faculty Research

Pigeonblog

A Project by Beatriz da Costa, with Cina Hazegh and Kevin Ponto.

PigeonBlog enlists homing pigeons to participate in a grassroots scientific data gathering initiative designed to collect and distribute information about air quality conditions to the general public. Pigeons are equipped with custom-built miniature air pollution sensing devices enabled to send the collected localized information to an online server without delay. Pollution levels are visualized and plotted in real-time over Googles mapping environment, thus allowing immediate access to the collected information to anyone with connection to the Internet.

By using homing pigeons as the reporters of current air pollution levels we are hoping to achieve two main goals: 1) to re-invoke urgency around a topic that has serious health, environmental and political consequences, but lacks public action and commitment to change; and 2) to broaden the notion of grassroots scientific data gathering while building bridges between scientific research agendas and activist oriented citizen concerns.

Pigeonblog was inspired by a famous famous photograph of a pigeon carrying a camera around its neck taken at the turn of the last century. This technology, developed by German engineer Julius Neubronner for military applications, allowed photographs to be taken by pigeons during flight time. This early example of using living animals as participants in early surveillance technology systems made us pause. What would the 21st century version of this combination look like? What types of civilian and activist applications could it be used for?

With PigeonBlog we hope to make a contribution to the atmospheric and health sciences by introducing a low cost model of obtaining data that would compliment data obtained by the fixed monitoring sites, and would validate urban air shed models of pollution dispersion in areas where fixed monitoring site data are not available.

However, the projects main concern lies is in addressing the following questions: How can a non-academic public become involved in scientific data gathering? How can an old topic such as air pollution be addressed through artistic means in an effort to increase public interest and support for solutions to these problems? How can real-time information about current localized pollution levels be made public? How can a mutual beneficial human and non-human relationship be developed in an urban context inhabited by both beings? How can we “re-script” our relationship to technology and the city, and build our own hardware and sensing devices?

Finally, how can we contribute to a techno-scientific discourse that takes political, research and artistic concerns into account on an equal footing?

AIR :Area’s Immediate Reading

a project by Preemptive Media (Beatriz da Costa, Jamie Schulte, Brooke Singer)

AIR is a public, social experiment in which people are invited to use Preemptive Media’s portable air monitoring devices to explore their neighborhoods and urban environments for pollution and fossil fuel burning hotspots.

Participants or “carriers” are able to see pollutant levels in their current locations, as well as simultaneously view measurements from the other AIR devices in the network. An on-board GPS unit and digital compass, combined with a database of known pollution sources such as power plants and heavy industries, allow carriers to see their distance from polluters as well. The AIR devices regularly transmit data to a central database allowing for real time data visualization on this website.

While AIR is designed to be a tool for individuals and groups to self identify pollution sources, it also serves as a platform to discuss energy politics and their impact on environment, health and social groups in specific regions.

Swipe

Beatriz da Costa, Jamie Schulte, Brooke Singer

SWIPE addresses the gathering of data from drivers’ licenses, a form of data-collection that businesses are starting to practice in the United States. Bars and convenience stores were the first to utilize license scanners in the name of age and ID verification. These businesses, however, admit they reap huge benefits from this practice beyond catching underage drinkers and smokers with fake IDs. With one swipe—that often occurs without notification or consent by the cardholder—a business acquires data that can be used to build a valuable consumer database free of charge. Post 9/11, other businesses, like hospitals and airports, are installing license readers in the name of security. And still other businesses are joining the rush to scan realizing the information contained on drivers’ licenses is a potential gold mine. Detailed database records, of course, also benefit law enforcement officers who can now demand this information without court order thanks to the US Patriot Act. SWIPE brings attention to these practices and enables people to see exactly what is stored on their mysterious strip. Many people are unaware that personal data is even encoded on their license, and, if they do realize this, they probably do not know exactly what information is there. SWIPE illustrates how this information is used and why businesses and government crave it. Our hope is to encourage thinking beyond the individual self ("I do not care if a bar database has my name and address and time of visit...") toward understanding databases as a discursive, organizational practice and an essential technique of power in today’s social field. With public knowledge there is a chance for public voices, and ultimately resistance!

