Astrodime at Maker Faire Rhode Island

Astrodime at Maker Faire Rhode Island

Sept 30 2009 by Amanda

This is a recap of Astrodime’s experience at the Maker Faire festival in Providence, RI. The website for the festival is at http://makerfaireri.com/.

On Saturday, September 19 the Astrodime Transit Authority demonstrated our tin can telecommunications system at the Maker Faire Rhode Island festival. The technicians of Astrodime, including sam, Julia, Lisa, and Amanda worked directly with adults and young children in using the AstroCan communications systems. Many adults were eager to prove to their children that the tin can system worked just as well as their iPHONES.

Set in the heart of the Financial District in Providence, Astrodime’s exhibition consisted of 2 videos displaying the most current INtransit journal “Can You Hear Me Now?” and “Secret Decoder”. Also on display were the hand-crafted iCANs, tin can phones, and wire tapping devices. Between 2pm and 10pm locals and out of towners experimented with our iCAN, tin can party line, and tin can phone wiretapping. Throughout the day, over 200 people tested the tin can communication device, and sam experimented with our wiretapping capabilities.

Maker Faire is the foremost event for grassroots American innovation. Being the first Maker Faire festival in Providence, this event attracted over 50 makers, inventors, and artists to showcase their most recent inventions. One of the highlights of the day was the disco bicycle party, designed by the custom frame bike-makers Circle A Cycles; another rare gadgeteer was Tellart, and they installed an interactive mixed reality pong game that people could play by wearing helmuts with IR LED’s attached. As Maker Faire continued into the late evening, the Providence River was set on fire as the themed “Celebration of Life” Waterfire festival took place!

Sam and Julia on the iPHONES

Astrodime using the Party Line

Astrodime technology

Love on the Line

This is one of a short series of interviews on artists who are featured in our special and upcoming edition of INtransit: Can You Hear Me Now. G. Melissa Graziano’s animation, Love on the Line was featured on Cartoon Brew. It is an amazing work out of cutouts, featuring long distance love in the Victorian era

What inspired you with the original storyline?
I was driving around Westwood (the area of L.A. where UCLA is) and I had what I
thought was a funny image pop into my head: a very prim and proper Victorian
gentleman doing a Tex Avery take (bugging eyes, huge salivating tongue, wolf howls)
as he talks to his prim and proper girlfriend over the telegraph. Later that day, I
did a sketch of the idea in my sketchbook. About six months later, when I needed an
idea for my second-year film, I went back into my old sketchbooks and found the
drawing. I thought it was a good, simple idea and decided to run with it.

How did you come up with the title?
It’s about two lovers sending messages on a telegraph line. I thought “love on the
line” was a commonly used phrase that just fit the premise perfectly. I don’t
actually know where it comes from.

What interested you with the Victorian era setting?
I thought about the characters and why they would be apart, and
why they’d even have access to telegraph machines, since not everyone did in those
days–the telegraph was more akin to a courier service than a telephone service. So
I had Phineas’s father be a major player in the newly-constructed cross-continental
American railroad system. It wasn’t really important to the story, but it gave the
setting a bit more authenticity. As for Elizabeth, her family is just ridiculously
wealthy and very high on the social ladder, so I figured her parents would be the
first in their neighborhood to have their own telegraph machine in their parlor.

How did you make the set for the animation?
I did a lot of reseach on Victorian era furniture, architecture, wallpaper designs
and paintings. I designed the sets in Photoshop first, then painted the backgrouds
in watercolor on huge sheets of watercolor paper. I painted the furniture separately
and then cut it out and pasted it onto the set; I only just started using watercolor
paint as a medium when I started this project, so I wanted to make sure I could
control how my set looked as much as possible. Both sets are flat so that I could
lay the cut-out puppets on top and shoot the animation with a digital camera
suspended above the set.

