Building Blocks from Claudine Lamothe on Vimeo.
Synopsis
Building Blocks is a project that focuses on collective memories, architecture and senses (touching, earring, seeing). Each box represents one architectural site located in Montreal that is or was in the near past in danger of being destroyed or forgotten, and this project serves as a medium to extend awareness about the beauty and ephemeral nature of these sites.
Technicalities
This is simply a prototype to demonstrate the interaction possible with the blocks once completed. For this version, foam board and white glue were used to make the boxes, aluminium tape used to create connectivity, and resistors of 100 Ohms and 1KOhms used in combination with wiring and electrical tape serve as a detecting mechanism. Also, I used thin wrapping paper during the presentation to hide the untidy insides of the boxes.
[ Download Circuit Sketch ]
As for the software side of the project, I used a combination of Max/MSP and Arduino to do the work.
[ Download Max Patch ] **Edited March 28th**
[ Download Arduino Code ]
Issues
The biggest issue I had was related to the prototyping nature of the project. Since foam board isn’t very heavy, connectivity between the boxes was very hard to achieve. Also, the conductivity of aluminium tape is not as good as with copper, for example, and there would be a lot of “noise” present in the voltage calculations. These two issues combined made it very complicated to calculate what was the voltage range for each box.
On another hand, I will also need to find a way to slightly change my Max patch. A problem with my If statements have made it impossible to play 2 samples at the same time, instead, during the presentation, I made a third, separate sample, that was the 2 first sound samples combined. This works, but isn’t the result I want.
**EDIT** This has been corrected, but the idea of using MAX/MSP for the project has been dropped. Please refer to more recent posts about the project for more information.
For some other descriptions of this project, please refer to previous posts
Tags: Building Blocks