For this assignment, I took a passage from my favorite book Where the Wild Things Are? by Maurice Sendak. Instead of taking imagery straight from the book’s illustrations, I decided to put my own spin on the characters.

In the book, Max, who is the main character, gets sent to his room for misbehaving. While in his room, it turned into a jungle. He gets into a boat and travels for what feels like years to an island where the wild things lived. The passage I chose goes:

“And when he came to the place where the wild things are

they roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth

and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws

till Max said ‘BE STILL!’ and tamed them with the magic trick

of staring into all their yellow without blinking once

and they were frightened and called him the most wild thing of all”

I started my making process with a sketch of the layout of my composition. I like to work with layers of tracing paper, so i can easily move different elements without having to erase or damaging the paper too much.

Next, I made a prototype of my circuit. Because the monsters have a total of five yellow eyes combined, I wanted to make sure I can light all five LEDs with one 3v battery. It worked.

The circuit is split between two sheets of paper, the top being the negative and bottom the positive. I first mapped the circuits on the back of the top sheet of paper, then traced it to the bottom sheet of paper. Once I finished mapping the circuit, I started laying down the copper tape.

To keep the circuit from crossing with one another, and shorting them, I had to put a “rise” on the sheet.

After I finished laying down the circuit, I had to put in the LEDs. This was the most difficult process. (I was so wrapped up in taping the LEDs down, I forgot to document this process.) This was especially difficult because I had to tape one leg of the LED to the top page, then do the same to the bottom page. I broke two LED legs while doing this, and I found that some of the LEDs weren’t getting any power. I also discovered that the connection needed to be soldered, otherwise they weren’t getting enough contact on the circuit to light up.

Once the LEDs were in place and working as the should, I placed all the characters in place.

Here is a video of the interaction:

SMART RITUALS

A/D/A Festival Hamburg, on Friday, August 26th – Saturday, August 27th.

Smart Ritual is a project created by Mika Satomi and Hannah Perner-Wilson’s (KOBAKANT). I found this browsing on their HOW TO GET WHAT YOU WANT site.

In response to smart cities, Smart Ritual, KOBAKANT created a workshop  that invited other artist to create costumes that will collect data. These costumes will be integrated with sensors smart textiles, and Internet of Things technologies that will collect data and send them over the web by performing ceremonial gestures.

There were a total of ten participants who were grouped together to create a series of different, and exciting costumes that collected different types of data.

Here are some examples of the costumes that were produced:

By Sina Greinert, Katrin Rieber and Katrin Rieber, a Hairy Monster that detected how noisy a space was.

The Curious Twins, created by Lilli Berger, Marie Josephine Bouquet and Mareike Brunswick, that counts all the nice people in the neighborhood.

Lastly, the Flower Fairy, which allows the user to detect the luminosity of a particular spot. The Flower Fairy was created by Barbro Scholz.

Their process for creating these costumes was to first decide what types of data they wanted to collect. Then each team had to act out and perform the gestures they wanted to decide how to incorporate the sensors. After that, they had to sketch out their plans- where does the sensor go? where to place the LEDs strips? how are the sensors integrated into the costume? Once that’s done, they go into the prototyping phase. Each team had to connect all the parts that they wanted, then they had to test the gestures to make sure it works with the sensor, then testing to see if the costumes actually work. The last step in the making process is to decorate their costumes.

Making stage:

Testing their gestures:

All photos and content was taken from:

Smart Rituals