Our nephew is in art class and had to make a 3d render of something from the cemetery. He choose a obelisk since it looks like him. He's pretty creative considering he just learned how to new Ferrara brand Italian computer.

I spend way to much on stable diffusion.

I can't stop with the tortoise jewelry

A giant toirtoise made of gold, pearls, quartz and rubys, victorian opulence

Here is Sarah - a sheep transformed via stable diffusion into the super cyborg she really is.



Here we have little Sarah back in 2018 in the photo this was based on.

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.