Hey Kids,
Almost two weeks ago now, FinnAir flight AY812 landed in Helsinki.
I was on that flight.

Four hours later, I sat naked in a very small room, surrounded by a few other men, who were also naked and a fair bit older then me.
If it had not been in Finland, and if that room had not contained a little wood stove burning in overdrive, I would have felt much less relaxed and at ease at that point.

Why was I there and how did I get in that situation you ask? Some time ago, Liesbeth tipped me of about a “HackLab by the Sea”. A HackLab is basically a place where tinkerers and/or makers get together to geek out and tinker with each other. As you might have noticed from earlier posts, these days, I’m always up for some hot soldering action.

When I checked out this particular HackLab a bit closer, I got even more excited.
It was organised by Tapio Makela of the M.A.R.I.N group. Instead of flocking together inside, the idea was that all of this hacking would go on on an island in the middle of the Baltic sea, with solar-power, fresh caught fish and wood-fueled saunas as the backdrop.

That didn’t sound bad at al. So I got ready to pack my bags and bought a new gas-powered soldering iron for good measure. I left with the vague plan of experimenting with solar-powered Arduino SensorBoxes. So that’s how I ended up in a small, smoking hot room, with several men. Two of those, Tapio Makela and Tuomo Tammenpää, I joined in picking up supplies for the move to the Island the next day.

On the Island I met up with two other great people. One of them was Dave Griffiths, who had been working at Sony Computer Entertainment but now moved his Artist/Programmer-skills over to FoAM in Brussels.

Marije Baalman also joined us. She brought a part of her SonoBotanics project. It provided us with lots of wierd late-night sounds.

So we worked on Tapio’s island for a week. Lots of interesting stuff, ranging from speaking pirate ships to webcam microscopes got built.
I tinkered with my Arduino SensorBox until it could live through the night (and a whole lot longer too) and recharge in the daylight.
Later we all moved on to hacking an RC boat into an autonomous vehicle. First tests ranged from catastrophic to quite promising.

All of these activities where highlighted by great Finish weather, superb food and nice late-night sauna talks ranging in topic from the case of vinyl versus iTunes and trying to make sense out of the Zelda narrative timeline. I had a blast geeking out, learned some neat stuff, and met some great people in the process. Sign me up for the next one.

More pictures and words on my Flick set.

Love,
Jim

Hey Kids,
It has been a million years since my last post here. Back then I was finishing the last elements of my thesis, my final presentation to be exact.
I’m happy to say I graduated with big honours! Kickass! Awesome!

Since then, a lot of stuff has happened, but informing you about that is not the point of this post. I wanted to show you the last little thing I did with some mates and students from my (now old) school. Sometime ago I was part of a special workshop at Kunstencentrum België (Hasselt) about circuit-bending led by Jethro and Micha Volders.

We (Wout Standaert, Danny Leen, Tom Luyten, Peter Briers, Ruud Denivel, Olivier Berger and me) were given the task to develop some visuals for the The Vermin Twins show at the end of the workshop.

We used the little-scale tutorial on VGA hacking to generate super-glitchy super-realtime-visuals with an Arduino based on the live audio from the gig that was played in the evening.

It was great fun, a cool project and awesome people to work with. You can read more about it on Wout’s or Micha’s Blogs Also, check out the video Olivier made, it’s attached below.

Love,
Jim

It’s Done!
My thesis-document is printed, bound – and at this very moment, I’m on a train to Genk to hand it in. Wish me luck. Now the only thing left to tackle is my final presentation. I’ll get cracking on that soon enough, but not today. So what is my thesis about you ask?

According to my own writing it’s “an investigation of the boundaries and possibilities within the concept and experience of immersion, and the possibilities given by the introduction of a strong physical element within this very concept”. If you’re interested in that (and you are able to read dutch) then check it out.

Before I dissapear again to fix this presentation-thing, check out a little video I made of all the people that I “immersed” in my third prototype so far. It will give you some kind of idea of the end-result of my research.

Love,
Jim

Hey Kids,
After finishing the GPS Jacket v1 (aka Prototype 02) I started working on my final (slowly running out of time, aarg) Prototype 03. No catchy names here. That’s what it’ll be called. Prototype 03. I also finished that. And I got a good opportunity to test it out. I will show it in the new C-MD buidlings. The 24th and 25th of March next weekend. It will be part of the open house we do to attract new students to our school.

So more about that later. For now check out my new abstract (and new picture in it) while I try to get some words on paper for a reading version of my thesis. Slight brain-overload going on right now.

Love,
Jim

Glasgow Mega Snake was created at a workshop during the Victorian Circus V festival at the Brakke Grond in the Netherlands. Tom Luyten, Wout Standaert, Danny Leen and me cooperated on creating this thing.
It was a long time ago we made a project together, and I felt like it was long overdue. Since it was our first experiment into 3D interactive content, we worked our asses of – late into the night. The rest of the workshop was filled with mostly game designers.

