Jekyll2023-08-31T13:55:12-04:00//aka.farm/AKA MEDIA SYSTEMResearch | Art | Strategy | Advicenoah feehan / AKAhttps://hi-hi-hi.comPARAGON2023-01-23T00:00:00-05:002023-01-23T00:00:00-05:00//aka.farm/paragon<p><img src="/images/paragon/paragon-3up-a.jpg" alt="image-center" class="align-center" /></p>
<h2 id="paragon">PARAGON</h2>
<p><em>This is a series of 1:1 CNC replicas of the iPhone 4S, cut from Noir Belge.</em></p>
<p>The sculptures are machined to match the exact dimensions of an iPhone 4S. Each piece has a different swipe pattern gilded onto it, using UV-catalyzed human nose grease as the gilding size. The pattern of gold on each device in the series corresponds to the accumulated smudges after that kind of mobile interaction. For example, “Witness” features a strong diagonal smudges corresponding to the frequent zoom-and-pan involved in that activity.</p>
<h3 id="midas--residue">Midas / Residue</h3>
<p>Each sculpture’s face has embellishments in 24 karat gold leaf whose shape corresponds to the finger-smudges accumulated on the surface of a phone while engaged in a specific mode of use. The modes, and subsequent version titles, are:<br />
- Like and Subscribe (YouTube, Twitter)<br />
- Doomscroll (Twitter and news apps)<br />
- Witness (camera and photo reel)<br />
In the <a href="https://archive.org/details/case_6a_159_no_87">Midas</a> legend, the king wishes that all he touches might turn to gold; in practice, with this gift comes the inability to nourish himself.</p>
<h3 id="touchstone--attention">Touchstone / Attention</h3>
<p>The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noir_Belge">material</a> in this sculpture has most commonly been used throughout history as a <em>touchstone</em>, the surface against which a merchant would scratch a piece of gold in order to determine the gold’s purity. The word <em>paragon</em> owes its etymological <a href="https://www.etymonline.com/word/paragon">roots</a> to this practice.</p>
<p>Here, the gilding highlights the commodification of attention ingorming the design of almost every interaction hosted on the deivce. The accumulated smudges on a phone screen, ephemeral desire-paths of hand and eye, here precipitate into actual gold, deposited on the surface of a contemporary touchstone.</p>
<h3 id="production">Production</h3>
<p>The sculptures were CNC machined from a chunk of Noir Belge over the course of six months in 2022; polishing took another two months, as working with stone in these proportions is extremely delicate and tenuous work. The stone-milling facility uses large 6-axis robot arms to hold the tooling, similar to the robots used in automated car production facilities.</p>
<p>I chose the iPhone 4S because it is the phone that feels best in my hand.</p>
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<figcaption>Like and Subscribe, Doomscroll, and Witness in noir belge with 24kt gold touchmarks
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<figcaption>Maquettes used to test UV-catalyzation technique for nose grease as a gilding size
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</figure>noah feehan / AKAhttps://hi-hi-hi.comCNC Sculptures in Noir BelgeSUPER POSITION2022-11-09T00:00:00-05:002022-11-09T00:00:00-05:00//aka.farm/super-position<p><img src="/images/super-position/still-thorns.png" alt="image-center" class="align-center" /></p>
<h2 id="super-position">SUPER POSITION</h2>
<p><em>Four videos from an ongoing performance series</em></p>
<p>In each video, a camera hovers directly overhead as a person walks in a complete circle over the course of exactly one hour. The person starts at the top of the screen and moves as consistently as possible, so that his position on screen can be read as the minute hand of a clock.</p>
<h3 id="labyrinth">Labyrinth</h3>
<p>This video-performance series draws on the tradition of labyrinth-walking, a meditative practice entangling perceptions of time, space, and copresence. The path of a labyrinth is designed to bring the walker at intervals closer to the center and away again, near other meditators and away agin, each in his own hermetic orbit of thought. Here, the circular path invites the viewer to experience the piece ambiently, allowing it to exist in the room without requiring strict focus - you and I come in glancing contact with each other throughout the hour, following the dynamics of the attention in the room rather than a path on the ground. I use ambient videos like this as a way to yield, in their viewing, the same layered depths that are involved in the pacing-out and filming of the piece.</p>
<h3 id="beating-the-bounds">Beating the Bounds</h3>
<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beating_the_bounds">Beating the bounds</a> is a perennial rite in which a community transits the circumference of a village, their performance reinforcing a collective consensus on the boundaries and borders of their domain.</p>
<p>Here I am beating-out the clock, dedicating 1:1 attention to remarking/marking out time itself. The bounds are temporal and explicitly not physical; you can’t see the face of the clock in the shot, it is only traced out as I walk it.
