The Final Project

Just like a clock every living person lives by a certain rhythm. This rhythm controls our sleep, energy and lots of other essential things. It is called the circadian rhyhtm.

With time the clock ages. The gearwheels get rusty and the clock can no longer show the right time. In other words it loses it rhythm. Just like the aged clock the aged humanbeing to loses track of its own rhythm.

This disturbance in rhythm causes in many cases insomnia. About 40% of the people older than 65 suffer from insomnia. This means that they have trouble going to sleep or staying asleep for a longer time. Their sleep gets very fragmented. Because of this they have to compensate their loss of sleep from the night during the day. They form their own irregular rhythm.

To illustrate this problem we are using a building in an urban presentation. The building we are using is the huge tower at Medborgarplatsen, Södermalm, Stockholm, Sweden, as our building. We chose this building because of its location, near a public square where lots of people pass by every day, because it’s well known, because its populated, it is not a fancy office building it is an actual building where people live and because its huge and hard to miss.

Each window in this building will represent a human life. The windows will all have a light blinking in it. These blinkings symbolizes their sleep and awake time, that is their own personal rhythm. The majority of the windows will be blinking with the same rhythm and some will blink with their own rhythm. The windows that blink off-rhythm symbolize the ones that suffer from insomnia. When looking at the building you will see a big main rhythm and many smaller rhytms with a distortion that are trying to catch up with this main rhythm. The windows showing the smaller rhythms represent insomnia and insomnia represents ageing...

Pictures of the exhibition

Here you can download some of the pictures of the exhibition taken by Alexander Busnynkl and Alexander Biledt. Thanks again.

The paper of "The wall of cells"

The wall of cells

Peter Börjeson
Ludvig Elblaus
David Emilsson
Alexander Forsén
Olov Sundström

Ageing is a continuous process, it happens all the time to everyone and to everything. It’s a constant state of change. The process of human ageing is invisible; you can see the traces of ageing but not the change itself. Every cell is programmed to live a certain amount of time and every second, we lose 6500 skin cells.
How do you show ageing in numbers and in what ways is it measurable? We translated the number of cells that die in the human body to measures in meters, square meters, cubic meters and time. We built a clock that measures time in terms of cell loss, but we wanted to have a more comprehensible visual model for the figures.
The installation we made is a real-time visualization of the loss of skin cells. Every bright white dot on the screen represents the actual area of dead skin cells that the visitors produce during the exhibition in scale.
The music is controlled by the patterns produced by the animation. The factors that influence the sound are the coordinates where the pixels are drawn in the two-dimensional space and the amount of surface covered by the white pixels. The y-value of the coordinate determines the pitch of the notes sent to the synthesizer software and the x-value determines the timbre of the instruments used. The amount of pixels determines how many instruments will be used to
perform the music.
The music is then constructed by using the latest pitches and building phrases and chords of that material, so essentially the pixels that are being lit create the music.

You can download the PDF here.

Video of the Exhibit

All projects didn't make it to the video for various reasons (the "missing glove" for example).

If you have additional footage, I wouldn't mind re-doing the editing of this video to include it.

Please upload your video clips to Loborits for example and email me the link so I can re-edit this video to include it.

Final Exhibit

Dust of Modernity

Here's also a link (pdf) to the sheet explaining our project

The Final Project

The Dorian Gray Mirror

Mikaela Kurtson Bellman Anna Kvernplassen Cecilia Thorsén Mattias Larsson Joakim Lööv

In The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, Dorian Gray stays young and fresh while his portrait grows aged and corrupt. The portrait ages in his stead. Our version of the Dorian Gray Mirror will let you see yourself through old eyes.

The final project

The most common eye disease caused by ageing is cataract. Cataract is a increase of opacity in the lense of the eye. As the lense gets less opaque, you loose contrast and your vision gets blurred. The light that enters an eye with cataract will disperse, and as a result you get halo effects around light sources. Yet another consequence is that you easily get blinded by bright light.