What excites/interests you as an artist/animator?
I love using different animated media to tell stories in ways that I can’t do any
other way. It’s really exciting to take two different things and put them together
in ways no one has seen or done before. I always try to have the medium I’m working
in match with the story. In this case, I tried to use a paper doll technique to tell
a story that takes place in the 1870s because the Gibson style is iconic for that
time period. I didn’t use that exact aesthetic, but it inspired me to creat my own
designs. I almost used silhouettes, but decided against it in the end.

Interview by sam smiley

Love on the Line can be seen on Cartoon Brew at http://www.cartoonbrew.com/brewtv/loveontheline.html

In Memory of Woody Woodson

On June 13, 2009, biker dyke extraordanaire Woody Woodson died of ovarian cancer. Woody appeared in an interview in Astrodime’s INtransit Journal FAST WOMEN in all of her rainbow mohawked glory. She was 64, she was a member of Moving Violations, and a round the world biker legend.

I last saw her at the Boston GLBT film festival this spring 2009..she sat by Gina and me at the Womens’ Opening Night and we talked. She died on this Saturday, Boston Pride 2009. She’s awesome, we’re going to miss her

Here’s the interview I did in FAST WOMEN.
-sam smiley \(-_;)/

Interview with Geoffrey Alan Rhodes

This is the first in a short series of interviews on artists who are featured in our special and upcoming edition of INtransit: Can You Hear Me Now. Geoffrey Alan Rhode’s film, Tesseract is a fascinating and multifaceted look at Eadward Muybridge. -sam smiley

What sparked your interest in Muybridge and the topics in Tesseract?

I came to the story of Muybridge inadvertently. When I was first conceiving of this multi-channel film, I wanted to adapt a story written by Steven Millhauser, “Eisenstein the Illussionist,” which tells the history of stage magic’s demise in the face of cinema at the turn of the century. I was in contact with the author, but wasn’t able to get the rights because it was already optioned (and, in fact, was made in to the film “The Illussionist” with all the smart bits taken out). But telling the story to a friend, it made her think of an essay by Hollis Frampton on Eadweard Muybridge, “Fragments of a Tesseract.” Reading it, I immediately realized the resonance between the multi-channel form and Muybridge’s work and saw, as well, the connection between all these great upheavals at the turn of the century… the moving image, Taylorism, the end of stage spectacle… And Hollis Frampton was an amazing thinker. His essays are only beginning to be re-discovered. He saw in Muybridge’s obsession with pulling apart time a resolute humanism— a current against the regimentation of time… a view of time and movement as obsessional and inconceivable.

How did you decide on the use of multiple screens in your video? How
did that influence your editing?

The idea for making up the screen into multiple parts preceded the content, as I stated above. It was one of my first formal film ideas, it came to me when I was 19 and reading Scott McCloud’s “Understanding Comics” while staying at my brother’s place in Boston (we shared a fascination with comics in the 80’s). I was struck by his comparison of cinema and comics as to how they communicate time. He calls the process of communicating action in comics “closure” where the reader has to reconcile the “gutter” between frames and imagine the movement (whereas cinema, of course, just moves). I was fascinated by the idea of bringing this irreconcilable difference in to the film frame and what that could make possible. It did make editing a nightmare. The amount of editing choices grows exponentially when you split up the screen. I didn’t feel like an editor, but a layout artist working in four dimensions: where in the x,y on the screen and how large, what’s on top and what’s underneath, and when does it happen. I wound up having to give myself limits, compositing the material based on my original drawings and then editing those mixdowns more like a normal film.

What did you have to do with respect to researching this topic?

I have slowly become a better expert on Muybridge. At the time of production I was most concerned with images and original text (Muybridge’s defense attorney’s speech and the events of his crime are taken directly from the reports in California newspapers of that year). In researching the timeline of his life I was struck by how flexible that history is… most biographies have slightly different years for the events– especially the sequencing of his experiments leading up to his more famous Motion Studies. In the editing room I found that I had to follow his process in a way. In order to produce the animated sequences of his photos, I scanned in almost 2,000 original photographs (a small portion of his 80,000 negatives!) and then produced individual animations of each. All this done on a home computer, waiting for the render bar to clear. Once animated, I discovered in those images while sitting in my dark editing room a certain melancholyâ especially in the image of the young lady joyfully dancing. It occurred to me that all these people are long gone. In fact, they are the end of history… I will never see the image of someone moving before those years of Muybridge’s obsessive production; before that it is still photos, then paintings, then nothing.

