By Justin on February 26th, 2010, 7:29 pm 0 Comments

The epic adventure with Arduino, LCDs, and PHP continues. I’ve finally made some progress in terms of breaking up the words and lines appropriately. It felt like a huge achievement, since I had been trying to figure out this line-break thing for quite a while.

You can check the majority of the progress in the video below, and all of the steps along the way are below! Don’t mind the nonsensical example texts. So first off, I figured out I needed to send Arduino very specific information to know where to line break.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tagged: arduino BCL LCD PHP research text

By Justin on January 10th, 2010, 4:56 pm 10 Comments

I spent the better part of the day on Saturday doing some more basic research into connecting an Arduino and LCD for this ongoing project. For the most part, it’s pretty basic and following the wiring diagrams and tutorials online is fine.

I ran into a problem with getting text on two lines, which I’ll detail below. Next on the to do list is to order a different LCD, maybe a 4×20 display and maybe something even smaller and then do some work on the text processing part of this whole thing.

Overall, it was a good start and I’m anxious for later this week when I’ll have a block of time to continue with the next steps in this early research.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tagged: arduino BCL electronics LCD research soldering text wires

By Justin on January 3rd, 2010, 12:55 pm 0 Comments

Josh, Cristina, and I spent a part of the afternoon yesterday speaking with Josh Mehler, formerly of the Windsor/Detroit area, now studying at Florida State, working on a PhD in Rhetoric and Composition.

It was a great conversation, and as always, these kind of casual interviews help us to articulate what we’re trying to do in an expanded manner. We talked a lot about why we use text, how the idea of composition can move into a physical space, and what the potentials are in connecting artists and writers more often and in alternative spaces. My favourite interviews are the ones where I learn something too, which in this case, I definitely did.

I think Josh will be posting excerpts from the interview on his blog, so be sure to tune in there.

Tagged: BCL city conversation interview text Windsor writing

By Justin on January 1st, 2010, 2:32 pm 10 Comments

As part of a Canada Council for the Arts Inter-Arts Research and Creation grant I received, I will be documenting my work on the project through here, as I anticipate it will cross over into other projects we work on and came out of past projects we’ve completed.

This project comes out of Broken City Lab’s previous work on Text In-Transit, where I’m hoping to open up a continuing flow of those kinds of texts in relation to a public space like a bus, or bus stops, or the downtown terminal. It’s likely that we’ll be working with Transit Windsor again on this project as it moves along. The project will connect this kind of publicly-engaged work I’ve done with BCL with some of my digital work I’ve done in the past.

The project is going to involve a lot of experimenting with Arduino-controlled LCD screens, and efforts towards capturing sms text messages, twitter updates, and emails and pushing them all into an LCD display. This will be the foundation of the project anyways.

I’m assuming this is going to involve a combination of interfacing Arduino with Max or Processing and using Perl or maybe PHP to do the text processing (depending on how involved it is), though it may end up taking another route altogether, but that’s what this time is for. I’ll be spending the next few months working through these aspects of the project, while also building towards an approximation of a public installation. I’ll spill more details as time goes on, and I’ll be documenting my progress, as I’ll undoubtedly need notes of my own, and why not keep them on here?

For now, I’ll be working through some basic tutorials, and eventually heading up to InterAcces for some of their workshops.

I would like to thank the Canada Council for the Arts for their generous support in this project. I’ll be acknowledging their support with their logo on each post that I write while documenting this project.

Tagged: arduino BCL electronics LCD research text

By Justin on December 11th, 2009, 10:01 am 1 Comments

21,633 feet of salvaged nylon string was strung between the two parallel fences over a 24-hour period to spell out FREE in a fenced-off parking lot for the AGO.

We’ve written about Sean Martindale’s green sleeves in the past, and with this project, I really liked how the string stretched across the lot and connected the two sides. I just wish the entire lot had been done.

[via Torontoist & Wooster Collective]

Tagged: context fence installation intervention text Toronto

By Justin on November 19th, 2009, 12:32 am 3 Comments

Tonight was the final night of this suite of Cross-Border Communication. We sent another set of messages to Detroit, and hopefully there were some receivers across the river, as I got to talk about the project on WDET’s Detroit Today earlier in the afternoon.

Given the winterish weather that’s setting in, we’re almost certainly done projecting for the year (with the exception of one more upcoming project with the Border Bookmobile). However, we’re already imagining a continuation of the Cross-Border Communication project for next spring.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tagged: BCL cross-border communication Detroit message projection research text Windsor

By Justin on November 18th, 2009, 10:05 am 7 Comments

Last night was the second iteration of Cross-Border Communication where we sent a variety of messages from Windsor to Detroit. We started with “We’ve Missed You.”

We’ll be doing the final iteration of this suite of Cross-Border Communication tonight (Wednesday) around the usual time (8pm).

Read the rest of this entry »

Tagged: BCL cross-border communication Detroit message performance projection research text Windsor

By Justin on November 17th, 2009, 1:47 pm 6 Comments

Last night we projected a message from Windsor to Detroit. It was a message we’ve been meaning to send for a while. We wanted Detroit to know that we know that, “We’re In This Together.” And we mean that, in every way.

This message is part of a project that we started working on in the spring with students from Vincent Massey Secondary School called Cross-Border Communication. We had previously imagined the potential in sending a message to Detroit in a strategic plan we invented last winter.

With the help of the students at Massey and their teacher, my brother, Mr. Langlois, we did the math to figure out the size of the letters to make them visible from Detroit.

Then we wrote a proposal for the 2010 Rhizome Commission cycle and we were finalists, but ultimately we didn’t get the commission. So the project stayed in the background, and slowly we were able to gather the support we needed to secure the equipment to make this happen.

Thanks to the generosity from the University of Windsor’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Research Leadership Chair and Spectrodata, we were able to project our first message to Detroit last night. We’ll be attempting to project at least two more messages this week, as long as the weather holds out.

Tagged: BCL cross-border communication Detroit message projection research text Windsor

By Justin on November 11th, 2009, 9:51 am 0 Comments

In Philadelphia, an artist named Steve Powers is working alongside the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program to create this large-scale mural project that paints huge sentiments of love letters onto the sides of 50 buildings on one street.

The project is called A Love Letter For You and totally made me think that there might just be potential in murals after all.

Take a look at the project blog and read it from first post to the most recent, it really gives some great context to the project.

[via an email from Nathan]

Tagged: city context graffiti mural Philadelphia text

By Justin on November 10th, 2009, 2:48 am 3 Comments

Troika is a multi-disciplinary art and design practice founded in 2003 by Conny Freyer, Eva Rucki and Sebastien Noel, who met while studying at the Royal College of Art in London.

This project, SMS Guerilla Projector, is about four years old, but it caught my eye while flipping through my copy of the Design and the Elastic Mind book. The SMS Guerilla Projector does what you’re seeing above, basically project the screen image from a Nokia phone onto surfaces around the city. The project is somewhat reminiscent of the Image Fulgurator, which I posted on back in July of 2008.

Most speculation on the interwebs suggest it’s basically a hacked phone and slide projector mashed together, which is kind of ingenious in its simplicity. Basically, and LCD screen can have light pass through it and so by opening up a phone and shining some concentrated light at the screen, so the speculation goes, you would be able to project the image with a lens.

Some other notable and interesting projects of theirs that you should check out: The Tool for Armchair Activists, SMS Memory Wall, and Exploded Monologues.

Tagged: context hack hardware projector sms text