dave's blog of art and programming

Category: swamp-bikeopera

  • Sonic Kayaks: musical instruments for marine exploration

    Here is a bit of a writeup of the gubbins going into the sonic kayaks project. We only have a few weeks to go until the kayaks’ maiden voyages at the British Science Festival, so we are ramping things up, with a week of intense testing and production last week with Kirsty Kemp, Kaffe Matthews…

  • Sonic Kayaks Hacklab

    Part one of our two events for British Science Week was the Sonic Kayak open Hacklab with Kaffe Matthews and Dr. Kirsty Kemp. Amber has reported our findings here, this was the first time we successfully trialled the technology and ideas behind the Sonic Kayak, in future we will be refining them into instruments for…

  • Sonic Bikes to Sonic Kayaks – using puredata

    When I first started working on the Sonic Bikes project with Kaffe Matthews in 2013 I had just moved to Cornwall, and I used the Penryn river for developing “The swamp that was” installation we made for Ghent. We’ve always talked about bringing this project here, but the various limitations of cycling (fast roads, stupid…

  • Cornwall “Let’s Get Digital” presentation

    Here’s a presentation I gave at the end of last year at a Creative Skills Cornwall meeting at Falmouth University. I introduced the problems of a growing producer/consumer digital divide – the need for more public discourse in the politics of technology and how free software, codeclub, livecoding, algorithmic weaving and sonic bikes can indicate…

  • Sonic Bike Hacklab Part 3: The anti-cloud – towards bike to bike mesh networking

    [Continued from part 2] One of the philosophies that pre-dates my involvement with the sonic bikes project is a refusal of cloud technologies – to avoid the use of a central server and to provide everything required (map, sounds and computation) on board the bikes. As the problems with cloud technology become more well known,…

  • Sonic Bike Hacklab Part 2: FM accelerometer transmissions

    [Continued from part 1] On day one, after we introduced the project and the themes we wanted to explore, Ryan Jordan had a great idea of how to prototype the bike-bike communication using FM radio transmissions. He quickly freeform built a short range FM transmitter powered by a 9v battery. The next thing we needed…

  • Sonic Bike Hacklab: Part 1

    Time to report on the sonic bike hacklab Kaffe Matthews and I put on in AudRey HQ in Hackney. We had a sunny and stormy week of investigation into sonic bike technology. After producing three installations with sonic bikes, the purpose of the lab was to open the project up to more people with fresh…

  • ‘The Marja trio’ – Sonic Bike Experience for Marjaniemi

    I’ve been doing more remote install work on Kaffe’s latest piece she’s been building while resident at Hai Art in Hailuoto, an island in the north of Finland. The zone building, site specific sample composing and microscopic Beagleboard log debugging is over, and two new GPS Opera bikes are born! Go to Hai Art or…

  • Bike Opera – layering sounds in space

    New advancements on the the bike opera project with Kaffe Matthews include a brand new mapping tool based on, yes you guessed it – Ushahidi which I’ve been using for a lot of wildly different projects recently. This time the work has been mainly focused in improving the area mapping – adding features for editing…

  • New Portuguese Bicycle Operatics

    Prepare your bicycle clips! Kaffe Matthews and I are starting work on a new Bicycle Opera piece for the city of Porto, I’m working on a new mapping tool and adding some new zone types to the audio system. While working on a BeagleBoard from one of the bikes used in the Ghent installation of…