What did it take in terms of time and coordination to get all the cast
members and tech people together?

The project was generously funded by the Princess Grace Foundation, a really exceptional funder of moving-art works. Still, much of that was reserved for post, and the film was produced on a shoe-string. What made it possible was the arts community in Buffalo, New York. No where else could I have found such an exceptional community of theater costumers, actors, photographic collectors, and antique locations willing to donate their time and resources. And Buffalo is a city of that time period, its most famous hay-day the 1901 Pan-American Exposition when some of the first Edison films were produced and the first city lighting grid assembled.

What impassions you as an artist/cinemat0grapher?

I am quite attached to ideas and visions. I once read a Pat Conroy book where one of the characters says that he is capable of anything as long as he can see it in his head before-hand. I am like that. I can have very convincing images in my mind of how something will be, and without those, I have no idea how to create or want to.

For more information on Geoffrey Alan Rhodes and his work you can visit his web site at GARhodes.com

iCan Featured in Citywide Section of Boston Globe

Sam and Gina’s presentation of the iCan was featured in an article by Katherine McInerney on December 21, 2008.  Only available in the actual paper was a photo of the audience’s engaged and beaming faces as they learned about the new possibilities for communication with ATA’s latest product offering- priceless! Check out complete article here.

Q&A with Mark Adams (‘Secret Decoder Ring’)

Continuing our blog series for ‘Secret Decoder Ring’ we hear from artist Mark Adams regarding his entry: A Model of the Universe: the work of Nathalie Miebach

What inspired you to produce this video piece about Nathalie’s work?

I’m always interested in work that looks back at the planet with humility from our exalted position as king of the beasts. Also how we can process real world information into beautiful things. Too often, environmental artists are preachy or hopeless. Nathalie Miebach is a modest questioner with the patience to watch the world unfold. She’s not afraid of looking at numbers and measurements which are normally intimidating and off limits. Even many of the smartest people I know refuse to let themselves dig into real information about the world.
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How do you see this related to “code?”

I’ve always been drawn to the mysteries of forces we cannot see, either because they happen in timeframes we can’t see or because they aren’t directly sensed by our humble orifices. The world is full of code that is being interpreted for us: weather, statistics, fashion, trends — we can’t take it unfiltered and need it decoded in small doses we can easily swallow. Nathalie is someone looking for patterns in the raw code and making it visible. Much art in any medium — my own paintings included — are code but they don’t necessarily translate… Sometimes code is deciphered to clarify and sometimes it is meant to obscure. Both are interesting but the clarifiers are more rare.
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What was your overall concept and design, such as doing audio layering and incorporating ocean scenes?

I began by trying to get her to talk, ask the right leading questions to open up the flow of her ideas without scripting. But her sculptures invited fly-throughs, so much was happening on their surfaces. Also I wanted to mess with scale — the tight shots attempt to blow up the sculptures into little worlds. The layering — both video and audio — was a response to the complexity of layers in the sculptures and in Nathalie’s ideas. I was looking for echoes from the big notions to the detailed execution. Plus I had lots of footage I wanted to distill and couldn’t part with all of it. The ocean stuff was a way to get out of the closed world of the
gallery and go to a source.
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What do you want viewers to take away from watching your installment?

I like being dazzled by the visuals flying by. I love Nathalie’s questions and lack of pretension — how she decided to follow any patterns she found without concern about where she was going. She made a leap when she decided its OK to be naive. The biggest thing is for everyone to be their own observers — tin can scientists.
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What did you learn about weaving and the designs?

