OliOli Residency Week Two

I’ve just completed the second week as an artist/tinkerer in residence at the OliOli Childrens Museum in Dubai. It’s been a busy few days that has including lots of prototyping to finish the musical bench exhibit and preparations for a giant STEAM themed event to celebrate the second anniversary of OliOli.

The first part of the week was doing some prototyping with the new hardware that I’m using for the musical bench, the Bela platform for BeagleBone and the Playtronica TouchMe board. I was convinced about the powerful possibilities of these two elements, but since it was my first time working with them (as well as my first time playing around in Pure Data, there was a bit of a learning curve.

On the recommendation of Sasha and Sasha from Playtronica, I dove into Designing Sound by Andy Farnell (which was about three orders of magnitude too complex for me but still very interesting). Luckily I had some Turkish coffee to help with the process.

Even though I didn’t have the sound totally figured out, I pressed ahead with the design of the bench and integration of the circuits. The team at OliOli fabricated a design based on the Tinkering Studio version of the bench and I worked to connect the electronics components into the furniture.

One small element that I felt proud of, was hacking little copper ring terminals to be wire holders because we couldn’t find any simple p-strap style clips here in Dubai. It was really fun to use a vice and hammer to bend the metal to the right shape and I felt pretty happy with the look of the finished parts.

At the end of the day on Tuesday the bench was all put together and I used a ton of clamps to attach the copper contacts to the armrests while the construction cement cured overnight.

The next day I got a great boost from the Playtronica team who helped me debug the Bela board and TouchMe interface and they got me to the point where I could start uploading the pure data patches to the board and tinkering with the sound quality. After a bit of tweaking to their sample patch I got to the type of sound I wanted that was pretty straightforward in terms of high and low notes but also had a bit of a watery, melodic quality.

On Thursday, OliOli had a opening for the STEAMania event, a huge celebration of the two year anniversary of the center. The rest of the team created some amazing experiences included a cardboard sphero robot maze full of the landmarks of Dubai, a experimental circuit board set, a wall of digital/physical selfies, Micro:bit instruments and much more!

As part of the preparations for the event I took a field trip with Reid to Dragon Mart, an immense shopping center that while overwhelming, had a lot of potential for tinkering supplies.

Along with the shopping trip, I also spent some time helping the team setup a few other exhibits for the event including a Chaldni Plates demonstration and an arduino controlled robotic air hockey table.

And then for the weekend, I got the first chance to share the musical bench with visitors to the museum. It was so fun to see the process of discovery as people started exploring how their touch could conduct different amounts of electricity and create different melodic tones.

It was super fun to see groups of kids playing together on the bench, creating a link between their hands to become a human wire for the signal to travel between the two armrests.

Additionally I liked how this exhibit allowed for multi-generational play with families experimenting together and discovering how the elements work.

Later in the week, I set up an second station near the bench with a computer hooked up to the pure data patch that we could manipulate to make lots of different sounds using the same hardware set up. It was super fun to “lift the curtain” and show kids and adults the inner workings of the bench.

We’ll keep an eye on the bench for the next week and continue to tweak the exhibit and signage as a result of watching how people use the exhibit. I’m really happy with the results of this exhibit and feel like the sound more faithfully recreates the original cricket computer version at the Exploratorium instead of the later arduino version. We’ve been wanting to revisit this idea for a while and this artist residency has been the perfect chance to make some great progress on the design.

There’s one more week left here and in that time I’ll continue creating a stop-motion animation station and light play set, lead a tinkering workshop for local teachers and prepare a “care and feeding“ guide for the exhibits so that they can live on after I leave. Stay tuned for a final recap next week!