I try to walk an exact circle, despite that circle being visibly interrupted by other things; streams, paths, etc; as well as to have the performance interrupted by nonparticipant actors (deer, frolf teams, vehicles, birds, leaves, etc). “Super position” of the clock and the timekeeping metric (rigidly measured face; highly technical filming equipment and process) onto various wilds in a manner similar to my <a href="https://aka.farm/parallel">larking piece</a>.</p>
<h3 id="overhead-view">Overhead View</h3>
<p>A profound sociotechnical moment allows me my bird’s eye view here, a perspective long imagined in historical artworks (Nazca lines, Cerna Abbas Giant) but only now found ready-at-hand. The camera in this piece is ordered to be dead still, but its small motions (to account for wind, magnetic inaccuracies, etc) highlight the work taking place to serve up such a serene view - like a duck’s placid top-half gliding through the water while its unseen feet flail wildly below the surface. Similarly an absent orchestra of finely-tuned control loops and hyperprecise satellite constellations work to provide an imperturbable, centered, eternal view-from-heaven.</p>
<h3 id="production">Production</h3>
<p>Each video’s subtitle is taken from the phenomenon that interrupted the piece - the one in the video below is “Zorro,” the name of the dog you can see confusedly trying to play with me while I’m walking the circle. Other titles are “Thorn”, “Frolf”, and “Deer”.</p>
<p>Prior to each performance, I measure out the circle using some standard surveying equipment; I mark out a 74-foot diameter circle and at each of the 12 arcs (one for each hour’s position on the clock) I place a small flag not visible to the camera. Once the camera is running, I use a timer to ensure I walk each section of the circle in the same amount of time.</p>
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<figcaption>Production stills
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</figure>noah feehan / AKAhttps://hi-hi-hi.comVideo / Performance SeriesFIXTURE (2022)2022-11-08T00:00:00-05:002022-11-08T00:00:00-05:00//aka.farm/FIXTURE2022<p><img src="/images/fixture2022/fixture-5.jpg" alt="image-center" class="align-center" /></p>
<h1 id="fixture">FIXTURE</h1>
<p>remote installation made with custom hardware + software</p>
<h3 id="description">Description</h3>
<p>FIXTURE is a continuous mapping between my smartphone’s orientation sensors and the red, green, and blue intensities of an LED light strip.</p>
<h3 id="implementation">Implementation</h3>
<p>FIXTURE is a 6-meter linear array of 360 lights; each light corresponds to a data packet describing the physical orientation of my phone. The mapping from sensor value to color is as straightforward as possible, with X, Y, and Z orientation values linearly scaled to R, G, and B lighting intensities.</p>
<h3 id="continuity">Continuity</h3>
<p>Packets arrive once a minute; as one packet arrives, it populates the leftmost position in the LED array and the previous packets move one position to the right. The length of the strip in pixels is the number of minutes into the past the piece displays.</p>
<p>The server has no database or memory - it simply provides the last value it heard from the phone. No attempt is made to “fill in” information lost due to interrution or interfeerence.</p>
<p>The result is a series of colors representing periods of one posture or another: a line of ten identical blues when I set the phone down to charge; a patch of mottled pinks where it was jostling about in my bag as I head to work.</p>
<p>This is as taut and durable a line as I can string between the sensed object and the display.</p>
<h3 id="metonymy--surrogates">Metonymy / surrogates</h3>
<p>FIXTURE is an experiment about remote forms of presence. I made it to augment my thinking about the ways our phones/devices often serve as functional surrogates for our presence, and to look for ways to expand, modulate, or isolate various parts of that relationship. A preliminary mapping is a logical first step, which is what you see here; I am still experimenting with other forms and arrangements to push on this line of inquiry.</p>
<p>The primary signal is as described: simply, the sensor values sampled each minute. The secondary signals reside in the extrapolations made possible by the presentation of the data in this form, this fixture: A metronomic progression of orientations; a series of postures; a progression of states.</p>
<p>FIXTURE is an attempt to manifest the metonymy between smartphone and person - its output is a peripheral awareness of this taut line strung between two domains.</p>
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</figure>noah feehan / AKAhttps://hi-hi-hi.comRemote-presence installation with custom hardwareMuhannad Shono - Teaching Tree2022-04-05T00:00:00-04:002022-04-05T00:00:00-04:00//aka.farm/teaching-tree<figure class="third ">
