Week of December 3-7

Mobile support structure

Thanks to a lot of precise measurements and calculations, my support structure for the base of the mobile worked great on the first try! This basically never happens. Actually, I think one of the things that I’m most grateful for learning during my grad program so far is to embrace the feeling of testing things out and to let go of an attachment to getting it perfect the first time. I’m learning that the best ideas often come from just plunging into the process, rather than sitting and thinking or writing them out beforehand (which is my natural tendency to do).

Here’s what the support structure looks like:

Getting the recordings to work

Speaking of learning through the process: After I had already ordered an Arduino and 16 PV sensors, my teacher let me know that, after putting in several hours of trouble shooting on my behalf (I so appreciate her for doing this), she finally realized that method just wasn’t going to work for this project. There’s a bug in the Arduino/Processing template for the type of program I need to create, and it just wasn’t ever going to do what I need it to do. The bug made it to where the recording would only play once after the first time it’s triggered, but not again upon an additional trigger, due to an issue with 1s and 0s and them switching up in the code. Clearly I’m a super beginner in this area haha!

So, on to my backup plan: a Makey Makey. And it worked beautifully! After sitting around unused for years (I originally purchased the Makey Makey while dreaming up this very project more than two years ago!), I finally have the courage now to just try it out. I did, and it was easy! I used this online program called Scratch to create a very simple program that does exactly what I need it to do.

One of the cool things about using a Makey Makey is that the only way to ground the circuit is literally to hold ground in your hand. This means that, to trigger the recording, either someone has to be holding ground (which I’ll wrap around one of the stones) while picking up a stone, or be touching someone else who is holding the ground stone while picking up another stone. I think this is beautifully symbolic of the connection to self and others that’s inherent in the healing process.

Here’s what the Makey Makey set up looks like:

And here’s what my Scratch program looks like:

Also, my teacher taught me to solder! It was so much fun. After I drilled holes into the wooden display and strung wires through the holes to test out the Makey Makey set up, I realized that there wouldn’t be enough contact between fingers and the wire to trigger the recording to play. Soldering the wire that’s connected to the Makey Makey to a copper liner placed within the pocket of the wooden display increases the surface area that can be touched to trigger a recording.

Soldering really got me thinking about the gendering of art and craft. Soldering felt really natural to me, despite it being a totally new skill to learn, because of all the detailed and precise crafting I’ve done my entire life (beading, crochet, etc.). It’s just totally bullshit that soldering and other “maker” type skills are considered to be masculine.