Vanessa Sorenson's Blog

Blowing up on Google

vanessasorenson — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 22:34:06 +0000

Wow. Just wow. The Tweet Sleeve project is blowing up on google. Couldn’t have done this project without the help of my lovely New Media department here at Purchase College! xoxo. and my professors Joe McKay and Brooke Singer

Progress on Tweet Sleeve

vanessasorenson — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 15:31:49 +0000

Tweet Sleeve from vanessa_rae on Vimeo.

sketch of lilypad connectors.

vanessasorenson — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 16:09:31 +0000

here is the back of the shirt where the xbee lilypad arduino and power supply will be. green are the LCD’s. red is the power, and black is the ground.

this would be the sleeve. the circles are the LED’s with the RGB values on the bottom. I realize the sketch is a little crazy as I did it sort of “backwards” but I understand my mess. Essentially I believe that you can wire each value (so red, blue, and green) with the same wire respectively throughout the course of the 6 LED’s. So one thread would go through all the “R’s”, another through all the “B’s” so on and so fourth. Leaving about 4 digital pins needed on the Lilypad Arduino deck.

Updated Timeline as of February 03, 2010

vanessasorenson — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 19:09:12 +0000

February:
February 7th : Have xbee communicating with one another/ or similar device
February 14th: Working LED arrays (Knight Rider) in order
February 21st: Final stages of coding before use with LilyPad
February 28th: Lilypad LED’s and Lilypad sewn on shirt; test with previous code

March:

March 7th: Work out any bugs with LilyPad or Arduino programming
March 14th: Begin thinking of installation process
March 21st: Work on documentation of Tweet Sleeve project.

Knight Rider

vanessasorenson — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 01:03:05 +0000

So my goal of the project this week is to get the led’s to light up in a row at different intervals depending on the word’s frequencies in the tweets. This will be done either with a for loop (also known as the knight rider according to the arduino site) or with an array. As of now I think the array will be easiest to control.

Exploring Online Exhibition Pages

vanessasorenson — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 02:25:55 +0000

Of the exhibitions provided I have chosen Conflux as an exhibition I find successful and the SFMomma: 010101 exhibition as one that had some issues.

The title of the Conflux festival matches the curatorial focus of the exploration of urban and public space due to the way a city itself is always in conflux. The website is organized in a way that is easily navigable to find the locations where each demonstration/activity occurs. Being involved in preparing for Conflux and being apart of a demonstration I can say that most all of the activities demonstrated urban life and urban space. Many artists focused on ways to change the way a person views urban spaces and communities while also trying to preserve what has already existed.

While the title and website of the 010101 exhibition relates to how people interact and understand contemporary online netart, I find the website so hard to navigate and explore that I believe the design of the website overpowers the context of it. While I believe the intent of the website for the 010101 show is to encourage exploration, clicking through a user manual to find information on any artists involved in the show, takes too much time and I find myself losing interest in any of the netart that the show curated. This exhibition seems aimed more for people who are already emersed within a netart community, and is awfully intimidating to those who are not.

vanessasorenson — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 01:42:51 +0000

Hasn’t really helped me in configuring mine but has helped in understanding more on how the xbee works. Definitely worth a watch.

Xbee Configuration Tutorial from Tellart on Vimeo.

Twitter4J exercises

vanessasorenson — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 23:35:41 +0000

The first exercise I’ve been trying is to gather info from a search query through Twitter.(I searched my own username.) The results are printed on the bottom of the processing sketch. I have deleted my password for privacy’s sake, but here’s the coding/progress thus far!

Twitter4J

vanessasorenson — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 14:05:33 +0000

Since I’m putting the XBee communication on hold while I save up money to buy another shield, I have been doing research on Twitter libraries to use to communicate with Processing and my project. It seems so far that the best library for Processing is Twitter4J. Right now I have been experimenting with how to use the library to extract data from Twitter. It seems like the Twitter API is pretty easy to work with since it’s still open source. Im continuing to work on my Twitter data experiments and will hopefully be able to extract the words I want to make some sort of drawing sketch in Processing by the end of November. This sketch will act as a practice run for the project which will need to extract data to make the lights turn on instead of having Processing draw data visualization sketches. (Although, I have thought about using these sketches I create in my installation to create more content than just the Tweet Sleeve.)

Progress

vanessasorenson — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 02:03:28 +0000

So far finding tutorials for the XBee Series 2 has been proven to be very difficult. I found some tutorials which allow the XBee’s to communicate with one another through two Arduino’s and two XBee Arduino Shields. However, I am trying to find a way how to use only one Arduino XBee Shield/Arduino and an XBee pad for the LilyPad Arduino. It’s proving to be difficult. Each of the XBee’s seem to have the correct coding uploaded to the board but cannot communicate with one another. (Even with help from Joe! Ahh!) Hopefully, during the weekend I can figure out how to configure the XBee’s to communicate with one another as it is an essential part of having the Twitter updates effect the LED’s color.

In the meantime I plan on looking for Twitter libraries for Processing and figuring out how to extract data from Twitter and bring it into Processing/Arduino