late spring and summer days 2024

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Summing Takeaways

13 RFID (radio frequency identification) tags. No significance to the number, just what was handy on the bench, using these prototypes as audio visual tactile teaser fiddle toy-like distractions, while attempting to optimize the test system designed to validate them. The sounds that the receiver antenna makes while registering signals from these tags, in this configuration, can be heard toward the end of a song called Bodily Humors, the 3rd track on the album, Hands to Mouths (Doug Seidel & Todd Tuttle 2019).

The scope of this project is based upon, possible conclusions one can formulate from how frequently cattle come to drink ionized water, addressing animal health, food supply and safety. My glossing over important research should not be interpreted as an attempt to marginalize the people working to invent systems and technologies which will ultimately help to shore up deficiencies in a global food supply system, as a few of them I worked very closely with to realize this novel application, but as presented here, was merely showcasing an example of a mental distraction technique people  sometimes use when they are stuck on a problem. 

More a kin to stuff like this while building things like that.

This audio-visual sculpture was assembled from wood, paper, cast-iron, factory-rolled circuits,  video  music,  glue,  electrical tape and other stuff. 

It is assemblage as "Thank You" to Dave Seidel.

The construction consists of printed images on stickers the are affixed to a compressed wooden box sent to me in the post, a long time ago, by a large corporation soliciting random people to purchase internet time, this is a thing that used to happen. Some of the box constructions were so elaborate and impressive, I saved a few, and over the years have modified them for selfish repurpose. 

The box cover art, is graffiti, cropped from a larger photograph taken while visiting New York City, possibly attributable to the work of Masao Gozu (?) , but could also be a reference to Gozu, a Japanese urban legend (?), or any  combination of things that occurred when Gozu was written on the name tag.  In any case, I was not aware of  the meaning of any of it when I photographed the graffiti, I merely liked how it looked.

Sounds play as the box is opened and a couple of images and a disc are revealed. 

Images

Robot/bear (inside right) was transposed from graffiti in the Milwaukee area (artist unknown to me), 

Bear/robot (inside left) was drawn by Jon Hargreaves. 

Sound files were flashed to circuit boards, two of them, one circuit plays electronic sounds that Doug Seidel recorded and "sent" to me and the other circuit plays a recording of myself tapping organ pipes with the plastic coated handles of needle nosed pliers, (because that's what I had handy), the entire instrument was mounted to a pergola and played while I was simultaneously kicking a bucket. 

Sounds play for roughly a minute and will do so upon repeated openings of the cover until the non-rechargeable batteries discharge, brown out conditions may also occur. 

This box audio also serves as the soundtrack for the video Robot Oil, a tangential experiment I was working on, at the time. The video explored some simulated physical properties of the oil that leaked out of Mr. Bear's friend.

Mounted inside, a cd-r with associated digital files attempt to document the thing, music, images, video and such-like. 

It stands on a cast-iron foot, three feathers stuck in the head.

Upon completion it was sent to Dave Seidel .

Starting with a series of photographs of photographs of self-portraits with some form of a preserved or semi-preserved rodent captured and photographed, in the stack up, then pausing, when Mike declared  after viewing one such piece, wherein, a mouse in a snap trap was immersed and sealed inside the jar, “What a waste of a perfectly good jar of honey!” Work resumed,  when I was asked to leverage experiences integrating a capacitive proximity solution to act like a switch, initiating a small motor to open a valve inside a touchless flush device, for a bath and fixture manufacture. So, this proof of concept was for a pest control company, asking for scalable, cloud connected functional pest control, deployed in industrial and warehouse environments. What we invented and demonstrated onsite at their facility, was pest control over WiFi, with phone notifications when bait stations were occupied..  Capacitive sensing was optimized to register  occupancy and transmit the signal out of the bait station to the gateway (Todd), from the gateway to the cloud (Scott),  near-realtime updates on the status of each bait station, from the cloud (Ben),  This might have been around 2014, so nothing like this existed before our functional on site demo, though some months later another company, (not the one I work for, nor the company we invented this proof of concept for), was granted a patent for having written up something that was similar in description to the thing we had conceived, built, field tested and proved, some months before. 

Spider 

This cartoon image of a spider was assembled from rearranged photographs of a painting, coated with polyurethane and covered with a lexan box. An image appropriated and adapted from a larger series of works, of which, there may have been a few dozen, each roughly 8”x11”, these were visual retellings of rearrangements, rather whimsical commentary on the often amusing but of some interest (to me), method by which this animal had come to its current description and classifications. The series was built from a 4’x6’ painting which was on permanent display outside at the Northern Kettle Moraine Cultural Confabulary, until a time, in the spring of 2005, when high winds splintered the plexiglass overlay and torn the weathered canvas destroying the piece, entirely. 

The cartoon  exists as a summary of and a departure from, these smaller impressions and visual retellings, now imbued with a character and a narrative history, of its own.  

Bird 

Exterior house paint on gessoed masonite, a larger painting cropped with a frame saw successive times, dependent upon on how it looked on the silver or sugar maples, that I had it screwed to, over the years. 

Addendum

A while back, we started placing the things we had been working on, outside, even though (early on) a life outside was not the intention for the pieces. This might have something to do with the lack of wall space inside and the abundance of outside, outside. It also frees up the interior space for the next thing(s). 

I liked how these 2 things weathered, so, I made some room on an underutilized wall, and brought them back inside. Though unrelated, they ended up tight together, like this, as lopsided comical adversaries.