Famirds is a project consisting of 3 birds made out of felt that follow basic rules of survival.
[ The box under the birds is a project of Vadim Kratchenmachin and is not part of my project, aside from the fact that the data of the offsprings was sent to it as part of the network ]
Here is a video (bad quality, sorry) of the project in action. At the end, because there are only female birds the generation dies.
Birdies from Claudine Lamothe on Vimeo.
First Rule : Gender
Like all living creatures, Famirds have genders. Since this project was centered around networking, these values are determined by simple mathematics using the values received from the Serial Port of the Arduino. If the value received is an odd number, the Famird will be male (XY), if the value received is an even number, the Famird will be female. In other words, if the value datum1 received is 3, then bird number 1 will be male, if the value datum2 received is 6, then bird number two will be female.
If there is at least one male and one female present in the “flock”, then there can be offsprings. If not, then the birds are unable to reproduce and will die.
Also, female Famirds can be identified physically by the presence of yellow in their color pattern.
Second Rule : Dominant and Recessive Attributes
If the birds are able to reproduce, then the offsprings will have some of the attributes of their parents. This is demonstrated with the colors of the birds. Famirds are red and blue (and yellow if female), but these two colors are not always in the same intensity. Ergo, a Famirds color can be purple, pink, blue, red, sky blue, etc. Once a new generation of Famirds is born, these new offsprings take the attributes of their parents, mixed with some randomly generated values, to then pass it again to their children. Henceforth, if a red Famird reproduces with a blue Famird, the offspring will most likely be a shade of purple. More precisely, 4/6th of the offsprings’ color pattern is determined by it’s parent’s color pattern, while 2/6th is taken from a randomly generated value that adds “personality” to the new generations.
In a closed network, the birds would show clear signs of dominant and recessive color patterns, but in a networked system, I decided that since the adults’ color was determined by the values received through the Serial Port, the babies’ values should be repackaged and sent to the next project. This transformed the values, sending them again to the Arduino modified. In a poetic way, we could say that that was the “voyage” birds have to accomplish before becoming adults.
Research Process
I’ve always wanted to work with felt but never really had the opportunity to do so. When sketching for ideas for this project, I had made a joke to a friend saying that I should make chickens that would have babies. After reflecting on the idea, I decided to go for that concept but to instead use birds. I started by making the bird and egg pattern, cutting the felt and sewing it. I then did some prototypes with Arduino and some L.E.Ds, and got the project to work so that if there was at least one female bird and one male bird, an egg would light up. It was only really late the night before the submitting date that I had the idea to make them genetically “evolve”. Everything was there and all I needed was to change the programming so that the offsprings would take part of the “genetic code” of the parents and make new generations of birds.
Conclusion
This project started very humble, and grew to be something far greater. Even if it is a quite simple physical computing project, it is the first project that I have made in this class that made me truly inspired. I really liked working with the felt, and the way it diffuses L.E.Ds is quite pleasing to the eye. It is also a very nice fabric for it’s texture, robust and “easy to sew” attributes. To boot, I love pigeons (hence the name I Heart Pigeons for my personal site), so these birds were a lot of fun to make.
I am also very happy with the simplicity of the result. At first I was unsatisfied with only making L.E.Ds light – as we are always compelled to add sensors, motors and other fancy instruments to our projects – but as the project unfolded it was really fascinating to see what happened to the birds. Which color would dominate in the end? Would they die because they lacked female or male counterparts? Would equilibrium thrive because of the individuality factor of each new generation?
Given more time, I would have liked to make the bird pattern a bit better. Some people though they looked more like fish then birds. Also, the work would have been more physically pleasing if I had done the sewing by machine, instead of by hand. Additionally, I would have liked to place the birds on a tree branch or some sort of perch. This would have been very practical to dissimulate the wires. Ideally, I would have create a million of these birds and made the code more complex to find exactly who would be the parent of given offsprings, but for the benefit of my sanity, only three were created.
I was a tad disappointed that the values fed back to my board were almost all even numbers during my presentation as it would have been far more fun to see the project similar to what it was during my closed network tests. Overall, thought, I am really happy with the end result.