cut of top face plate.

4. Double-checking component holes in acrylic scrap material. Want to make sure all the panel mounting works as expected.

5. Testing out a t-slot joint that Ian put me on to.

6. Another t-slot joint test, this time with the actual slot

7. Cardboard test for the whole box (double-checking t-slots).

10. Face cut! Except the engraving gave up towards the bottom of the face?

11. Taking this to my bedroom! This was all I could find for helping hands in my room.

There are some issues with the final build:

Ideally, this would be a system where you could pop the top off, unplug, replace components easily.
Some of the panel mount components were secured from the top of the panel, others from the bottom.
Some of the connections needed to be soldered directly to the protoboard, so the top can’t be completely removed without ripping some of the circuitry out.
I used a lot of female jumpers as a plug/unplug interface. This is not a great permanent solution as these connections are not always the most secure.
RGB LED? What is it doing? Can you use too many analog pins?

Final Product

Here are some highlights from the ITP Spring Show.

And this summer, I was my own doc lab and took my own video documentation!

Next Steps

Need to recut face plate so that it can close properly. Parts near the box edges are in the way
New button eyes? I do not like how they feel
Need to figure out what is going on with RBG LED —> should this become an on/off switch?
Fix wiring (and label!) so that the top faceplate is removable
Screw circuit board into enclosure somehow
Other things that can be done with step sequencer modules?!?!?
Experiment with future modules: lo boob oscillator and ADSR envelope generator modules
Resin knobs….

Resources

⭐️⭐️interFACE Github repo⭐️⭐️

Jesse’s lecture with wav2sketch

Audacity Loudness Normalization tutorial

PJRC Audio Tool

Materials

Teensy 4.1

PJRC Audio Shield

Alginate Life Casting

Plaster of Paris

[ITP: New Portraits] Final Project Update

April 23, 2024 in itp: newportraits

Group members: Kay Wasil, Elif Ergin, and Cindy Hu

Idea

For our final project in Alan’s New Portraits class we need to make some volumetric captures using the Depthkit system, post-process, and make either a Unity project or some WEBGL assets for a live stream. This includes getting a subject, calibrating the systems, conducting interviews, lighting, and recording sound. Kay was super generous in opening up their community to us and they did a lot of hard work putting out an open call for drag performers to come into 370 and be our beautiful subjects!

Process

We booked out the Media Commons last Friday night to capture two performances. NYC-based performers Charlotte Harlotte and Sweaty Eddie generously shared their time and talents with us. We only had a 3 hour block of time so we had to move kind of quickly to make sure we could film everything we needed.

Calibration

First step is always calibrating the Depthkit system. We made super quick work of this the first time… but then we realized that the angles of the cameras were off because we couldn’t see feet through some of the camera views. Do the heavy cables pull the cameras down?

One question I do have is that after fixing the camera+sensor angles and then redoing the calibration in the original project, it seemed like the accuracy/precision went down. Does it break a project when adding new calibration points to an existing project? We decided to make a new project and start calibration over again, which seemed to work! Not sure if anyone recorded the final stats of our calibration but we got there eventually.

Lighting

After getting calibrated and checking all the camera views we moved onto lighting. There were still quite a few blue light flares which we worked on removing. This is also super weird because we fixed all the lighting in last class, right? Maybe the lights weren’t locked in place and gravity pulled them down too?

We set up a pink and orange light for Charlotte which looked SO good!

Sound

We wanted to record some interview questions so we set up a Zoom recorder. Here’s Elif while she’s really serious about the boom.

Filming

❤️❤️❤️

This experience was honestly so fun and super special! We were able to back up our files onto a hard drive and now I need to start reading up on the Unity setup.

References

Depthkit into Unity documentation

Depthkit Downloads

[ITP: Thesis II] Ctrl + Art + Delight

April 17, 2024 in itp: thesis2, itp: thesis

Ok, these are the vibessss

I always wanted a cartoon sidekick like Lizzie McGuire

Also, my dear friend Lita shared another artistic reference that I think is super relevant to this project: Milford Graves, A Mind-Body Deal… will look into this in more depth in the future. When there’s more time…

Finishing up Womb

No words, just pictures.

