Thanks to german SPEX-Magazine for publishing a detailled and nice article in their Blog. It’s not only about “Aufstand der Dinge” but also describes some other things we did. We don’t completely agree on being called “Extrem-Geeks” – but thats how press business works.
As well we wanna invite everyone to Neoangins / Jim Avignons Concert on Sunday 25th at 19h, Gallery Sakamoto. Its going to be the Releaseparty for Yukihiri Taguchis new music-video (we already saw it, great work!)
Our art-installation went quite well last Saturday. We’ve been working the whole night through building and programing and made it work in the very last minute. Well, almost work. Due to some strange Arduino-problems not everything was as interactive as we wished – but you wouldnt notice until you know it.
Thanks to everyone who came (about 400 People!), it was a great evening. Kaspar already posted some pictures on Flickr. We’ll improve the interactivity of the installation in the coming weeks and will post more details about some single machines / cardboard boxes as well.
If you live in Berlin- we invite you on the 25th of January. Yuhihiro Taguchi who showed his wonderful installation and stop-motion-movies at Sakamoto-Gallery before we entered the space will create a music-video for Jim Avignons one-Man-band Neoangin and present it around 6pm. There will also be a Neoangin-concert and we plan to make the machines dance to the rhythm.
(Day 2 of 7: filling the boxes)
Here you can see the world – and us creating it. Together with our friend Jim Avignon we’re currently putting together a mountain of cardboard-boxes and a real lot of fancy electronic gadgets (including 15 servo motors, 2 wiimotes, 2 arduinos, an old cash-receipt-printer (which tickers twitter), a tikitag-RFID-Reader, an old Atari-Joystick, a gembird switchable power-bar and much, much more.)
In the end there will be a controllable world-map (11 x 3-meters) and an arty ehibition called “Der Aufstand der Dinge” in SAKAMOTOcontemporary Gallery, Oranienstr. 164, Berlin-Kreuzberg. Its obviously about things and tools regaining control and theres more info in german on the gallerys site.
This is by far the biggest thing we’ve ever build. We’re hoping to be finished till the opening on saturday (18pm) – and to find some time to tell you more about the technical side of the project. Hopefully we also get our webcam running as soon as possible.
Hello SMS Jukebox is an interactive horoscope for partys and vernissages. People can ask all kinds of questions by sms, adding their name and birthdate. The Jukebox then blinks, a character repeats the question on the screen and the horoscope, personalized by a clever fox, gives the answer.
We built the SMS-Jukebox using: an old Nokia 6310 and a datacable, Gammu to submit the SMS to a MySQL-Database, PHP for the Horoscope-Backend and XML-output, Python and MaryTTS (thanks to Universität Saarland for their fast TTS-Server!) to generate the voices, XML and Adobe Flash to display everything on the screen. The Flash-Part was written by Barbara Rauh and the style, music and characters were created by Jim Avignon. The holy (and secret) horoscope itself lives in Scotland and Berlin.
So far we’ve had fun presenting the SMS Jukebox in Athens (Goethe Institut), Berlin (Haus Schwarzenberg), Luzern (Fumetto-Festival), Munich (Jörg-Heitsch Gallery) and New York (Deutsches Haus).
> View the Jukebox-Demo (without questions and answers)
> More pictures and details on jukebox.mtz.in