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<p>I worked with artist <a href="https://muhannadshono.com/">Muhannad Shono</a> as Technical Lead on this massive-yet-subtle artwork. It is available to visit at the 2022 <a href="https://www.labiennale.org/en/venues/arsenale">Venice Biennale</a> through November 27, 2022.</p>
<p>The work is a 40-meter long undulating line that starts out as a single palm stalk and expands into the room, culminating in a tuft of over 500 fronds spanning 10m in diameter. As visitors encounter the work, they notice that the entire skin of the sculpture is moving, breathing from within via a 57-channel nearly silent pneumatic actuation system that stretches and flexes the blacked-out, gently rustling palm material. Over time, visitors see a range of motion behaviors ranging from a variety of meditative, evenly-paced deep breaths to more sudden peristaltic shivers that ricochet up and down the spine of the sculpture.</p>
<p>It was a pleasure to work with Shono to shape his vision into an implementable and successful experience for the Biennale visitors; I particularly appreciate the mix of conceptual rigor and true generosity with which he approached sometimes-arcane engineering discussions. This project came together across oceans, languages, and teams in only four months. I am indebted to <a href="https://benjamin.panreck.de/">Ben Panreck</a> for his ingenuity and leadership in designing the pneumatics system; to the dedicated team at <a href="https://www.weexhibit.biz/we-are">WeExhibit</a>, who led the logistics and architectural aspects of the installation; and of course to Muhannad’s capable and talented <a href="https://muhannadshono.com/">studio team</a>. The images in the gallery above are from the piece’s host, the <a href="https://saudipavilion.org/art/2022-the-teaching-tree/">Saudi Pavilion</a>.</p>
<p>Press / Links:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.stirworld.com/see-features-stirring-dreams-muhannad-shono-presents-the-teaching-tree-at-venice-art-biennale">StirWorld</a></li>
<li><a href="https://arte8lusso.net/art/muhannad-shono/">Arte & Lusso</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.arabnews.com/node/2068521/lifestyle">Arab News</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/451107/muhannad-shonothe-teaching-tree/">e-flux</a></li>
<li><a href="https://vimeo.com/705790855">Vimeo</a></li>
<li>Saudi Pavilion <a href="https://www.instagram.com/saudipavilion/">Instagram</a></li>
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</figure>noah feehan / AKAhttps://hi-hi-hi.comLarge-scale mechatronic artwork at the 2022 Venice BiennaleAnicka Yi - In Love With The World2021-10-12T00:00:00-04:002021-10-12T00:00:00-04:00//aka.farm/in-love-with-the-world<figure class="third ">
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<p>I worked with artist <a href="https://www.anickayistudio.biz/">Anicka Yi</a> as Technical Lead on this sprawling, deeply technical artwork. It will be available to visit for free at the Tate Modern’s <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/hyundai-commission-anicka-yi">Turbine Hall</a> through January 16th 2022.</p>
<p>The work involves a cloud of 3-meter tall autonomous dirigibles, each following a unique set of proclivities that mutate and develop over the course of the exhibition. A thermal camera network mounted in the Hall allows each dirigible to understand where humans/mammals are, without involving any facial recognition or surveillance concerns. I am particularly proud that the entire exhibition does not need the external internet at all (although in the interests of transparency, some of our systems are securely remotely inspectable by the team to assist in debugging if necessary).</p>
<p>This project afforded me the opportunity to work with some truly excellent people, including the folks at <a href="https://sitara.systems">Sitara Systems</a> (whose main developer, Nathan, wrote the behavior software controlling each dirigible); the supportive and dauntless staff of the <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk">Tate</a> (in particular producer Petra Schmidt); the infinitely capable and professional folks at <a href="https://kitmapper.com/">Kitmapper</a> (who are now running the day-to-day operations of the exhibition); innovative and peerless folks at <a href="https://airstage.biz">Airstage</a> and <a href="https://pozyx.io">Pozyx</a>; scent scientist Dr. Pam Dalton of <a href="https://monell.org/pamela-dalton/">Monell</a>; and of course Anicka and her truly amazing <a href="https://www.anickayistudio.biz/">studio</a> staff. I miss them already!</p>
<p>Press:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/11/arts/design/anicka-yi-tate.html">The New York Times</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.cnn.com/style/article/anicka-yi-tate-modern-turbine-hall/index.html">CNN</a></li>
<li><a href="https://londonist.com/london/art-and-photography/floating-aliens-have-invaded-tate-modern-s-turbine-hall">Londonist</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.designboom.com/art/anicka-yi-tate-modern-hyundai-motor-london-floating-machines-aerobes-10-11-2021/">Designboom</a></li>