We deliberately steered away from them and tried to create something different.
A game with no clear purpose, or objective.We focused on control, visuals and sound, and tried to make something we liked ourselves.

We used the Unity Game Engine to create Glasgow Mega Snake. We managed to go from no knowledge to finished “game” in two and a half days. We modeled our assets in SketchUp and 3DS Max, and interfaced a WiiMote with the engine for input. Sound Output was handeled by sending game data to Ableton Live.

In the video underneath I call it an art game, but I think it’s a bit of a silly term. It’s like you would call something “Art Music”. I guess it’s a sign the medium is growing towards maturity however. That’s good.
But enough words! Moving pictures below!

Love,
Jim

Update #1: Tom blogged about this too. Go check it out.

Update #2: Posts from one of my teachers and Wout about this too..

Allright. My blog can now be officially called “a vlog“. But that’s besides the point. Check out the video above. I’m sorry for the craptacular fake HD quality, but I hope that between all the silliness the big idea becomes clear.

Godspeed,
Jim

So, the GPS Jacket eh?
As I said in the previous post, this was the first project to get myself moving again. So what is this GPS jacket, and what the hell does it have to do with my muscle-controll-related thesis? First, maybe a hardware overview of the system would be in place. Click on the picture underneath here and mouse over “the notes” to find out what the different components do.

This little experiment was (among other things) inspired by Luarence Malstaf’s Compass. It’s a wearable instalation art piece that I checked out at the Brussels Perfomatik festival a while ago. It looks like a piece of equipment out of the cold war (one of the reasons I loved it). Besides looking cool, it guides you around a (virtual) space using sensors and by swinging its own weight around – with you in the center. It’s pretty cool.

But, back to my GPS Jacket. Maybe a better name in the light of my thesis would be “The Feedback Jacket”. The idea here was to build a really quick prototype to explore another possiblity of “physical feedback”. So I tought up the idea of a screen-and-soundless GPS system that would guide you around by vibrating little pads in the armpieces of your jacket. It could be usefull for firefighters for example, who don’t have the time liberty to look or listen at their GPS while out in the field. But I always saw it as a device that would prevent you from getting lost, while still giving you the ability to wander around in an unknown city for example. That’s why it has an easy off button too. Tomorrow I’ll try to finish this and “steer” my little brother around the garden.

And that’s that for today.
Love,
Jim

Update:
So – I didn’t make it to “videotaping-my-brother”-stage today. Too bad. I wired up my speakers wrong and I needed help for somebody to point that out to me – so there where some delays. Everything is ready for a first testing run however – but by then, there was no light left outside for a video. So I decided to just call it a day for today, and have some nice family-time. Tomorrow however, it’s ON!

Update #2:
Allright, before I drop into bed. I forgot to write this down in the previous post. I have been pondering about a good interface to enter destinations into this GPS system. I like the idea that it’s a more simple, less intrusive, more “wander-friendly” version of a GPS. So I came up with the idea that – whenever you reset it – it will point you in the direction of your home. Then, there’s just one other button besides “reset / on-of”. And that is “record current location”. So you get to a place – let’s say the hotel you’re staying in. Press the remember button and turn off the feedback system. Then you go out and get lost. Then you turn on the feedback again, and find the way back to your hotel. And that’s that. Goodnight.

Allright,
A Thesisupdate. What have I been up to? Less than I would have wanted to – but no biggie, not everything is lost. I did my “halftime-presentation”. It can be found on my server space, on the same spot as always. Be warned though, this things is not really “internet-ready”. Wait for it to load, then use arrow keys to navigate. Unfortunately, when my feedback came, it wasn’t what I expected. The main point the teachers sent in my direction that it was “too much about Crew”.

I struggeled with all this information. I was quite pissed, to be honest. I had the feeling teachers where commenting on the very core of my thesis proposition. A proposition I had been communicating to them for almost a complete schoolyear. But there was some truth in it to be honest. My muscle control experiments where not overly successful so far, and I was getting frustrated by all of this. How it would al fit in a theater piece by Crew was another question all together too. So I wrote down the “big idea” of how and why I wanted to pursue this whole muscle-control-in-a-piece-by-Crew plan in the first place. That piece of text is here.

And then I tried to re-orient my thesis. I had a talk with Liesbeth Huybrechts, one of my thesis mentors, and decided to look upon the whole thing from a “broader” angle. I choose to opt for a wider range of “physical actuation” devices. Crew is still very important in this, but I definately gave myself some more freedom to explore my subject matter with other prototypes, and from different angles. Then I focussed on writing my abstract (also in english) which can be found in the ususal places

So now I now have a new plan and more work then I can wrap my head around at the moment. So it’s time to get a move on. Tomorrow I’ll start a new experiment: the “GPS-Jacket”. And I hope to show my first steps off right here, tomorrow.
Until then.

