Artists talk

I will be giving a talk about my current work to students at UCLAN on the 15th February. Although I've giving a number of talks over the last year I'm still a little nervous of showing my work to other people, especially when the work is at the development stage.

I'll probably finish the talk with the Myriorama work, I've got the card reader working with this piece now and hopefully the students will have their student id cards with them so there will be an interactive element to the talk.

Inductions this week

It was a busy day yesterday but interesting to meet so many people at the University of Central Lancashire (UCLAN). Thanks to all the staff I met I've now had my inductions and can use the darkrooms, scanners, portable lighting and the library.

Some interesting ideas are starting to emerge from talking to staff, some concepts about how to create the Myriorama background, using black and white images and tinting them manually to overcome the problems of colour correction on colour images while trying to match background landscape images, especially shades of green grass. This ties in nicely with the origins of the Myriorama with hand tinted images.

Another interesting conversation brought up the technology I was using and the use of sensors and input/output technology. The staff at the Electronic and Digital Art Unit were mentioned and I will have to investigate further as their projects looking fascinating.

Myriorama

Definition: A popular optical toy which involved the rearranging of specially-made picture-cards.

This is the wikipedia entry, what it doesn't explain is that the picture cards all have the same dimensions and can be placed in any order to create a continuous landscape scene.

My idea is to create a landscape digitally and to use a card reader to extract the data which would control the final image.

Mindmapping the project

Mind mapping the concepts for the myriorama project, defining landscape and how to control the panelled view. What constitutes a landscape and when creating a sequence of views what should they be built up of?


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Rewiring the card reader

There were some tips online about using a card reader with the Arduino board, I found a good example here http://www.instructables.com/id/Arduino-magnetic-stripe-decoder/ which I've used to rewire the cheap card reader I bought from eBay. Although the card reader I purchased wasn't the same model I downloaded the data sheet of the card model I was using and have remapped the input sequence and wiring. Most of it was the same so that was relatively easy to get up and running.

The sequence was the same, DATA - 2 CLK - 3 LOAD - 5 Finally, connect the +5v and GND to their respective terminals on the Arduino board.

Supermarket gift cards

Now i've got the card reader I'm working on the card data, those gift cards from the supermarket have been a useful way of getting a variety of data to play with.
So far I've been playing with visa, nectar, id cards, and now itunes vouchers and sainsburys vouchers.

Microtech MCR12

I've just bought a magnetic card reader from eBay as the first step to build an interactive photographic work using the magnetic strip on credit cards. £7 was a bit of a bargain, all that I need to do now is remove the cable, unsolder the connections and work out the data sequence.

Microtech MCR12 Magnetic Card Reader-Tracks 1&2 pictured