During January, I was artist in residence at NYU’s school of Integrated Digital Media.
During this time I worked on two key elements of my PhD. The first was to learn python coding – to create a map of the star based on cases of internet censorship.
I took from Google, their transparency reports of 2019, Laws around the world affect the availability of content across Google products and services. These reports disclose data on content removal requests in an effort to inform discussions about online content regulation. I wanted to create a constellation based on these reports. I really like the link between observing the skies and observing the internet.
This is an early idea which I would like to continue to work with. I'm not quite sure how to take this forward. I hope that it would be done in the printing of this, or will reveal itself as more data becomes available. The map below was created with a python program which took data from google, related to the censorship or take down requests made by certain countries, these were divided into different themes.
The second part of this was working with the conductive ink. Unfortunately, the ink which I bought from Amepox earlier - described in the inks section, was particularly difficult to get to work in the way I wanted. I heard from a friend that the way to solve this would be to heat it for a higher temperature for much longer than I had been doing. I went back to the CircuitScribe for this project. I was having a lot of luck with the pens in NYU, I tried our many papers and I found the ones which were the best were the Awagami inkjet papers and the cheap coloured papers for poster printing. These papers provide a smooth surface which the ink does not sink into. Again, the iron on the pen made a huge difference in the ink's resistance, however, too much ironing would affect the flexibility of the ink. I was able to get some great test results with the speakers and the heat circuits.
I found a small break out amplifier was a really nice and easy option for the audio. https://protosupplies.com/product/lm386-audio-amplifier-module/
I found that the loudness of the speaker was better with more turns in the spiral, however the resistance across the spiral had a huge impact on the volume. One of the trickiest parts is making a hole for the ink to pass onto the other side of the paper and making sure the connection did not break. The other tool which I developed during this residency was soldering paper clip connectors. These did not destroy the paper or rub off the ink in the same way that crocodile clips did.
You can see the difference in resistance before and after ironing.
Trying different capacitive sensors.
Although many tests and trials were done, and a real experimental attempt at perfecting the drawn paper speakers, this one month residency did not produce any concrete final works using paper electronics.
The other side of the works was to get to grips with Risograph printing, something which I had not tried before. I wanted to experiment with the many colour layers which the printer could produce. I ended up making a series of astronomical prints, which were taken from and online image from NASA. I experimented with how the layers of inks would change the final print, depending on which order the layers were printed.
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