What is art? To me it has always meant indirect communication–the implied conveyance of ideas through conventions of shared culture. Anything is fair game for a medium, and anything can be a potential message; thus art is infinite in both dimensions.
Continue reading “How I Made the Art Hackathon Image”
Never Buy a Dust Cover Again
Here at Hive76, my desk sits right next to the wood working station. Normally, this isn’t an issue because my computer uses passive heat management, so there is no risk of getting dust clogged up in the fans. But I recently bought a new printer and want to keep it nice and clean. I initially thought of buying a dust cover, but serendipitously completely forgot to even look for them before I left the store. So, necessity being the mother of invention that it is, I was stuck in the space, not wanting to hop back in the car for a silly little dust cover, when I realized that I had a useless cardboard box that I was about to discard that was almost the exact dimensions of the printer itself. Duh! The box it came in! I cut one side off of the box, taped the corners down, left the hole from the missing flap for the wires coming out of the back of the printer, and voila! A free dust cover. I suppose if the color ever bothers me I can just spray paint it a solid color. This solution is actually better than a real cover because now I can stack papers and other lite objects on top when the printer isn’t in use and not have to worry about them sliding or rolling off because of the somewhat round top of the printer.
Art Hack Day in Brooklyn
The MAKE blog recently posted a notice of an event being held this weekend–Art Hack Day–that I find very intriguing. I’ve been bandying about an similar idea, in part inspired by the Bravo Channel’s reality TV series Work of Art. The show has the typical “Top XYZ” format of elimination challenges. What strikes me about the show is that their work space looks very much like a hackerspace, and once the artists settle in to the work format, they start producing some extremely intriguing pieces.
In a lot of ways, the artist’s studio and hackerspaces are very similar; indeed, we here at Hive76 have made a former artist’s studio as our fire-retardant-home-away-from-home here at 915 Studios. So with that in mind, we are putting together a similar event to the Art Hack Day. We would like to make it an open build session with recycled materials. Stay tuned for the full details in an upcoming blog post (honestly, I will write it, really, I will).
Open Question to our Readers
We all bring our own ideas to the table of what hackerspaces are about. For some, it’s a place to work. For others, it’s a place to socialize. For me personally, hackerspaces are a place to do work for the community in ways that are unique and effective for engineers and scientists.
I’ve participated in a lot of community service work in my life (voluntarily!) and I found that traditional community service organizations tend to mostly require manual labor from their membership. As you get more involved in the organization, there are other, minor administrative duties that you can take over, like publishing a print newsletter or keeping financial records. Some of the larger organizations have different divisions of state- and national-level management infrastructure that long-time committed members may participate in, for the greater governance of the organization.
But none of these things have any particular bearing on science, technology, engineering, or mathematics. I found myself feeling like I wasn’t contributing as much as I possibly could, because I wasn’t using my strongest skills (in my particular case, I’m an expert programmer with strengths in technical project management). While I certainly appreciate the need to just have bodies that can move trash, it seems a bit wasteful to perform traditional community service duties when you have a group of highly technical people on your hands.
But that is also just me. A lot of people have completely different ideas about what it means to have a hackerspace. Ultimately this is the beauty of the model: the hackerspace is incredibly malleable, independent, and always current. I’m very interested in knowing the variety of opinions from our readership on this very question – what DOES hackerspace mean to you? There may be an aspect of Hive76 some of our readership find intriguing that we fail to advertise to others.
Open call for help from ESR
Eric S. Raymond has recently asked for some help from Philadelphia’s DIY and engineering community with an exciting project. Amongst many other interesting projects, ESR is the lead developer on GPSd, a “service daemon that monitors one or more GPSes…”. He needs help building a cheap GPS repeater to forward the RF data from his roof antenna to his test rack in his office. For any student or hobbiest electrical engineers looking to make a name for themselves, this could be an excellent opportunity.
The JayOscillator
The JayOscillator is the stupid name that I came up with for my HTML 5 synthesizer that I’ve been working on over the last month or so. I spent a good part of today making it look pretty, though now It works in Chrome and Safari right now. It technically works in FireFox, but the displays for the variables don’t seem to want to open their eyes. Take a look:
I named it the “JayOscillator” after the Korg KAOSCILLATOR, as my thing is a similar sort of notion, written in JavaScript.
You can try it out here for now, though no promises that the URL won’t change in the future.
Unfortunately, I think I have to give up on iPad support. Apple nerfed the ability to auto-start HTML 5 audio tags from JavaScript. Without that ability, their is no way I can keep a continuous tone going.
I’m considering rewriting this as a native app, though. Most of the effort here has been in figuring out the math necessary to get this going. Since that work is done, porting to different languages and platforms is more of a chore in API calls.
Creating the “Common”
This came in to my inbox this morning. It sounds very interesting, in line with a lot of our core values, especially considering the history of libraries in Philadelphia. I’m a little disappointed because I can’t get in to that part of the city by the necessary time on a weekday, so I won’t be able to go.
Making… Paint!
Back in late August, when we did the experimentation with ferrofluids, I discovered-for-myself an interesting process for making the requisite Fe3O4, aka magnetite. Through an electrolysis process, and then some other steps, I was able to create a fair amount of magnetite from iron screws. I ditched this process in regards to ferrofluids, but eventually picked it back up again for making paint pigments.
Yes, real paint is pretty cheap, and there are easier ways to make black pigments, such as carbonizing just about anything (though I don’t know of easier ways to make brown from a scratch process). That wasn’t the point. I specifically wanted to make paintings in which I could claim I made the pigments.
From the time of the Renaissance up to the late 19th century, artists often were engineers and scientists, and vice versa. Leonardo Da Vinci should probably be more accurately remembered as a government contractor in weapons engineering rather than artist. Prior to the industrial revolution, any painter kind of had to be a competent chemists to able to make their pigments. And any student of botany, biology, and other natural sciences needed to be competent sketch artists to be able to record their work.
I strive to maintain a lot of that tradition in my own work, and I think it’s important to know what goes in to the things we make, even if that thing is “just art”.
I started with a beaker full of salt water. Ahem, excuse me, “aqueous solution of sodium chloride”. Right. The sodium chloride acts as an electrolyte to allow the electricity to conduct through the water. Basic stuff here. I’ve got a laptop battery charger with alligator clips holding on to the plug. I have iron screws as both electrodes because I didn’t want to bother making sure I had the right polarity on the charger plug. The screws dangle from wires that are taped to my beaker so they stay in place.
WARNING! This process creates a couple of nasty things. First, there will be a small amount of hydrochloric acid produced in beaker. It won’t be a lot, but if you keep your hands submerged in it for long enough, you could get a slight rash (yes, I speak from experience, from many, many years ago when I accidentally blew up my bedroom as a kid). It also creates small amount of chlorine gas, which is poisonous! For the small scale at which I was working, as well as working in a well-ventilated room, it was not a concern. However, I should have used sodium bicarbonate as the electrolyte, it would have eliminated both of these issues. Alas, I didn’t have any at the time.
It also creates a LARGE amount of hydrogen and oxygen gas, which if you’re dumb like I was when I was 15 and try to collect it, can be quite explosive. You are forewarned!
The orange stuff floating in the top of the beaker is iron hydroxide. You might not be able to tell from the picture, but there is a slight green tint to rest of the water. That is also iron hydroxide, in another form. Iron hydroxide is apparently very difficult to control in color. However, I did use a little paint brush to sweep up the orange stuff from the edges of my beaker and make this little painting.
The greenish-black iron hydroxide was what I was after. I actually thought it was the magentite iron oxide that I was looking for at the time, but I’ve since learned otherwise. Black iron hydroxide is slightly magnetic, so I balanced my beaker on top of a large, neodymium magnet to draw the precipitate down to the bottom of my beaker, allowing me to pour most of the water off of the top of the stuff I cared about.