A natural part of ageing is that the lense turns yellow, and will thus act as a yellow filter. The brain compensates for this so you will never notice that your vision has become more yellow, but as a result you will loose valuable color information.

Our Dorian Gray Mirror acts as an aged eye with cataract.You will notice the lack of contrast and yellow image, since there is no brain to balance the image, as well as the blurred impression.

Background

In our first assignment we discussed money as a human companion through the ages. We considered both the appearence and the value of money.

Our second presentation was more spot on. We compared the ageing of a simple rubber band to the lense of the eye. We then focused on the aging of the eye, which led us to our final project.

The Final Project

Where’s my glove?

“I’ve lost my glove. My absolute favorite one. The red biker glove. Where is it? What have I been doing today? I went and had a cup of coffee at Café Bristol. I did my grocery shopping for the week. Oh, and I have been on the subway. I know I have taken my gloves off. Where could I have dropped it? I just can’t seem to remember in which order I have been to all these places. “

The episodic memory is part of the long term memory and this is where we store memories of events and episodes. When recollecting memories of episodic sort they flash before our eyes as video clips. As we grow older our memory starts to deteriorate, primarily in the episodic memory. As a result of this, elderly experience difficulty in placing memories in chronological order. Sometimes certain parts of a memory get lost, for instance a person’s face might get blurry. Other times the different parts of a memory cannot be seen as a whole, they are shattered into separate images.

The installation represents this reduced capacity of the episodic memory and it visualises how we recall a course of events and try to make sense out of them.

Enjoy.

FINAL PROJECT LINK

This is a link to our final project:

http://web.comhem.se/arrebarre/original_typewriterFX.mov

Group 2: Dust of Modernity

A screw in the wall away from done..

All I have to do now is to put a screw in the wall to hang our model.. Done!

I will also be showing a slideshow next to the model showing our progression..

The stick of joy is no longer jolly with joy

Our idéa with the joystick is complete. We programmed it to "repair" the video and restore the pixels that are missing, so the user can control the music/video experience with the stick...

of joy

Unfortunately the joystick we bought isn't compatible with macintosh, despite the fact that the fabricator states that it should.. Sooo, we're forced to go with a PC. We also got a fancy sheet for the installation, so we got everything we need for great success.

Memories

Forever young

Our workstation!

Our installation

In Alzheimer’s disease, a disease associated with ageing, nerve cells in the brain are dying, which leads to reduced brain activity. Some of the patterns of brain activity that get affected are those associated with reading. For that reason, the ability to read and understand a message delivered by a text decreases for a person with Alzheimer’s disease.


In our installation, words disappearing can symbolize nerve cells dying in the brain. The message gets weaker and weaker as words keep on disappearing, and you can somehow see the analogy to Alzheimer’s disease and how it progresses. The stripped text on its own also gives us an image of how we may perceive a person with Alzheimer’s disease.

Almost there

Leif Handberg has been a great help for us. We got to borrow his half-mirror thing..that he uses in one of his courses here on KTH. Thank you so much, Leif!

So, here we go. We're using this half-mirror construction and because of that, we have solved the problem about the invisible camera. Now you won't be able to see the camera through the mirror and you will see yourself in the picture, as in a mirror. We have also found a way of hiding this, quite big, construction. The cover is a wood construction which we have installed lightbulbs in (covers the front) and some black fabric that we are going to cover the back with. This will also strengthen the effect that you get more sensitive to bright light when you grow old.

To make this great front cover, we bought wood, lightbulbs, and material to install them. After some serious handicraft by our group members, building and painting, it looks really good.

Joakim has finally found a program that we can use for simulating these filters we're going to use! Thank you so much for that, Jocke! With some work with this program, we finally found the right filters to use for the right impression of the picture.

Whihoo!

Demo

Demography of Sweden divided in 10 years period.

The Creative Age

The future is creative. An article of the impact of creativity in the modern societies published by the Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies:

"The Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies examines the trends and tendencies that affect our future. In the last couple of years, the Institute has concluded that many of these very diverse trends signal a development that means that society will increasingly be driven by creativity and innovation – and that these will increasingly be greater part of everyday life. That development – the rise of "Creative Man" and "Creative Man Logic" is the subject of this article".

