I Vomit Rainbows

I hadn’t been updating my blog as much as I should have. I’ve actually been doing lots of fun art stuff this spring, so I wanted to post about some of them.

Eliot’s Birthday! Me and my friends went over-the-top with strange and sometimes edible art projects. First, Erin (readiness) and I made hacker cupcakes out of fondant. It’s the first time that either of us had messed with it. First we sketched out wii-style heads of our friends:

Then we cut shapes out, either freestyling with a knife, or using cookie cutters, and ended up with these:

Dave’s idea was to make Eliot some Laser Boob Cupcakes, based on a business card design he’d been using lately. We took two cupcakes and jammed laser pointers into them, with the “on” buttons taped permanently to “on.” Then, I covered the cupcakes in pink icing and added some red around the center.

Which brings us to the last art project. Jeans Top Hat (though it looks like a Dr. Suess hat). This hat is in response to a twitter. It took me 2 hrs to make, out of jeans, a grocery bag, duct tape, a clothes hanger, and safety pins.

from sweetums:
Things that should be denim: jeans. Things that shouldn’t: everything else. #denimbustiersrsly?!

Careful what you twitter around your birthday.

More pics and the hacker drinkup party at Rick’s Tavern are here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pinguino/sets/72157623602392806/

Chris (cnelson) showed me a video about augmented reality cookies, and I knew that had to be the next baking project. The premise behind this is to hold a cookie with a special mark on it, and a webcam would render a shape over the cookie, even if you rotated it. We were going to make it so that when you bit into a cookie, you’d get a silly mustache on your face.

Of course, I waited til last minute to make the dough, and was trying to measure out 1cm tall chunks at 2am. But the bigger problem was that the dough was defrosting fast as I was trying to build the cookies, and I was worried that it wouldn’t be smooth enough to scan.

But the cookie block did look fine the next day, and sliced easily. We laid them onto cookie sheets and baked them. In Chris’s sunny computer room, they did scan. However, the program was having problems with the contrast. Next time, add more blue and red food coloring, as well as more melted chocolate, to give your cookies more contrast.

Chris was in charge of making the code work with the cookies. He used Processing and NyARToolkit to make that happen.

I also made some onigiri rice balls with the trigger shape cut out, and some quick California rolls. The rolls didn’t trigger the software, but the riceballs did. We showcased these at Hacker Drinkup 100, at Rick’s Tavern.

I drew a bunch of mustaches that would display randomly. Here is what your options were:

Screenshots from Chris’s App: http://id.cnelson.org/augmented-stache

Eliot’s Blog Post: http://www.robotskirts.com/2010/05/27/augmented-reality-mustaches/

My Flickr Set of Hacker Drinkup 100: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pinguino/sets/72157624155168304/

I think we’re a bit obsessed with augmented reality now, so expect more cool stuff from us soon!

Dave and I have been back for about a week. We just went to ToorCamp, which was a hacker convention out 3-4hrs east of Seattle. Seattle goes from beautiful waterfront to tree-lined mountains to harsh desert wasteland very quickly. Can you guess what climate we ended up in?

The last time Mount St. Helens erupted, it dumped ash out over the United States, but the part it dropped the most on ended up being where we were camping. Anytime you walked somewhere, it felt like you were on the moon (maybe a moon covered in sagebrush), because the ash and dust was so fine it would billow out in puffs of smoke off your shoeprint.

The camping at the event was Burning Man style, except that Toorcon provided showers (made of gardening sprinklers), portapotties, and generators for power. The major drawback was that the portapotties were not cleaned nearly often enough (they were seriously the grossest ones I’ve EVER seen) and water and ice weren’t brought in often enough.

It was worth enduring by the second day, when we got a short tour of the missile silo. The silo was built towards the end of the cold war and was the biggest one ever. The plans were leaked to the Russians, and they couldn’t afford to make one, so the war ended shortly after. The silo housed three Titan-one missiles.

Tprophet wrote a glow opera, using costumes lined in el-wire. Me and Jules got to be voice actors in the play, which was nerve-wracking but awesome and fun. It was probably the first hacker play ever. There were giant raves every night and a violin concert, too. Keith spun for 8hrs on Friday and 4hrs on Saturday, which was super awesome. There was also an oldschool happycore DJ for a while.

By day three, we could go out to the silo whenever we wanted, and got extensive tours out to the area where the missile was housed.. and got to peer down a 200 ft hole. It was amazing. The entire place was covered in graffiti, mainly pertaining to ducks. I did a bunch of sketches and taped them to the wall, and put a bunch of cardboard penguins up all over.

Our camp was called Camp Craigslist, because we got a bunch of stuff off Craigslist when we landed up Seattle and rented a Uhaul to cart it all over with. We ended up with three couches, a broken lightbrite, ottoman, skateboard, beanbag bed, vintage telephone, and some lamps. Keith showed up a day later with his giant speakers and we had our own Silo pretty much (our camp was next to it). His friend Jeph was with him and built some crazy tarp shade structures for us. We also had hit Costco and the Japanese market, so we had sushi almost every day (Albacore sashimi!) and I invented a roll.. grilled bacon-wrapped asparagus with cream cheese =) SO yummy. Also made bacon fried rice, yakisoba, and octodogs. Tip: don’t try to fry stuff on a gas grill. It’s messy, takes forever, and works horribly.

When we got back to Seattle, we had a giant group dinner at Quinn’s, ate at the oldest sushi resteraunt in Seattle, and got to meet an amazing street artist, starheadboy I got to hang out with tons of friends and explored a ton more of the city. The trip was absolutely amazing.

I didn’t really take pictures, but dave has lots here