I wanted to boil the rest of the water out, as the leftover looked like diluted ink. Eventually I was left with a liquid that was quite thick, almost like river mud, meaning it sputtered too much to continue boiling. The material on the edges dried out and turned brown; more on that in a bit. This was at the time we were doing the ferrofluid stuff, so I was very keen on removing the water and replacing it with a very light oil. One of our members suggested using acetone to dissolve with the water and increase the overall volatility, to speed natural evaporation. At the time, I still didn’t know that I only had iron hydroxide, I thought I had iron oxide, so this step was quite serendipitous. Green-black iron hydroxide in anaerobic conditions will oxidize to magnetite! I believe the acetone deoxygenated the water and left water protons for oxidizing the iron hydroxide. It very clearly went from a greenish-black, pluming precipitate to a very black precipitate fell out of suspension very easily and was much more magnetic. It still didn’t make a great ferrofluid (I didn’t have a surfactant, confused emulsifiers with surfactants, got unconfused and tried to use dish soap as my surfactant, and eventually just had a mess everywhere).
But I was intrigued by how dark of a black I had on my hands, and how readily it stained everything it touched (much to our quarter master’s chagrin). At this point, I had something I could start painting with. I mixed a little with some more water because I knew I wanted to do something spattery, and then made this stylistic interpretation of the classic video game “Asteroids”. There is a little bit of a brown tint to it because of an inefficiency in my process, but then I recontextualized and made it part of my process. I made a frame for it out of scrap wood, but I probably should not have. Now it just kind of looks cheesy. Grumble.
I wanted to now take advantage of the brown crust on the edge of my previous boil experiment. I realized that it was actually another form of iron oxide called hematite, Fe2O3. Magnetite oxidizes to hematite in open air under a flame, so I took some of my black material and blasted it under my pipe welding torch. I eventually shattered my shot glass that I was using as an impromptu beaker from overheating. Yet another instance of my lack of preparation and use of proper tools nearly getting me hurt. But I digress.
The last painting was difficult to work with because the water took forever to evaporate, which warped the paper I was painting on. This time, I mixed my pigment with acetone. It was more difficult to keep the pigment in suspension, but the much more volatile acetone evaporated much quicker, leaving me with dry paper that didn’t warp. The result was a painting of a steel bearing, which I thought was interesting because I’m technically painting with “rust”.
I finished up with the iron oxide by making an ink with it and this last drawing of the entrance to a mysterious forest.
So now what? Now, I’m experimenting with different metals to see what other colors I can get. I know that copper can lead to some green tints, which I’m very excited to try to replicate. I was able to
make a very, very small amount of copper hydroxide last night, which you can see in the following pictures. I also made a small amount of yellowish brown copper oxide. Unfortunately, it rather readily oxidizes in air to make black copper oxide, which I’m not too interested in as the black iron oxide is easier to make.
The brown is nice because it’s not as dark as the brown iron oxide, but I’m excited about the possibility of making green.
Oh, I also made a blue flame.
Hacktory Happenings
Our friends at The Hacktory are hosting an event this Friday from 7 – 8:30PM to discuss their experiences at the Chaos Communication Camp. I hear tell they will have popcorn, which is quite something. I wish I had gone just to see Disco Lenin.
Hive Cleans Up
As mentioned previously, on Sunday, the 5th of September, members of Hive76 spent time cleaning up the street at 915 Spring Garden St. The work proved to be hard but rewarding. While there are still significant areas of garbage and weeds, we made a big impact on the areas in which we worked, paving the way for future improvements.
As the coordinator for this particular activity, I really want to give my deepest thanks to our members Mike Hogan, PJ Santoro, and Dan Toliaferro for coming out and busting their asses in the 80+F weather. I also want to thank Dave Sharp for providing some supplies as well as one of our fellow tenants at 915 Spring Garden St. for bringing us water while we were working.
More cleanup efforts are still to come, we really want to develop the garden box and maybe add more garden boxes around the building. We’d also like to spiff the place up a little it with some local art, any sort of standing sculptures that can live permanently in our new garden. If you would like to donate to our cause, with plants or dirt or trees or money to buy such things, then please contact us at hive76@hive76.org.
In the meantime, check out the before and after pictures:
