I hate half done artwork. I hate half done projects. I hate, shitty, expensive, media art projects that pretend to be something they are not the most.

<big_freaking_lie>The sweeping zinc facade of the Burchfield Penney Art Center is no longer just a wall. It’s a projection surface. Buffalo’s seasons are no longer just the weather. They’re curators. Elmwood Avenue at Rockwell Road is no longer just another street corner. It’s the Front Yard at the Center—the world’s first permanent, environmentally-responsive, 24/7/365, outdoor audio and image experience. And on October 18, (2013) it turned on forever.

Here is another description of the project on the Cycling MAX-MSP site

And the launch story about Front Yard Launch written in Artvoice

And launch story about About the Front Yard project on WBFO

And from the Buffalo News Article about the Front Yard project

Here are some pictures I took on launch day for clarification about which project I am talking about.




The idea that you get from the articles is that the system somehow reads the weather from sensors and decides what to play and that it will do this forever and ever, making an environmentally sensitive video projection wall.

Back in late summer, early fall 2013, the artist Brian Milbrand first asked me to get involved with the Burchfield Penney Front Yard project. At that point just about nothing was working and they were crunching up against the golive date. I hate coming into projects like that and was very busy but I was interested in the concept and was a friend of Brian's wife so I decided to help out. I also was interested that the system would need a 24/7/365 uptime - something I am used to working as a systems architect in a healthcare facility.

The basic system works like this:

Brian Milbrand's group created a sensor reader that would feed weather sensor data to Max MSP which would then process the current temp, sky color, humidity, wind speed, etc and pass that data to my system which would in turn select which media to play based on a formula we agreed to and reply with the playlist. For example its freezing and windy, a video tagged with that info that incorporated those ideas would be selected. I didn't make the choices about which videos played, we agreed on the formula and the videos were tagged accordingly.

Then when starting to project the video on the front of the museum, MAX-MSP would send a confirmation response back to my server which I would forward to the Burchfield Penney site via an API some developer created so they could display what is being played. Not sure where that data is ever displayed.

Something like this, sorry just sketched it out quick on my phone screen.


The whole system entirely depends on accurate real time input from the weather and environmental sensors. The system was supposed to "work forever" but what I found was that even just a few months after the golive, the weather sensors started to fail and report back data in-accurately. They are supposed to give feedback 1400 minutes a day. Most days it works not even a fraction of that. Since last November (2014) it hasn't even sent back one day of accurate weather.



It kills me because I wasted so much time trying to help them out when I was really busy with work.

I've tried to contact the artist Brian Milbrand, many many times. In fact my system literally emails him at his work and personal email every single day to remind him of the issue because I got tired of reminding him personally.



I even wrote a personal email to his wife asking her to tell him in case somehow gmail didn't deliver the mail, which I thought was pretty impossible as I would have it CC my gmail and I would get them.



Here is an export of what played everyday since Nov 2014 since it has been stuck on the weather of that day since then when the system last reported weather. You can see the list is kind of limited for something that is supposed to be responsive.

MEDIA TITLE	TOTAL	REASON
Burchfield On Location Zoar Water	1902	temp = 20-32
Burchfield On Location Zoar 1	1877	temp = 22-28
Homespun	702	temp = 20-50
Pyroglyphs	684	temp = 0-48
Adrift/Removed/Steadfast	658	windspeed = 3-15
Geomania	656	humidity = 0-70
Wonderful Body Electric	655	temp = 20-50
Tourist	653	temp = 0-48

I'm sure they can find some way to turn this into an artistic statement about how all things rust and die in buffalo or that theme that the weather is not reliable. Really for all the money invested you would think they could find a way to make the weather sensor reliable or just have taken my offer to scrape the weather data from the internet.

We traveled over to The Albright Knox for First Friday with (e:terry)'s mom.

The Art was great but the letters between Knox and the artist were even better. I love reading old letters. Especially, type written ones in the style of those letters. I wonder why we abandoned the dash, carriage return word split.






