Oh okay, here are some words! One of the things I was desperately trying to accomplish with my washing machine was to use only one power supply. The motor runs on 24V and the LEDs need 5V and the max input voltage to the Arduino VIN pin is 21V. I monkeyed with the LM317 voltage regulator to step down the 24V to something the Arduino could handle. Bianca shared this super handy website to calculate the resistors needed to step down using the LM317. The voltage regulator got hot, but I was getting the expected voltage out and was able to power my Arduino Nano 33 IoT. However, the LEDs were not lighting up and I only measured ~2.5V out of the 5V pin. Turns out the Arduino can’t generate 5V if it is being powered externally.🤦🏽‍♀️

So, the current setup has two power supplies coming out of the washing machine but a future project would be to use another voltage regulator to create a 5V rail and only use the 24V power supply to run the whole system.

Installation Design

Something I was really unsure about was how all the artifacts would come together into one art piece or installation. I really didn’t want to just put all my stuff on a table for people to look at… it is supposed to resemble a body afterall. With my time and budget being what it was, I decided to go with something that was suggested to me in the alumni feedback sessions: put all the sculptures on uniform pedestals or columns.

Originally I had hoped I would be able to create cardboard stands for all my sculptures that would be in the shape of legs. However, based on some office hours I had with Ian in the shop it became apparent that the cardboard might not be able to hold up the heavier sculptures. I opted to use our department’s speed rail and I sifted through the random length pipes to make three pedestals that were at Priyanka brain, stomach, and womb height.

Handout

Because there are multiple parts to my thesis and the work I’m presenting is really personal to me, I decided to create a little handout to give viewers some context for my work. I wanted to invite the viewer to check in with themselves and I offered them a guided body-scan meditation based on what I learned in making my “embodiments”.

I placed these handouts with a box of crayons on a table next to my sculptures and I got surprisingly many responses! I collected all the responses in this google spread sheet and I’ve scanned some special ones. Not sure what this data means or adds to my project yet…

3D scan and print head

My buddy Kay told me that they just got their face scanned at NYU’s LaGuardia Studio and got the majority of the cost covered by grant money we have at ITP, and that it might be something relevant to my project as well. So I took their idea and ran with it. Laguardia is such a great resource to ITP students and they were really quick with post-processing and sending the files.

I was able to bribe my buddy Mat with a milkshake to help me get the scan ready to 3D print. He helped me get the super large file into Blender and simplify the mesh. To get a good scan, I had to remove my glasses and some of my jewelry but those are really important to the Priyanka-aesthetic. Mat modeled my glasses for me and helped me add the finishing touches of a septum ring and base.

Before printing, we dialed in some settings in Cura, specifically the nozzle speed and layer height which both affect the quality (and time) of the final print. My 5 inch head took 1 day and 5 hours to print … on the big special printer! <3

Ok, those 3D printer lovers never tell you how much work it can be to remove the print supports! I thought they would just fall away easily. Nope! It took a lot of force, care, time, and cutters+pliers to remove them. The only issue I really ran into is that the glasses ended up being really thin and they were super delicate. I broke them a few times, but it was nothing that some super glue couldn’t fix.

Projected head

So my last little gimmick I wanted to make was my projected head, bopping around on the floor. You know, like how logos are sometimes illuminated on the floor when you open the door of a luxury car? I also wanted to join all the projection cool kids. But you know what this means, right? I needed to revisit the infamous Hypercinema Cornell Box…

I made a new Unity project and plopped my head scan (.obj) in there. I also found the old assets from Gabe’s class to get a box. I mostly followed this tutorial to write the script to get my head bouncing around. To get this animation made, it honestly was a bunch of googling and youtube tutorials, the helpful ones I’ve linked below. To get the head to look like it was bouncing around in emptiness, I turned off the skybox under the camera settings and changed the background color to black. Once the physics of the “game” was all sorted out and the scene looked right, I just built the Unity project which makes it really easy to run.

