June 2011
8 posts
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Final Exhibition/Presentational Scenarios
Final Exhibition of Building Synthetic Agency and the future scenarios of the Neuroprosthetic Research System will consist of a series of videos that are edited down from durational experiences, highlighting different levels of engagement, mechanical acceptance and transformative moments with each device. While to date only a handful of scenarios have been designed, the current robustness of...
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Language of Praise
Building Synthetic Agency is an entry point into a limitless poetic space of human agency amplified by technologies both material and immaterial. It functions as one node in the larger Neuroprosthetic Research System, which will be built out from the core functionality developed for this piece.
The major influence on this body of work are the early investigations of the body into space by...
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Revisions
Late in the quarter I was given access to synthetic voice built from my own which transitioned the focus of my project from physical and haptic investigations of expanding the body schema into a text and speech based exploration of the system. Created using the Festival Speech Synthesis System, the voice was built from hours of audio recorded by Nicolás Varchausky last spring. An example of the...
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Code/Programming Issues
During the first half of the quarter my primary programming issue was to decide in which environment to build the final project. I had been working in parallel with many strategies on my last few projects: Processing & Arduino, Supercollider with SCPyduino, Supercollider with raw serial, etc. I had partial prototypes in each and had used different configurations for each of my previous...
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Fabrication Issues
The primary challenge in the NRS devices is centered around motor control and housings as well
In the case of the fan harness the use of a DC motor, rather than a stepper motor, is due to the desired scale of a wearable device. Motor control will be solved using a small potentiometer and pulse width modulation to create controlled gestures that are limited in range, never going past 180 degrees...
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Research Methodology
The Neuroprosthetic Research System functions as an experimental landscape in which to explore new aesthetic experiences of the body, or more generally the self, expanded into technologically mediated situations. I am most interested in locating a threshold for our neuroplasticity in remapping into abstract mechanisms.
Does that threshold have to do with the proximity of a prosthetic device to...
