work + progress

Author: Salem

Shipwreck Society, presentation

This is the presentation Eamon and I did for the findings of our joint research project about both Shipwrecks and Muriquis.

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Sources

The call: ❂

Failure in conserving Muriquis + “It’s not just numbers, it’s dynamics.”: ❂

The Power of Environmental Narratives: ❂

Cod food web: ❂

“Ultimately art does not reside for me in the object. Art reside in what is said about the object.”: ❂

Biomorphic art: ❂

Pathology in Evolution: ❂

The concept of a shipwreck society: ❂

Homogeneity is bad: ❂

Ecology and Realist Ontology: ❂

Umwelt: ❂

October 23, 2014
Listening to the user

(This is in relation to my ongoing Online Wayfinding System project.)

Listening to the user

This week I conducted a survey. The main thing I wanted to learn about is whether users feel overwhelmed about their open tabs. Specifically, how many open tabs they often have open, what is the rough age of the oldest tab, and whether they do remember what brought them to each tab.

While most people had (unsurprisingly) more than 15 tabs, most of their tabs fell in the range 2 to 7 days old. I was expecting them to be older, but it is understandable as the respondents were ITP people, and we all go through our one-week cycles of homework.

Another important thing to note is that, typically, more than half of the tabs open are for regularly visited websites (e.g. email and social media). To me, this means that those belong to another category than “sessions.” They are static points that are always there and always open.

The above is a surprising finding to me, as most people indicated that they do remember the “reason” behind their open tabs. I think I was asking the wrong question, as yes, the reason (or more like the context, as in “my ICM assignment”) is easy to recall. But what about the process of navigation, the detours, and the progression of research?

Listening to the user’s interaction

I’ve been also working on “listening” to the user’s interaction with: 1) his tabs, and 2) the links he clicks. I use the term “listening” in its most technical sense, as in writing the code that listens to events and register them. I am, at the moment, able to detect when a new tab is opened, or when a tab’s url has changed. This data is used to instantiate nodes in the underlying graph data structure.

Listening to the data

Another thing I’ve been also experimenting with is the idea of grabbing more “meta” information about the content category of each visited website. I found an API that provides such information, but I am yet to try it out in action. (There is also the matter of the rate limitation, as there is a paid fee that incurs above a certain threshold.)

An interesting aside is a book I’ve been reading (more like randomly picking up and looking through). The book is called Elements of Spacemaking. It is about the elements that make up manmade spaces, and what it all means. For example, windows are not only a way to ventilate and let light in, they are also a medium of communication. Walls are there to guide movement; they are not only vertical surfaces.

October 23, 2014
False Starts and Happy Endings: Making a pen holder

For my Intro to Fabrication class final, I was a bit lost. My first inclination is to do something that mimics the aesthetics of butterflies, but I wanted to do something functional instead. Making pretty things is cool, but making pretty things that have a function is even cooler.

The first direction I explored is making a wooden phone case for my iPhone 5s.

The first thing I wanted to know about is the dimensions of said case. After a bit of googling, I found out that Apple has a publicly available document that has exact specifications of all its iDevices, as shown in the image above.

After playing around with (found) 3D models, I ended up with a pretty basic sliced model of the iPhone case that I wanted to cut using cardboard to get a sense of.

After multiple failed runs, where the size was either too large or too small, the whole thing felt ugly and uninspired. I had to change direction, I felt.

I started by playing around with basic shapes in Illustrator, as well as think about materials I want to work with. Acrylic is always my first choice, so no to that. Cardboard is great, but sort of rugged. I went to Staples and found the amazingness that is foam board. They come in all sort of beautiful colors, including a pleasant shade of muted gray as well as the blackest black possible.

The whole thing was an exercise in drawing modular, exchangeable shapes that are all based on the same basic shape. I felt better in this clean, simplified direction. By now I knew what I wanted to make: a penholder with an architectural appearance.

After a bit more experimentation, I went ahead and laser-cut the shapes in my newly acquired foam board.

The above was made using the gray foam board. I also used the black foam board for a more striking look.

After trying different arrangements, I felt the below is best because it’s orderly, asymmetrical and proportional.

After adding a bit of color, the below is the final assembled piece in all its functional (and nonfunctional) glory.

October 17, 2014
Shipwreck Society, research summary

Eamon, my partner in research, and I, have been thinking deeply about our joint research project about both shipwrecks (yay) and Muriquis, a particularly interesting semi-extinct species of monkeys.

