[dorkbotsea-blabber] Brainstorming Emergent Communication Procotols

[Eric McNeill]

> It would be awful cool if there were interesting interactions, however

> unplanned, between multiple projects in the exhibition.



Yes! That's what I hope the "emergent" part of it will be! I'm glad to see
these ideas getting started. If you have any thoughts on activities or
formats for our meeting this Wednesday please let me know. We were thinking
some combination of small and large groups to get ideas going.



I saw a wall of Furbys a while back, at a gallery in NY. They had a woman
dancing in front of them. I remember thinking the sensors didn't have enough
power for what they were trying to do, because she really had to put some
effort in getting them to light up.



Along those lines, another piece I saw once (can't remember the artist) had
two mannequin heads tilted back, kind of facing each other. Each one was
autonomous with speech recognition/generation software, so that they could
sit there and talk to each other. But then a viewer could also insert
him/herself into the conversation. The artist did a good job of limiting the
subject of the conversation so that it wasn't just random thoughts, but at
the same time it didn't just repeat the same things over and over. It was
very cool.



eric


On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 1:35 AM, Heurihermilab <heurihermilab at gmail.com>wrote:

> > Years ago the Exploratorium had a travelling science exhibit on Chaos,
> and
> > had the perfect device:  an array of "Teddy Ruxpin" toys nailed to a
> wall.
> > These are teddybears which, when spoken to, will mumble a similar
> > distorted reply.
> >
> > Just imagine clapping or yelling.  The wall of teddies breaks into
> > murmuring as waves of delayed/distored sounds are propagated between
> > nearest neighbors.
>
> I'd always hoped the Furbys of the same period would be able to
> capture small bits of sound and regurgitate them on occasion; at least
> that would justify them being banned from CIA/NSA/etc premises a while
> back...
>
> Details of the protocols would be interesting -- can an individual
> Ruxpin know how many others are on the line?  Are there Doppler or
> other phase effects on the incoming infrared?  Can you fuzz their
> inputs with a mirror, or a candle and some well-chosen gestures?  How
> complex a finite state machine can we run in a Ruxpin, anyway?  It's
> not at all unlikely that there will be emergent effects from having
> bunches of them, but I suspect they may require a well-chosen
> networking rule, or two, to be viable/interesting in groups.
>
> It would be awful cool if there were interesting interactions, however
> unplanned, between multiple projects in the exhibition.  Or perhaps
> they will be affected by the crowds breaking up the usually-simple
> optical environment -- everybody wear reflective clothing!
>
> cj.
> ........................................................................
> .........dorkbot: people doing strange things with electricity..........
> ..........................http://dorkbot.org............................
> ........................................................................
>
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