Body Electric

Simon Penny, Malcolm McIver

Body Electric is a colaboration with Neuro-ethologist Malcolm McIver of the Center for Neuromorphic Systems Engineering, CalTech, and due for presentation at gallery of the Art Center College of Design Pasadena in April 2003.

ElectrosensterII is an immersive interactive environment in which a user experiences a simulation of the sensory modality of a weakly electric fish of the amazon basin, in a non-didactic and engaging way.

A user in dark room. Two walls of the space are live rear projection surfaces. A virtual volume identical to the real room is dimly depicted in screenal space. Dimly, a body model is perceived, which is confirmed to be a real time 3D mirror image representation of the user.

There are (8 channel spatialised ) sounds in the room. The sounds are moving. As they get ‘closer’ to the user, the body model is illuminated in a way which is consistent with the fishes electrosensory perception. The sounds are emitted by autonomous agents which are analogous to the fishes ‘prey’. They exist acoustically for the user, and their existence is implied by the illumination on the body model.

The user will engage in a corellation of sounds with illumination on body model. By moving about, they can change the amplitude of the sounds and could play the environment as an instrument.

Technical Components

• Multi-camera infra-red vision system.


• Custom body model skinning, agent behavior and rendering.

Traces

Penny, Bernhardt, et al.

The Traces Vision System is a custom, versatile and extensible linux based multi camera 3D machine vision system which has been in continual development since 1998, at Carnegie Mellon University, ZKM Karlsruhe, GMD Bonn, and the Arts Electronics Museum of the Future, Linz Austria, by Simon Penny, Andre Bernhardt and others. Originally built as a novel sensing interface for the CAVE (immersive environment), the TVS allows non-encumbering full body sensing for embodied interaction and builds a real-time point-cloud body model at variable temporal and spacial resolutions. It has been employed in a wide range of interactive, immersive and telematic environments and theatrical contexts, in USA, Canada, Australia, Germany, Austria and elsewhere. Development is continuing on various client applications, for interactive spatialised sound, telerobotics, avatar generation and other applications.

Big Father

Simon Penny

Over the past 20 years, an entirely new global system of digital communication has come into being, comprised of satellite relays, optical fibre and coaxial cables, and computer networks. This augments the already vast global radio traffic. This new phenomenon is referred to as the `datasphere’. Examined as an organism, the datasphere is colonial, in the sense that an ant colony or a marine sponge is colonial. Information is transmitted and recieved between millions of sensor and effector `nodes’ via a distibuted `rhizomatic’ network. Viewed in this way, any electronic information gathering device which is hooked into this system becomes a sense organ of it. These sense organs operate on a vast range of scales, from the galactic (outward looking satellites and ground based observatories), to the global (earth watching satellites), the local (video surveillance systems), the personal (medical imaging technologies) and the microscopic (scanning tunneling electron microscopes). One might even postulate an imagination or dreaming in the form of synthetic computer imagery.

The installation is an attempt to represent this system by simulating it. The visitor is confronted with five indentical, large, vaguely anthropomorphic `stations’ which breathe. Each station individually senses the visitor. The sensing triggers the transmission of audio and video material.

Pride of Our Young Nation

Simon Penny

Pride of our young nation is a meditation on machines of war and the psychology which motivates their construction. Its material construction echoes the archetype of a piece of field artillery, unchanged since the napoleonic era, while its control system uses body heat detection and digital electronics. In this way it collapses the history of war machines into a single object.

The device senses the proximity of a visitor (using passive infra red detection of body heat). Process control circuitry initiates two actions. It tracks back and forth (locating the target), and `fires’, its spiked conical barrel rotating and thrusting repeatedly and noisily. It is an impotent and somewhat adolescent machine.

Petit Mal

Simon Penny, Mark Needelman, Kurt Jurgen Schafer, Gabe Brisson and Jamieson Schulte

Although much work has been done in the field of screen-based interactive art, the mode of interaction in these works is confined by the very existence of image material on a screen, the so called “graphical user interface”. I am particularly interested in interaction which takes place in the space of the body, in which kinesthetic intelligences, rather than “literary-imagistic” intelligences play a major part.

The goal of Petit Mal is to produce a robotic artwork which is truly autonomous; which is nimble and has “charm”; that senses and explores architectural space and that pursues and reacts to people; that gives the impression of intelligence and has behavior which is neither anthropomorphic nor zoomorphic, but which is unique to its physical and electronic nature.

