New Web Design

Will this be the final face of our web presence? Tune in later to find out!

this past weekend we went out to the arb to tag some invasives, get some gps readings and get a beter sense of the sites we have been planning.

feb 12 meetign notes

Mtg notes from feb 12:
Misc tech needs:
Powerfilm – solar film that you can wrap around a tree – how much is it per foot? How much does it power? – can we get from grocs?
Solar panels from last week - http://siliconsolar.com/– can grocs get for checkpoint Charlie-?

Inv species tech needs:
a mac mini – can we get these donated from the mac rep on campus? Can we get by next week?
Solar panels for power
Super bright led’s – red, green, blue, white, orange – $1.70 - can we get wholesale? – get 10 of each – these are the same size as below, but the wattage is different -
Mini led’s – 60cents ish – 50 white - order
Ezio board – to connect a computer to any type of transmitter – can rodemer give us one of these? $129 from the ezio company –
Estimate for 300 trees – can we pull a daisy chain to power these? It will be cheaper to run these with a wire and connect these to one power source and pulse source, email rodemer -
-wireless transmitter and receiver form the ezio board – ask rodemer for recomendation
- wires from the receiver/microcontroller to the lights for both signal pulse and power source – maybe 100 feet to start-?
Sensor to trip it – from qkits, motion sensor – one sensor every 10 feet – which are more accurate, sonar/sonic or motion detector/light level sensors? Early evening has less light? -rodemer again
Also, mike asked a good question – can we just run ext cords from the reeder center for power?

Prairie:
30 tvs/monitors/lcd screens – ask checkpoint Charlie if they have 10 tvs or something we can take out to the arb and check out brightness
30 plexiglass boxes – make up dimensions and cast – get enough plexiglass for one and build – do this before spring break for my tv or one form checkpoint Charlie
video splitters – from ckpt Charlie
cord for signal from splitter plus for power
solar panels for power of mac mini
mac mini to send video signal
transmitter for video signal
receivers for each tv – 30 – ckpt Charlie?
car batteries for tv’s power
wireless transmitter – pos. jamco – or ask checkpoint charlie
big issue here about intrusive to root system of plants in the prairie – check this out, can we go wireless with data transmission?

Other notes:
river – equipment for measuring & emitting digital signals from the water measurements – tao will email professors, there are devices that take these measurements and output digital signals -
gis maps – Thursday lunchtime we can all get together and enter into the computers at snre
- sketches for Thursday of each site – ? - maybe
russ will email tom bray to go to the arb -

gis & remote sensing data images

prairie early site sketch

early shrine area sketches

hidden river early site sketche

invasive species early site sketches

more visual research

production schedule as of feb 8

Production schedule:

Fri jan 27th – sketches or ideas for the aesthetic design of the web site – even web sites that currently exist, we can look to as references – NEED GIS and REMOTE SENSING DATA, look at this, at the forms it can take – keep pushing with the conceptual – set up production schedule, as well as line item list for all purchases made for this project – keep copies of both in grocs lab as well as on server

Feb 3rd – look at big maps of the arb & start to plan out where things will be – rough web outline/html/photoshop page completed – push on installations still incomplete – SOLAR PANELS/ENERGY SOURCES – plan mtg with MISO crew/head if not yet heard back – begin to figure out/plan for alternate energy sources –

Feb 10th – final conceptual “nails in the coffin”, as it were – keep going thru arb map, cut extra sites OR create a “MAYBE’ category of site ideas to get feedback on during the design review – start final list of actuals and tentative production dates for the fabrication of those objects/installations – pos. quicktime vr photo capture??? - SITE VISIT SCHEDULED FOR SATURDAY FEB 11TH, 9AM TO 1PM

Feb 17th – web site completed (everything except the quicktime VR stuff) – final sketch drafts done/we will review – models? Physical sensors? Whatever needs building, build. Start to fabricate energy sources – if we cant get from miso by this time a solar cell, go ahead and buy one ($100 ceiling on price) – keep working on list of actuals, begin to gather materials – BOB DESIGN REVIEW MTG TUES FEB 21 AT 5 PM!

