Week 1

Working on my first assignment for the minor started off with getting to know my fellow classmates, and specific for the assignment, getting to know and being able to introduce Melissa de Bie. We talked for around an hour and discussed our lives and interests. With this information I had to create an interactive portret, using any material I would like and using the Arduino touchboard.

In the beginning I had no clue where to start. While I was listening to Melissa talk, I made notes and drew a simple drawing of her. I decided to just take that drawing and make it into an interactive portret. After redrawing the portret, I found some pieces in a magazine and Photoshopped these as the hair, skin and sweater.

I was really interested in the new UV printer in the lab, so I decided to test some cool things out. I printed some of my own designs on acrylic and it intrigued me. My goal was to find out if I could use the electrical paint and print on that. I did some tests and it worked!

As a background I wanted to use colored acrylic, so I could put a little LED light under it (Loes her idea). This part didnt take me that long. I used to lasercutter to cut a circle with some engraved and cut out lines. I tried a few different types of acrylic and a few different sizes.

Now it was time for the complicated stuff... On white paper I printed the exact design I wanted, put the acrylic on top and painted the silhouette of the portret (and a little line under it so it can connect).

Now I wanted to print my portret on the exact spot of the paint.
I decided I was going to print a circle on white paper first and then know where I could place the acrylic. The one thing that went wrong is placing the round circle and the actual design I was going to print on the same spot on the computer. I think it shifted a little bit so it didn't really work out.

I tried again by just printing the design on white paper in 'white' after that I could place the design where it printed, and just run the same print, but with white color and varnish!

As a finishing touch I made a very easy cardboard box with the lasercutter. I folded the sides by aligning a ruler to the fold and going over it with a ruler!

As you can see - most people had multiple trigger points in their portret - but as I didn't I wanted to write a new code where audio would play at random. After looking around a little bit, I actually found a very easy sample code.. so that was easy!

https://github.com/BareConductive/random-touch-mp3

My first zine page I ever made! We will be making a zine spread every week, the words taken from the material and we have to read. After reading the materials we will have weekly discussions and try to find thirteen words related to the topics. For my first zine I got the word 'Alienation'.

I worked on this for around half an hour, I had a rough start so I just started to randomly cut out shapes.. Later on I tried to make something out of everything and I'm very happy with the result.

A link to the used file to create the lasercut;

https://drive.google.com/file/d/12OuhpQHF6I6CMkWM7fmMCL7ipGa_JC3Q/view?usp=sharing