A semi-weekly note of what has transpired this week. What’s a weeknote? See more for A pre-history of weeknotes.

This is a week is all about Janus – the Roman god of endings and beginnings. A project is about to end, and I’m looking to fill in some whitespace, now that I have some headspace. This week’s links feel quite martial, but I wanted to highlight Michele Spanghero’s work Ad lib (2016):

The sound sculpture Ad lib. (2016) combines a medical machine for automatic pulmonary ventilation with a few organ pipes that play a musical chord to the constant rhythm of the mechanical breath, creating an artificial organ that is metaphorically a mechanical requiem that sounds incessantly.

Now, some time to talk about the many (many) ongoing projects which I tend to slowly get to:

Project Raconteur

I have loved Little Printer since the day it was announced, and shed a tear when the business was shuttered. I’ve been somewhat obsessed with using older technology to tell stories, and receipt printers have held my attention, in addition to split-flap displays, flip dot displays, and changeable letter boards. I think that the common thread is that these are mechanical instruments, that you can touch them, and there there is a certain friction that digital displays lack.

Below is a story generator I found in the Canton Akron Airport. Multiple discovery theory abounds in life.

 

Project Chattle

Continued deep research on who makes what street furniture is amazingly time consuming. As does being able to take high quality photos of the furniture in-context, without too many distractions. Not a lot of movement this week.

Project Radiance

No movement on my GPS-enabled light. Boo.

Project Moses

Rethinking my Robert Moses-inspired game, this time with machine vision instead of physical cards. Maybe a dead end since I don’t have any knowledge about machine vision. Guess I will have to start. I’m enamored with cards (see Project Raconteur above), but finding a way to combine physical totems with digital work is very compelling to me.

And so the week ends, some things coming and going, some projects just stalling.