Kieran Nolan

Here are the slides from the Hacking Toys Into Tangible Interfaces workshop that was held at DKIT last week for the ISEA 2009 conference. Thanks to everyone that participated :)

I'm presenting a paper at the ISEA 2009 Conference (International Symposium on Electronic Arts) in Belfast this August. It's under the 'Posthumanism' category and called 'The Real Virtual Living'. Basically in it I'm examining what people thought the 'cyberfuture' would be, how it actually turned out and how that future vision has inspired creative work in different digital and electronic mediums, both in cyberspace and meatspace :)

Also as part of ISEA 2009 I'm running a workshop on 'Hacking Toys Into Tangible Interfaces' at Dundalk IT. We'll be building unique game control gizmos by adding usb connections to cheap electronic toys. The workshop is an introduction to physical computing, covering some basic interaction design theory along with practical hardware hacking techniques. There's more on the workshop and everything else that's happening as part of the conference at isea2009.org.

I was over in London recently to check out a couple of talks that were taking place as part of Onedotzero's Adventures in Motion festival. First up was a presentation about digital means of creating music, controlling music and creating musical controllers by Tinker.it. Afterwards a number of music related Arduino and Processing projects were shown, including a granular synth and the Brokenspiel, which plays a sequence of notes generated from a barcode or magnetic card's unique id number.

Then later on that evening was This Happened #6, where the audience learned all about the creative processes behind four unique tech art projects. These were Touched Echo by Markus Kison, Audience by rAndom International and Chris O'Shea, Troika's 'Cloud' and the responsive installation at Covent Garden by United Visual Artists. One thing that was striking about all these was the ammount of time put into planning and pre-visualisation, leaving little or no room for error when the final product was delivered. Also they were made in very tight timeframes, Cloud for instance was nine months from initial idea to the final installation.

In the lobby of the BFI there was a project I really liked called Doodle Earth, which basically encourages people to draw. An animated map dotted with buildings and moving vehicles is projected onto a blank wall and people are encouraged to fill in the blanks with coloured markers. I drew this dragon head thing burning the building in the projection (someone added the 'Cheese' speech bubble and 'JAFC rules...' messages later on). All the art meets technology stuff is great but this really suceeds at creating a fun, collaborative user experience in a fairly lo-tech way. It's good to draw!

Many thanks to Arcade Heroes for featuring my Bionic Roshambo game on their blog. I definately recommend adding their site to your rss feed, an excellent resource.

I was over in Sweden last month attending 7workshops7 organised by 1scale1, a research lab based in Malmö city. The workshops were all about interaction design and prototyping with open source hardware and software tools, mainly arduino, processing , reacTIVision, PD and some PCB design in Eagle as well. We also built a 'Smapler'. A lot of ground was covered in the two weeks and I headed back home with a new bag of tricks and fresh inspiration.

Below is a work in progress shot from my 'Alternative Displays' project, it's a 4 x 4 grid of square electromagnets. These are controlled by an Arduino and a Djuicer (a custom circuit designed especially for the workshop by 1scale1). A framed sheet of perspex goes on top of these and it contains a layer of industrial printer toner. When the magnets are switched on the the metal fibres stand up and you see a 'pixel' in the dust. Thanks to Mattias, Tony and David at 1scale1 for all their help making this. Next step is to have custom animations appear in the dust and have it respond to some external inputs.