This page refers to a theme in Dorkbot Seattle's upcoming (June-July 2009) electronic art show People Doing Strange Things with Electricity IV. For general information on the show see http://dorkbot.org/dorkbotsea/events/pdstwe4/.
Emergent Communication
Emergent Communication is a theme/collaborative project we're exploring this year, where artists are joining together to create languages, or protocols, that their artwork can use to mutually communicate.
The Emergent Communication network will be based on a text chat-room-like backbone using the Jabber protocol. Pieces will join in the chat and can submit and take text as needed.
Participating Artists
Eric McNeill: In the P-I This piece consists of two components: One half uses the last edition of the Seattle P-I as a source for making statements to the other half, which pulls information from the web in response. Each half formulates responses based on what the other participant said, i.e. a conversation. For Emergent Communication, some of the statements will be sent to the Jabber chat room, and the piece will use some of the Jabber conversation as input.
Stewart McCullough and Rhy Mednick: - A Modest Garden : We are building a garden in which puppets respond to signals, which make the puppets either grow or shrink, depending on what signals are received. For more information, see the full description here: EmergentCommunication/Stewart_McCullough.
Andrew Peterson: Touch Doll With Animating Former Self Pelt This is a circuit bent Elmo toy that, when physically activated (touched) by the audience, will talk to Stewart and Rhy's puppet garden piece.
Archival Info...
Tribe and Protocol Ideas:
/OctaveOfLight - tribe based on Octave
/OctaveProtocol - 8 notes/colors/meanings
/ChronosAndAdagio - 2 simple(r) to implement related protocols
rosetta_stone - (obsolete)
Emerging Project Ideas:
Thinking and Dreaming [Michele Boland] This piece will be an exploration of the things that occupy our thoughts. The piece will take the physical form of a transparent human head. Contained within will be a display for visual images, speakers for sound, and visual clues as to the emotions that the sounds and images evoke. The piece will have limited points of contact for viewer interaction as well as some sensors. The device will access the show server infrastructure and will react to data shared across exhibits. Artist of other pieces in the show will be given an opportunity to add images and sounds to the collection contained in the piece to personalize the works reaction to the states of the othe pieces in the show.
Anti/Social Lights [Ari Lacenski] Just wanted to respond to the wiki's call for participation, since I am not able to come to meetings (my partner on this project is in Seattle.) The project is so far designed to communicate only with itself, but I am open to interfacing with other projects, if others have ideas. It's a set of soft, huggable lamps that change brightness (either up or down) in relation to other lamps. The two distance-sensing technologies I am currently exploring are: passive IR sensing using lots of photodiodes, and Zigbee platform mesh networking using XBee radios. If someone else's project is IR-bright or using Zigbee, we could talk to one another. I don't plan to have any text readout on my end, though. I'm alacenski at gmail dot com, if this sounds interesting to your project.
News and Past Planning Events
March 4: Planning Discussion: We spent about an hour at the end of this month's dorkbot taking stock of where we're at and figuring out where to go from here, as the 3/14 proposal deadline is looming. A number of ideas have been proposed in the past month but none have gelled into clearly defined tribes. With 10 people in attendance definitely planning on doing a piece for the show (plus at least 2-3 others that I know of that weren't there) we don't have enough participation to support a lot of tribes. However there were several commonalities that people gravitated towards:
- Text-based messaging
- Audible/tonal messaging
- A mix of low-level communication, e.g. touch, electric signals, etc.
Some decisions were made:
- Have a server/backbone oriented around text, with a pluggable architecture that'll be easy to write "bridging" modules to connect pieced in.
- Bridges will be written to connect pieces into the backbone, as needed based on the protocol used by the piece(s).
- Bridges could also allow communication with the outside world - subscribing to Twitter feeds, getting feedback from users on our web site, crawling for data, etc.
- Not all pieces must connect into the backbone. We may end up with some smaller isolated tribes, or perhaps a tribe where one member is bridged in.
Proposals do not have to include detailed specs of how you'll be bridged into the backbone. We'll need a general idea of what you're planning and assurance that you can get it done or team up with someone who can help.
Next Steps:
- Everyone planning on submitting a piece is encouraged to wiki a brief description of their idea, the protocol(s) being used, and how you're planning on bridging into the backbone. If you've got a great idea but don't know where to start with this bridging stuff please make a note of that also, and email blabber for help. We'll use this information to hook up people common protocols so we can reuse as much as possible.
- Michelle will sketch out an architecture for the backbone server piece.
Feb 20: UPDATE! Deadline for proposals extended to March 14th (from March 7).
Feb 4: Brainstorming Meeting: On Feb 4 we devoted our monthly dorkbot mtg to a brainstorming session on Emergent Communication (EC). We had about 30 people and many fantastic ideas about what this could be. One major discussion point was about the forming of "tribes", which would be smaller groups of artists agreeing on a common protocol for their pieces. One tribe may use low-level signals such as voltage levels, lights, noise, etc while another tribe might use higher-level protocols for sharing rich media. Translators could also be developed to communicate between multiple tribes.
Inititial thoughts on server topology
So after some investigation what I would propose is we put a server upp with and open source Jabber server. Openfire seems like a very feature rich option and it also has an open source client. We can develop simple plug ins for bridges to low level tribes as well as twitter and email. Anyone that wanted to consume the text stream would leverage the client.