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Blogging continues elsewhere…
All blogging will continue principally on the foam website blog section as well as on project specific blogs such as the Penelope site.
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Penelopean robotics – radio transmissions (part 3)
On the Penelope project, our plan was to develop technologies that could be useful in constructing a swarm of robots which could be livecoded by using the pattern matrix – a general purpose tangible programming system based on the Raspberry Pi. In order to make communication possible remotely, radio is the most obvious approach to…
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Penelopean robotics (part 2)
Penelopean robotics are about rebuilding technology in the woven cosmos. You can read more about the theory in part 1, but roughly our aims are to: Embody Penelopean technological practice – they should be easily undone (taken apart) so they can be understandable, self documenting and repairable. They are not automated looms, but must eventually…
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Stackable hexagon prototype boards
We are working on a lot of hardware projects at the moment as we are interested in how to to rebuild technology from various alternative starting points. It seems most “off the shelf” hardware has converged on increasingly inaccessible and conservative forms, but luckily (and probably not due to entirely unrelated reasons) at the same…
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Viruscraft: tangible interface electronics
We needed to get a working prototype of our tangible interface running for the second Viruscraft workshop, so that we could have a complete system up and running from the custom hardware to the on-screen game world for people to test and give us feedback on how it worked. You can read Amber’s full report…
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Penelopean robotics theory and the woven cosmos (part 1)
The Penelope project is concerned with many things, pattern structures in ancient poetry, comparisons of Andean and Greek mathematics, and the role of liveness in thought processes – to name just a few. We can also add robotics to this list. A weaver in action is often mistaken for a robot – perhaps it’s the…
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Building Viruscraft planets
The last months have been booked solid with production on various projects, so I’m very behind with blogging. This means that there are a few loose threads that I need to look back on and write about, one of which is the Viruscraft world. This is a screenshot of the current ‘alpha version’ of viruscraft…
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Viruscraft tangible hardware prototyping: etching PCBs
While we experiment with new fabrication techniques in order to shorten supply chains (with a philosophy of collapse in mind), electronics is problematic. Components can be salvaged and reclaimed but a particular problem is printed circuit board manufacture. Like many we have tended to outsource this work to China, where the costs allow us to…
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Midimutant in MagPi Magazine
Here’s an article on midimutant we did with Aphex Twin for MagPi Magazine, written by Sean McManus. Most of the work on this project recently has revolved around exploring custom hardware using old FM synth chips from games consoles, but with any luck there should be some more evolved DX7 sounds around here soon.
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Further attempts at untangling tablet weave
One of the great unknowns following the first weavecoding project was the nature of tablet weave. Other than a few primitive attempts that didn’t work in all cases and lead us to further questions, modelling tablet weave fully was left as an undeciphered mystery. Tablet weave is a complex and particularly ancient form of weaving,…