<li><a href="https://aestheticamagazine.com/biomechanical-life/">Aesthetic</a></li>
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</figure>noah feehan / AKAhttps://hi-hi-hi.comLarge-scale autonomous artwork at the Tate Modern's Turbine HallLarking / Parallel Fields2020-12-23T00:00:00-05:002020-12-23T00:00:00-05:00//aka.farm/parallel<h3 id="artists-note"><em>Artist’s Note</em></h3>
<p><em>I completed the first performance and documentation of this piece in rural New Hampshire in November 2019. The pandemic hit just as I was preparing to show it in person. *The ideal* presentation is a synchronized 2-screen video loop with the text (below) available to read somewhere in the room. *The reality* is that I can’t let this sit anymore, and would like to share it, so I am placing it here. Please understand how non-ideal it is to see gorgeous synchronized 2-channel video smooshed into one small Vimeo screen :-(
If you have a space and would like to show this, or facilitate a re-staging (the performance can take place in any woodsy river), please get in touch.</em></p>
<p><img src="/images/parallel/aka-bdl.jpeg" alt="wand-and-system" /></p>
<h2 id="mess"><em>Mess</em></h2>
<p>Ma and I walk in her woods, mostly in silence. We move among beech trees and older conifers, following low ground and favoring the easy route. Each of us hopes not to have to carry the other.
The land is ordinary (objectively! To me: ancestral, enchanted), and she had a forestry service come do some logging a few years ago. The intervention was a weirding of the space: more often than before, we find ourselves wondering where, exactly, we may be in reference to the three main trails that used to divide the land. Now, with pragmatic caterpillar tracks opening new areas to our walks, it’s not uncommon for her to stop at a spot, troubled, her face darkening. She’ll say, or not have to say, what’s on her mind: <em>what a mess.</em></p>
<p>These spindly young trees, this overgrowth: a shambles.</p>
<p>She’ll begin to tidy up, parallelizing branch-bunches and laying them to the side of what we think might be the trail. After a while, something breaks the reverie (errant dogs, waning light, shadow of Sisyphus) and she’ll move on.</p>
<p>It’s like we’ve sullied the woods—hired a chaos-agent to disrupt a natural order, moving branches and paths where they shouldn’t be. The tidying isn’t atonement, just scratching an itch: the surface of a weave has been stretched out of shape, and massaging the warp and weft back into order feels essentially productive, useful.</p>
<p>We commissioned a competing model of entropy for this “wild” space and, years on, meander uneasily through the results.</p>
<h2 id="mudlark"><em>Mudlark</em></h2>
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<figcaption>Video <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SdlC-l92uA">source</a>
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<p>A woman wades through the center of a shallow, calm river. The GoPro on her forehead shows that she is mainly looking straight down, and often hunches over to get closer to the riverbed; she carefully frames her shots, and her searches, so that the sun’s glare never reflects off the water-surface into her eyes—if it did, she wouldn’t be able to mudlark very well.</p>
<p>She reaches down and picks up something that is, to the viewer, indistinguishable from the other multicolored rocks on the riverbed. Only as she raises it up out of the water do you notice its flat, straight edges—it’s a fragment of white china.</p>
<p>There’s a pattern on the china. We’ll look it up later using reverse image search or, more likely, by crowdsourcing an answer from other mudlarkers online. She keeps the fragment in her bag, even if it’s not a “keeper” for her—a side benefit of mudlarking is the gradual cleanup of the riverbed. In some places, there’s nothing left to find—the spot along the river had a bottle dump, or bordered a pottery, and had yielded finds so interesting that after a while, it was cleaned out. Subsequent mudlarkers, also YouTubing their travails, will dejectedly detect this—that all the fun has been had; it’s just a boring river again, waiting for renewal via trash and time.</p>
<h2 id="detectorist"><em>Detectorist</em></h2>
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<p>“It’s a 79, so it can’t be another soda can” he says, digging with a tactical trowel into the green turf of an open field in rural England. After some depth, he begins poking a sealed plastic wand into each clod: one clod elicits a chirp, and the hands quickly break it up into smaller sub-clods, eventually yielding a large copper coin with Young Victoria (1838-1887) on obverse. A penny from the past, but too worn to be valuable; it is tossed into the finds pocket with other insubstantial metal objects: pull-tabs, wads of takeout-food foil, nuts and bolts.</p>
