Lisdon-A Metropolis by doublexposure

Lisdon the Metropolis:
Which are the differences between the sound landscapes of Lisbon and London? To explore that, nothing better than 'seeing' both cities through the ears of a commuter. Each interchange, each conversation, each door opening and closing, every passenger speeding up its daily routine, is going to be put up to the test in a sonic battlefield.

This is the basic premises of the new project I've done with Amadeu Dias. By overlapping sounds recorded both in London and in Lisbon, we've tried to somehow eliminate the distance and create a metropolitan dialogue, whispered in our ears. The project aired on the 21st of October in Radio Futura, as part of the Future Places festival.

Due to the extensive use of stereo to differentiate both locations, for best results we suggest the use of headphones.

We, as the Double Exposure Collective, are currently exploring a similar concept but with images instead of sounds, by exposing the same 35mm photographic roll twice, once in each city. More on this soon!

This is a fully parametric extra shelf generated by a Processing code I've uploaded to Thingiverse. When I want another shelf, I measure my space and the things I want to store in it, and change the parameters of the application in order to generate a new extra shelf, perfect for my needs. Apart from being quite useful to me in my tiny student housing space, I've made this as an example of a vision of the future: Parametric Autonomous Super Stores.

Today we go to Ikea and we can choose a furniture set, combine modules, pick materials and go get the right products from the warehouse. Now imagine that we could not only choose modules, colours and materials but also each individual parameter of the furniture piece, such as the height, depth or the number of shelves and doors, from the store's website and preview them in place virtually overlayed on the video feed of our living room, using an augmented reality phone or tablet. When we finish configuring our furniture, we place the order and wait for it to be completed. Digital fabrication makes it cheap and easy for unique objects to be built. When we receive a confirmation that our new furniture is ready to be picked up we drive to the store, park the car in front of one of the picking places, and let the system scan our phone (or a printed page with a barcode, for instance). Some seconds after, the autonomous warehouse delivers our own unique furniture kit.

Now wouldn't that be cool?

Getting original on the cheap! I like the idea of giving out something personal when giving out business or contact cards so I've wrote a computer algorithm to generate hundreds of different images from pieces of my photos and the result is these fragments of my life, things I've seen and places I've been that people can chose from and take the one they like the most. To make all cards different from each other I've got them done on moo.com, which was the only service on the web that I could find which let me do this, plus the paper and print quality are really great!

The QRCode points to my website right now but I mean to add a nice mobile-friendly version of the contacts page with a text box to leave messages and links to twitter and flickr.. when I have time.

Here's the Processing sketch I've quickly put together to generate the images, in case you are curious or even want to generate your own cards! I've used the Mesh library to make the triangulation.

Processing sketch

This weekend I had a really good time while attending Pachube's Internet of Things Hackathon! Me and Frieder Ganz, from the University of Surrey, went out to get some inspiration for the hackathon project and ended up buying a very cheesy Maneki Neko in Chinatown.

After some seriously low-tech hacking (the cat still has a chocolate bag inside its arm) we fitted a Servo motor for controlling the arm position, two evil looking red LED's in the eyes and a speaker on the bottom and connected it to an arduino+ethernet shield.

On the programming side, the cat reacted (moving the arm, blinking the eyes and singing a few tunes) to several expressions and hashtags people were using on Twitter and also mapped the wind speed in Lisbon to the arm position, using a Pachube feed. The concept was to have a personal object that would tell us some information just by looking at it, if it's going to rain today or if someone is talking about us on Twitter, for example.

ExtraOutputs is a small Arduino Library that makes it super simple to add more digital output pins to the Arduino, using the 74HC595 IC. The 74HC595 is a practical and very cheap IC that allows us to "indefinitely" expand the arduino's output pins.

This Library allows you to control one or more connected 74HC595 just like you control the digital pins of the Arduino.

DOWNLOAD EXTRAOUTPUTS

To install the library move the folder inside the zip file to the Arduino Libraries folder and restart the Arduino Environment. 

The 74HC595 is really cheap, as you can see on the Ebay link below:
Ebay Search for 74HC595: http://shop.ebay.com/?_nkw=74hc595
Data Sheet: http://www.nxp.com/documents/data_sheet/74HC_HCT595.pdf