Final Project

After searching many examples that people have done with mood/emotion, basically what they used is the motion sensor. There are many different types of motion sensors depends on what I need. The most common motion sensors are PIR, passive infrared Sensor; strictly it's a sensor detect body temperature,  No energy is emitted from the sensor. The other one is called Ultrasonic sensor which detect measure distance, sends out pulses of ultrasonic waves and measures the reflection off a moving object. Im interesting in ultrasonic sensor because it might have some interesting results. 
Material to be used: 

arduino board

wires 

ultrasonic sensor

the light in the middle of the sensor is a signal tell you that it is reading the distance 

                                          
I set the LED light as a referencing signal light, when the distance is over 20cm, it fades off. once the distance 20cm, as the object gets closer and closer, the light gets brighter and brighter.

This is the final look after setting up the plants and sensor. The pc suppose play the music. Very simple

readings

complexity as practice
The author Tom Davis did his first creation, Swarm Lab,- self organization of single particles into a swarm structure. However he thinks such work is not an interactive installation, not a composition, so much as a mere exploration of complexity in sound. Next he says, putting artificial life to models of musical creativity, however this idea is conflict when in musical terms. He decided to explore the creation of internal music-critic. Then he created "Natural Selection", based on the biological model of female frog mate selection. Autonomous machines, a device outperforms the designer's intentions through the development of a system that restructures its own knowledge-gathering about the world. After his creation, he did not know what that use for, he think that is a blind exploration. However he just interested in internal critics. Then he created "Excuse me!"- sonification of behavior, to the creation of physical installations based on exploration of the underlying philosophy of complex systems. also embedied with environmental context.
From his first installation and approached to his last installation, from each creation, he found something  that he interested in; step by step, in his blind exploration of complexity, he realized social relation- ships found in music creation as well as the relations between complex systems and humans and technological agents and humans.

 Interactivity and Agency in Real Time Systems

 By introduce both Burnham and Gell's theory of art, both of them saw art more than object, - as process , as doing. "Doing theories of art shift the focus from the aesthetics of art objects to the aesthetics of relationships, between people and their environments." Introduce Net Art or Networked Performance, Networked Art emphasizes interactivity, process, and time and is often characterized by real time, indeterminacy, flux, and emergence.

 "Systems can be static/dynamic -> which can be linear/closed loop ->which can be recirculating/self- regulating -> which can be first-/second order -> which can be self-adjusting/learning." 
The agency in doing meaning, take meaningful actions to see the results of our choice.  The system in networked art need a second order to co create thus can be called authentic interaction.

A comment, a case and a history  Gordon Pask

Gorden says , commonly, a man deals with goals at several levels of an hierarchical structure in which some members are freshly formulated and some are in the process of formulation. Man enjoys performing these jointly innovative and cohesive operations. Together, they represent an essentially human and an inherently pleasurably mode of activity...


"Abstract Machines", "Hardware"- Mitchell Whitelaw 
The "Abstract Machines" of a-life by using technique like cellular automata to investigate pattern, form and morphogenesis. in "Hardware," artists adapt Rodney Brooks's "bottom-up" robotics to create embodied autonomous agencies. focusing on a physical manifestation and interactive robotic system...

The Aesthetics of Intelligent Systems

Comparing two artists work, Rembrandt's portrait of his father and Kenneth Noland's work on exhibition at a gallery. Burnham said, the differences between these two painting is not painting themselves, it's the way we are forced to look at the work of art. We have been conditioned by art- history texts to look at art in the classical manner, as Rembrandt did, where the work is removed from its environmental context either by the frame of the painting or by the arbitrary decision of a photographer. 

Burnham discussed earlier art as a form of communication-ignoring style, its a one way process, then later on electronic technology increases, two way exchange of information becomes a normative goal. The shift of communication is a evolutionary step in aesthetic response. This shift represents what could be called a figure-ground reversal in human perception of the environment.

 "The computer's most profound aesthetic implication is that we are being forced to dismiss the classical view of art and reality which insists that man stand outside of reality in order to observe it, and, in art, requires the presence of the picture frame and the sculpture pedestal."

The possibilities of nonbiological intelligence were first explored in the writings of Allen Turing, John von Neumann, and Ross Ashby, three pioneers of cybernetics and computer theory 

 

 

The Darwin Machine: Artificial Life and Interactive Art

Alifers are peripherally associated with the related, perhaps less deterministic fields of non-linear dynamics and complexity theory by virtue of their common interest in self-organising systems and emergent order.
 Includes: 1. computational Biologists  2. builders of procedural systems  3. Subsumption and 'bottom up' roboticists utilize ethological analogies create bottom up emergent behavior in mobile machines. 4. Builders of autonomous digital agents to do work in the digital realm. 5. Wet Alifers

define the meaning of these terms

Sensitive Dependance.  

Fractality.
Entropy and Self-Organisation.
Emergence and Reductivism.  

The Top-Down paradigm, exactly replicates the dualistic structures outlined above, like the hardware/software pair, the Top Down method centralises `intelligence' in a central processor, into which data is fed from (unintelligent) sensors, and which in turn instructs actuators, having meantime prepared a master plan. The problem with this method is that it is computationally intensive and causes processing bottlenecks in with real world problems without formally bounded domains. 

An interactive work, like any work, consciously or unconsciously embodies a value system.
The discussion of mimesis is complexified by the intrusion of this goal of a parallel order 

A question of mimesis and modernism: Is the artist concerned with simulating or interactively representing an existing being, or with inventing another possible being. 

Artificial Life, is the instrumentalization of a very particular notion of `evolution'. 

exercise #2

In the researches about plants, I focused on plants growth, which I think basically is plants movement. In general, plants' growth has to do with lights. They react differently under different light sources, also in the different environment. How we can tell a plant react to something o their movement? They make sounds. Researchers found out when a dehydrated piece of plant, expose light on, you can hear they make sounds like "ouch". Then I tried to make a digram, which it seems need some special equipment. Because the sounds plants make are in high frequency, ordinary human ears are not be able to hear them. In order to hear the sound, need a high frequency sound recorder, then slower down the frequency rate to the normal hearable rate.

complex system: emergence

In complex systems, “emergence” is the result of self-organization, Goldstein initially defined emergence as: "the arising of novel and coherent structures, patterns and properties during the process of self-organization in complex systems".

The common characteristics are: 
(1) radical novelty (features not previously observed in systems); 
(2) coherence or correlation (meaning integrated wholes that maintain themselves over some period of time); 
(3) A global or macro "level" (i.e. there is some property of "wholeness"); 
(4) it is the product of a dynamical process (it evolves); 
(5) it is "ostensive" (it can be perceived).

The notion of emergence can be subdivided to two perspectives:

weak emergences: describes new properties arising in systems as a result of the interactions at an elemental level. Emergence, in this case, is merely part of the language, or model that is needed to describe a system's behavior.

strong emergences: qualities not directly traceable to the system's components, but rather to how those components interact, and one is willing to accept that a system supervenes on its components, then these new qualities are irreducible to the system's constituent parts. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. 

The complex behaviour or properties are not a property of any single such entity, nor can they easily be predicted or deduced from behaviour in the lower-level entities, and might in fact be irreducible to such behavior.

motion sensor for final project

From all the information I've searched in common, I want to create a system that will need participants interact with.  At first I wanted to build a sensor can sense emotion, the idea came from the moon ring, however it seems impossible that determine one's emotion just by using a sensor. The moon ring's idea is based on measuring a person's body temperature, once the body's temperature changes also color changes. Then I also searched some information about the test emotion by skin elasticity, which turned out not quite different than what I am looking for.
So I decide to go simple,
 build a motion sensor that can sense participants' movement

use Arduino board
wires
motion sensor
usb cable

then connect arduino to the computer, so which ever motions it detect will be sending to computer
processing through max/msp/jitter, video display on screen.

for example, I can create a character (above) instead play participants images, so the motion sensor detects movements, it will trigger the character in the screen move; like when you looking at mirror, doing the same movements, but instead just using a character here to represent. Then combine with sounds for the movements. 

In the researches about plants in exercise two, I focused on plants growth, which I think basically is plant's movement. In general, plants' growth has to do with lights. They react differently under different light sources, also in the different environment.

The above is a final look on screen after done all the precess. Every time has a sound then a electric line appears and disappears.

Then I did some more researches about plants that scientists found out sounds also will affect their movement/ growth. The recent research shows that plant not only react to the sun, also react to the sounds. By playing though a loudspeaker, can hear the clicking sounds coming from roots. Scientist found out that plants communicate each other with that "clicking" sound. 

When scientists test by using noise at 220Hz, plants attempt to grow towards sound source. 

http://www.medicaldaily.com/articles/10247/20120611/plants-communication-survival.htm
http://www.tgdaily.com/general-science/42941-plants-can-talk-apparently

So my thought is
set up a loud speaker, play the "clicking" sounds towards the plants.
then build a motion sensor to record the plants movement data to see if they grow toward the sound source.
import data to max/msp, map out the growth map, can be cooperate with clicking sounds.