Newsletter #13
We went into full crunch this week as pushed toward our Soft Opening and we’ve been busy! First and foremost, we developed an artistic identity for both of our pieces. Our piece formerly known as “Jars” is now “One to One” and “Mirrors” is now “M_rror.” The names came naturally to all of us and the meeting for naming them was quick because we had spent so much time to harmonize our artistic visions.
Jason devoted his entire time to polishing One to One and M_rror from the code-end to have the pieces operating as we want them. He also started the final push for soldering all of the PCBs, the last step before assembling all of the pieces and mounting the jars on the wall. We decided that for Soft Opening we would have one jar functional in case there were any changes we wanted to make to the code base. Elwin worked alongside Jason on finalizing the core for the PCB housing with team Lazer Mouse’s laser cutter. Elwin also finalized the mounting for the jar to attach to the false wall we were creating. He used ArtFab’s CNC router to cut the wood and then sanded all of the mounts by hand!
Yotam and Jason had also met with the events coordinator from the “Dirty Ball” event, a party hosted here in Pittsburgh by Attack Theatre to discuss exhibiting M_rror. Anisha was out for the first half of the week for Sandbox Summit but came back to hit the ground running. While she was out, Yotam worked on preparing the documents we would need for Softs which included drafts of the plaques, the post-mortem, the script for our promotional video, and the poster for our project.
When Anisha returned, she and Yotam jumped right into the woodshop to build the false wall for One to One so that it could be hung by the end of the week. They spent the remainder of the week in the woodshop to construct M_rror’s framing and to cut the wood for the exterior paneling. Once it was assembled, they began mounting the mirrors to the framing, which required by precision and patience. Since the mirrors can rotate, they had to be spaced exactly right so that they would not crash into each other. Once the mirrors were up, Anisha installed the servos and passed it off to Jason so he could work on finalizing the codebase.
By the end of the weekend, both pieces were fully functional! We feel very confident in our progress since Halves and we can definitely see the finish line in sight.
Looking Forward
Our path toward Finals is clear and straightforward. Since both of our pieces are functional, our next step will be sanding, varnishing, and mounting the wood – which will just take time at this point. In terms of documentation, we’ll be writing our poster as well as the maintenance manual for the care and upkeep of the pieces once we graduate.
Current Challenges
We want to refine the experiences so that they are smooth and that visitors understand our intent. Since interaction is such a key element for both of them, what people do to interact with them needs to be clear. We’ll be working over the next two weeks to hone in on this point specifically.