I think of the materials as a little mundane, ordinary reeds — and in fact there are no real designs — but the accumulation of pattern creates an intuitive whole. I think it’s cool to build from really simple raw stuff. Like
the notion that when Steve Reich makes layers of simple rhythms and tones, these unintended resonances appear, accidental music. I’m a big fan of following instincts and letting things grow.
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How did you produce this? In what format? Editing? etc?

I’m not much of a techno. I got the cheapest 3 chip camera I could find and Final Cut Express. I also use mpgs from my still camera, a Panasonic Lx2 with wide format. I’ve learned everything I know, such as
it is, in a few months. I work as a cartographer for the National Park Service and use GIS mapping software which is all about layering images and finding conjunctions and geographic relationships. I’ve found
plots of forest that hadn’t been cut in 180 years by digitizing some old maps and layering them on top of recent aerials.

Q&A with David Lachman (‘Secret Decoder Ring’)

Continuing our series of blog entries for ‘Secret Decoder Ring’ we hear from artist David Lachman regarding his entry SNEW…

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What was the inspiration for your piece?

This piece is a collaboration. We each had different things we brought to its creation. I know that we were both interested in how language works and wanted to see it in physical expression.

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Why call it SNEW?

Humor is important to both of us. So the piece starts off with that old line: “whatsnew?” “I don’t know whatsnew with you?” The piece takes off from there and the possibilities of communication and miscommunication.

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How do you feel this piece fits into “code” ?

We think it fits “code” because language and movement are codes, sometimes easily translated, other times not. Often it depends on what we are willing to know, willing to see.

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Describe the concept, design, look of the piece?

We took a lot of footage with the performers and used props around the issues we were interested in. They are all in a dance troupe that Jodi runs so the dance they were working with touched on these issues. We ended up using less dance footage and more stuff with the props, but I think all that stuff is in there. And that is “code” again. The way art is code and we each have to break the code ourselves to complete the piece, just like a message. There are always the issues of translation.

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What would you like viewers to take away from watching SNEW?

I think some of our answers have gotten to that, but I think it is good to remind ourselves that the piece is really completed in the viewers eye/mind/heart, and that means it will be different things for different people, and have different meanings over time for the same person. I think it is important to understand that communication is a process of human engagement, and that there is so much more there than just the words, or just the code. We always already make it up as we go along.

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Thanks David!

Q&A with Jane Hudson (‘Secret Decoder Ring’)

As part of our ‘Secret Decoder Ring’ video installation, we will blog a Q&A series with various artists represented in this video.
The first is with digital artist Jane Hudson. Enjoy!

Why did you call your work “desiring machines?”
The piece is related to Gilles Deleuze’ ‘Anti-Oedipus’ in which he coins the expression ‘desiring machines’. This concept defines the trajectory of desire we seek to express which is constantly constrained by the institutions of State, family and culture.

What was your inspiration for the content and the design/look of this piece?
I had been working with digital animation, and became interested in the rather mechanical quality of movement I could achieve with the animation of still images. As well I had been using the technique of compositing for some time, and loved the way I was able to create a totally synthetic space for the figures to move in.

How or why do you believe ‘desiring machines’ fit into the topic of code?
If ‘code’ indicates the translation of all phenomena into digital information, then the ultimate constraint/filter through which to drive desire is the quantification of the body.

What would you like viewers to take away from watching your piece?
Hopefully, the ways in which the body is thrown from the cone of time onto the constantly moving surface of life to act out a pattern of expression that seeks to define an identity.

Describe the music, who produced it, and what rhythm were you looking for and why?
My husband, Jeff Hudson, created the sound track for the piece. I wanted an electronic pulsing complex that illustrated the thrust of the cone and the undeniable power of the return.

What format did you produce this in and how long did this take you to complete?
I produced the piece, first, in digital photo, then imported stills into Adobe After Effects for animation and compositing of 3-D, video and still images. The piece was mastered in widescreen Final Cut Pro.

Thanks Jane!