Author Archives: adkat

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Empathy Swarm, Open-Studio, Robotics, Studio |

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Open-Studio swarming with our guests

Some impressions of a busy night, full of emotions, enjoying the robots and explaining the backgrounds to our guests.

 

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

The work is coproduced at Kontejner within the framework of EMAP / EMARE and co-funded by Creative Europe.

 

Empathy Swarm, Event, Open-Studio, Residency, Studio |

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OPEN-STUDIO this Friday 31.08.2018 6 PM

Hey everyone!

We would like to invite you to our open-studio in Zagreb at the Academy of Fine Arts at Ilica 85.

Starting from 6 pm we invite you to check out our nice studio that we spent our EMARE residency with KONTEJNER at.

Electronics, etching, 3D-printing, camera tracking, emotion recognition — of course a lot of ROBOTS and FUN 🙂

 

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

The work is coproduced at Kontejner within the framework of EMAP / EMARE and co-funded by Creative Europe.

Empathy Swarm, Prototype, Robotics |

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Silent Running: Robertina and Kryten

With the dear help of professor Zorislav Šojat from Ruđer Bošković Institute, Zagreb, we finally managed to make the robots smooth and silent. 🙂

Learning about interrupt functions to get the update rates of the WiFi communication and the sending of PWM values to the brushless DC motors  independent of each other!

See Robertina and Kryten rolling smoothly on the grey “NASA” floor of the studio, while the prototyping of the next generation is in full work mode
–  10 robots to be seen soon, with new body and battery management!

 

 

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

The work is coproduced at Kontejner within the framework of EMAP / EMARE and co-funded by Creative Europe.

 

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Psychophysics Machines, Residency, Sound, Talk, Workshop |

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Lecture and Workshop: Machines in the Landscape of PLEMENITAS for Croatian Art students

The past weekend we spent with a group of students and their professors Ines Krasić, Mirjana Vodopija and Iva Ćurić from the Academy of Fine Arts Zagreb in the idyllic village of Plemenitaš where they have one week of lectures and workshops on the topic of SOUND from different experts ranging from mathematicians and physicists to composers, musicians and artists. We are situated in the middle of this field of experts and presented our work and Empathy Swarm in the relaxed atmosphere of an outdoor evening lecture and a workshop “Machines in the Landscape of Plemenitaš” with one of our Psychophysics Machines: Megatautophone.

In a first step we sent the students out to record the sounds that express how they experience Plemenitaš, capturing the sounds of the scenery, ranging from cicadas, birds, bells of sheep to the rustling leaves in the wind. Then they could listen to their recordings through the directional speaker and learn how to modify the sound to improve it for the special nature of the directional speaker, applying high-pass and low-pass filters to get into the correct frequency range. To capture the results of the workshop and as a prototype for a series of “Machines in the Landscape”, we put the Megatautophone into the landscape, giving it the transformed sounds of the landscape as a language to communicate with its surroundings. We shot videos from different positions and used Zoom X/Y microphones next to the cameras to record this ‘dialog’ of the machine with the landscape. The videos and sounds need still to be combined and cut. We will present it soon!

You can get an impression of the overall Plemenitaš workshops in the article  ” “Zvučni radovi” proizašli iz matematike i fizike” by Marinko Krmpotić.

We had a great time in Plemenitaš! Thanks to all organizers and our host Vesna Osojnički!

 

The work is coproduced at Kontejner within the framework of EMAP / EMARE and co-funded by Creative Europe.

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Residency, Studio |

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Check out our studio in Zagreb

Those first weeks of the residency with Kontejner have been very busy: meeting experts and new friends,
setting up our lab that we took with us from home to get the tool chain up and running again for the next generation of prototypes,
while prototype Kryten is the guinea pig for finalizing the PCB design and programming steering behaviors.

 

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

The work is coproduced at Kontejner within the framework of EMAP / EMARE and co-funded by Creative Europe.

 

Interview, Psychophysics Machines, Saturn 3 |

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Some words on our work on Katapultura, Croatian National Radio

We missed the date of broadcasting, but luckily the internet remembers.
So here you can listen to our interview for Katapultura, the cultural program of   HRT – Croatian National Radio by Katarina Kolega about  Izlog Festival.
Some English, more Croatian 🙂

 

          

The work is coproduced at Kontejner within the framework of EMAP / EMARE and co-funded by Creative Europe.

 

Empathy Swarm, Prototype, Residency, Robotics |

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First steps of robot prototype Kryten on the streets of Zagreb!

Just playing on the streets of Zagreb…collecting data with Adam Donovan, Katrin Hochschuh and Tomislav Pokrajčić ;)#emare #robots #emotiondetection #empathyswarm #hochschuhdonovan

Gepostet von KONTEJNER | biro suvremene umjetničke prakse am Dienstag, 26. Juni 2018

 

 

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

The work is coproduced at Kontejner within the framework of EMAP / EMARE and co-funded by Creative Europe.

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Empathy Swarm, Residency |

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Our EMAP/ EMARE Residency continues: Happy to be back in Zagreb!

We are back in Zagreb and continue to work on Empathy Swarm in our studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in the middle of the city center and with a nice green park to have a break from time to time.

Thanks KONTEJNER for all the preparation and fantastic hosting! Looking forward to having our newest prototype Kryten rolling around and soon some more swarm friends for him.