C + A + D show

I am feeling so lucky, and admittedly SO burnt out, but our group thesis art show @ NYC Resistor was A HUGE SUCCESS! I got my project all done, install and show time went without a hitch, and I got really great feedback and participation with my thesis! I plan on writing a more comprehensive blog post about how we organized this art show and how it went for our group in the future, but in the mean time here are some of my favorite photos taken by Hank during the show.

Resources

Hypercinema syllabus

LM317 resistor calculator

Unity tutorials

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqq9QxM2m7I

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/u7BADOIfuY0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_AXWeKYK9k

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOxnizAvMys

[ITP: New Portraits] In Defense of the Poor Image

April 02, 2024 in itp: newportraits

[Reading] In Defense of the Poor Image

Lol, what’s ironic is I had trouble downloading this image from the article…

A poor image is a preview, thumbnail, distributed for free, squeezed, compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, copied and pasted. As culture became a commodity and cinema was commercialized poor images actually made images/video/cinema/art accessible to the masses. Non-conformist and experimental visual matter disappeared from the surface into an underground of alternative archives and collections kept safe by humans. People who care enough to download and re-distribute images became co-authors. The medium of poor images is a co-created global network, a human network, distributed by word of mouth.

Here are some of my other notes:

“It transforms quality into accessibility, exhibition value into cult value, films into clips, contemplation into distraction.”
High-end/”rich” economies of film are rooted in national culture, capitalist studio production, male genius, conservative in their structure
lack of resolution = appropriation and displacement
poor image reveals the decline of experimental and non-commercial cinema
imperfect cinema = blurring the line between consumer and producer, audience and author
Users become editors, critics, translators, and (co-) authors of poor images —> popular images! For the people, people LOVE these images

Depthkit

We have our own Depthkit rig downstairs in the Media Commons. Depthkit it a software solution that captures volumetric video with a PC and depth sensors. The exported media is combined-per-pixel video files and are 3D objects at runtime in Unity.

Calibration

We have an appointment for the media commons 04/02 @ 4pm… 😈

Resources

In Defense of the Poor Image, Hito Steyerl

Depthkit documentation

[ITP: Designing Your Voice] Final Project Planning

March 31, 2024 in itp: synthvoice

Final Project To-do list (or ideas)

Since starting this class (and hoping to make something for my thesis) I had this idea of creating an interface synth, in the shape of my face. I’m thinking about sounds that the body makes or life-casting some of my body parts to use in the interface (damn you nipple knobs!!). I’ve got lots of ideas rattling around in my brain so here’s a list:

Gather samples of body
Make (?) knobs —> life casting
Gate sequencer vs. pitch sequencers —> learn about that
Plug face into brain?!!?!

Some inspo: Brendan Byrne’s Theseus Synth

You can never have too many VCA’s

After some office hours with Jesse trying to iron out my final project, he pointed me in the direction of this video. These are my notes:

VCAs allow us to inject animation into our patches
- Let us change the volume of signals over time
- Change the “volume” of control voltages (CVs)
Use a VCA to build things:
- Compressor, side-chain a kick (?), AM synthesis
- Intermediary to modulate modulators
Moog DFAM
VCA’s can have character, not always clean
Input, output, control voltage (controls how loud)
VCAs to create voices, filters out sub-base mud, closes voice down
AM synthesis - plug another oscillator into CV control, oscillators kind of combine
Using a sequencer to change the volume of another pitch sequencer output
Static vs. animated

External DAC Oscillator

Michelle, Jess, and I worked together to get the PT8211 external digital to analog converter (DAC) working. We used a Teensy, DAC, and Jesse’s audio out Arduino code which outputs a sine wave and changes the frequency based on the position of the potentiometer.

Also, here’s a video of me beep-booping and modulating some stuff some weeks ago.

Resources

Why you can never have too many VCAs

Expert in modular synths

Sequencer comparisons

Contact mic tutorial

Contact mic club

Funny life casting tutorial

[ITP: Thesis II] Alumni Feedback

March 27, 2024 in itp: thesis, itp: thesis2

Alumni Feedback

Here are the scribbly notes I took during my crazy alumni feedback sessions. I met with some really talented artists and got some great pointers. Specifically, Darcy Neal, Ari Melenciano, ❤️ Khushbu Kshirsagar ❤️, and Hayeon Hwang… and I roped in my new teacher Alan Winslow to give me some feedback as well!

Here is the relevant feedback:

Create a “take-away” paper —> maybe a body passport, checkin? ask questions
- Could ask the viewer to describe me or what they learned about me, what they learned about themselves?
Installation is touching in with the senses
- Grounding, polyvagal theory, fight/flight/freeze
Potentially add soft material?
You don’t need to make your art make sense to other people
What are you looking for by getting more connected with body?
Project is relatable, vulnerable
- Reflect yourself and the viewer to themselves
Create thoughtful/intentional exhibition
Alumni like the sketches and illustrations…
Make the viewer go deeper
Thesis is not the end, it can be the middle
- It is okay to compromise on the scale
Since pieces are so different, uniformity in showing the pieces could be good —> pedestals, table, whatever
Could collect body samples using a contact mic

Womb

So, I’m bringing back the washing machine!! I originally made this curiosity portal for Sharon’s STEM Accessibility class. I was able to get it like 90% done last year but the motor couldn’t reliably turn the drum and I feel like I got too edgy with the concept and I abandoned it totally.

To get it up and running, the first step was getting the motor system going. Based on some advice from Phil, I got a new big, bad motor and his favorite driver, the TMC2209. I got some help from other stepper experts Jeff Feddersen and resident Gracy to get the motor and driver up and running! Here are some updates I needed to make to my circuit:

I needed to chop off the two pins that were in-line with the ENABLE pin —> out-of-the-box configuration is not meant for bread board
GND the ENABLE pin
Through some testing, I decided to implement microstepping of 8 microsteps to get the speed that felt right

It is really amazing that you can move a stepper motor just by blinking a pin! So I didn’t use any motor libraries in my final code. I also whipped up a lil sequence for the washing machine to follow, with some typical washing machine randomness. I also put in some neopixel action to get some portal lighting. As always, you can find my code and other files at my Github repo.

Stomach

I also worked really really hard on finishing up my journey-to-my-stomach pop up book. Another body part down: stomach✅. You can find all my documentation on the paper process at this blog post.

Face

The last body part I’m working on is the inter-FACE. This is the least baked body part. Inter-FACE will be the interface to this synth on the left. I’ve got quite a bit of work still to do. You can find some of my progress at these blog posts.

Thesis Show @ NYC Resistor

On top of developing my thesis itself, I’m curating and producing a group thesis show at one of my favorite NY spaces, NYC Resistor. With the help of my buddy César, we put out an open call to be a part of the show, went through submissions, organized the artists into production teams, and did all the coordinating with the venue to make the show a reality. Below is the beautiful show poster designed by Angie Kim and some stickers I made to give away!

Resources

Washing Machine blog posts

TMC2209 stepper motor driver

NEMA17 stepper motor

Washing Machine Github repo

Pop up book blog post

C + A + D Eventbrite

[ITP: New Portraits] First Week Portraits!

March 25, 2024 in itp: newportraits

3D scan portraits

For our first assignment, we had to make two 3D portraits, one of a person and one of an object, using the Polycam app. I don’t remember why that app didn’t work for me before, but now I use Scaniverse. Below are some screen shots of my portraits.

