For my final project I’ve had a change in heart and instead of continuing with the augmented projection of suburbia on the floor, I would like to pursue more work with chairs. My plan is to get the front seat of an ordinary car, a swivel office chair, a wooden kitchen chair with a tie-on cushion (this one I have), and a lazy-boy recliner. I will then, with the use of an arduino and multiple motors and sensors, have a realtime feed of motions in suburban life that are then created in these chairs. I am thinking of asking friends who have family in suburban neighborhoods near Pittsburgh to help provide the data that will be mimicked.

This is an attempt to sum up the complete suburban experience by visualizing removed actions in a new context. The chairs will be installed side by side and spaced approximately a foot apart. I feel that much of suburban living is done sitting down and, most often in some variation of these particular seats.

Some projects I have been looking at for inspiration

William Lamson does an interesting series of small gestures/actions involving balloons, sculptural elements and sometime himself. I always find these really enjoyable to watch because there is a light humor and sense of suspense/expectation set up in the beginning of each video.

And here is a link to his website where you can thumb through all 33: http://www.williamlamson.com/#/selected_work/actions/video/8

Here are some my favorites:

11/33
8/33

Zimoun: Volume

I know Golan showed us this one in class, but I came across it again and it made me think of using motors within the final project.

Seiko Mikami's "Desire of Codes"
http://www.creativeapplications.net/events/seiko-mikami-desire-of-codes-ycam/

This piece corresponds more with my original plan to expand on the the projected image. Overall, I think that it has a lot of very interesting and complex components and I do like the treatment of video, but I find that the complexity of all these components muddles the message in the piece.