Mail Reading Response

https://vimeo.com/101332523

Mail me a surprise.

After moving away from Philadelphia, my college town, I dearly missed my close community of art school friends. One of the activities that we had done countless times during undergrad was collective doodling. So, to stay connected we began a version of this game through the mail. I would draw an abstract bit of scribbles in Austin and send them to Philadelphia where they would be added to and sent back, often making several cross country rounds as more and more pages in various states of completion were added into the envelopes. I thought about this experience very fondly while reading about the elaborate collages and even chairs being sent through the mail.

Mail is such a joyful and visceral expression that I have continued to use the medium. A couple years ago I started a Valentine exchange. Each spring myself along with a group of a dozen or so artistic women from all across the country make an edition of valentines and mail them to each other. The results have ranged from tiny sculptures to lavender sewn sachets, augmented reality and of course, glitter bombs. It’s an experience in itself to receive a steady stream of bright envelopes filled with friend-love. Mail is tactile, it’s object worship, it’s a forgotten art.

Homework for Oct. 1st (Node Serial 1 and 2)

Node Serial 1 with Arduino

(LED light blinking every few seconds)

Node Serial 2 with Arduino

photo of arduino and pi

HW 3 (Arduino – Raspberry Pi LEDs blink)

Arduino – Raspberry Pi LEDs Blink with Node

http://https://vimeo.com/141118574

Raspberry Pi – Arduino Communication w/ Node

HW4 – Node-Serial

Having setup the pi and arduino using the logic level converter, the next step was to run the node-serial codes. The codes were available on github. In the first node-serial output, the led is blinking while displaying 0 and 1 on the screen. In the second part, the pin details from the arduino are displayed on the pi screen.

HW Week 4: Arduino + Pi + Logic Level Converter with Node.js

Failed Attempt(s) #1

Attempting on flashing LED on Pi using node serial input from Arduino. The result is supposed to show 0, 1, 0, 1 but somehow it got stuck at 0 all the time. We suspected it was more of a slow network issue (?). But it’s also strange because the built-in LED pin #13 on the Arduino board blinks, but somehow the one on my Pi didn’t do anything. Another failed and miserable attempt at Raspberry Pi… I’m just hoping for that one magical day to come, when my Pi does not give up on me. *fingers crossed*

Failed Attempt(s) #2:

So I cried for help to Ayo and he helped take a look at the wiring connections, etc. Lesson learned: One, we don’t need resistor for this (yet) – so he took that out. Two, we need to make sure both RX and TX pins on Arduino crossed to the RX & TX pins on Raspberry Pi. After that, we tried to run it again………….. BUT SOMETHING FUNKY SHOWED UP.

WHAT. THE. F!@#$%. IS. GOING. ON?!

Remember my simple FUTUNE (Future Fortune) project with Pi + Thermal Printer last year? So I had a python script set up on my rc-local folder, to initiate calling the fortune.py script whenever I booted my Pi, and THAT apparently causes serial port conflict so it disabled the connection to node-js. All we had to do was to kill the python script from running in the background on startup, so we did:

sudo pkill python

Voila. After that, everything runs smoothly. SUCCESS. Ayo is a genius, if you haven’t known by now. This is the 1st example – node-serial_1.js / ardpi-serial-node.ino – where I’m trying to flash LED on Raspberry Pi using node serial input from Arduino.

And here’s the result for the 2nd example – node-serial_2.js / ardpi-serial_2.ino – where it’s trying to send Arduino analog data to Raspberry Pi via node serial:

HW1: Email

	import feedparser
	import time
	import subprocess
	import socket
	import smtplib
	import datetime
	import urllib2
	user='***@newschool.edu'// my email address
	passwd='***' // my password
	smtpserver=smtplib.SMTP('smtp.gmail.com',587)
	smtpserver.ehlo()
	smtpserver.starttls()
	smtpserver.ehlo
	smtpserver.login(user,passwd)
	today=datetime.date.today()
	arg='ip route list'
	p=subprocess.Popen(arg,shell=true,stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
	data=p.communicate()
	split_data=data[0].split()
	ipaddr=split_data[split_data.index('src')+1]
	extipaddr=urllib2.urlopen("http://icanhazip.com").read()
	my_ip='Local address: %s\nExternal address: %s' % (ipaddr,extipaddr)
	searchFeed=raw_input("search word?")
	searchFeedTwo=int(raw_input("search word2?"))
	newmails = feedparser.parse("https://" + user + ":" + passwd + "@mail.google.co$
	for i in newmails: #for loop itterates through newmails feed
	print str(i.title) # uncomment to print out each title of unread e$
	if str(i.title)==searchFeed: # replace the word Search with $
	print i.summary
	if str(i.title)==searchFeedTwo:
	print i.summary
	while True: #loop forever —- to exit use keys "ctr+c"
	newmails = int(feedparser.parse("https://" + user + ":" + passwd + "@mail.g$
	def emailcount(n): #define function emailcount
	if n > 0: # if you have over 0 emails. You can change this based on how$
	print "you have "+str(n)+" new email(s)"
	else:
	print "you have no new email"
	emailcount(newmails) #call emailcount function and pass value newmails as a$
	time.sleep(8) #wait 8 seconds
	msg=MIMEText(my_ip)
	msg['Subject']='New Email Feed'
	msg['From']=user
	msg['To']=user
	time.sleep(5)
	smtpserver.sendmail(user,[user],msg.as_string())
	smtpserver.quit

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Email Parse

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MailArt Response

A Quirky Talk

“Mailart History: The Fluxus Factor” by Ken FriedMan appeared to be another historical reading. A lesson in a medium we used was this and came from this so on and on, after diving deeper into the story it became more, a unique look into communication.  More so, about the evolution in talking to and with family, friends and associates. Looking at the types of communications used both physical and digital. Also their changes in design and artist approach gave me a unique perspective I had not considered before. While the title itself does not give the strongest of impacts to start the content and story Ken shares is by far a treasure.

Ohh Great here we go again…. Reading Glasses and Coffee powers activate!

Its not about How but Why and Back and Forth

In the Reading the author brings up the idea that Correspondence Art is by its core found in the physical. Material goods: stamps, penmanship, and  are it’s heart. This left me puzzled as how can it be transitioned over to modern electronic communication. Where everything sent by a base standard of the medium is digital and little is physical.

Later in though he mentions the idea of mailing list. Small communities of artist sharing ideas and growing them over time. This brought some interesting perspective. It’s less about the communication and more so about the ability to form communities to communicate. From their experiment and grow repeating the cycle. From this I concluded at its core not like “Nouveaux Realistes” where the medium is key. Mail art is about interpersonal communication, exchange and the creation of a virtual community of participants ever expanding in both public and private spaces. In this way, mail art can was and is anticipating the digital communities founded on the Internet we see today.

The Digital Mail Art Communities

A response to ‘Mail Art Then and Now’

My background is business strategy, so honestly I was ignorant about art movements. In fact, first time to hear corresponding art, but this essay was intriguing me in two points: dynamism of artist movement and passion in the artists.

Firstly, I learned how a art movement has develop through a case study of Fluxus. Originally, Fluxus started with outlandish artworks in a closed private group in New York, but their adventurous mind of exploring a social issue and inventing a new medium offering unique potentials and challenges developed a big movement that created a vast resonating network of correspondents and would disseminate all over the world. It’s DNA of New York to transform a small phenomenon to a world-wide movement.

Secondly, it was very interesting to see what was artists in the movement like. They were experimental artists with passion to form a next phase of the world. The artists discussed by asking ‘Why?’, ‘How?’,’Why not?’ and ‘How else?’. What is more, a fair number of artists came from untraditional backgrounds including ballet, music, economics and biological sciences. Fluxus was bolstered by the forum to be tolerant to experimentation that valued failures and learnings from the failures in a multidisciplinary group of artists.

I fortunately live in the fast-changing world led by rapid technology advancements. This class offers us perfect environment to take advantage of passionate students with diverse backgrounds in New York. I will be one of experimental artists in this fantastic environment to shape the future.