Kay

Okayyyy. So this portrait was kind of done in the spur of the moment. A “volumetric candid” if you will. But if I am being really honest, not much preparation of thought went into composing and posing this portrait. Kay and I sat next to each other on the ITP floor all Spring Break working through our stuff … and unfortunately this was kind of our vibe. Tired, burnt out, task-list oriented. Technically, tho, I think this turned out to be a pretty good scan!

Josh

Thinking of an object that might serve as a portrait, I was hoping to scan Josh’s phone and airpods. They are both “Josh yellow” and really personal items that allude to identity, personality, taste, etc.

When I tried scanning Josh’s phone and airpod case. My app refused to process the point cloud altogether, which has never happened to me before. My only guess is that it didn’t like the reflectivity of the phone screen? But that’s pretty weird because I’ve definitely scanned objects/spaces with mirrors before!

I tried again by scanning Josh’s water bottle this time. The scan came out way better than the previous one, except look at that weird bump! I think that this item serves as a much better portrait because I this object oozes Josh personality too.

[Reading] Sum of Profiles

It is really crazy to think that artists found a way to make volumetric captures in the 1800’s! They developed a technology that works surprisingly similar to Polycam and Depthkit. They made sculptures using the photos of the different profiles of a subject and a master sculptor would carefully smooth the linear junctions between the carved profiles and unite them into a harmonious and just likeness of the subject. It was a “marriage of art and industry” and reminds me of the fact that portraiture wasn’t seen as a serious art form, only a craft, for a long time because of its mimetic nature.

Here are some technologies discussed in the paper:

Sequential construction - Rodin
Photo sculpture - Willeme
Mechanical sculpture/automatic sculpture - Willeme
Pantograph?
Physionotrace - Chrétien
“Gravure numismatique” - Collas
Smoke screen technology - Claudet

Advantages of this volumetric capture:

Microscopic subjects could be transformed into sculpture in very large proportions
Time saved and commensurate economic gain
“The advantage of the mechanical process was that it allowed the sculptor an amount of freedom to conceptualize and cultivate inspiration”
Realism

Resources

Sculpture as the Sum of Its Profiles: Fraincois Willeme and Photosculpture in France, 1859-1868

[ITP: Designing Your Synth Voice] Ornament and Crime

March 24, 2024 in itp: synthvoice

ornament & crime, o_C

Eurorack module running off of a Teensy 3.2
- Basically a DAC breakout board with OLED display
- It’s a “polymorphic CV generator”
  - Polymorphic = something that has multiple forms (?)
4 precision CV outputs, 4 CV inputs
This is a post-capitalist, open source project
- You can build it yourself or try to find a pre-built version
Comes with 10 different apps
- Digital ASR (analog shift register) called “copier machine”
- 4 channel pitch quantizer
- Wave table quad LFO
- Quad VC envelope generator
- Etc, etc, etc

Control Voltage (CV) refresher

I watched these two weird videos from the Moog Foundation about CV. Here are my key takeaways:

“Voltage control just acts as a means of control that’s just like a hand on a knob”
Simple electrical automation to cause changes over time using voltage
reverb and shimmer

Teensy Examples

TB303 Acid Button Press

Button 0 triggers an envelope and plays a random note in a hard coded scale. Button 1 cycles through the different wave types. Button 2 changes the octave of the notes. A15 is the filter attack time, A16 is the filter resonance, A17 is the envelope release time

TB303 Acid Generator

The gui output is the same as the example above. This sketch plays continuous tones to the Teensy’s audio output, a random note from a hard coded scale. The tempo of the playback can be changed by adjusting the potentiometer on A14. A15 affects the filter attack time. The knob on A16 affects the filter resonance. A17 affects the envelope release time.

To the right is the serial monitor output which prints the current MIDI value and its corresponding frequency.

Random Gate Generator

This sketch is basically just the blink sketch but on a random interval. This can be used to trigger external microcontrollers or hardware.

A gate is a signal type that is passed around inside a modular synthesizer. It jumps to a high level when a new note is supposed to start and stays “on” for the notes duration.