<p>The metal detector is a transducer, exciting electromagnetic fields into sound, sound into digging, and holes into treasure. You find garbage, or loot.</p>
<p>The space is exhausted and the game is over when no further electromagnetically-responsive material remains to be found. On popular sites—battlegrounds, ghost towns—this is a common, if lamentable occurrence: the site is played out, it has yielded its treasure. Future entities scanning the surface of the world will notice swaths, broad and organized tracts, of land bereft of ferrous material. Statistically, this must indicate an intervention—no natural process can denude such geometric patterns of a specific resource.</p>
<h2 id="hobby--study"><em>Hobby / Study</em></h2>
<p>Strategies, formal and casual, for distributing order over a wild domain⎮measure. A pastime made of the haphazard sorting, sifting, organizing of space: is this real life, a rage to order?</p>
<p>Looking for the grace in this situation, the magnanimous elision—the happy-go-lucky—yields a site of poignant depth and breadth. These practices produce sites of exquisite entanglement: wilded and ordered, semantically winnowed through a hi-Q spectral filter.</p>
<p>A moment of kinship, of transtemporal community—to detect this process, this pursuit—to see the land as <em>already-demarcated</em> and, in so seeing, feeling containment, support, validation, envelopment: there is no wild, there are only unexamined spectra. There is no new, there is only a change in framing.</p>
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<p><img src="/images/parallel/aka-w-apparatus.jpg" alt="wand-and-system" /></p>
<p><strong>Here is something:</strong> a wand-and-system I made from aluminum rod and cheap electronics plus gaffer tape, a wand that resembles a metal detector. Instead of a coil, though, the wand has at its end a borescope—a small videocamera with macroscopic lens. And at the actuator-end, a commodity “virtual reality” headset for viewing the live feed. I use this wand to wade through riverbeds in a new way, seeing differently—organizing my motion through an absurd, gloriously difficult microscopic perspective. Everything is waterproof, and I fall down a lot.</p>
<p>The wand is another transducer, filtering, focusing, and amplifying a radical sensorium directly in front of me—for all the good it does, it might as well be a much greater distance farther away: as I move forward I must try to keep the last minute’s muscle-and-vision input in my working memory, to interpolate between the live/remote feed and the river-rocks underfoot.</p>
<p>I walk midstream in order to avoid disturbing the rocks with footprints; what stones I do upend are quickly settled by the river-current.</p>
<p>The video-feed is not designed to be recorded (although I have cheated here, once or twice, for you). It is a live (limited, vital, restrained) link between the borescope’s lens and my vision. It is a performance whose traces are designed to be minimally-disturbing to the entropy of the site; the cameras at work to record the performance are the only off-river footprints that remain.</p>
<h2 id="trace"><em>Trace</em></h2>
<p>I used to think I could tell where my mom had recently been walking by spotting neat little piles of sticks—pockets of order in a distressingly messy forest.</p>
<p>It’s still possible, because our family are creatures of habit, to find places on her small acreage that we have never before visited. It takes some determination, or more likely some true cluelessness, or the pursuit of a dog in pursuit of a chipmunk, but it remains possible. When I find these spaces, I look for piles of sticks on the ground. I do not know what I would do if I found them.</p>
<p>When I wander through the borescope-spaces, a procedural satirist on a goofy mission from no command, I fantasize about happening across an improbable order: a series of pratfalls in a sequence matching mine; a sequence of divots mirroring my wand’s swath.</p>
<p>The performance focuses this entanglement between order and wilderness, between pursuit and ritual—I tighten this knot.</p>
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</div>noah feehan / AKAhttps://hi-hi-hi.comText, electronics, videoLiving Distance2019-05-02T00:00:00-04:002019-05-02T00:00:00-04:00//aka.farm/ebifa<figure class="third ">
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<p>I worked with Slow Immediate on <a href="https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/living-distance/overview/">Living Distance</a>, a hybrid art/research performance in zero-g. The mission was part of the MIT Media Lab’s Space Exploration initiative and flew in May 2019 on a Blue Origin mission <a href="https://www.blueorigin.com/news/new-shepard-mission-ns-11-updates">NS-11</a>. The payload consisted of a free-floating robotic device and supporting camera and capture systems.</p>