More of the article HERE. Download the "creative men publication" HERE.

Thanks to Hannah Zackrisson, librarian of the Institute for Future Studies of Stockholm, who pointed us this publication.

Last week

Our tape loop have been working for some time now. What last week was about was making it refresh automatically through analog techniques.


From a source we are feeding the loop with fresh speech that is recorded on one of the players. When the tape is filled we change the switch and record what is played on the other player and what is said in the room. The looping continues for a few minutes until you can't hear the speech anymore and the switch is then changed to speech source.

Limiting us to only use analog techniques we are controlling the switch with two turntables. The first turntable control the motor for the second turntable, making it run a full lap in about 6 minutes. On the second turntable we are using a reading fork (läsgaffel, LED + light sensor) and a record with a drilled track. When the light sensor picks up light our switch will be set to the refresh state and when there is no light on the sensor we will record the loop.

All that is left is just making it work. Which proved to be a bit harder than what we expected.

That is all for now.

You could never polish away to much wood!

After sawing, polishing, scrubbing, polishing and some more polishing, the table and chair is now overused. Now they have a history, and you could tell from it what kind of a person who have used the table, what he likes to do and so on. It's no longer just an ordinary table! The ageing process has given it a soul.

We still have some ageing to do on our two objects to give them a final look. We are going to paint them and then polish the paint away in different places where the table for example has been more used.

We are also going to use a projector that will project a moving picture, directly from above, and down on our table. The picture will show how different meals and things on the table could have been set down and used on the table.

Group 2: Dust of Modernity

Getting there...

Almost done..

The model will be complete Monday..

I'm also preparing a slideshow of the project from start to finish that will be playing during the exhibit. (will be available on youtube also..)

Also found an old interview with La Corbusier in English if anyone is interested:

Demography of Sweden during 200 year (SCB)

http://www.scb.se/templates/tableOrChart____43016.asp

Group 5 - Banana Prints

the following text is a first version of our presentation for the final exhibition

Banana Prints?

Before your eyes, you see an unfinished painting taking its shape by your motions. What you see, is an interactive canvas, with you as the artist.

But the painting is more than just a random pattern, drawn by moving people. It is the scars created by our actions, leaving traces in the once flawless facade. Like footprints in a soft blanket of snow, the steps is a map over the past. By reading the scars of an individual, you can sense the experience of his life.

If you look above your head, you will see a camera capturing a large part of the room. The information is sent as a live stream to our computer, which plot the difference between following pictures onto our canvas. - TEXT ABOUT COLOR SHIFTING THAT IS NOT COMPLETED -

We are currently brainstorming about a new name for our project. We came up with “Banana Prints”, “Just a Simple Banana” and “The Life and Death of a Banana”. Any feedback and suggestions about the name is welcome.

Where's my Glove?

To make the work more efficient the group split up in two. One part of the group hit the streets of Stockholm to film our movie, the other part went to Ikea and Barkaby Handelsplats in search of mirrors and spinning toys.

A first draft of the movie will soon be uploaded here.

We've made a preliminary set up for the mirrors and video. But we've encountered some issues. One, the video is too unclear, the point we are trying to make isn't getting across. The other, the mirrors or moving too fast. And now that we've slowed them down, they are too weak to move the mirrors properly. But we'll sort that out. Somehow. What can you expect when buying toys from Jysk Bäddlager?

A Molecular Map of Aging

Jörg Frank Seeman sent us the link to this article that might be useful for some groups: Molecular Map of Aging. A new genetic database could help reveal why animals age so differently.

Exhibition: 12th of December @ 13.00

Dear All, 

the final course exhibition will take place the 12th of December at 13.00. PLEASE NOTE not the 11th as we have assumed. 

You are very welcome to invite your friends and whoever you wish to. We will have some special guests or guest critics with whom we'll discuss each project (more people - more fun). Students from last year will also come.

