ACC publication

A paper I submitted to the 2010 American Control Conference (ACC) has been accepted for presentation and publication in the conference proceedings.

The paper is titled "An Optimal Sliding Mode Controller Applied to Human Motion Synthesis with Robotic Implementation" and describes a new type of nonlinear controller that I developed with my PhD supervisors Dr. Guido Herrmann and Professor Chris Melhuish.

Milk Pixel in Realtime magazine

Milk Pixel has been featured in issue #95 of the Australian contemporary arts magazine Real Time. The article 'Coders, Crafters and Crooks' is a report on the Craftivism and Uncraftivism events at the Arnolfini (many videos of which are now available on the uncraftivism wiki). Here's what it says about us:

"Flickering from across the room was Milk Pixel built by the Bristol Robotics Lab, an inspired re-use project incorporating LEDs into two-litre plastic milk bottles. The 64 bottle/pixel array continuously responded to sound performances and moving image in unexpected collaborations and improvisations."

Interestingly the picture chosen to head the article (shown above) was one I took of Jason and Paul (from Potential Indifference) debugging MilkPixel a day or so before the event. It's nice to think that the editors thought that the hands-on sorting of a tanlge of ribbon cable and recycled junk represented the craftivism movement to such a degree.

The Article was written by Melinda Rackham, an Emerging Artforms Curator and Adjunct Professor at RMIT University.

Just for the record, MilkPixel no longer flickers, we fixed that bug :-)

Haptic Theatre Update

An online update of the collaborative project I'm working on with Extant (Britain's only professional performing arts company of visually impaired people), has appeared on the News Flash section of the Extant website.

The project involves "creating an immersive dramatic environment that invited audience members will explore using a specially designed hand held Haptic device. Currently the team of project partners, artists and engineers are working on areas of script development, sound and set design, and technical construction of the device and its support system, along with sensory trigger mechanisms to connect different elements of the installation".
For more details please visit http://www.extant.org.uk/question.html