Method

Method PLAY London: Exquisite Corpse from Claudia Bernett on Vimeo.

I recently went over to London to spend some time in the studio and co-host a Method Breakfast, and hosted a Method PLAY session in the studio while there. I did a quick presentation that introduced some basics around hacking, configuring, and designing electronics for creative output, and brought with me a handful of Keychain Digital Picture Frames for our use. The London studio is full of so much interest in this stuff that we had plenty of tools and materials to work with from personal collections!! After presenting a few basic tips regarding hacking the picture frames, electronic circuits, and Arduino, we dug into a group project.

Collectively, we decided to create an Exquisite Corpse interactive screen-based object that reflected the group as a whole. While some of us hacked open the picture frames and wired them up to the Arduino, others took photos of everyone there and cut each photo into five parts. Once we had the frames ready for input from Arduino, we loaded each with a set of pictures. We then wrote some code on Arduino to randomly tell one of the frames to advance a slide. This sets us up nicely for future implementations which integrate sensor input into the experience. For now, we ended up with an animated image object that reflects a continuously re-composing image of the studio as a whole!