Thanks to the two Alexanders from group 1 we will have a photo documentation of each work and of the event in general.

Each final project has to be uploaded here so that we all know what we have done so far. For the final exhibition you also have to provide a text (max 1 page) of the description of your work. This will help you to clarify your concepts and to introduce your work to the audience and to the guest critics. But we can discuss more this aspects during the class schedule.

see  you tomorrow, good night.

ant.

The Clockers progress

Hello my fellow humans!

We feel that we are getting somewhere with our project now. We have bought a microprocessor and programmed it so the lamps blink the way we want them to (thank you Avo!). Then we have bought some cartboard, tape and stuff so we can make the model. Then we took pictures of the building we are making the model off. The project will also have an animation that presents our idea.The animation will basically be a picture of the building that we are making a model of with blinking windows like the earlier animation we made (here it comes!)

PEACE!

wall of cells + programming is fun

every second we loose hundreds of thousands of cells. we decided to collect every single dead cell from every visitor of the exhibition. by projecting the cells on the wall (scale 1:1) as the visitors loose them we can see the collective loss of cells during the whole day. 

we are currently in the deep process of writing code to make a cool projection. this is a wonderful step and being nerdy is a lot of fun. we are using flash wich is fast and easy and all by all a supergreat tool for designing interavtice visualisations. flash can also nowadays work with cameras in a great way, the "dorian gray mirror" and "traces of time" people might be interested in this, check www.setpixel.com for nice examples.

when we searched for a good programming language to use we also found processing. this is something that might be interesting for many of you. a programing language for designers and artists. a sweet little helper for you who want to create fancy visual representations without computer-engineer skills. Have a look at the processing online exhibition for some wonderful creations.

Faith

We borowed a projector, a OH- machine, a magnetmixer and two cups.

With these devices we wanted to experiment how it would look like if we created turbulence in water and the Non-Newtonian fluid. We first tried this with water. We put a cup on the magnetmixer and in the cup we put a magnet that would begin to spin once we turned on the magnetmixer. This spinning magnet created a whirl in the water, which is turbulence. The faster the magnet spinned, the bigger whirl was created. We poured some paint in the whirl to check what would happen and we saw that the paint first was held in the whirl but later on it was spread all over in the water.

We also tried this with the Non-Newtonian fluid. We saw that a whirl wasn´t created. This because of the faster the magnet in the cup spinned, the more resistance it was in the fluid. But if the magnet didn´t spinn fast it wasn´t much resistance in the fluid.

We couldn´t see anything we could develop this into so we are still thinking of something new.

Hope

For a couple of days now we have been experimenting with the Non-Newtonian fluid. We put the fluid in balloons and found that the balloons where very durable, because we could throw them into a wall and they didn´t break. We thought about products that we could apply this on. We came up of many ideas, like a stressball or a bullet-proof vest but nothing really that had with turbulence to do.

We experimented with a funnel that we filled with this Non-Newtonian fluid and poured little paint in it. We wanted to check how the color had placed it self on a plate, but we didn´t find any interesting results with this.

Progress

Yesterday we were kinda stuck in the beginning of the day, but we didn´t let the mood gets to us.
So we started to make phonecalls to found out if some of our teachers had some ideas and materials that could help us.
And finally Leif Handberg answer and he told us that when they are working on their ongoing project, were they use i method similar to what we wants to do. And today when we called him he was just about to fix some things for us and we are going to meet him in an hour to see what he has found for us.
Leif also told us to give Anders Friberg a call, and we did.
We asked him if he knew a program that could be used in our project to put layers in realtime production. And we found one, but it didnt work exactly the way we wanted so Joakim was up all night to find the right one.

We have also make some thoughts about the construction, but we are still thinking...
We are planning to use two regular mirror to project the image on the right spot and a second mirror for the image to project to image on.
The problem we have is were to put the camera and the projector. But we will figure it out, just wait.

So at the moment we are in a working process and will probably be for the rest of the day.