Resources

https://ornament-and-cri.me/

Ornament & Crime tutorial/review

What is polymorphism?

O & C on PJRC

O & C quantizer tutorial

O & C chord generation tutorial

CV from Moog Foundation 1

CV from Moog Foundation 2

Week 6 Teensy Examples

Gate definition

[ITP: Paper Engineering] Final Project - Stomach!

March 20, 2024 in itp: paper

For my final project for my paper engineering class I wanted to create something that could be a piece of my thesis. I’m basically constructing pieces of my own body to make a full self-portrait. I set out to make a pop up book exploring how I experience my stomach: what it eats, what it feels, how it exists. This post describes the process of creating Thoughts for Food, a illustrated journey to my stomach.

Sketch

Here is my quick story board sketch for my pop up book and some random notes. These ideas and sketches were evolving through the whole process of creating this book. One thing I learned is to take my time in the sketching and writing stage because incomplete thoughts and ideas became road blocks in the future.

Prototyping

When it came to executing, I tried my best to follow the method Sam taught us in class to not think too much but just start cutting and gluing paper together. I bought myself a whole stack of white card stock and prototyped with that only so I wouldn’t be so precious about it.

Accordion mouth mechanism

This design was inspired by an Instagram post by @paperjulia. I took a couple of screen shots of the video and was able to replicate the accordion mechanism to create a throat.

Basic tab mechanism

Spiral stomach

I really wanted to visualize the feeling I get in my stomach when I’m anxious. My stomach gets really tense, feels like it has dropped, or there’s a deep pit in there. It sometimes feels tingly and churning. I tried embodying this feeling through a few paper iterations.

Flip tabs and spinning wheel

These next two mechanisms were inspired by @paperjulia too. This project and this one is so great! All my anxieties swirling around in my stomach, what else could you want?!

Process

Here are some of my process shots making the pop up spreads.

Once I had all the pages constructed, I needed to glue them into spreads. Then I glued all the spreads together so I could flip through them like a book. This process required a lot of holding, smushing, and paper massaging to get everything glued down all the way. The paper sometimes became kind of wavy from the glue. Getting stuff lined up wasn’t as easy as it seemed, but I ended up letting go of perfection and leaning into the hand-made. In the off-time, my work was being pressed by two large books on my table.

Binding nightmare

Let me just say … I thought binding would be hard and it was!!!! Silly me left it for the day of my documentation appointment. Being in a rush didn’t help the situation.

First off, I found out that you could buy scrap mat board at Michaels which is pretty cool. It was super hard to cut through with my tiny little knife. I made the covers the same width as my content and an inch taller. I cut this puny little strip of board for the spine of the book using the height of my book content to figure out the width. I used duck tape, like Sam demoed in class, to create this beautiful cover.

I found out this cover I made did not work at all when I tried gluing my content in.

Here’s the golden rule: ✨When the spine is too wide the book can’t open all the way. When the spine is too small the book doesn’t close all the way.✨

I ended up getting some advice from Ian and Phil in the shop and I decided to remove the small strip of mat altogether. I ended up sandwiching the content between the covers, squishing it, and then taping the spine to get the correct spacing. I ended up re-doing this 2 more times because I got greedy, wanting the book to open all the way. I eventually reached a happy medium but my pop up book does not open up the full 180 degrees.

To finish up, I wrapped the cover in paper and glued on the cover image. Another thing I found was that the more I glued the pages together, the more fragile the mechanisms became and harder they were to operate in bound format. So, kind of a bummer.

Final Product

I got these amazing images taken by the ITP Documentation Lab.

Messes

Paper projects are a lot of work and take a lot of set up / clean up / shuffling of materials.

Resources

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Og5xAdC8EUI&themeRefresh=1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZR_b753ZJ0

https://www.instagram.com/paperjulia/?hl=en

[ITP: Designing Your Synth Voice] I've Burntout!

March 19, 2024 in itp: synthvoice

Lol I’m so done, but remember this?!

