EXPERIMENT

REFLECTIONS ON PROJECT BLACK BOX

The past three weeks we have been experimenting with a personal item and a group object for the project opening the black box. The idea was to select an object and open it and examine it. Since we have been learning on theory so far about eco/bio and techno systems, it is imperative to start seeing the importance of systems, their functionality and the choices behind those systems. Why and for whom have they been designed. My personal item was a calculator. I choose that item because it was the first "super" computer since the computers functionality hundred years ago was to count and calculate faster, more efficient and without error, thus the pocket calculator was a mini pocket computer that everyone could afford to make their daily calculations easier. I was curious on what would be inside the calculator. How would this pocket computer look like. As you can see it is simple and efficient. It contains a battery and a led panel for its power sources that are connected to the led panel, which projects the numbers and the results. Last a matrix that contains the numbers and their functions (sum, subtract, multiply etc). I brought this item with me at workshop hoping to make music or something that could change it's function as we know it, only to be disappointed.Because of it's matrix it was a more complex device that nobody could help me go further.
Luckily Ines had a VERY cool object that had much more potential. A Japanese toy dog from the 70's. We formed a team with Ines, Zoe, Veera and Britt where we explored each others items, broke them apart, discussed their initial function, purpose and design. The dog as you will see in the videos above had two different functions(bark and walk). We experimented with the Pietzo to capture it's internal sounds and after a lot of demolishing we managed to
extracted a small speraker from Britts JBL and connected to an arduino where we could play certain sine waves. It was very interesting and valuable to experiment and explore the insides of all this devices these last three weeks. With the arduino for example we could create an array for the frequencies and use the random function and generate music from the speaker attached to the dog. This could change for example the expectations that someone has from the sounds that a dog toy could produce. I would like to go deeper in the second part of the assignment and explore how a system creates a certain expectation when it comes to its inherent function and perverse it.