With wisdom comes experience (californication)

We have developed our child of labor even further and have decided to get a brother/sister. In addition to the modified music we also make modified video to match it, so the viewer gets the experience in two dimentions. We have chosen Californication by Red Hot Chili Peppers feel confident about the direction the project is taking and strongly believe that we can do something well out of it.

Group n. 5 - Traces of time

MEN AT WORK

You haven't heard a lot from us, but we are really doing fine. For you who didn't stay until the end of the Friday presentation, the video above explains our concept.

We moved away from the banana, but the principle is still the same. Just in another shape, and with some graphical effects.

As for now, we are solving all of the technical issues. All of the equipment is at hand, and it's now about rigging it up. At the same time, our programmer Mattias is locked into a dark room, and will not come out until our software is ready.

Lastly, we want to thank The Lion King & Branch Mountain for their ideas about where to place our camera.

Group 2: Dust of Modernity

Progress...

(click HERE or on the picture for updates)

No where to run

We have filled a balloon with the non-newtonian fluid. The harder you hit the balloon (or throw it) the harder it feels. For the moment we are trying to come up with products to make out of this magic fluid. Thats where we are right now.

Experimenting

Today we started to experiment with the non-newtonian fluid. The fluid is based on water and corn starch. We are experimenting and hoping for a miracle.

And so on..

Now we have actually decided which idea we will proceed with. After the presentation last friday we were quite confident that this idea will work and that we will be able to present it in a good way. We chose the idea "The Dorian Gray mirror". But we will not be able to show a mirror image where the person looks "aged" in the sense that he or she has wrinkles and gray hair. Instead, we will show a mirror image of the person who stands in front of the "mirror" as an old photograph. The image will be more yellow, have less contrast, be more bright and have some blurry texture to it.

We are going to use a camera, a projector, a computer and different filters. Probably something else too, but now we have just started to experiment with these things. Hopefully we will find a way to hide the camera and projector so it really will look like a "real" mirror. We have contacted some professors on KTH that we thought could help us with this project. We have got some answers but the most help we have got so far is from the people at AMT that we borrow the material from.

We still have some problems but hopefully we'll be able to solve them in time for the exhibition.

Non Newtonian Fluid

This the a video showing how non-newtonian fluid behave when exposed to sound; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpN1wfdbew0

New direction!

After practically being "sawed by our ankles" (direct swe-eng translation) last Friday, we dropped our Jeans-project and tried to move on.
Basically it was a big misunderstanding the whole thing. But now we are on the same altitude and ready to make a (hopefully) great project.

We spent the day trying to come up with some new ideas on how to move forward, by trying to apply what we had learned on the jeans-part of the project. We were thinking in ways like:
- How cars tears the road
- How UV-light breaks down our body's
- How water can shape different materials.
They are all examples on how destructing can be a way of ageing, and they are all similar to the jeans in that way.

We moved on with UV-light but got stuck. Then during a talk to Antonio, he helped us on an idea on how we could try to overused objects to their maximum. We are now trying to "speed age" everyday used objects to make them look like the way the should look like if they would have been used every day for a long long time.

So we are not trying to destruct objects, we will simulate how it could look if it's been overused, like if we use a chair everyday for 100 years without breaking it so it looses the ability of a chair, but it will reshape, sharp edges will be rounded for example.

/Group 6

Antonio thought that we had some conceptual problem after our second presentation. We showed the ageing process with the hearing and a simplification of how the brain synapses disappears in time.

So we discussed about which step we should take further as a group. The first thing we decided was that the group should focus on one project at the time.

Then we discussed about the information loss when you get older, in the terms of that the actual hearing start to worsen the perception of some pronunciation. We decided a manifest of how our projects should look like:

• Concentrate about the information loss
• Highlight the loss in transmission
• Avoid exaggeration
• Emphasize the change
• To make it simple with some more functions if the users want to

We made also some pros and cons:

Pros: It is impressive and easy to implement.

Cons: Maybe too superficially, hard to clarify (how do we show more concrete about the loss?), maybe the visitors would not affected (it should contain more drama?) and could we finish the project.

