Subway

One of my semi-secret projects got picked up to be in the Activist Technology Demoday at Eyebeam in NYC ( http://demo-day.org/  http://www.eyebeam.org/events/activist-technology-demo-day )

You can learn more about our project at:

http://dwig.lcc.gatech.edu/projects/Quitmeyer/subway/main.php

Tortoise Tracker (Analogue Version)

I created an Instructable for the best means that I have found for keeping track of mischievous pet tortoises. It also includes an overview of fun, weird alternate methods that I have attempted in the past.

http://www.instructables.com/id/Tortoise-Tracker-Analogue-Version/

Laser Cutting Test Tubes

I had to make even cylindrical obstacles for ant experiments and decided to try out laser cutting test tubes into small chunks.

If i got on a lower power setting and keep going around and around, it will actually cleanly cut through, but i got bored and opted for a technique of just etching the glass with the laser, and using its built up heat to bring it under a cold tap water and the two parts just pop off rather cleanly.

 I'll be adding fluon to these so the ants don't crawl up and into them.

__

Sincerely,

Andrew James Quitmeyer
Digital Media PhD Student/Researcher, Georgia Institute of Technology

www.andrewquitmeyer.com

Mark Your Territory: Release!

As I am prepping its paper for submission to TEI 2012, i have officially released Mark Your Territory.

check it all out at 

www.markyourterritory.org

Explanatory video is here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRdfeb7vDWg

My instructable for the project also got featured!

http://www.instructables.com/id/Pee-to-Check-In-to-Foursquare-Mark-Your-Territor/

 

Iranian Subversive Performance Proposals

MYT additions

Earlier, for the MYT project, i talked about encoding personal messages into the plants grown from one's marker and finding cheap effective means of reading this information. This article from boingboing shows that this sort of tech is not too far off.

http://boingboing.net/2011/09/29/encoding-text-with-gm-bacteria.html

"a steganographic text-encoding scheme that uses bacteria to encode messages and selective antibiotics to reveal them. It was conceived of in response to a DARPA challenge to devise non-electrical text-encoding, but its applications include adding text-based information to GM crops that can be read in the field (or in the market) to determine what's being grown."

MYT Design Phase 1

The first step was to prototype the purely physical stage of the product. This means prototyping and designing a marker with several intersecting qualities related to taking ownership of a particular locale. The key features that I initially needed to design for come down to the following:

1) Visibility - Bright, eye catching, indicative of a user's goals and actions.

2) Resilience - especially to being soaked with water/urine

3) Conductivity - To measure the power of your pee with the arduino

4) Mutability - to provide a bit more engagement and feelings of accomplishment for the interactor, the device should react and change in accord with the user's actions (peeing on it makes it different)

5) Semi-Permanence - Littering sucks, and also this increasing the dynamics of claiming spaces; once your marks bio-degrade you need to maintain your trips and markings of a place to retain leadership.

At first, I wanted to deal primarily with points 1 and 2 (and a little bit of 4). 

My very first goal was to create a little marker that, when peed on, would reveal a secret message.

A nice discussion of possibilities for doing this was held here:

http://www.instructables.com/community/Secret-Message-Revealed-After-Wet/

My beginning attempts focused on methods of imprinting an invisible message onto supposedly ordinary looking paper which would reveal itself once soaked in water or a mildly acidic or basic solution (urine). This was the tricky part- there are lots of methods for making invisible ink that reveals itself when activated by heat or UV, but liquid alone proved to be challenging.

I experimented with those crayola color changing markers, and tried to located that special crayola water color paper used by very young children, where the colors are activated by a paintbrush with ordinary water. 

The color changing markers failed to respond to water or urine in order to reveal the secret message. I tried various other chemicals too. 

Another difficulty to this problem was that the method should be mechanically repoducable (i wanted to print it) and the message was of high visual complexity (a QR code), and I needed high contrast for it to be machine readable.