The formulation “an autonomous robotic artwork” marks out a territory quite novel with respect to traditional artistic endevours as we have no canon of autonomous interactive esthetics. Petit Mal is an attempt to explore the esthetics of machine behavior and interactive behavior in a real world setting. Its public function is to present visitors with the embodiment of a machine “intelligence” which is substantially itself, not an automaton or simulation of some biological system. More generally, Petit Mal seeks to raise as issues the social and cultural implications of “Artificial Life”. The reflexive nature of interactivity is a focal issue: interactive behavior is defined by the cultural experience of the human visitor. As in the Turing Test, evaluation of interactivity is subjective.

Petit Mal is in some sense an anti-robot. Most conventional robots are elaborations of von Neumanns~ notion of the universal machine, in which the physical machine is simply a formless form to be filled with software “content”. This attitude is an application of the Cartesian idea of the mind-body split. Petit Mal is an attempt to build a robot which opposes this attitude. Hardware and software were considered as a seamless continuity, its behavior arises from the dynamics of its “body”.

Petit Mal is not a tool in the sense that an industrial robot is a tool, it does not execute a predefined task in an optimized way. In robotics terminology it is a reactive robot, it is on its own little voyage of discovery. Although the principle of Brooksian subsumption architecture was influential, the software architecture of Petit Mal is a hybrid of various techniques devised with respect to its particular form and dynamics.

In neurological terminology, a Petit Mal is a momentary loss off consciousness. It is important that Petit Mal is just a little out of control, it is a reaction to oppresive theories of control so ubiquitous in computer science. It is an engineers nightmare, although the mechanical structure is inherently stable it has a chaotic motion generator at its heart, the double pendulum, an emblem of unpredictability.

Petit Mal was produced on a tiny budget and a conceptual efficiency or compactness was desired. The aim was to under-engineer as far as possible; to choose simple solutions over complex, even if they were statistically less reliable; to produce a robot which has seemingly intelligent relation to both objects and people, with the minimum of hardware, sensors and code. The design process of Petit Mal sought not to ~design out~ unreliable behavior, but to capitalize on mechanical or electronic quirks, such as the dynamics of the double pendulum structure or the limitations of a sensor, as generators of emergent behavior, of “personality”.

Its mechanical structure is a pair of nested pendulums of welded aluminium suspended from a pair of bicycle wheels on a common axis (a dicycle). This design is lightweight, economical (a full range of motion and control is achieved via only two motors) and self stabilising. The upper pendulum houses processor, sensors and logic power supply. The lower pendulum houses motors and motor power supply. The inner pendulum functions to keep the sensors (more or less) vertical while the under frame swings due to acceleration. Batteries in both frames function both as power source and counterweight. It has three ultrasonics sensors paired with three pyroelectric (bodyheat) sensors in the front and a fourth ultrasonic at the back. There is an accelerometer and two motors with optical encoders for motor feedback. These are coordinated by a single Motorola 68hc11 microprocessor. A second processor will be added to allow Petit Mal to learn. Petit Mal will function autonomously in a public space for several hours before requiring batery replacement.

Having designed the basic geometry of the work, the material aspects of the work were proscribed by the necessity that it be lightweight, durable and mechanically efficient. This led to a physical appearence which had a “laboratory prototype” esthetic which visually coded the work in a very specific way. An attempt to defuse or confuse that particular reading, while avoiding anthropomorphic/zoomorphic readings has been made by the addition of coverings of domestic printed vinyl tablecloth on some of the parts.

Petit Mal was first designed in 1989, building was begun in 1993. Assistants in the project have included Mark Needelman, Kurt Jurgen Schafer, Gabe Brisson and Jamieson Schulte.

Ceci n’est pas un oiseau

Simon Penny

Ceci n’est pas un oiseau is a projection installation comprising a specially built animation projector and a system of four automated semi-transparent screens. The projector projects a looped series of images of a cockatoo in flight onto the four screens. These images were originally made by Edward Muybridge. The screens are moved by the action of six programmed, suspended fans.

Ceci n’est pas un oiseau is a deconstruction of the cinematic apparatus. It is simultaneously a discussion of the chains of signification created by modern image reproduction technologies. It is thirdly a discussion of Muybridges place in the historical process of quanitification (scientization) of the world.