Feb 24th – DESIGN REVIEW
Have site sketches, plan (arb layout where things will go) and models OR actual physicals – web site mostly functioning

Mar 3rd – out of town, spring break
Mar 10th – finalize quicktime vr web presence – finalize actuals list, keep gathering materials, push fabrication -
Mar 17 – live feeds from site - ? where, figure out installation,
Mar 24 – take stuff to the arb – look at (even unfinished) objects in actual space
Mar 31
Apr 7 – DESIGN REVIEW – ON SITE?
Apr 14
Apr 21 – OPENING – update quicktime VR files on web (sites –w- installations), drop opening photos onto website.

early digital sketches of possible site installations

early digital sketches of possible site installations -

meeting notes from feb 5th

Mtg notes feb 5 2006:
We looked at/experimented with the motion tracking software patches that russ had made for digital kami – found that the software tracks a bright light source/the brightest portion of an image being recorded/fed by a live dv feed, and depending on where that bright point is it changes a looped sound sample – bottom right corner of the established grid made the sample rate extremely fast and the closer the bright spot on the image got to the camera lens, the louder the sound sample would be, he was also projecting an image of gis data of the arb which moved left, right, up and down, depending on where the subject being tracked by the camera was moving. But the movement was a tad bit choppy, we think b/c the computer was simply processing it as fast as possible. Talked about a set of patches for Isadora available called “the very nervous system’, heard about from rich pell.
Also looked at the dwg mike did of his idea for an opening web page – as well as www.kyledraws.com and www.donniedarko.com for web aesthetic research - we decided that the dwg and interface that is necessary to program mike’s idea is something a flash or java programmer will probably have to help us out with, and that we will stick with the template russ designed for the first design review and keep pushing for the more complicated programming for the final page design in april.
-also looked at the large maps of the arb that tao got from bob – the scale is estimated to be at 1 inch = 200 feet – tao will make copies of both the color and the black and white for each teram member
-we talked about power sources for a bit – miso recently emailed that they cannot lend us their solar panels. Lame. So we freaked out for about 10 minutes, then decided to go ahead and plan the conceptual thru lines and we will figure out the power sources later on. Possabily we can pull power from the outlets int eh arb, possabily we can purchase a zillion car batteries, possabily we can purchase 5 solar panels and sell them on ebay after the project is done, we don’t know – but we will figure it out later. We need to move on with the design.
-we went thru site by site and plotted out what we want the sites to do, which ones we cut and which ones are ‘maybe’ sites, or partial ideas.

