I took some pictures before people started coming on 4-28. I posted them on the WIKI. Here is a link to the page. http://wikihost.org/wikis/techartsound/programm/gebo.prg?name=jason_s_pictures

If I say something stupid in this review, I hope that the artists don't get mad at me because I don't know anything about art or the pieces that I'm talking about. I will preface this review by saying that all the pieces that I saw were great, and I really enjoyed the show. The February final Friday show marks the first art event (excluding music events) that I have ever attended. I knew from class that final Friday was a big deal down on commerce street, and that the WSU Sculpture Guild was having a show staring some of our class's very own artists. It took me a while to find shift space, but eventually I did. One of the pieces that I found interesting was an assault rifle made out of army men. While I was looking at it, I kept thinking about how that could have possibly been made. It had to be a very long process of gluing and re gluing if it was even glued at all, it may have been fixed using a process that I am not even aware of. I also liked the little fat guys called "Goophoff and Reddrick" one of them was sitting on a chair, and one of them was pushing the chair over. I'm not sure exactly what is being portrayed, but I thought it looked cool. Steve Atwood had an excellent piece in the show named “Cell #3” which incorporated art and technology using incorporated led lights to light the piece. At this point I really didn't have any idea what our final projects would be like, or how we would combine art and technology, and Steve's piece helped my mind to start working in that direction. Paul McKee presented some of his world famous mason jar pieces. I wish we would have had the time for him to explore the mason jars for our class project, because I imagine the final project would have been great. Scott Murray had a few pieces at the show that caught my attention. One of which was a gigantic spark plug with 4 other normal sized spark plugs holding up the platform it was on. It was called "Sufficient Support”. This piece makes me think of how big things are always supported by many smaller things, and without the smaller things, the bigger things wouldn't stand up the way they should. There were also some pieces at this exhibit that I did not get at all. There was an alien in the room downstairs called “captive alien” and I wasn't exactly sure what that was supposed to mean. There was also a cutout of the silhouette of a soldier with a bunch of “go usa” bumper stickers stuck to him. I imagine there must be some political message to this piece, but I'm not sure exactly what it is. The Final Friday exhibit was very good, and I'm glad that I was able to attend.

When I began to think about how I might do the tech side of this project, there were many options. I could use PD, I could use a sound chip, I could take apart a digital answering machine… The route that I decided to go with is a common cd player. This is how I wired my cd player to work with the logochip.
Step 1: I went to walmart and bought a $10 cd player that I didn’t care if I fried it.

Step 2: I took the cd player apart to see how it works. I noticed that it uses push buttons to send a signal telling the cd player to ‘play’ ’stop’ ‘vol up’ ‘vol down’ etc. I used a garden variety volt meter to learn what electronically the cd player is doing when I press a button. For most of the buttons, when no button is being pushed, +3 volts is flowing through the buttons. When you press a button, for less than a second, +3 volts goes to 0 volts.

 Step 3: I attached wires to the bottoms of the buttons so that I could plug the buttons into the breadboard.

 Step 4: To control the cd player with the logochip, you need to send a quick ground to the button. when the port on the logochip is set as an output, it is not sending any voltage, so if the cd player button is plugged into that port it doesn’t do anything, but as soon as you send a ground to that port, the button is activated.

I should be much farther than I am on this code, but when I use my laptop with the usb/serial adapter to upload code, there are all sorts of errors. I spent way too much time trying to figure out why it wouldn't work. I fianlly gave up and am now using my brother's computer (which has a serial port) to do my programming.  

So last weekend, I figured I would get a head start and begin working with my logochip. So I started to wire it up, and nothing worked. I wanted to go to the lab on Monday, but I couldn’t get off work for it. When I got to class on tuesday Ann informed me that the power and ground busses don’t go all the way through the outside rows. Once I added a jumper wire to the ground and power bus everything worked. I have been able to hook it up to my laptop and have begun to do some simple commands and stuff.

jason_2029@hotmail.com or 644-7449

I added some arrays to the Primitive Techno Machine. It kinda adds a visual to the sound. Like the Arrays are the Primitive Dancers or something. http://wikihost.org/wikis/techartsound/var/gebo/data/file/Primitive%20Techno%20Machine%20With%20Arrays.pd

Here is a link to my first PD file. It kinda sucks. I couldn’t really get PD to do anything cool… So…. http://wikihost.org/wikis/techartsound/var/gebo/data/file/squealers.pd

I haven’t really had any good ideas come into my head, so I came up with this:

I would like to design a device that could be worn on the person’s body as a wrist watch or head band or something like that. This device would assist musicians or vocalists stay in the same key as the music is written in. The device would be programmable so you could change the key to whatever the music is written in.
The way that this would work is that when a musician/vocalist is playing/singing in key, the device would remain dormant, but when the device detects a note is out of the programmed key, an electrical shock is transmitted into the user’s body. Obviously an electrical shock would encourage the musician to stay in key. The device would give shocks in incremental levels. The first mistake made by the musician would result in a level 1 shock, followed by level 2, then the device would double the shock strength to 4 then 8 then 16 and so on. If the user was a very poor musicain, the device would eventually kill them, and this would be a good way to “weed out” the really bad musicians/vocalists.