John Morgan

Last Friday, OCAD University hosted Lev for a workshop/lecture series. I attended the latter and was not disappointed. He mostly discussed the themes of his new work.

Manovich started with George Legrady’s visualization for a public library in Seattle. He used it as an example of how visualizations and ambient intelligence create shortcuts in human behavior. Typically, decisions would be formed by a cultural paradigm. When technology intervenes in this process, however, individuals can make more relevant choices.

Brendan Dawes work was also introduced in this lecture to demonstrate this shift in art-appreciation.

Impending deadlines not withstanding, I’m reviewing the final design I plan on implementing for my nanocopter circuit board. There are some nagging consideration to air.

Fine-pitch soldering requires using solder paste with a hot air rework tool. Typically, there are two ways to apply the paste: stencil and dispensing tips.
To my lament, these are only found in the Digikey catalog and have already placed an order through them.

Producing a method for making stencils in house is the best option. Adafruit Industries understands, and has published a terrific tutorial.
The tutorial demands using Kapton film or Mylar as the stencil substrate – these are expensive in low quantities from suppliers: McMaster-Carr.

The cost of setting up to produce stencil at Ryerson is a deterrent for this project, especially when the service of producing a stencil is available from retailers like Pololu, offering the end product for less than thirty dollars.

Pictured is a part of my nanocopter design sitting atop my printed circuit board. It’s worth being neurotic about lining the parts up.
I’m confident my measurements are accurate, but what do you think?

Photo from MOMA Collections

Josh Harris started as an entrepreneur. After some success, he began work in early new media experiments. His company, Pseudo.com (1993-2000) produced free and original video content a decade ahead of Youtube. In 2000, the NYPD execute a warrant and raid his social media experiment Quiet: We Live in Public believing him to be a dangerous cult-leader.

Internet fame, to Harris, is merely an aftereffect. His intentional transformation from a mundane individual into an internet experience inverts the standard model of media consumption. He has grown up expecting a “future, where everyone’s famous for fifteen minutes”.

Criticism from the commercial art market radically contrasts the success of social media services which reproduce the effects of Harris infamous experiments. Booming bandwidth and the shrinking transistor realize the vision he had, but expose his failure in timing.

His career is the central focus of Odin Timoner’s documentary We Live in Public (2009). The metaphysical theme of this work explores his influence in early new media, focusing on Quiet (2000) and his impulsive alter-ego. Harris and his personae Luvvy push the inversion of the television platform until it ultimately crashes. Not only in Josh Harris’ personal life, but commercially by the dot-com bust

In anticipation of printing the nanoquad frame, the design has been reorganized to fit inside of the 203 x 203 mm footprint dictated by the Stratasys uPrint SE. The model, built in AutoCAD is imported to Sketchup. Doing this permits the use of familiar STL tools like su2stl.

MeshLab (screenshot) provides a visualization of the exported Standard Tessellation Language file.

This model is on the project page.