Updated Idea and Progression

So in my previous post I made reference to a number of digital to physical projects that involve web content of different kinds. I also commented on a project idea that involved creating digital content from a physical environment and that project idea is the following.

My idea is to create a physical installation that takes sounds (in particular speech) from an environment and transforms them into online digital content. The plan is to use speech from a public environment and transform that into online content via twitter. The context behind this idea is to use speech from a public environment and convert it to tweets, due to the idea of twitter being a public environment for thoughts and ideas.

I came across two patches for Max/MSP interactive software that would possibly help me to create a physical to digital project. The two patches are Twitter for Max/MSP and "aka.Listen". Twitter for max/MSP allows the user to directly tweet to twitter via the max/MSP environment. This would enables me to connect other ways to communicate with twitter using this max object. The aka.listen object is a speech recognition application that uses Mac OSX's speech command system to enable the user to use voice control within max/MSP.

So far I have successfully managed to connect the two objects so that when a user speaks it records what they say and adds the speech to text recognition into a text box ready to be sent to Twitter. I need to explore these further as at the moment I have to assign specific keywords to the aka.listen object in order for words to be recognised by voice, it does not automatically detect spoken words but only specified words or phrases so it seems. This could cause some issues with the project plan due to the fact I want it to be unrestricted in terms of content production and not be pre-determined as this would defeat the object of the project itself.

My next step is to explore whether there is another way for the speech recognition to detect spoken words with out having to input specific phrases, failing that I may try and find a way to add an entire dictionary to the patch so that it automatically loads all available words within the english language...

A Few More Digital to Physical Art Projects

Here are a few more digital to physical (and vice versa) projects. The first was a project referred to me by Gianni called 'Listening Post'. This project is another example of a digital to physical art project. It works by displaying both visually and audibly, content from the web that was posted seconds before being displayed. It is passed through a variety of filtering mechanisms and they appear on 231 text displays and a sound system.

This project enables digital web content to displayed both visually and audibly into a physical environment. The Video Below demonstrates how the project works fully and how it displays the content.

This project as well as the projects in the previous post gave me the idea of using twitter to create a physical to digital project that holds the context of creating digital content using the surrounding physical environment and by using in particular public environments to create the public content category that twitter and tweets fall into. The idea of tweeting being a public act for all to see and to involve with on the web could involve the idea of using a public physical environment to create digital public content such as twitter tweets.

I will explain more in my next post...

Gianni Meeting (2) & References & inspiration

So I had another meeting with Gianni about project progression and ideas. He felt that the idea of a project involving autonomous art controlled by twitter didn't really have a strong context in terms of what the project is trying to achieve and wasn't really focused enough.

I shared a few more ideas with Gianni that were different to the autonomous art project that involved bringing digital content into a physical element. All of which still involved using Twitter as a source of user generated material.

The References I showed Gianni all involved using twitters digital presence and bringing that from the web into a physical form. I found a blog containing three pages of twitter art projects that bring twitter from digital to physical. the blogs are found at:

http://www.creativeapplications.net/webapp/5-twitter-art-projects-webapp/

http://www.creativeapplications.net/webapp/twitter-art-projects-part-2-webapp/

http://www.creativeapplications.net/webapp/5-twitter-art-projects-volume-3-webapp/

The projects that stood out from the three pages of blog posts are the following:

The first is the 'Chalkbot' a twitter art project that is part of Nikes Tour de France - Lance Armstrong campaign. It featured a huge road printer that would print users tweets regarding the race at points on the road itself. The project according to Nike features a "pneumatic robot and software system. The system includes a text message interface, web based queue and approval system for tour officials, onboard machine and nozzle control, spray mechanism, camera and GPS capture system, and Twitter integration." This project brings digital content and takes it from a virtual environment and transforms it into a physical print. Below is a clip of how the Chalkbot works. This is a great example of publicly displaying digital content in a physical approach on a large scale.

The next project of interest was an art installation that audibly displays current tweets containing the word art though a selection of toy robots that were customised using text to speech software. This is another example of bringing web based content into a physical environment.

Where is your art? from nilseuropa on Vimeo.

This project involves users tweeting to twitter via a computer and then having them printed out on small label strips. Once the tweets are sent to print, they are removed from the web and only exist in the physical arena. The user gets a message on twitter stating that their tweet has successfully been sent to the physical world and removed from the digital environment.

default to public: tweetleak from sport4minus on Vimeo.

These are just three great examples of digital to physical web content projects, be sure to check out the three web links at the beginning of this post to see the rest of the projects featuring twitter.