1 Feb 2010 I ordered the necessary medical parts to complete the sculpture on Saturday. Sunday, I contacted a nurse friend who was willing to help me with the project. We arrangeda meeting and she drew blood for me. So far I am very pleased with the restults. As of this writing, it has been just about 1:15 since the blood was drawn. Here is a picture of the test tubes she got me
The green and purple ones are regular. NO special juice inside. The yellow one has a bioculture gel at the bottom that makes the blood become like Jell-o. The last teal one was for testing and also to see if it is at all possible to get the tag off. What makes these tubes special is that they are vacuum. They contain virtually no air so this makes the blood clot at a much slower rate. So far the clotting has barely begun and the blood in the yellow tube is very much like one large chunk of meat. I want the consistensy to remain liquid and according to my friend's instructions, blood can safely remain in the tubes (for testing purposes) for up to 48 hours. This means that if I collect more samples on the day of the showing, it should be good for at least the entire day. This is great news as I was worried that clotting would occur much faster. And another pic, for shits'n giggles.
25 Jan 2010 This week we get to see what the other teams and individuals have in mind for the midterm project presentation. At any rate, Here is ours. I will be teamed up with Peter Rockwell for the execution of this piece.
17 Jan 2010 On the individualisation of technical objects. I've never seen something so simple explained in so many complicated words. There is interference between technical objects. They react best when operated on a standalon basis. An oscillator makes noise and will therefore affect itself and any other oscillators in the vicinity. Those machines are a lot like people. They are never out of context. Isn't a person just a bunch of sensors connected to some squishy processor? When put in a room with anything else, a person will happen to react; consciously or not. Same goes with any machine. Take any commercially available electronic object and it says pretty much that on the warning label. "This device is subject to any received interference[...]" But then again, isn't philosophy about stating the obvious in a very complex manner?
7 Jan 2010 I figured out that setting up a Wordpress blog is a lot of work for just about no reason. I made my blog for CART498F in plain HTML and it was great. So here is plain HTML once again. 3 things that inspire me. The theme for this piece is "body". Pretty vast as far as themes go. Well, I like making objects. Who says objects says affordances. Then I started thinking about affordances in software. They suck. Problem is, software can only do what it is programmed to do. The minute you start coding an affordace, it becomes a feature. Then I thought some more. The closest thing we have to affordances in software are: