Assignment04 : Scrapyard Challenge

Assignment04 : Scrapyard Challenge

‘Don’t worry about getting it “right” or making it “good,” focus more on your process and response to the practice as well as the material affordances of what is made available to you.’ This was such a key concept for me.

In the beginning Ivy, one of a member in our group, came up of an idea of using a telephone cable and bounced it with something. Suddenly we happened to see a big robe on the other table then we thought we should do something with it as an installation. After experiment with it for a while, we got a little lost whether we should carry on with this idea or not, since we weren’t so familiar with technology. Some of us tried to hack a keyboard instead and some tried to come up with new ideas.

Later on, Ivy had an idea of making sound from a paper box. And then, we made trail and error for a while to make the box functional. Finally we made four controllers from four sides of a cardboard box. When those wires were pulled out foil inside the box would connect as a circuit and trigger different sound for each side of the box.

While we were almost finished the box before the deadlines, I still wanted to make the idea of using a rope come true as an instrument, since the big rope had potential for users to get engaged and play with it and in the aesthetics sense, it’s a very strong and a very tempting object in the quirky way. Hence, I tired a rope more on the air duct to make more circles of rope dangle.  As a suggestion from someone in the studio at that time, I wrapped foil around the rope to make it conductive. After wrapping four part of the rope, they worked as four different inputs and made four different sounds.

After this assignment I learnt a very important lesson about interface and how it connected to electronic equipments, in which the switch or input can be anything beyond just a button once you can connect or disconnect a circuit.

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