Today was a productive studio day. I managed to get the key-tapping solenoid thing working from the raspberry pi, by installing Processing and then Arduino using these instructions. It’s really exciting to have Processing running on the pi, as this opens it up to me as a usable computer. I’ve been holding off from using it because it’s such a pain to translate everything in to Python from Processing Java. To be fair, it runs incredibly slowly when drawing graphics – down to 3 or 4 fps – so this will only be a useful method for control apps that are very light on visuals.
I’m hopeful that oF will do the trick for more video or graphics-heavy applications, but I doubt it.
In between, while things were loading and updating, I read a few articles from the inaugural issue of Social Media + Society. The best and most interesting article was a piece that discussed animation as a paradigm for understanding social media activity, replacing the shortcomings of performance as a theoretical lens. Interesting stuff, about how the audience fills in the gaps in representation with an animation, which can be just a few sketched lines. I think I need to look into this a bit more fully.