BEACH BOY

This project was created at winter semester 2001/2 at University of Arts, Berlin (UdK). Then, I attended the “Class for Designing with Digital Dedia”, lead by Professor Joachim Sauter .

Let’s Go Surfing!

The Beach Boy used to be a simple Ikea commode. But sometimes dumb furniture turns into smart furniture… Opening the drawers reveals a direct connection to a beautiful surfer beach in San Diego, CA. All with real-time weather, nautic map, and a merry surfer tune!

The installation performs a real-time weather lookup every twenty seconds and displays the weather data (humidity, wind speed, temperature etc.) on an attached screen.

When the upper drawer is opened, the data is translated to a poetic audio-visual representation, e.g. the wind speed corresponds with the moving panorama in the back of the drawer.

Technical set-up

The aforementioned commode had two of three drawers closed shut. The upper drawer could be opened. In it, a paper panorama covered the back side. Depending on the actual wind speed at the californian beach, the panorama movement speed would be adapted accordingly.

The panorama mechanism was powered by a modified servo motor. The motor itself was controlled by a BASIC Stamp microcontroller, which was attached to a Macintosh computer running a custom Macromedia Director application.

I personally found it very interesting to retrieve real-world data from a very remote place and displaying it in a unusual way. This was before the days of RSS/XML, so I had to code come kind of API for the data provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)

Exhibitions

The Beach Boy was on display at the 2002 “01 Award” presentation with Alan Kay in Berlin, Germany, and “Lange Nacht der Museen” on February 1st, 2002.

Current status

Alas, the Beach Boy is currently out of order.

Filed under media , University

META

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