 

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

The work is coproduced at Kontejner within the framework of EMAP / EMARE and co-funded by Creative Europe.

 

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Electronics, Empathy Swarm, Prototype, Studio |

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Tool chain for next prototype is ready: from PCB-Design and Exposure Box to Etching Tank and SMD-Reflow-Oven

We just made the next step in the development of our Empathy Swarm project: We set up a working tool chain for the production of the next robot prototype!

While our previous prototypes Robert and Robertina had a lot of cables, we now dramatically reduced the number of cables by designing and producing custom-made PCBs (Printed Circuit Boards). This does not only increase the robot’s robustness, it also reduces the production time and complexity during the assembly of the individual robot – and imagine producing 100!

The circuit is designed on the computer in form of a black and white image where all the connections are represented in black while the gaps in between are white. This image is then printed out with a laser printer onto a transparency foil. This transparency foil is used together with a pre-sensitized positive photoresist PCB, which initially looks like an empty copper plate. In order to transfer the circuit design onto this photoresist  PCB, the transparency foil is fixed to it and both are put into the UV light exposure box so that all the empty ‘white’ parts are exposed while the toner of the black ink is preventing the exposure.

In our special case we designed a double sided PCB which can have circuits on either side that are connected through pins. It is necessary that both sides are perfectly aligned during exposure, which can be achieved by building a kind of bag from the transparency foils with transparent tape.

After exposure the pre-sensitized PCB is put into the etching tank until all the exposed parts are etched away while the shiny copper of the designed paths stays. When you can see light shining through from behind, you know that your board etched enough. We choose a quite thin board which we cut into shape after the etching process with a pair of scissors. The remaining photoresist layer needs to be wiped off with acetone in the end to make better soldering connections possible. Then the holes to connect both sides of the board need to be drilled and the PCB is ready for the electronic parts.

In order to reduce size and weight of the robot as much as possible we decided to become as small as possible and to use SMD (Surface Mount Device) parts. These are so tiny that it is difficult to solder them onto the board manually. That for we build a temperature controlled SMD reflow oven, which melts the parts onto the board for you instead. 🙂

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Psychophysics Machines, Residency, Robotics, Saturn 3, Sound, Talk |

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Talking about: Robots in Music at Izlog Festival

We started the second day of the festival giving a familiar talk about our work, the last night’s Saturn3 performance and presented the Mega Tautophone that we built during the 2 week residency.

 

          

The work is coproduced at Kontejner within the framework of EMAP / EMARE and co-funded by Creative Europe.

(pictures © Tjaša Kalkan)

 

Projection, Residency, Saturn 3, Software |

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Face-Projection Experiments: Preparing for Izlog Festival – Saturn3

Preparing for Izlog Festival  and our Saturn3 Performance on 2nd May, 10:00 pm, we are experimenting with face-tracking and real time projections onto our faces.

Yesterday night we made some first tests, using infra-red light and a filter for visible light on the camera, to track the face and its landmarks in real time, while the projection was projected back onto the face, being visible for the human eye, but not for the special camera.

It’s a first idea of how it will be when the robots take over and transform Łukasz Szałankiewicz aka Zenial into one of them during the Saturn3 performance, synthesizing sound depending on his emotions.

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Interview, Psychophysics Machines, Robotics, Saturn 3, Software, Sound |

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Interview for Croatian National Radio

This evening we had a nice distraction from working: Katarina Kolega from the Croatian National Radio came to talk with us about our work, robotics in music and more.

She came at the perfect moment to see the first Mega Tautophone ready to go, could smile into the camera and let some emotions synthesize first sound experiments.

We don’t know when the interview will be broadcasted, but sure we will let you know 🙂

 

          

The work is coproduced at Kontejner within the framework of EMAP / EMARE and co-funded by Creative Europe.

 

Empathy Swarm, Prototype, Robot Psychology, Software, Studio |

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Robertinas first steps towards Empahty!

Currently we are working on making our Robot Swarm  perceive humans. The vision sense of our robot is a camera; the robot sees its environment, but that alone is not enough. The robot needs to learn to differentiate a bit more.

Previously we used Python and could already detect emotions, but to be more flexible and have the possibility to have more control, we are porting our coding environment to c++.

With the goal to respond to human emotions the primary goal is to detect faces. In order to teach Robertina to identify a human face, we use the computer vision and machine learning libraries OpenCV and dllib.

And see what she can already perceive: That’s Adam and me and she can identify two heads and amazingly also our so called facial landmarks that play a relevant role in her future ability to actually perceive emotions!

 

Psychophysics Machines, Workshop |

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WORKSHOP: Psychophysics Machines Jam Session on 26. April in Zagreb

The workshop gives an introduction to robotics, directional sound and visual control ranging from working with mechatronic systems to programming in processing and VVVV to cross-communication using open sound control.

We give an insight into our artistic practice and participants have the possibility to engage with 5 robots and use the tools we normally use to have a jam session together. This includes controlling the movements of the robots, the sound that is played and a custom made visual mixer.

When?

26. April

Duration?

~ 4 hours, start 2pm – open end evening

Format?

informal meet-up at the gallery space,

hands-on jam session: control robots + sound + visuals

Where?

Student Center, gallery

 

          

The work is coproduced at Kontejner within the framework of EMAP / EMARE and co-funded by Creative Europe.