Love,
Jim

Hey Kids!
So, how have you been, you ask? Well, unknown yet beloved reader – I’ve been better. I have just lost the favourite part of my life. Friends tell me that "sometimes things just end", and that you can’t do anything about that. Well, sometimes things just downright SUCK BALLS, and you wish they where different, but they are not. Stuff is as beautifull as it can be hard sometimes, and that’s true too. And it’s one of the hardest things I know.

I feel like I’m living in a bubble these days – and I am – this is one of the first days I actually came out of my room. It’s a bright sunny day, and I feel strangely disconnected from it all. Music keeps me sane these days. "The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place" by Explosions In The Sky and "As If to Nothing" by Craig Armstrong are playing right now on my iPod. Also, the first album by Burial. Can’t wait for the third one to come out. Not the most fitting music for one of the first sunny days of the year, but bright sunny days are not the kind of days that would fit my mood now anyway.

So – schoolwork then. The show must go on, right. That’s the only stuff i have to concentrate on now, so I better go make my thesis a succes. The last weeks – or months maybe – I was in a very non-productive mood. Partially because of this relationship-crap, but also because making this kind of thesis is very hard for me. I get crushed under the fear of fucking it all up, and I have a hard time dealing with it all – sometimes (or several times a day) I’m just convinced I will never make it – and that’s not the best mood to get work done. It’s a downward sprial sometimes.

But – I’ve been trying to get out of it. As long as i keep going i surely have to end up somewhere in the end. So the next post will be a big status update on my thesis ideas. Before i can get to that though – it seemed like a good plan to list all my other finished projects here. So brace yourselves for it – here they come.

Factory Instrument (Launch)

So – after building it an testing it, we had to go install this on location. It took us a while and the software written by some other group members wasn’t really up to the most stable level ever, but in the end it turned out good anyway. It was really nice, working on a real location, for real people and appearing in the newspaper with our project afterwards. This is one of my favourite projects I have done so far I think. The fact that Wout and me just picked out our craziest idea and started building it AND succeeded (at least as far as I’m concerned) made working in the darkness in an empty wet factory building until two o’ clock in the night all worth it. Also, we had Peter (my stepdad) to cover our back with his awesome "getting-it-done-and-not-despairing-skills". Yeah. It was good. The video is in Dutch, by the way, or at least some Limburgian variant of of it.
On with the show i say!

Noise Pong

Noise Pong is a project produced by Wout "Blobkat" Standaert and me. We continued on the "lets-try-something-that-seems-really-fun-and-get-it-done". Our teachers where all ok and supportive of our idea of a music game without a real purpose or aim. Noise Pong was inspired by awesome stuff like United Game Artists’ Rez and Toshio Iwai’s Electroplankton.
It is a tangible interface to make music with and it uses the reacTIVision framework, Processing (Visuals) and Ableton Live (Sound). What you see in the movie is actually what would be underneath the real table surface you are manipulating.
We plan to continue developing this thing if possible. And, if luck is on our side, we might get to do a performance with two of these tables at once.

Residual Self Image

DSC_0837
Sofie In Residual Self Image

One of two "Mirror Installations" I helped to develop in close succesion. This one captures the face of the person that is sitting in front of the mirror, and then projects it onto the next person who visits the installation.
This creates an eerie blend of two different faces, who eachother in the mirror.
This installation was created in a very short time for a workshop in "De Brakke Grond". This was another one of my more "real" projects, and it was a good experience.

Firefly

Photoshop Composition
Firefly Title Page

Firefly is a quick-and-dirty concept (not built – yet) for an interactive/immersive room.
It recreates a technologic version of the classic Will-O-The-Wisp stories of uncatchable lights that lure you deeper into the forest all the time.
It was meant to be able to be built easy, quick and cheap. And powered by Arduino. I hope to produce this one some day.

I Think I Broke Myself

This is the other "mirror" installation piece. It’s is an interactive / immersive installation for one room.
The installation resembles a mirror and gives a poetic expression to an idea about yourself in relationship to your self image: When you get to close to it – it shatters.
This was a group project and it was made possible by using just one camera, a projector, Arduino and a tool called Isadora. Video above was shot and edited by Roger. This is an important project for me – especially in relationship to my thesis – but we’ll get back to that later.

So far, for now,
All my love to all of you
(and you know who you are)

X
Jim

Hey Kids!
A Slice of what’s going on in my head.
It was a project for the myStory course.
There’s a paper for this thing too – in dutch.
I went for my gut feeling here.
It’s not done, but it’s in a state that I can leave it for now.
Help by Olmo.
Music by Burial.

Take Care,
XXX
Jim