Because it’s been a collaborative effort, we have our notes in a google doc for your voyeuristic pleasure. (Only viewable if you have an NYU email address.)

October 16, 2014
Slicing and Stacking

After a number of false starts, undelivered materials, and soul searching, I decided to use cardboard + vinyl as my material combination for this project. My self-defined challenge was to make it a 3D figure somehow out of those two materials.

I played around with 3d models to end up with a shape that is somewhere between a sphere and a cylinder. It seemed to fit the theme that I have recently been exploring of planes that are circular, but here with an additional dimension.

I used a freely available piece of software called 123D Make that helped me transform the shape into slices that I could cut using a laser cutter.

The circular pieces are made to stack. I wanted to make the whole thing a bit more interesting though.

I decided to use transparent vinyl pieces with a basic pattern to be placed between some of the pieces, again, to play with color and light, as I did in a previous project.

The below is one of the pieces after the first stage of the assembly + gluing.

And after another iteration of stacking and gluing:

And finally, after assembling the whole piece.

October 10, 2014
Code Planning

(This is in relation to my ongoing Online Wayfinding System project.)

I think it is time to get my proverbial feet wet. I’ve recently started coding my way through the project, and it is exciting. The above is an outline I’ve put through to help guide my process.

October 2, 2014
A Call for Shipwrecks

THE CALL

RESEARCH FINDINGS

I.

II.

III.

IV.

THE PROPOSAL

THERE IS ALWAYS MORE

October 1, 2014
Making A (Fictional) Dashboard

For this fabrication project, I decided to make an old dream come true by constructing some sort of a dashboard with buttons, knobs, and user interface details. The parameters of this project is a to build an enclosure with the needed components within and without. Since I am not sure what function I am looking for at the moment, I will design the inside of the enclosure as one that fits an arduino board + wires.

“MOOD BOARD”

To begin with, I started with collecting images that I like of real and fictional dashboards. I was after the retro look for some reason; it is much more aesthetically interesting than the usual hi-tech dashboards.

More specifically, I found the clean, minimalist visual style of the below Intellivision II design the most attractive. Especially with all the sharp lines and the minimal color.

SKETCHING

This project required an intensive sketching phase as there are many considerations for shape, measurements, and fixtures.

The first goal at this stage were to find out what kind of “components” I was looking for, first in terms of shapes, then in terms of actual manifestations. For instance, I started with thinking that I want a keypad-like thing, which translated into a matrix of square LED-buttons that are sold in Sparkfun. Another component is a round UI element, which perfectly stands for a readily available knob. For some instances, I will probably have a filler component (in paper? acrylics? Don’t know yet), as with the idea of having an LCD-like component.

Another important aspect is defining the shape of the enclosure, which is rectangular. In addition, the dimensions of each component chosen were used to come up with the dimensions of the enclosure. A good exercise was sketching the “net” design for the model as if it was made out of contagious paper pieces, to get a sense of it (and possibly prototype it). The net design can be seen on the lower part of the left page in the photo above.

I did my best with the “fixtures” at this stage. I have no concrete idea about their dimensions as of yet, so I had to make do.

COMPONENTS

Next was the ordering of the components as was decided in the above step. I ordering the following components from SparkFun:

PLATE DESIGN

I then used Illustrator to design the main plate, as well as two sub panels that will make up the dashboard and the surface of the enclosure. At this stage I have no concrete idea about the material, but regardless of that, this exercise helps tremendously in having the arrangement of the components on the surface to be rational and sound. A great resource for this stage was SparkFun’s product pages which had drawings of the components with measurements.

PROGRESS

The furthest I could reach in this project this week was to have both panels cut (one for the “LCD-like component” plus three switch buttons, and another for the 4×4 LED button matrix). I also have in place my enclosure (which is, again, a maple wooden canvas—it’s quickly becoming my favorite material), and a panel made of black-painted masonite (scratch) board.

I don’t have any fixtures in place, but hope to get a few by the weekend.

September 29, 2014
Reefs are grownup shipwrecks

This is a summary post that serves as a snapshoot for the interesting things I recently learned through my research of the subject of Shipwrecks, as part of the Temporary Expert class.

Reefs are grownup shipwrecks

1. Shipwrecks are accidental shelters for marine life. Predators and sedimentation are things that inhibit the growth and sprawl of smaller sea creatures that live on the ocean floor, which makes a change of the topographical quality of the ocean floor a welcome thing to its ecological system.

