View source for User:Jasper van Loenen/RWRM/2-combination-of-descriptions-of-work

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'Test Screen' is the title of an installation made out of a big (about 110x80x40 centimeters), black, wooden box with an equally wide and about 60 centimeters high wooden board on top of it. The board has a rectangular opening in the middle, through which you can see a flatscreen monitor. On the left and right side of the monitor there are black plastic knobs - a total of 96 - which are divided into groups by thin white rectangles on the wood. Each of these groups holds six to eleven knobs and has a flip switch and the text 'element', followed by the number of the group, in its top left corner.
On the monitor you see an image representing a television test screen. Each group of dials controls a different element on the screen - such as a colored box or a gradient. By turning the knobs you can change the elements' properties like color, size, and position, enabling you to change the shown image and make your own composition. 
After the code needed to run the installation was finished and proven to work in a small prototype, the big box was the first element to be made followed by the top board. Each opening was drilled or sawn into the board and the whole thing was painted black. The electronics were soldered and placed behind the board, with the knobs sticking through the holes. On the front, small plastic knobs were attached: these are the elements the visitor can rotate. Stickers were used to draw white rectangles on the wood, to divide the knobs into groups. The last things to do, putting a computer inside the box and mounting the monitor, were done in the exhibition space.
When searching for a subject for my graduation project I realized I find modern electronics interesting, but also boring in their appearance - many devices look just about the same and are obvious the result of mass producing. Another thing I found interesting was the fact that these devices are capable of doing many things, but you can never see how these things come to be. It is impossible to see trough their fancy exterior and see the inner workings. I wanted to combine these two realizations and create a computer or system which would feel more hand-made and which would give the user some clues as to what is happening when you use it. I also found it important to produce this system by myself, so it would really be my product - from the coding and wood crafting to the electronics.

I used the same approach of creating the whole device from scratch when making the Poking Machine (together with Bartholomäus Traubeck). This small (9 x 7 x 5 cm) box made out of 3mm green transparent Perspex and with a piece of velcro attached to it uses an ATtiny45 chip, 9 volts battery, servo motor, bluetooth receiver and your Android smartphone to connect to your Facebook account. When you get poked on Facebook, a little arm will come out of the box to physically poke you on the arm.
Facebook then sends a message to your e-mail address to let you know you’ve been poked. In this case an e-mail address that was created specially for the Poking Machine is used and the program on the cellphone keeps track on the number of emails in this inbox. When the number goes up, it means you have been poked and it will send a signal, over bluetooth to the Poking Machine box. The circuit will receive this message and will make the servo arm move out of the box, wait for a second, and than move back in.
The reason we made this was that online social networks, even though they are platforms for communication and enabling us to connect anywhere we go, still lack the mediation of physical communication. Facebook tries to improve this by enabling its users to ‘poke’ each other, which basically only sends another written message to the person you poke, without conveying the original intent of the poking gesture. The Poking machine converts the message into an actual physical poke, extending the reach of this haptic gesture indefinitely. This way users can connect not only virtually but also physically.
This somewhat silly option of Facebook was also discussed in one of my essays during the second trimester. From Receiver to Homing Beacon is about how we changed from just the receivers of information through media, to broadcasters of our own information, but how the options we have at our disposal are not as democratic and decided upon by us, the users, as we might think.

I tried to connect multiple text related to this subject, from Richard Serra's Television Delivers People to Zadie Smiths' Generation Why? In the text I moved from a description of the 'old' media situation where you would only receive information, like when watching television, to the 'new' situation where you actively broadcast information about yourself to others, like by using online social media such as Facebook. I found this interesting to do since I'm a user of these online media myself but I was never sure what to think of them. For me, this was a good exercise in using different sources to make a point. It actually helped me form a clear opinion on these 'services' (which in the end lead to removing my Facebook account).
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