Invasive species: illustrating the unseen scope of destruction by the invasives.
Notes - idea of incorporating knowledge of species into the sound/image display – we don’t want to simply tell people about what they’re looking at, but to show them the scope of the invasives that are taking over. Possabily incorporating the plaques currently marking the invasives in the arb, a user will walk by a tree, triggering a light and/or sound – which will grow to include all of the trees with that invasive on them. We will mark five types of invasives with five different lights/sounds.
Questions – how many trees will have triggers on them? If the trees don’t have plaques, then how will viewers know what they are looking at and triggering?
Discussed possible markov chain for the tree lights, when thinking of how to control the light composition
Prairie: illustrating the process of land management over time on a particular place
-embedding tvs/lcd monitors within the prairie filed and putting footage of the prairie burn on them, looped
-problems – burying tvs in the ground, will we have to have a vent system to let off the heat for them?
Shrine: showing individual beliefs about the landscape –
-not one shrine, but a shrine site –lots of small structures, with one larger structure – a big idea we all really liked was having a set of something, like a bunch of templates that were the same that the visitors to the site could make their own and leave in the shrine space, so the landscape and shrine site would increase incrementally as more people added their objects but also it gives the viewer a way to personalize the site for themselves – b/c who believes what about the landscape? Which religion would we represent? How to condense all cultures/viewers/beliefs/deities into one site? Let this site be about the users and what a shrine means to them
questions – what form will this take? Mini shrines? Rocks that visitors inscribe with their own messages and then leave in the peony field? Flags? Object/structures people donate and leave in the arb? What happens when the installation is done – do the objects get left, or do we take them with us?
huron river: making temperature and velocity changes in the river visable
strings of lights anchored within the river that changed color/frequency in response to velocity and temperature of the water changing. As in a tea light ceremony.
Problem – how does the viewer know what they are looking at? Is that ok? I would like to get a single word focus for this site.
Hidden river: make visible rivers that have been buried underground b/c they did not fit into the site plan for the arb – create a change above ground to illustrate whats below
Figure out where these hidden rivers start and end, and then run installations along their paths – elevated, to provide shade, people can walk under them too(?) –
Questions - why are these important to show, why bring them above ground? What will the installations be made out of, fabric? Too gates derivative? Metal? Plastic? Again, how will the viewer know what they’re looking at?
I think all of these changes also make the installations things that we can install and leave up for three weeks.
Also discussed GIS data, and how to interface it within these installations. Possible idea – if the gis images have a grid system embedded in them and the motion tracking device inputs also operate on a grid system, then how can we track users within a landscape and have it act as a live feed to alter/manipulate a gis image of the same landscape, perhaps online? Ask rodemer or pell about this one.
Re: meeting with bob gracie tomorrow – questions:
-are there any outlets in the arb that we can tap into?
-can we tap into outlets in the house by the peony garden?
-can we do any earthmoving – in the prairie specifically, but in the arb at all? Mention possible installation of poles, shrine structures, etc –
-when does he need a productin.fabricatin.installation schedule from us by?
-plan to open april 21st (Friday) and run for three weeks –
-is an installation that constantly emits sound a possibility?
Out door installations in the arb – who has done them before?
-housing types used?
-speakers used?
-entrances to the arb – is there a third entrance somewhere in the south?

Assignments for next week (per site)
SITE VISIT – Saturday 9am to noon (with gis camera and pos. tom brayto start quicktime vr capture?)
Prairie – carrie will figure out per scale of the new maps how many tvs we need in there and get an exact power requirement –
DURING SITE VISIT – capture with gis camera. Bring maybe some 1’ x 1’ pieces of plastic or soemthign and place them around to get a sense of whats going where.
Invasive species – carrie will keep working on the motion sensor
DURING SITE VISIT – tao and russ will get 5 dif colors flagging tape this week and we will go into the arb and tag invasives on sat.
Huron river – russ will research led lights for purchase. Carrie will plot (based on larger map scale) how far we will need to place lights along the river (mike estimates that from the school girls glenn to the train tracks is 1500 feet – 400 feet should be enough to get 200 feet above and below the stone arc
Hidden river – tao will figure out where these rivers are exactly, where they started and where they end.
All will email russ web template feedback

GIS/Remote Sensing Shelter

I've been thinking about the GIS structure because something was bothering me about it. I think the problem was that it didn't seem to have a conceptual tie-in to the rest of the pieces, especially if it is in the vicinity of the shrine site.

My thought was maybe the structure could be a blown-up, in terms of scale, shrine or home to a digital spirit (as opposed to a digital representation of a natural spirit). Perhaps this is a spirit that embodies this human-made technology (good old animism, there's a spirit in everything). An "advanced" spirit that observes "primitive" or ancestral spirits. It literally looks down from the heavens, I wonder if this spirit would have a god complex.

Below is a Japanese shrine, probably Shinto, beneath a tree.



Maybe the structure we build could be beneath a solar panel tree. I was thinking also that perhaps only one person could enter at a time, maybe also limit the size of the structure. It would not only be a more intimate experience, it would also be easier to track the motion of one object/orb/person.

1st Website Sketch