I recently found this slide from Jesse’s earlier lectures and I think I should keep on referring to it! It’s so hard to understand what kind of stuff will go into the final modules we’re supposed to create for this class but this visual makes it more digestible. Maybe I will make a synth with all of that stuff in it?!

Week 5 Teensy Examples

wav2Sketch

wav2Sketch is a library that converts wav files into data arrays that can be played from on-board memory. This example triggers a different wav file to be played when one of the four buttons is pressed.

This is what my teensy setup is looking like these days!

Basic sampler

This example works the same as the previous one except that the wav files played are uploaded to an SD card and installed into the audio shield.

C Major seventh

Alriiiiight, below is what the gui output looks like, but I’m having a hard time understanding how the code works. The voice1Setup() functions are all called in the sketch's setup() function, so they are only executed once. I can see that the function is assigning a note (frequency) from the c major scale to a waveform but I have no idea what the potentiometers are doing in that case. So buttons 0, 1, 2, and 3 are playing 0, 2, 4, and 6 of the c major scale. The last button, 4, changes the octave of the scale.

Midi C major seventh

The gui for this example looks exactly the same as the example above. Here, instead of using specific frequencies for the notes, we are using midi to define the notes of the scale (and the midi to frequency library). I don’t think the fifth button (button 4) does anything. Nothing seems to change when I turn the knobs either.

I think the purpose of modulating the waveform and putting it through an LFO is what gives the notes that dreamy, vibe-y, echo-y bedroom pop sound.

Memory Usage

This example is playing a pink noise + sine wave note repeatedly. I have no idea what the Fast Fourier Transform is doing. The sketch prints out the memory usage of the various stages of the code. It can help to determine if you need to allocate more or less onboard memory to run a sketch. Sending “s” over serial slows the speed of the sketch and “f” makes it go faster.

Jesse’s VCV Rack Demo

I went through Jesse’s VCV Rack demo and this is the patch I ended up with (lol the same one he showed). I really found following along with this video to be super helpful in my understanding of patching. Below I collected some of my notes.

MIDI = messaging protocol which can contain information about pitch, trigger, velocity, etc
VCO = voltage controlled oscillator
VCA = voltage controlled amplifier —> signal intensity
CV = control voltage to modulate a signal
ADSR = attack, decay, sustain, release in terms of an envelope
Gate output —> gate input?
V/OCT connection gives different pitches (voltages) for the MIDI keys/notes
VCF = voltage controlled filter (low pass, high pass, band pass), adjustable frequency cut off
Quantizer = mapping frequencies being played to the nearest active value of the quantizer

Assignment

I would really love to make an arpeggiator! Gonna ask Jesse for some help!

Resources

Jesse’s week 5 examples

PJRC Audio Gui Tool

Jesse’s VCV Rack demo

[ITP: Thesis II] User Testing Day

March 10, 2024 in itp: thesis, itp: thesis2

There’s really a short in my brain now

I got my new, beautiful boards from JLCPCB this week. I feel the revision was totally worth it! I love the look of the black solder mask and the white silkscreen.

During this last week, I went through the same process as before to populate my new circuit boards. I give more details on this in a previous blog post.

The problems begin…

After the boards got populated I had to do my least favorite hardware task: debugging. Below you can see I had an issue with one board, not all the LEDs were lighting up as they should. Since the circuit is so simple, I know the issue is an unconnected or dead LED. I removed that pixel and you can see in the image on the right that one pad didn’t get soldered because the paste didn’t reflow. Replacing the LED fixed it!

Here you can see my fabulous, new mechanism for connecting the two boards together. At this point, all 160 LEDs were lighting up perfect! I soldered the two boards together, assembled the sculpture, and left for the night.

In the morning I tried powering my brain and I had a short. This was super frustrating because I tested the circuit at every step of population (or so I thought!). After some debugging with my multimeter, I realized my bigger, badder, stronger pads I used to solder the two boards together were actually shorting power of one board to ground of the other. I had to desolder the two boards and re-attach using hot glue like you see below.

