::votl:: group modifies a typewriter to print out selfie ASCII art (via votl)
This would have been huge in the early 90s! Those fun BBS days.
I thought I had seen the last of selfie technology with the toaster that toasts a selfie into your bread.... but alas, I was wrong! The Russian project ::votl:: has been having a blast with their modified typewriter that prints out selfies in ASCII fashion. ::votl:: is a project headed by a Moscow-based artist named Dmitry Morozov. He is a media-artist and a sound engineer/musician that seems to produce a few art projects every month for display at different exhibitions around Moscow.
You can see his typewriter in action.
It seems like a very easy project to recreate if you are bored at home and want a quick spring project to keep yourself entertained. His nifty idea utilizes a Brother sx-4000 typewriter, an Arduino microcontroller, a camera, and a lamp (for optimal selfie lighting). It seems like he used a tablet to help the process along.
The video also gives you a glimpse of his coding which he did using Pure Data, a graphical coding interface that many artists use to program installations. They also hooked up Pure Data and Arduino with Max/Msp to process the camera data and lead to the final ASCII selfie ‘art.’ You can see a ton of finished products with some very serious looking Russian people on the::votl:: website: http://vtol.cc/filter/works/i-o
Another example of repurposing outdated technology for today’s passing fancies. This artist has a lot of projects that they do which involve sound and video.
Their other recent project, called a kalculator, utilizes a person’s internet ‘fame’ as an input for an electronic composition. This was featured at the "Worker and Kolkhoz Woman" exhibition at the Museum and Exhibition Center in Moscow this year. A user presses a button to randomly select one of 18 of the most famous artists in Russia. Then Google searches the internet for the number of times the artist’s name is mentioned. That number is then used to generate an electronic composition. The greater the number, the more complex and lengthy the composition becomes.
I suppose it also highlights how the internet is constantly growing and changing, which should serve to increase or decrease the ‘fame’ of the artists and thereby change the composition played. The hardware for this is an android table, an Arduino microcontroller, and a simple 2 channel speaker system. They just used Max/Msp for the software.
This group has a slew of different projects like these. Perhaps it can help you come up with future projects that you may want to tinker with in the coming months. Or perhaps you’ll be spending more time outdoors, away from the computers and hardware.
I suppose a more public art display would be more useful for a spring and summer tinker session, and they’ll be plenty around as the weather gets better. For now, enjoy the sunshine and get inspired! There will be more wacky displays and tech coming up soon.
C
See more news at: