:: GussetBLOG ::

:: Thursday, April 16, 2009 ::

Tweenbots

"Tweenbots are human-dependent robots that navigate the city with the help of pedestrians they encounter. Rolling at a constant speed, in a straight line, Tweenbots have a destination displayed on a flag, and rely on people they meet to read this flag and to aim them in the right direction to reach their goal."

Labels: Art, Robots, Video

:: Dan 16.4.09 [Arc] [0 comments] ::
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Babble by Alex McLean

"Babble is a system for authoring mechanistic sound poetry. It occupies a space between speech and music, allowing play with the structure and form of simplified phonetics. The visitor is encouraged to enter nonsense verse, which is then immediately played back as synthesised sound. Although babble's phonetic system is quite unlike that of any natural language, when faced with the text that generates the sound, the listener has the sensation of 'hearing' speech.

"Babble is written in the open source HaXe language, which compiles to javascript and flash. The source code for babble is available under the GNU Public License version 3 or later."

This makes some fun noises and I like the rhythms it generates when given large sets of input data. However, the "simplified phonetics" are simplified to the point they bare little relation to what you put in.

Babble by Alex McLean is a project.arnolfini commission (produced for the exhibition 'Supertoys'.
[development blog]

"Alex McLean is a programmer and live coding musician. He is co-founder of the dorkbotlondon meetings on electronic art, the TOPLAP organisation for the proliferation of live algorithm programming and the runme software art repository. He is also a PhD student at Goldsmiths College, within the Intelligent Sound and Music Systems group."

I had a wander around the Supertoys exhibition last week. There is some interesting stuff, but as I've complained about previous technology based exhibitions at the Arnolfini, half of it wasn't working or was only a prototype. I may go back sometime to see if things gets fixed.

"mechanistic sound poetry. It occupies a space between speech and music"
Sometimes I think people might appreciate art more if the artists didn't write a load of balls about everything they do. That would raise the bar such that the art had to be good enough to stand on its own, rather than need to be justified by some pseudo-intellectual twaddle or gibberish manifesto.
[/end rant]

Labels: Art, Audio, Robots, Speech, Synths

:: Dan 3.12.08 [Arc] [1 comments] ::
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Robo Japan 2008!
Originally uploaded by Akihabara News.

The full article that includes this photo lives at www.akihabaranews.com/news-16833-X.html
You may also want to check out www.flickr.com/photos/akihabaranews/ for similar photos.

Labels: Robots

:: Dan 13.10.08 [Arc] [0 comments] ::
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"A village in south-west England will shortly be swarming with robots competing to show off their surveillance skills. The event is the UK Ministry of Defence's (MoD) answer to the US DARPA Grand Challenge that set robotic cars against one another to encourage advances in autonomous vehicles. The MoD Grand Challenge is instead designed to boost development of teams of small robots able to scout out hidden dangers in hostile urban areas. Over 10 days in August, 11 teams of robots will compete to locate and identify four different threats hidden around a mock East German village used for urban warfare training, at Copehill Down, Wiltshire"

Labels: Robots

:: Dan 6.5.08 [Arc] [0 comments] ::
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[thanks ana]

Labels: Art, Engineering, Robots

:: Dan 31.3.08 [Arc] [0 comments] ::
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Yellow Drum Machine


"This is a robot I just made.
It was very hard to film, as the camera came in the way for any natural behavior. Anyway, here is what it usually does:

• Navigate around, collect some data, avoid obstacles, until it
• Finds something "worth playing on" (a single isolated object or a wide flat surface that it can find an angle onto)
• Snakes into place
• Plays some beats on what it have found, and samples this, checking it has a "good sound"
• Based on data collected in the area, and sample just made, then compose a little rhythm, and plays this along with the sample

"Why? Well.. I was sitting thinking what I should do for my next robot, what it should do.. Listening to music.. making a rhythm with some robot-parts.. Thought; "Hey, I will make a robot that drives around and plays on stuff"
As always, get more on letsmakerobots.com"

Labels: Instruments, Music, Programming, Robots

:: Dan 23.3.08 [Arc] [0 comments] ::
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Bristol Kite Festival 05
Originally uploaded by gusset.

Computers to fly kites and produce energy | The News is NowPublic.com
A cunning idea for getting the most out of wind energy, anyone who flies a kite knows how you can keep it up even in very low winds by flying a figure of eight pattern, and the idea of controlling that effectively robotically is fascinating. Unfortunately the article is very slim on details of how the power is generated from doing this, except to say that "when the kites tug on the lines this turns the turbine." I'd like to see more detail there, and know if it generates enough energy to power the computer that's controlling it for a start.

A couple of my Bristol Kite Festival photos from last week appear alongside the article, but everyone else's are much better, have a look at those.

Labels: Environment, Flickr, Kites, Robots

:: Dan 11.9.07 [Arc] [0 comments] ::
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This is for Hsiao, I know he still harbours dreams of setting up his own audiophile hi-fi company.
Film about Audiophile Club of Athens

At the opposite extreme, I think this is the scariest thing I have ever seen:
Scary hacked animatronic robots sing Fergie's 'London Bridge'

Labels: Audio, Audiophile, Hi-Fi, Robots

:: Dan 7.8.07 [Arc] [0 comments] ::
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