During break an idea came up with an fictive checking-in card that a visitor get when they get in to the exhibition. When they check out they get a recipe and information about how much older they got since they checked in and other various “ageing” facts.

The concept was further developed, a black screen would be set up and the user has to press a button and white text pop up along with stressing sound. The text shows increasing data for example ageing in milliseconds and the number of lost brain cells. We made a prototype and showed Antonio. We told him that we wanted to show that the ageing process happens all the time and is not because of high age. He liked the idea but told us that it has not a clear connection to ageing.

For several days we were thinking about how to take a step further. We are interested in the constant process and want to highlight the mind blowing process that has high numbers. It is a challenge to make those figures more specific.

We are now focusing on the cell death process, if we would for example line up all the cells in a row they would die 7 metres per second, or 30 kilometres per hour.

And as I write this we are trying to think of a way to be even more concrete.

• Look at our visulisation of the synapses
• Look at our black screen (click on the middle of the screen and press blank space)
  

Group 2: Dust of Modernity

Stunning facts:

The average human skin weighs 4kg and measures 2 sq. meters.

It regenerates in its entirety every 28-30 days.

This means we "shed" 138 grams of dead skin cells every day!

Here's our last presentation:

And a LINK to the notes from this presentation.

the project

Today we are planing the big project, trying to find out how to present our concept in the exhibition.

This is a link to a homepage we have used a lot for research about Alzheimer, it contains a great interactive tour inside the brain: http://www.alz.org/alzheimers_disease_4719.asp

Monday 3rd tutorials schedule.

From this coming week we will start focus on the final project and its realization. We will have daily meetings with each group.
I gave a "title" to each project, this is a personal choice that helps me to remember the issues that you are dealing with. From now on you have to start thinking of a possible title of your work. Titles is important because allow to understand the way you are addressing the work to the general issue.

Tutorials will have the following schedule:

9.00 - Group n. 6 - Destruction - we will discuss the process since the very beginning and we will find ways for further development. The project needs to be re-conceptualized and be more focused on the process of "artificial ageing".

10.00 - Group n. 10 - Episode memories - It has to be discussed all the details of the project: video storyboard, montage, installation. The use of the mirrors as discussed during presentation is crucial. A clear need to use them has to be defined. We'll also start to discuss the way the project should be installed in space.

10.30 - Group n. 11 - Ageing dynamics - The project has to be clarified. During tutorials it will be discussed the issue and its visualization. A detailed plan of the work and its materials had to be discussed together with the installation in the classroom space.

11.00 - Group n. 1 - The Alzheimers - We'll discuss in details the possible realization of the project and its installation. It is important to find the right sound track to operate with.

11.30 - Group n.3 - Bio time - The group has to decide the direction to take, and how develop it further.

Lunch.

13.00 - Group n.4 - Dorian Gray mirror - The project has to be discussed in details in oder to be aware of its conceptual potentials and to make a correct plan of its realization.

13.15 - Group n. 8 - Omissis. The concept has to be defined. It is important to find the right text to read and to find the right "rule" of cutting words or letter in the text. Several king of text had to discussed, poems, songs, tales, discourses, etc....

13.30- Group n. 9 - Insomnia. We have to brainstorm a bit more to explore all the project possibility. a) sleeping lamp, b) insomnia lamp, c) presentation of an urban installation project.

14.00- Group n. 7 - Ageing Sound. All the project possibilities has to be re-discussed and carefully planned in all the details. It is also important to evaluate the sound source to work with.

14.15 - Group n. 12 - Human scape. The program applications are rules of the population ageing model had to be specified ad discussed in details.

14.30 - Group n. 2 - Dust of modernity. The scale of the model had to be verified. Plexiglas is suggested as material to use. Some tests on the dust has to be made too. Washing machine soap for instance contains phosphor that shines under black light.

15.00 - Group n. 5 - Traces of time. Project schedule definition.

Please note, schedule might change due to several reasons. However they will follow this planned order. Monday will be a crucial day for the organization of the following weeks.