Work page for dissertation project

Overview

The dissertation, A Machine for Living In stages intelligent systems in domestic space to study the home as a site of intimate life. Designed to be inhabited, this project examines how technologies are altered through inhabitation. Upending the typical utilitarian concerns of the smart home with optimization and efficiency, I focus instead on the home as a nexus of personal history, desires, relationships, episodic narrative, and bodily praxis. I deploy technologies that purport to represent and analyze the self--speech recognition and synthesis, motion capture, and facial recognition, for example--and engage them with the messy conditions of domestic life. Living within the machine for a number of weeks, I produce a durable record of the home and its inhabitants: human, animal, machine. This material is restaged for viewers as a hybrid experience of recorded media and live interaction.

Process

design/build
inhabit
summarize

To Do

indoor positioning system
- people / inhabitant tracking
sensing doors / appliances / objects / actions
event logging
audio recording system
audio plan
video plan
robot / mechatronc plan
tracking plan
event logging (house data recorder)

Components

Black Box Recorder

airplane / vessel / ship analogy
telemetry
Flight Data Recorder (FDR)
Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR)

Voice Assistant

voice operation
always listening in the different rooms

conventional

agonist / antagonist

lightswitch robots
door locks
other ways to provide / deny access

gleeker

lipstick robot

head stain wiper

garbage sensor

Technology

Spark Core with OSC

Audio

Test throughput raspberry pi (mic to headphone):

arecord -f DAT | aplay -f DAT

Record and playback on Raspberry Pi:

arecord -f DAT -D plughw:0 | aplay -f DAT -D plughw:1

mics in each room

Housemachine

Contents