Hi all -

Still need short bio/statements from most people. Please write three or four sentences about your background and work, and e-mail it to me.

I also want to encourage everyone to bring in and present ideas for experiments or artworks they have been working on; this is an important part of developing things for the SpaceProbe show.

Yod Lafarge is scheduled to organize a presentation of pneumatics technology and its use in kinetic artworks for this week, May 27th. Other people (Rod and Mike) have talked about simple homemade pneumatics/hydraulics, which could fit well with this. It was suggested that we have a discussion on the theme of "qualities of movement" and "encoding natural forms". Please feel free to bring any artworks along these lines.

The following week, June 3rd, Victoria Scott will present welding and metalworking techniques, assisted by Graham Smith; we will be meeting at Graham's shop on that date, which is at 317 Adelaide Street West (at Peter St.), Suite 202, 585-9434. A suggested discussion topic was "motion and emotion" and "the human in the machine". Again, please bring any relevant works or ideas.

On June 10th, I'd like to have a presentation on various kinds of sensors. Perhaps the people who volunteered to present something on sound, light, touch, etc. could get together on this?

Last week, Rob Cruickshank presented his sound sculpture entitled "A few things they didn't teach at plumbing school". It is based on various lengths of PVC pipe which resonate at certain audio frequencies. A microphone picks up sound, which is sent through a pitch-shifter (SPX-90 effects unit), amplified and sent to a speaker in the bottom of the pipes. The microphone picks up the sound again, creating a feedback loop. The feedback is kept under control by placing a small 5-volt light bulb in series with the speaker; the more current going to the speaker, the higher the resistance of the light bulb, which tends to quiet down or "damp" loud sounds. There are shutters over the openings of the pipes, which are opened and closed with stepper motors. The motors are controlled using a stepper-controller chip, special-ordered from Electrosonic (about $10 each). Originally, Rob had planned to use a computer and optical sensors to control the motion patterns of the steppers, but ran into a number of problems. Instead, he used a very simple circuit consisting of a clock chip (555), a 4-bit binary divider/counter, and some AND gates which combined different combinations of the counter's outputs to create a complex pattern of movement.

Jim Ruxton then demonstrated the use of the BASIC Stamp's PWM command to control the brightness of a light bulb, again using the IRL-50 power transistor. He explained the use of separate power sources for the Stamp and the bulb; the fact that the Stamp had a built-in voltage regulator and could output a 5-volt supply that can be used to drive other chips but not motors, etc.

We moved on to a discussion that began with Paul Davies describing Norm White's (who couldn't be there) "Truth, Dare" proposal. Jeff Mann read out most of Norm's original post to the web site. There was a brief discussion of serial protocols, etc., and of Norm's proposal in general. There was a lot of interest in the proposal. Jeff pointed out that it might not adequately address some of the concepts relating to "translation and transformation of (real-world) signals and data streams" or "sense/transform/express" as described by Paul Davies. A few suggestions were made in this regard; see the ongoing discussion in the SpaceProbe forum at:
http://www.interaccess.org/forums/arg

We then moved to discussing the larger question of whether participation in a specific group project would be a requirement for the show that we have been talking about. Several people (Veronica, Graham, etc.) suggested that the show should be organized on the principle of works "on the theme of SpaceProbe", and there was general agreement on this. By this, we could include projects such as the one suggested by Norm, without excluding other works that people in this diverse group might like to do - either individually or in groups.

We retired to Squirelly's for refreshments, where Rob Erlich was chastised by another customer for poking the jello lamp with a big stick.

cu later

--
Jeff Mann