View source for Students/Alex Barrera

Hello my name is Alex Barrera I am a Visual Arts major studying the craft of digital video and film.  I enjoy making films that explore things that have yet to be seen.  I am interested in taking the trivial and unimportant and shedding new light on whatever topic it might be.  I create documentaries, short films, as well as video installations for art galleries.  I believe that digital video is at the head of the art world and that it is a very refreshing medium to work with.  I am interested in this class because I believe it will help me explore the backgrounds of the technology that I use everyday.  I also believe that these sort of newer technologies are very essential for creating art in this day and age.

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Proposal for Midterm Project: Switches


My proposal is to create a sort of air cooling shoe that uses a combination of two switches to activate a fan that cools your feet ecery time you step.  I will have a normally open switch that when pressed willturn off the circuit.  Since your heel will be pressed down the fan will be off.  When u lift your heel off the switch "aka a step" the fan will turn on creating a breeze to your toes.  Then when your step finishes back to your heel the fan will be off.  It will also use a toggle switch to keep the contraption off when your shoe is not on.  Here is a diagram to show more detail.

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Prposal for Final: Arduino

I have already spoken to Steph about my proposal and am well on my way to completing it but here is a quick rundown fro the site anyways.  I am going to create a installation reaction timing piece.  It is kind of hard to explain but in essence it will basically create a physical manifestation of art in response to the inputs it receives.  I will use a code that involves the user holding a button, then when the piece tells the user to release (via light or something)  the user will have to release the button as quick;y as possible.  This in turn will generate a number, High or low and the output will be the spraying of paint or something similar on to a canvas depending on how quickly you released. 

The plan is to hopefully generate different art pieces based on reaction times of your own brain.  It will be a physical manifestation of your reaction time turned into art.  The details on  the spraying paint are still in the air, as I am still working on the code and the reaction timer.  I will try to create a diagram today after I head to the electronic place to brainstorm ways to make paint spray.

Final Project Documentation 

So at first my original idea was the one described above.  After much fumbling with the programing, failing to get it to work I decided that I would attempt to approach the project from a different perspective.  Thus the Octopussy was created.  After working on my original code on a Sunday night failing to get it to work I overheard my roommate's having a quite interesting conversation.  They were discussing the topic of Octopus vagina's.  They wondered if the place where the octopus ate was in fact the same place that it reproduced.  They then proceeded to discuss whether the Octopus's vagina was pink.  Anyways I found this to be hilarious and right then and there I decided that that was what I wanted to explore.  I knew from there I didn't want too use any program that was to complex because the Arduino software was upsetting me.  I remembered the Color mixer and thought that was a perfect fit to my project.  It seemed to me that quite a few students struggled to make that program work so if I could demonstrate it with a minor modification it would suffice.  If I could somehow use that to show the different colors a Octopus's vagina could be it would be perfect.  I needed a way to combine these two things so I thought why not combine traditional 2-d art with this new medium of Arduino software.  I Painted the Octopus and set up the Color mixer in such a way that it would be the vagina.  I then thought that I still needed a novel interaction.  That's when my other roommates comment struck an idea.  He said "I bet you could figure out the color of it if you  titillated the tentacles."  That was it, I would but the potentiometers on the tentacles for a simple interaction.  The rest was concealing and making the electronic portion hidden.  I also modified the code to make the image size of the color box larger.  I will present more pictures + a code later.
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