<p>During the spaceflight, the robotic device would become active only during the zero-g portion of the flight, releasing from its tether, spinning up a stabilizing reaction wheel, and performing some enclosed-locomotion experiments. The device itself carries its creator’s wisdom tooth at the top of the mechanical stack, as totem/surrogate of the artist herself.</p>
<p>For this mission, I wrote the firmware for the robotic device and the ECL (camera and flight-event sequencing) systems. I also vivisected a GoPro 6 in order to allow it to be remotely triggered by the firmware.</p>
<p>See more of Slow Immediate’s awesome work <a href="https://slowimmediate.com/">here</a>. Slow Immediate is <a href="https://www.xxxxxxxxxinliu.com/">Xin</a> and <a href="https://ger.sh/">Gershon</a>.</p>
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</figure>noah feehan / AKAhttps://hi-hi-hi.comZero-g payload at the intersection of art and researchpointy.cam2018-09-18T00:00:00-04:002018-09-18T00:00:00-04:00//aka.farm/pointy-cam<figure class="third ">
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<p>Pointy Cam is a self-contained thermal camera and display in a package meant to mount on your hand - so you can point at anything and see its thermal profile, whithout having to change your grasp (on a beer, spatula, etc). The prototype enclosure design pictured here is by <a href="http://superreleaser.com">Matt Borgatti</a>.</p>
<p>The device is yet another thermal camera in my portfolio - I kind of can’t resist the magic feeling of peering directly through a sensor and seeing through its eyes.</p>
<p>I’m on the fence about producting this device at scale; it would be really fun to see these out in the world, but at present I’m focused on another hardware <a href="https://weft.rocks">product</a> I feel is more meaningful. That said, head over to the Pointy.Cam <a href="https://pointy.cam">site</a> and add your email to the list if you’re interested in buying one! I’ll be keeping this project as Open Hardware as I can, which means the final device will be hackable and extendable.<br />
Contact me if you feel you’d like to share it.</p>
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</figure>noah feehan / AKAhttps://hi-hi-hi.comTiny thermal camera for everyday usesublime.cloud2018-07-24T00:00:00-04:002018-07-24T00:00:00-04:00//aka.farm/taut-line<figure class="third ">
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<p>The website <a href="https://sublime.cloud">sublime.cloud</a> synchronously plays any Youtube video I am watching; pause, scrub, and other play-alterations are relayed as they occur.</p>
<p>The piece’s main form is a wall-hanging screen that sits dormant until I play a Youtube video, at which point it plays the video in sync; when I stop watching, the screen goes blank again.</p>
<p>Press:</p>
<ul>
<li>…for the sake of my server, and in the spirit of the piece, this is meant to be an experience for you and not for anyone/everyone. Contact me if you feel you’d like to share it.</li>
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</figure>noah feehan / AKAhttps://hi-hi-hi.comSoftware/sculpture experiment in ambient intimacyPATCH - by UM Project2018-04-02T00:00:00-04:002018-04-02T00:00:00-04:00//aka.farm/PATCH<figure class="third ">
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<p>I worked with <a href="http://umproject.com/">UM Project</a> on this series for the Ventura Future <a href="http://www.venturaprojects.com/ventura-future-2018">fair</a> in Milan. The “good” photos here are from the UM Project documentation of <a href="http://www.umproject.com/patch">PATCH</a>, taken by <a href="https://www.fdphoto.biz/">Francis Dzikowski</a>.</p>
<p>The project melds 2d and 3d design artifacts with state-of-the-art power-management and expressive, subtle behaviors. Each unit can store and distribute solar power coming from the louvered array on the balcony. With this power, each unit serves its own ends: lighting the way, warming up to nearby inhabitants, or just providing a place to top up one’s phone.</p>
<p>For this project, I designed, fabricated, and programmed all the electronics; I also worked closely with the artist to flesh out the interactivity built into the pieces, balancing interpretability and subtlety to make a welcoming, engaging environment.</p>
<p>Press:</p>
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<li><a href="https://www.fastcompany.com/90168264/this-ingenious-furniture-doubles-as-a-microgrid">Fast Co.</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.curbed.com/2018/4/24/17268714/micro-apartment-furniture-um-project-patch">Curbed</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.sixtysixmag.com/um-project/">Sixtysix</a></li>
<li><a href="http://nykyinen.com/patch-um-project/">NYKYINEN</a></li>
<li><a href="https://a-d-o.com/journal/redefining-design-semiotics">A/D/O</a></li>
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</figure>noah feehan / AKAhttps://hi-hi-hi.comA micro-grid in which solar power is distributed and stored in discrete furniture modules throughout the space, each exhibiting its own unique behaviors.