Volunteering at FITC AMSTERDAM

24.02.2020

FITC is a design conference taking place every year in February in Amsterdam. It's a fairly expensive event for a student, so I tried to the organization to take me as a volunteer for a day.
Somehow I was lucky enough to get in. It is a two day conference, and brings together tens of successful designers and visual artists. I had the opportunity to listen and to have small chats with people like Beeple, Nadieh Bremer (visual cinnamon), David Hogue (Google's head UX designer), David O'Reilly, Santi Vilanova (Playmodes studio), Ferdi Alici (Ouchhh studio), and many more.

Exhibition in Rotterdam

04.02.2020

The prize won in September 2019, awarded by 100% FAT, gave us the possibility to build a new installation for TecArt Rotterdam Festival 2020. Me and my team worked for 5 months on what we called "A.I: Anxious Intelligence", and interactive audio visual installation.
"Current mainstream opinions of artificial intelligence always depict it as an omnipotent, dangerous and unreachable technology that stirs fear and excitement. But consider that any machine built in the likeness of the human mind can be subject to the same flaws all humans experience. The more like us we make our machines, the less they may want to interact with us. Can an artificial intelligence experience the same states of mind that we do, such as anxiety, laziness or introversion? If we build a social robot capable of human-like interaction, how much can we determine whether it’s introverted or extroverted. Any conscious being will perceive the world in it’s own unique way and base its own decisions on that."
We used a kinect camera for 3D space tracking. The space data was then manipulated in such a way to analyze the amount of people in the room, the speed of movement of each person, the acceleration of each person towards the screen. This processed data was then managed with fuzzy logic to create different states of anxiety.
The visuals were made with Processing and Unity's GraphVFX. The projection area was a couple of 2.5 x 2.5 meters acrylic plates placed one over another. In between the plates we allocated a dynamic fabric developed by Hellen van Rees, a dutch textile designer from Enschede. The special property of the fabric was its' ability to expand and compress. We automated the compression/expansion process by attaching for sides of the fabris with rotary to linear encoders, drived by stepper motors.
Fabric, visuals in between the fabric, and the sound created a nice abstract creature that was appreciated by the visitors of TecArt 2020.

Visit to Skalar Amsterdam

20.01.2020

I knew about the existance of Skalar Mexico and Christopher Bauder, but I did't expect to being able to see this stunning kinetic installation it anytime soon. Well, I was mistaken and luck brought the installation right close to my house.
Wonderful experience, impactful sound design, perfect location.

HACKATON MOD 5

15.10.2019

A new challenge is provided by our academic course: build an electronic device of any type from part of old computer's CD drives. In 3 days. We applied the knowledge aquired in the quartile in elctronics to build a terrifying sci-fi american propaganda machine. The project consists of a FLIP-FLOP system that acts as the brain for the moving legs of the lethal machine. The design of the machine itself permits to translate the rotary motion of the motors into linear motion through leg movement.

TodaysArt Festival 2019

21.09.2019

After searching for opportunities to get closer to the media art field, I tried to search online for some events across the country. To my surprise I found an EXTREMELY active and proliferating scene. Evenets, exhibitions, performances, big artists, small artists, almost every week somewhere in the Netherlands!
That is how I came across TodayArt, a wonderful TecArt event in The Hague. I immediately sent an email to the volunteering board, offering myself as a volunteer for a day or two. The organization was so kind to accept even if I applied last moment.
I performed multiple activities there, such as setting up beamers and structures for large projection surfaces, as well as mounting most of the 8 meters tall installation from the french artist Pablo Valbuena, "Array". The installation consisted of 20+ high quality led bars controlled by a DMX system.
From this experience a brough home new friendships with people with similar interests, and broader knowledge of how to set up a professional installation and which tools are used for light installation specifically. Furthermore, the visit of the vestival (which included brilliant A/V performances too) was revelational and inspirational.
Fuse Works and Ryoichi Kurokawa left a deep impression in me. I really resonated with something I haven't seen before, and I knew I wanted to do something in that direction.

