Interactive Electronic Arts

So this week in Inter-Media Electronic Arts we got to play with the MaKey MaKey. At first, I was worried that the MaKey MaKey would be similar to the Arduino,  which required an understanding of circuits and some general ECE concepts (scary!), but it was actually wonderful to work with.  The way the MaKey MaKey works, is that it is simply an additional “keyboard” and inputs to the Makey Makey are just interpreted as keystrokes on a keyboard.  Then you use conductive materials and alligator clips to make different objects act as input devices with the Makey Makey.

Here is an example from Makey Makey’s site of what type of objects you can use with the Makey Makey.

(Image from http://www.makeymakey.com/)

The artist here used alligator clips to attach bananas (which are conductive) to the MaKey MaKey. The artist then either wrote, or opened a piano-playing application on the computer.  By hooking up the bananas to whatever keys played the different notes on the piano in the applications, the user could “play the bananas” like she was “playing a piano.”  It’s actually really simple, but really neat!

So our task this week was to use the MaKey MaKey (hooked up to our own drawing) and a set of our own animations to create some art.

That was a pretty open ended assignment, so everyone created something quite different from each other.  I decided to pick up where I left off last week, by starting with my interactive animation and enhancing it.

For the project there were a few requirements. There had to be sound in our project, and we had to create a pencil drawing or “map” that would control our animations.  Starting with my interactive animation from last week, I got rid of the other two animations and stuck with the Pikachu animation. Then I enhanced the Pikachu animation by adding more parts to it. In PureData I added sound for Pikachu coming out of the Pokeball and for Pikachu summoning the thunder.  I also added a sound that played on default while the application was running.

I chose sounds for my project that were from the original Pokemon games.  I thought these were fun, fitting, and nostalgic for many WPI students.  Once I got the clips, I trimmed and edited them appropriately in Corel Video Editor until they sounded like continuous loops.  The “Pikachu” sound and the thunder crash aren’t loops, because they only play as the lightning is crashing down.

For my “map” that would control my animations, my goal was to make it artistic.  The drawing that was the controller for the MaKey MaKey was supposed to be as interesting and beautiful as the animations themselves.  I drew my animation so that it was a sequence: a closed Pokeball, a Pikachu, and an open Pokeball.  The idea is that you first open the Pokeball to let Pikachu out.  That is why it starts as closed.  Then you call on Pikachu to use Thunder.  This is why you tap Pikachu as the second step.  And last, the Pokeball is open, meaning Pikachu is still outside it.  So tapping the open Pokeball returns Pikachu to it, and the animation sequence ends where it started: with a closed Pokeball.

I made a video of all this below, and I explain a bit of what I did while I demonstrate the MaKey MaKey attached to my drawing working together with my PD patch with my animations.