“Sousveillance” is a response to the word surveillance. While many of us may be more familiar with the word surveillance, sousveillance is almost similar just sort of putting it in a different context.
The term “sousveillance”, is coined by Steve Mann. The word “sous” in the term comes from french and it means “below”. This responds to the word “sur” in surveillance which means “on” in french. The difference between Sousveillance and Surveillance is simply one is sousveillance denotes bring the camera down to human level instead of having other elements or higher authorities doing the watching.
Though I agree that Sousveillance is beneficial to society, I do believe it should be practiced with certain boundaries and precaution. It definitely helps one protect themselves and hold power accountable. However, it can also be misused and taken advantage of. Thus, I believe it should only be used as a response to surveillance. With the prevalance of smart phone technology and social media applications sousveillance is fully accessible and always in use. As such, we should also take into precaution how much we should support the act of sousveillance and how far is too far?
Midterm Project: Get into groups of not more than 4 to
create anything related to softwares we have learnt
- Processing, Arduino, Adafruit -
or anything related to experimental interaction.
My group mates and I brainstormed and eventually decided to use the Circuit Playground express to create an interactive agar piano using capacitive touch. From there, we built on the idea and wanted to our final product to produce something with visuals.
With that thought in mind, we decided to expand our initial idea into:
An interactive agar piano causing a visual to appear when a key on our “piano” is pressed.
inspiration
Use fruit to play soundsVisual produced with each sound made
division of work
Since our project consists of different components – Circuit Playground, Making of Agar and buying of fruits to experiment with, Processing – we decided to split our work into these categories as well. At the same time, we still all did research on ways to improve our project.
Processing — Claire
Ada Fruit — Dominique
Agar Agar fruit experimentation with Circuit Express— Jamie & Dinis
This way we could all work on our individual parts at our own time and put everything together at our group meetings.
Process
Our first group meeting was mainly to test out if capacitive touch really works with the fruits. Jamie and I prepared boxes of Agar and Jello to see the difference and brought whole pieces of fruits to test out as well.
Prepared a variety of materials to experiment for capacitive touchCircuit express programming
Unfortunately, our agars and jello did not work, instead we only managed to get the capacitive touch to work with the vegetable our fruit slice.
This method of poking crocodile clips into fruits worked and allowed us to play sounds by just touching the fruits. As a result, we decided to go back and try again as it should work with the Agar and at the same time, Claire could still work out the visuals through Processing.
Difficulties
During our consult on recess week, our group’s main problem was to link Adafruit to Processing so that one key on the “piano” is pressed, it will create a reaction in Processing, then forming a visual on screen because of the key pressed. However, there were several port issues and the adafruit code would not link. We first tried the method of connecting adafruit to arduino first as it may be easier to connect it bit by bit this way. BUT! It also didn’t work! Dominique and I realised that the computer port may not be recognised and tried to troubleshoot it through the control panel on her windows laptop.
Finally!!! We managed to fix it and the port connection was still successful so we eventually managed to transfer the code over. From there we worked out the connection to processing as well.
Claire was also struggling with the visuals as she wasn’t sure how to make the visuals come out and how to make it sync with the sound/key pressed. Thankfully she managed to clear her doubts and eventually coded boids that looked amazing 🙂 We all owe it to her for the coding on Processing.
Jamie suggested to use real piano audio notes instead of the adafruit sound, so that we can make it louder and also it is clearer that we are trying to mimic a original Piano.
On the day of the presentation itself, we realised that we were not able to carry out capacitive touch as processing reads pure touch and not different pressures. Because of that, we weren’t able to clip the crocodile clips as the boids will appear non stop because of the constant pressure and crash the code.
FINAL
I was in charge of creating the looks of the agar agar piano and testing out with the circuit express if the capacitive touch works with it, and it did! 🙂
Final Agar Piano Keys LookFinal Set UpFinal Boids Look: More swimming colourful triangles will appear everytime you touch the adafruit. They can swim in different patterns such as disperse, avoid and gather. They can also grow or shrink in size with different keys pressed.
