| The Blues Chair | |
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| By: Mirit Tal, Ryan Holsopple Instructor: Tom Igoe ITP - Tisch School of the Arts at NYU February 2005 |
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 There is something very charming about old furniture. They makes almost everyone fascinated by. Maybe it's the nice wood, the massiveness, the beautiful design. Trying to figure the magic behind these oldies, we hide inside them some new technology while trying to maintain the beauty and the nostalgic feeling they arise. So - our project contains a beautiful old Philco radio from the 40's and a wooden chair on wheels. Each one was connected to the main Furniture Server with an Xport. The chair had some Reed switches on its base. These switches activates from magnets. We put a group of magnets on the chair and each time someone swivels the chair the magnets touch a different switch and a special message was sent to the server. On the other side waited the old radio. Once it got a message from the chair it tried to tune-in to a different station. The affect of tuning was achieved in 2 ways: (the radio of course doesn't really work) one way is connecting the dial to a servo motor and moving it left and right and the second way was playing old Jimmy Reed's blues songs using MAX/MSP as the DJ. The messages were sent to MAX using MIDI. We also used super bright LED's to make the radio glow. read more>> |