Here’s the fix in EAGLE and I’ve updated my repo with brains V12 which don’t have this shorting problem! Ground ground ground ground ground ground ground

She’s beautiful and she works! :’)

User Testing Day!

Here are some pics from user testing with other thesis students. Somehow, brain v1 broke on the trip over from my staging space to the user testing classroom! It’s really perplexing and frustrating, but something I need debug in the future.

Here’s some feedback I received that could be helpful:

Try free writing about what the project/process means to me
I can put parts of myself (nails, hair, eyelashes) into the resin knobs
All the sculptures seem like they are from a different POV, watching yourself from the outside
Include the drawn portraits as decoration, maybe people can make their own?
Face synth - play back samples of voice reading back personal texts

References

Blog post with circuit board population process

EAGLE files for brain v12

[ITP: Designing Your Synth Voice] Group Work??! Yuck

March 10, 2024 in itp: synthvoice

In class examples

Here were some VCV rack examples we did in class 02/12/24. These might be helpful for future Priyanka (or anyone else).

Also in class we learned about line inputs and outputs. Line level is a standard used typically with gear that has the ability to adjust the volume/gain, such as a mixer or amplifier. It’s approximately 1.75V which is not enough to power headphones. The Teensy audio shield has mono left and right channel outputs.

Assignment

Hi Jesse. This week I organized the Stupid Hackathon and mentally I am here… everybody shut up on this floor. Everybody shut up in this department.

This week I got a new breadboard and a Teensy 4.1 because I realized I would quickly run out of IO pins on the 4.0. A big task for me was soldering all the headers for my new Teensy and getting my buttons and potentiometers set up again.

This was a two week assignment to use the line in/line out pins to patch into another person’s synth setup. I was on a three person team with Tres and Q. This was kind of a brain-breaking practice because I had an untested, brand new setup and I think Tres was having some hardware issues.

We started with the pass through example, which seemed to work for me and Tres. Then we tried to get all three synths working together. Here’s some documentation of us jamming together. Tres’s line out was connected to my line in and my line out was going into Q’s line in. I’m not really sure what’s going on here. Tres has some LFO and modulation going on. I tried getting the reverb example going. Q also had something going on in their setup but the best part was the drum they had setup on the button (you can hear it at the beginning of the clip). Overall, no idea whats going on…

Code Examples, audio pass through

I’m also really curious about building a sequencer at some point, I think. I watched some videos and saw people’s really cool synths they’re making. I’ve linked some inspo’s below for future reference.

Resources

Everybody shut up in this world

Jesse’s week 4 examples

David Wieland’s sequencer module

Praj’s Portable synth documentation (comprehensive)

Praj building his synth (with Teensy)

Brendan Byrne’s Theseus

[ITP: Paper Engineering] Build off of a box

February 21, 2024 in itp: paper

Background

In class last week, Sam had us build a box out of paper. As far as I understood, the assignment was to make this box into … something by adding to it or cutting stuff out. For some reason, I had a really hard time thinking about what I could make out of this box. I did some inspiration searching but all I could think about was making the box into a house, or a robot, or a building or making a fancy box, or … thinking outside the box?! At some point I came across tunnel books, which I really love, and those are kind of box-like right? Anyway, I drew up a sketch to make a tunnel book-inspired face box.

Process

Final Product

[ITP: Paper Engineering] Pull tab Valentines

February 21, 2024 in itp: paper

Background

For this assignment we were supposed to build off of a pop-up cube. I was not inspired by the cube. I did not do that.

In class last week we learned about pull tab mechanisms. My thesis deals with mechanism and self portraiture, and I was really really inspired by this music video showed in class. I thought I would try to mock up what a paper self portrait might look like.

Process

I followed this tutorial from the Pop-Up Channel to create the mouth mechanism and kind of free-balled the eye tab structure. Here are some process shots.