This last one you have to see in person. At full height, looking straight at it, it ripples.

I literally spend every moment of today programming for the production at the Burchfield Penney. I think I have a pretty solid video/audio selector formula now to go along with the media manager and camera controls. One of the tricky parts was doing the math for sunrise/sunset but I ended up just scraping the next five years worth of time and dates from the web and storing it in a DB table.

Now the thing just needs to be fed more data.

Programming with (e:joe) a bit was fun. I am really excited about the possibilities.

I was saying to brian it would be interesting to communicate with the audience from cell phones over the speaker system or to have the system itself text to speach grumble about the weather. There are so many possibilities.

Inspired by the Haters Gonna Hate unicorn bike meme from a while back I decided to make (e:mike) a bike unicorn for his birthday. The materials I had where copper piping, a blow torch and some solder and flux from the hose repair project. This makes me think I could make those sprinklers. I kind of want one that looks like a unicorn throwing up.

Had a great time at the City Of Night event at the silos. The art was interesting, we saw so many people we know, and we danced. I even saw people I know from middle school which was so last century.

We all danced our asses off. I felt so bad for (e:Dianne) as I know she loves it so much but its gotta hurt with that shoulder. At one point I inhaled a lot of rust by accident and could talk normal for about an hour. I hope I don't come down with some rare iron borne bacterial infection.

















This was by far the best piece.

He was hungry for the crocheted food and rats.

We hit up the annual Peep Show fundraiser art show for Squeaky Wheel. It was at Dnipro, The Ukranian Center at 562 Genesee St. This makes it two weekends in a row at that place.

I had such an amazing night. Saw a lot of people I had not seen in a while. I only wish we had gotten there a little earlier so I could have seen Holly and Brian's video. I think I missed a lot of stuff but I got a great picture of (e:holly) in her costume with the homunculus.



I got to wear my new red photographer pants from express with my white crystal fox tail. People seemed to really love that one. I got lots of compliments although I think some of it was just people blinded by chest fur and red suspenders.




I had the most fun in the ball pit. I think I was there for an hour. The artist had set up an adult ball pit and filled it with crocheted food, condoms, and rats. It was pretty hillarious. The detail work on the food was awesome.

Somehow, everytime I hang out with Rita, I never manage to say goodbye. She is so fun.











The whole evening was pretty awesome until wee hours when everything fell apart.

We ended up having an impromptu party last night. A bunch of people came back from comedy night with (e:heidi) and then (e:terry) came back with robert, john and (e:yesthatscacey). We tried out the rock-it 3.0 on a the styrofoam frim the chocolate fountain packaging and it was amazing. styrofoam is definately the way to go.

I finally broke out the colored pencils that (e:hodown) and I had bought back on our thanksgiving trip.

I also realized I like making paper dolls. Now I just need better scissors. Robert had on the cutest lilac cowboy shirt. I was jealous. I wish I got a picture. As you can see in the picture.

(e:mike) saw this the other day at the mall, I thought it was cute but not $50 worth.

We headed up to silo city last night for the art shows. The art was really good, from photography to installation. They had multiple grain silos open with exhibits in each silo, as well as, music in the middle of the open area between them.

We escaped into the darkness as for a bit and found a silo which had the bottom of the funnel part sawed or rusted off. We put our heads up inside and the sound was incredible. A giant confined space, echo chamber, stories high and probably 40 ft in diameter. With (e:terry) and (e:enknot) singing it was so awesome. Even clapping was awesome.

The only bad part was all of the rust in the air made my eyes and lungs hurt. Especially the first time we were in there and (e:terry) thought it was funny to be smashing on the metal funnel. Every time he did it prices of rust fell from the ceiling.

I had (e:terry) capture the sound on my phone

::DOWNLOAD SOUND::

All in all it was a great time. I wish I could have taken more pics but it was too dark or I was having too much fun most of the time.