PROJECT Q4: THE LURIAN CUBE – HUMAN TO DATA TRANSLATION

28.06.2019

If you could give away your genetic code and all your information to a machine to enhance yourself, what would be the consequences of such actions? We are creating an interactive and immersive audio visual experience, which aims to detach the user from reality, guiding his emotions through sight, touch and audition. The show immerses the spectator in the digitalization process of their biological data and the improvements which a computer will want to make on it. The interaction will initially be lighthearted and playful to draw the user in and to keep them engaged. Over time, the exhibit will start to change unexpectedly, and the experience ends with a strong message of the possible risks such actions may have, be they physical or moral.
THe experience consists in intersection of multiple mediums, like light, sound and visual design. We merge together projection mapping, sound design, sound reactive led system and motion recognition.
The project is a GOGBOT 2019 winner. The prize was sponsored by 100% FAT company located in Enschede. Next step: Exhibition at TecArt in Rotterdam in February 2020.

PROJECT Q3

10.04.2019

I've collaborated with a team of coursemates to create a similar to SkyCam system to move artworks in festivals. Our client, owner of Exoot, is working on a project for an interactive exibition in 2020 and he asked for our help.
We realised a system which permits a 3D motion in space of a centerpiece based on a work of only two motos, placed one close to each other. The setting of the system is meant to be outdoors environments, mainly green areas. This means that the system is anchored to trees, which will never offer a perfectly balanced propotions. For this reason, our system also needed to be highly adaptive and optimized to work in different situations.
All the goals have been reached, even though we didn't have a possibility to scale our project and test it on bigger areas.

ANALOG DRONE SYNTH DEVELOPMENT

29.03.2019

In the third quartile I've decided to dive more into electronics. Since before my studies at UT I wanted to build my own musical instrument, a modular synth in particular.
The modular synthesizer is a type of synthesizer, which exists in both physical and virtual forms, consisting of separate specialized modules. The specialization is usually in the module being designed to allow the modification or processing of one parameter of a signal, such as the frequency, spectrum, or amplitude.
My idea of the synth is a multi-oscillator drone. This means that the sound is, in most cases, continuous and is generated through an additive synthesis. Every oscillator can be modulated on its own and the sound of each one can be added or removed from the overall harmony. Furthermore, every oscillator has a modular frequency (pitch), resonance, volume and filter.



The synth is also meant to control light. The idea is to have a light source for each of the oscillators, connected through a relay, turning on and of the lamps (since most of the oscillators are square-waveform-based, alternating between 1 and 0, so ON and OFF) based on the shape of the sound.

MODULE 2 DEMO DAY

31.01.2019

For the Smart Environments project of the Module 2 we realized a serie of CO2 sensors based on a dynamic wireless mesh network. The core of the concept was to create a prototype of a relatively cheap sensor, easily replaceable, with a modular power source, contained size and easily implementeable on every kind of vehicle, from bikes to buses.
Sensors are comunicating trough each other and send data to a central data collector, called coordinator.



For the protective case we used a 3D printer, small and with different moving parts, each one containing a specific part of the product. CO2 data is saved on sd card from time to time to prevent the lost of data when sensors are not in range. The data received by the coordinator is then organized and uploaded to the web app, which visualize the values sensed across the map. The coordinates of every value are detected by the GPS module, which also provides time information.

MODULE 1 CLOSURE

06.11.2018

First module came to the end. By the end of this period of our course, we had a possibility to expose and check output out the works from all the fellow students of CreaTe. The event was mostly based on exibition of final video projects and posters for Visual Communication. Moreover, we were able to show our programming projects as well.
It's been a really nice opportunity to look and discover some nice and fancy ideas from many people, and to chat about these. Listening about what people found difficult and how they solved the issues was, personally, really interesting and inspiring. Our video project talkes about a court case, in which the viewer can decide the sort of the suspect's future. You can check it out here.

VOLUNTEERING

GOGBOT FESTIVAL

13.09.2018

DeLorean Time Mascine from a Belgium artist is a good example of how is possible to gain incredible inspiration and visionary ideas just from remaking an object from a SCI-FI movie.

DeLorean time machine is a mixture of knowledge in mechanics, electronics, software and hardware engineering and scientific research. The perfect replica was made following the official project sheets of the car from the original movie. But the artist did not only copied the project, and many parts of the car were improved, or simply made functional, since in the movie not all the functions were shown.


By doing this replica, the artist learned insanely interesting facts about warm holes and other scientific studies, and now he has the inspiration for his second creature, which will be related to vehicle technology, but, as he said, "something two steps forward", something that will come in a far future, another visionary concept that, maybe one day, will change our world.