Group project to develop tiny, affectionate robots that respond differently – and incompatibly – to sensed input. One would hear things and flash, another requires being held, another likes light and noise, another hates noise and light.

Design modified from Sputnik speakers on Thingaverse: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:21272

With
Lindy Wilkins - http://lindywilkins.com/
Ruzette Tang
Pavika Chintraruk

http://www.psXXYborg.com

Hannah and Sagan produced the content. I did the technical back-end wrangling and various pieces of installation design.

What Did You Do, Alex?

For psXXYborg, I dragooned Ryan, Owen, and Kate into teaching me how to use NodeJS to build a very basic websocket application. Then I optimized and built on top of that demo to get a proper exchange and some branching paths going on. The application loads videos from our main server to between ten and fifteen clients located on the same wiFi network. From there, in version one, players tap a tablet (an iPad until various other makers get their weird patenty issues about H.264 video out of the way) and control where the game takes them. “Game.” Dynamic head-melting migrane experience. Same difference!

Hardware Design

We ordered up a load of Mac backend and installed some Mighty Dwarf resonators to build panels that yell at audience members directly. This gives you the experience of being yelled at by plate glass. I cannot overemphasize how much fun this is. For me. Let’s be clear, this is fun for me.

Mixed media, 2012

So, once upon a time I went to Burning Man. You can see more about that in the posts about the Heart Machine, if you really care about it, but the thing that stuck with me – more than the dust, the hippies, the trying journey back with its payload of permanent Denver Airport anxiety dreams – was the art. The art was amazing! Like all people who attend the festival and love welding, I instantly decided to fabricate an art car! An art car that shot rainbows.

Little known fact about Burning Man: A large portion of the festival is like a very dusty version of any major city’s pride festival. It is very proud of this fact. Unfortunately, it is also Burning Man. Therefore, seeing all the slightly tired rainbow flags made me sad. Seriously, my darling peers: try harder. Given that the chemistry for producing rainbow fire is widely and publicly available, I was disappointed at the underachievement of the majority of the art cars.

Because of being a prat, and altitude sickness, I decided I would do better. I would build a rally car, then I would stick a giant rooster tail on the back, and when I hit the big red button, they would shoot vast gusts of pride-flag-flavoured flame. And sparkles. Because try harder, this is Burning Man, not Toronto Pride, you can do that here.

Then I laughed about the idea for a few weeks, got over the altitude sickness, and gave up the idea but not the document specifications for about a year, when the Awesome Foundation came to my attention. I applied! Giggling merrily, using the actual phrase “Non-optimal result” for the idea of accidentally hosing someone with methanol – a real, possible, dangerous outcome for coloured flame work, largely responsible for why we haven’t seen much of it at the burn – and send.

Then I won.

Now I have to build it. You can watch my build process here, in photos. It should be fun. And funny. And with any luck, there will be no hospital visits.

More about The Awesome Foundation

http://awesomefoundation.org/

In late 2011 I was approached by the Dames Making Games collective to produce a brand specification. I was given a guideline of “noir” and “edgy” and asked to return something in a couple of months. Taking a cue from Saul Bass, who is imitable but never replaceable, I produced an initial design spec in black and purple.

By 2012, it was clear that the DMG was going in a different direction entirely; more sociable, more accessible, less dark. We ended up using bright, chunky text with a salmon-and-orange colour scheme, the better to showcase often-bright new games from new game-makers.

My favourite part is our chattery mascots, because what the DMG does best is let people talk to one another in a comfortable setting about makin’ games.

Dames Making Games

This is a short video of me speaking at the 2011 Women in Film, Television and New Media – Toronto conference as part of the TIFF Nexus Initiative. There is no transcription because I made it up more or less as I presented the slides. This is, from my perspective, an unusually large amount of preparation. I have a lot to learn in that respect.

The core of my speech is that the future is here, and we are, by and large, unimaginably rich by the time we’re seen as middle class. Rich, and tricked into thinking that we are not rich, that we cannot dream truly huge weird dreams. But we can, and we should do it because we can, because curiosity will be rewarded now as it has never had a chance to be rewarded yet. We should not play games of bureaucracy and nonsense. We should make something amazing, then we should teach others to make other amazing things, because we are here, and we are rich, and we will not always be alone in this. So we should dream bigger, and weirder, and do it right now.

This is a talk about the future. It will eventually be quite evenly distributed, and, like most things, eventually does not last as long as it used to.

My speech was co-presented as part of a panel with Pearl Chen and Kate Hartman, who are fantastic and very, very smart people.

Pearl Chen at WIFT-T

Kate Hartman at WIFT-T, on the web.

More About TIFF Nexus: http://www.tiffnexus.net/

More about WIFT-T: http://wift.com/

Special thanks to Derek Quenneville (techknight.com) for my Facial Hair of Authority.

Video games are my first true love in interactive or “live” media. I prefer books, because books move at the pace of my brain, but video games allow me to truly adventure through worlds I might never otherwise visit. Or, in this case, humourously revisit a world I live in every single day. For the Difference Engine Round 2 I decided to produce a fast-moving action game of terrific brutality that expressed the amazing fun of getting to work in the morning in the city of Toronto.

This game came out of a conversation with a friend, who similarly feels like not dying every day is a significant personal victory.

• Duck cabs!
• Crush cube-vans!
• Get chased by weirdly familiar logos!

Future patches will include actual game logic, and goals somewhat beyond preventing your own grisly death by curb-cut.

Play Psychlepath here.

Organizing even a one-day event is a massive challenge. SoOnCon typically features a microcontroller-driven badge – ours was based on Jimmie Roger’s LOLShield – and a single track of talks, with a reception the night before to show off the host space. Site 3 is worth being dead proud of, so we sorted out lightning talks for the evening of September 30th, and ran the conference proper at TIFF Bell Lightbox as part of their Nexus initiative.

We ended up with 28 speakers across two days, with ten presenting at Site 3 and 19 presenting at SoonCon proper – there was some overlap between the two, on topics as diverse as Quad Copters and How to Publish Your Own Book. I’m still a little overwhelmed by the whole thing; I didn’t have a chance to grab many photos at the event proper, even, but it was a fantastic time.

Here’s hoping I get to do something similar next year!

• Shannon’s Fireflies at Asymptotic.ca
• Scotiabank Nuit Blanche 2011

The idea was given out by Gearhead_Liz of Burlington, VT: A soft wall to be punched with brass knuckles saying I AM AFRAID OF INTIMACY. I took the idea one step further, producing a ring where you can label your own fears, or the fears you see in other people, while safely keeping them at one remove -just like the manufacturing process that produced the ring itself.

• Printing by Derek Quenneville of Ponoko.com
• CNC brass by Scott Miller of Argent Data

• ARCNET01: fictional clothing for unreal people