Alive with Mistakes/L'erreur est Humaine - Fashionable Technology

Design Brief – To make a numerical code alive with qualitative decisions. By making a black box mechanism using code, arduino, servo motors and housing this device will become a collaboration between machines and humans. It will allow an injection of humanity into binary decisions making. What makes humans human is the ability to analyze and make decisions. The goal is to subvert expectations of well-known inputs that people are familiar with creating the appearance of agency, will, choice.

When setting up an extension of these ideas, we chose to create a system of feedback.  As a human enters text onto a computer keyboard (most likely expecting to see the text represented on the screen) the input is instead used to both drive a on screen visualization and a hand crafted printing machine.  The print machine creates a representation of morse code on a piece of paper by drawing with a pencil.  However, the code is created by the length of time between hitting the keys (rather than the words being typed).  All our previous associations with a computer keyboard are then ignored.  While the keyboard is being used for communication, it is not the traditional method of typing words, but instead the space and time between the letters, that matters. So as the machine “reads between the lines” it conveys its own form of language onto the paper exiting the printing machine.  In addition to driving the printing machine, the typing also controls a series of shapes that are mapped to the location of the keys on the keyboard.  Again, the traditional use of the letters is forgotten in place of the position of the letters on the keyboard which controls  color, opacity, and shape.

Through our creation of this project, we’ve searched for a way to add humanity to binary code.  By generating a system that is based of information that people are normally unconscious to, we hope to have a system that is both individually personal and subjective.

A collaboration between myself, Laure Pétré EnsAD '13, and Liz Taylor MFA D+T '12

Endless thanks to EnsAD, Elizabeth de Senneville, Sabine Seymour, Scott Peterman, Martin De Bie, Martin Le Tiec, Christobal Karich for help with one of the most rewarding projects I've worked on so far.

Alive with Mistakes/L'erreur set Humaine Dada-inspired randomness keyboard.

Laure installed the suspended mechanisms.

The loom-style armature exposes the guts of the Rube Goldberg-esque machinations.

The machine spits out a receipt tape with Morse code translation of the codes entered on the keyboard with a pen attached to a small servo-powered arm.