Art | ROBBIE TILTON

Category: Art

Sisyphonus

6 January 2012 | Art, Web | no comments

As an art piece I decided to create a website that will endlessly be stuck loading itself. The site can be found on www.sisyphonus.com. People waste endless hours viewing loading bars and I thought it would be appropriate to bring some self-consciousness into this viewing experience and the emotions it evokes. When a loading bar first begins it often progresses fairly fast and then slows down. During this process, most people experience a feeling of optimistic excitement to a pessimistic frustration. This website is meant to draw out the emotions of waiting and allow one to self-reflect on life and your own ability to stay level-headed throughout a process where the destination is unknown. This analogy can be compared to human life. I was also inspired by Waiting for Godot and The Myth of Sisyphus (which the title plays on: Sisyphus + onus (onus means “wait” in Latin)).

Macho Joe

17 December 2011 | Art, Physical Computing | no comments

Since a young age I’ve always been afraid of death. The fact that we all must eventually go to this shared destination is a scary and unavoidable thought. To create an art piece to express this fear I felt a toy would be the perfect manifestation. A toy has no control over its surroundings. I’ve also played with machoism and human vulnerabilities by creating a fictitious character “Macho Joe” who is a world class wrestler struggle to gain freedom and not die within his packaging.

I made the piece with 2 Arduino Uno’s, 1 Wave Shield, 3 servo motors, an accelerometer, a range finder, and an 8ohm speaker. Macho joe has 4 distinguished states of agony. When a viewer first walks by the range sensor the piece comes to life pleading for the viewers help. Once the user picks it up, the piece begins to move a bit differently and it’s head movement is mapped to an accelerometer that gives the illusion of the toy always looking at the viewer in the eye. Lastly, when the user places the toy back on the shelf and leaves, Macho Joe gives his final plead for his life before dying.

Overall it was fairly difficult to get the inputs and outputs to work together. I used two arduinos: 1 to manage the 3 servo movements along with all of the sensors and 1 to manage all of the audio output. In order to avoid issues with the Wire library I created communication between the two Arduino’s by reading and writing directly to their digital pins.