nOtbOt held up pretty good during it's first showing at the GOGBOT festival, just one minor malfunction during the week which could luckily be fixed with good old gaffa tape :)

here's a pic of what i'm currently working on; i call it 'nOtbOt'.
It's an old Logitech force-feedback joystick, slightly modified to create 'dada-machinima' which will be shown at the GOGBOT-festival later this week...



messy soldering still...

I control the force-feedback servo's from within PD, and send the output of the potentiometers to another machine (through a joystick interface), which is running a videogame. The data generated by the virtual game-player is sent back to the first machine running PD, and is then hooked back up to the stick....creating a (force)feedback loop.

The feedback loop can be viewed as an automated player (bot, NPC) possessing rather crude artificial intelligence; it responds to it's own movements and it's virtual surroundings, yet the result is completely irratic behaviour : )

Future nOtbOts will have Artificial Neural Nets (ANN's) which provide for more interaction with exhibition visitors, hopefully resulting in more strange behaviour on both sides..

hacked up a pygame clone of 'Space Invaders' for the fine people at Villanella, which they showed at the opening of the new cultural season in Antwerp (B).

: )

took a lil break and hung out back east with old friends at Kongsi.
some history: Kongsi is/was an organisation for young artists and musicians in Enschede, the Netherlands, founded by a bunch of friends while studying at the AKI, academy for fine arts and design. We started out as a squatters-group which turned into a somewhat more 'legal' artist collective after several succesful exhibits. We basically squatted large buildings for workspace and exhibiting purposes, and were on kind of a rampage tour through the city for a couple of years...

Recently the city council 'gave back' the building we squatted first, and where we founded our organisation, the old school at Daalweg 73, hmm..so much stuff went down at this place, I won't even start...



Kongsi'll be there atleast untill august 2007, so if yr in the neighbourhood...
In the meantime they'll also be involved in setting up a medialab in the city center, together with Planetart, which might be interesting.

I'll be back there again soon for the GOGBOT festival, which takes place around the 14th of september. I will be showing my new 'nOtbOt' there, which i am frantically workin' on now... (more info up soon!)

here's a pic of my work for the graduate show at PZI, in which us first year students exhibited the outcome of the -instrumental- project...



walking through the gamelevel generated sounds on a PD-style Moog, and I kludged together an interface by which the switching of weapons would shift modulation of the sound.

Other tools used were the Steim-junXionBox in combination with the KBStick joystick hack, the wonderful q3apd, and ofcourse my gentoo boxes.

here's some more stuff on the Gamezone exhibit in Antwerpen. There's also more images on their site
Apparently the media coverage even made it to the evening news in Belgium, which can be viewed here

I found these pics on Peter's site, who came out with Eddo Stern for C-Level, showing the 'Waco Resurrection'

at the gamezone festival in Antwerpen right now, check it

just had the coolest glitch in a while...was playing some HL2 - i died, and so did my machine : )

made some minimal casemods (or should i say Kees_mod?) for exhibiting machinima stuff at the KunstVlaai

PlanetArt invited me to participate at KunstVlaai06, at the Westergasfabriek in Amsterdam.
Kees (mr. planetart) decided to set some MediaMarkt propaganda on fire during the opening, which made for some nice smoke effects on our hanging dead guy...

two exhibitions in May where i'll be showing new work:

Kunstvlaai6 , Westergasfabriekterrein, Amsterdam - opening May 6th 16.00h, open till May 14th (every day from 12.00h till 18.00h)

Gamezone De Singel, Antwerpen (B) - 24-28 May, every day from 14.00h till 19.00h - more info

updated some stuff on the STRP festival...



more here

got to play around with q3apd for a bit in a CollabLab at the Theaterschool in Amsterdam, courtesy of the Dance Unlimited programme.

Mostly worked with musician/composer Sebastian Schatz on a game version of the studio we worked in, hooked that up to PD and sent stuff to yet another machine through MIDI, wich mapped audio tracks into the physical space, corresponding with the virtual player's movements and location...(oh well, i guess you had to be there).



some more pics 'n stuff soon

I started making this map/level of our building here at PZI , so upon walking around with a cam i found this on the ceiling of our library:





now these buildings are strange anyway, but finding a leak before even trying to compile the thing was kinda weird...