Reflection
Overall, this project was enjoyable even though we met a lot of difficulties. I do think that it has taught us a lot and we have managed to find out more about these various softwares. Creating the Agar was fun but I hope to be able to do more coding for my future projects.
Do It With Others or DIWOfor short, is a term that was created back in 2006. The term DIWO, means what it stands for, of which is collaboration. With the world slowly revolving and advancing, individualism may not be the best way to progress because collaboration allows more than just working with possibly smarter people. Collaboration creates a community where everyone can share openly with one another.
Adobe Connect Screen Recording of Marc Garret with ADM students
After reading the article and watching the video of Marc Garret, I realised that DIWO is necessarily not limited strictly to art cultures. It can go beyond that and combine different fields together for example, art and science. By having such combinations, outcomes will be more effective and creative.
Here are some points that I have picked out after reading the article,
History of DIWO
Unexpectedly, DIWO did not start out in a pure art space, instead it started with experimental music sound and music in the late 80s and 90s. A music scene that speaks the same values as DIWO is the contemporary indie scene. Indie music scene is a independent music scene, most likely creating music that is in opposition to mainstream music. Like Indie, DIWO is also independent and self-governed due to its practice of grounded ideas and relational connections with others. DIWO most closely associated to Media Art, till today, is still struggling to find its place in the world. Media art depends largely on technology together with sound recordings and visual images to create art works. DIWO also has cultural and historical links with Net Art and Technical Media.
Roles between artists and curators
Practicing DIWO challenges the roles between artists and curators. With DIWO, there is no one strict role, an artist can become a co-curator and a curator can become a co-creator. This collaboration in a sense allows roles to be mixed around and opportunities for fresh ideas/opinions to grow. Like others say, sometimes it’s good to have a pair of fresh eyes. As such, DIWO promotes a more unique collaboration and sharing experience.
I resonate and agree with the practice of DIWO. As mentioned in the article, artists actively urge to introduce themselves as ‘new’ and ‘exciting’. Because of that, we don’t learn to move forward and create opportunities to receive greater, wider creative dialogue, we may forever be stuck in a cycle. The art of working with others, sharing information with others has definitely more pros and cons. DIWO is slowly getting recognition from the world.
A rising trend that is has values of DIWO is Crowd-sourcing where anyone and everyone can help contribute to a project whether it is sharing of ideas of helping monetarily. Because of crowd-sourcing, many projects that were once deemed impossible to create has now been completed and that is only possible because of collaboration.
I am excited to see the practice DIWO grow and impact the way the world does art or anything else for that matter!
Open Source as Culture/ Culture as Open Source by siva vaidhyanathan
“Open source” had always been the less preferred choice known to be the insurgent model to proprietary models to the general public . However, this was because humans have been so accustomed and influenced by proprietary information. Little do they know that the “open source” way is closer to how human creativity usually works.
Nearer to date, the advantages of the “open source” model of creativity and commerce have become clearer, revealing flaws and faults of the chief regulatory system such as copyright.
Copyright aims to protect media and its creativity but also limits the improvement of softwares, devices and bans the sharing of techniques and tools with others. Richard Stallman, a computing scientist, was “offended that openness was being criminalised”.
Of late, more countries such as South Africa, Brazil and China have realised the practicality of “open source” models and are now encouraging the dissemination of these softwares. In fact, “open source” is now advancing past software and into licenses. Common “open source” sites are also commonly used by the general public such as Wikipedia.
Copyright can no longer work the same way it used to due to the changes in practices. With “open source” models, copyright is no longer a a single right bestowed on a single author but is now a group of rights that the author may license to others.
“Open source” was something that was unfamiliar to many and difficult to advocate. However, it is now more and more accepted, proving it’s brilliant success and positive habits on the world.