2. A beautiful example of this is the CondoFish project that was an accidental result of a the sinking of an anchored Mexican ship in the mid 1980s in the Playa Hermosa region in Costa Rica.

3. The ship sunk in shallow waters, and upon its discovery in 2002, the southern part of it, where ropes and nets were kept, was found to be completely covered by corals, small fish, and vegetation.

4. As a result, the CondoFish project came to being where efforts were made to design, test, and deploy artificial reefs in the (recreational divers abound) coast to both save and encourage marine life there.

Not all reefs are made equal

5. One endangered species that is greatly benefitting from the structural properties of sunken ships is oysters. Their environmental value lies in their agency in consuming excess nutrient in the ocean floor, recycling them in some cases.

6. A study was conducted to find the optimum reef configuration to induce both a sustainable growth in an oyster community, as well as survival against predators, compared the effects of four arrangements according to their vertical-horizontal orientation, and whether they contain a shelter or not.

7. The advantage of a horizontal arrangement in an artificial reef is that it increases the chance of contact between abandoned oyster shells, and young larvae that seek to settle and grow in a reef. (Oysters generally nest on shells that are abandoned and they gradually make their own.)

8. However, in times of high sedimentation, a horizontal arrangement has the major disadvantage of lowering the number of growing oysters as the sediments can effectively kill the larvae.

9. Therefore, a vertical arrangement is superior in times of high sediment, even if the level of contact is decreased. This was proved by the study’s empirical results.

10. In terms of the effects of having a shelter in the structure of the reef, empirical results found that the number of settled oysters in arrangements with shelters is noticeably less than cases without. However, with the presence of predators, the percentage of surviving species is much higher than shelter-free reef arrangements.

11. Therefore, taking both the size of the communities within reefs as well as the percentage of surviving oysters in cases of predators and high sedimentation, vertical reef structures that contain sheltering alcoves are the best arrangement for oysters to prosper.

Please save our oysters

12. There has been a number of cases of catastrophic loss of oysters population as well as corresponding efforts to correct them.

13. Locally, the NY-NJ Harbor Estuary lost a great deal of its (once famously abundant) oyster population to water pollution, overfishing, and disease.

14. One major effort was the NY-NJ Harbor’s studies conducted between 2010 to 2013 to deploy and monitor a number of artificial reefs in a number of locations to assess the feasibility of a major restoration effort.

15. Another catastrophe is the almost complete depletion of the (reportedly delicious) Olympian oysters in the Bay area, specifically Tomales Bay.

16. This time the culprit is global warming: the increase of CO2 in the water results in increased acidity that effectively eat into the shells, making them more fragile and their oysters vulnerable to predators and sedimentation.

17. Another effort I am currently investigating is one in Al-Aqaba gulf in Palestine/Israel.

Reefs are art too

18. There seem to be an interesting pattern in the field of environmental art where artists are making meaningful work by creating artificial reefs.

19. One of the most inspiring instances is the work of Jason deCaires Taylor, who made a series of surreally beautiful statues that are not only aesthetically pleasing, but environmentally conductive in two ways!

20. The statues have the obvious value as artificial reefs (for corals mostly), but they also serve as a distraction for the recreational divers from existing, natural reefs.

21. (The statues have also the communal value of being made from using persons from the fisherman village around the community in the sculpture casting process.)

22. Another local project is the Oyster-tecture project (currently invasatigating).

23. Also, the Manahatta project which even comes with its own curriculum of activties for kids that I hope to follow.

24. An amazing, local artist who I am hoping to meet soon is Colleen Flanigan. Her underwater work even includes electrical components (!!).

There is always more

25. And don’t get me started with the aesthetics of coral reefs…

26. There is an Instructable for everything, including How To Make Your Own Artificial Reef (courtesy of the CondoFish guys mentioned above).

27. There are vertical ships too!

(Photo on top is Jason deCaires Taylor’s Viccisitudes Sculptures. [I don’t own the rights to this photo. I’m only an overworked student, please don’t sue me!])

September 24, 2014
Operating On The Concept of Shipwrecks

Inspired by Marina’s conceptual research operations (Analogy, metonymy, conflation, juxtaposition, amplification, exaggeration, speculation, mimicry, false methology, and the absurd), I decided to document the results of my asking the operational questions on the subject of shipwrecks as I progress in my research.

The below is the google doc I am using to track my answers to said question. Scroll horizontally to view all the entries.

September 21, 2014