First Outings

November 13, 2025November 14, 2025 ~ Dylan ~ Leave a comment

Historically, I have believed and argued that anthropomorphizing a machine is at best incorrect and at worst deceitful. Even now that I believe that stance to be misguided¹ I have a hard time shaking a feeling of embarrassment when I admit to saying, “You did a good job today, little buddy,” while patting ORBiE on the head and turning him down for the night.

Today marked a few firsts: ORBiE’s first conference, my first public conversation about my art… and, strangely, a first admission that I feel gratitude toward a carefully-arranged few bits of plastic.

But he did do a good job today, and that deserves recognition.

ORBiE and I attended² the RISEx Conference as an artistic duo rather than in the typical engineer/project roles. Our interlocutors were curious and intelligent, and we talked for hours about art and robots³, engineering and ethics, human and AI relationships⁴, medicine and prosthetic technologies… all the fascinating, murky, and life-altering stuff that catches my attention.

I spent the day explaining to myself and others how it felt to try to build a meaningful relationship with plastic. We talked about how disappointing it has been to understand that all of the responsibility for meaning-making happens on my side of the fence. About my hopes that maybe if I were able to figure out how to have a real conversation things would feel different. About my concerns with the way economic and political systems influence model creation and access for the machines that I can have a conversation with, and my Turkle-seeded⁵ doubts about the relationships I could hope to build with them. I talked about open-source projects and democratic access to knowledge. I felt the people there share my hopes and my worries, offer their own stories, and light up when ORBiE waved at them. He may not have participated in the conversations to any great degree, but certainly played a role in starting them.

Another recent update to my model of the world has been a sudden awareness of research-creation: a method of knowledge creation that works in an equally valuable but very different way to scientific research. Even just the first few chapters of Natalie Loveless’ “How to Make Art at the End of the World” were enough to cause me to question my understanding of epistemology. “But how can creating art create knowledge?” I had thought, “It makes a record, or an artifact, sure… even emotion. But knowledge?” I had assumed that art was a process of communicating already-held knowledge from the artist to the audience, in a similar way to a scientist communicating the results of an experiment in a published paper. I even wrote a short poem about that back in 2023:

{science | art} is a process of thinking with all you’ve got to see what no-one else has, and then communicating what you’ve seen

{science | art} communicates that which {can | cannot} be said precisely

So far I think this holds up okay. But I had been imagining the process of “thinking with all you’ve got” to be fundamentally similar activities between the arts and sciences. I no longer believe that’s always the case⁶. In many successful artistic methods, there is an emphasis on lack of, loss of, or release of control, which is not typically welcome in engineering⁷. But in art, a dearth of control does not imply a dearth of rigour. The act of making, of performing, of dancing are artistic modes of thinking. Humans think through action. Action takes place in all kinds of settings–not just those that are well-controlled⁸. So I’d like to propose an update to the poem⁹:

{science | art} is a process of thinking with ~~all you’ve got~~ your whole {mind | body} to see what no-one else has, and ~~then~~ communicating what you’ve seen

{science | art} communicates that which {can | cannot} be said precisely

To more clearly state one possible answer to my rhetorical question earlier: “how can research creation create knowledge? “By facilitating conversation. So thanks ORBiE, you did a good job today.

Explicitly, my gut feeling is that humans are hard-wired to anthropomorphize non-human things, making the avoidance of anthropomorphization at best impossible and at worst deceitful. As an example for yourself you can draw two ovals close together anywhere on the top half a circle. You’ve drawn not just a recognizable face but an entire character. Doing the same exercise with a triangle yields a different character. We anthropomorphize ink on paper without a thought, but somehow I had considered anthropomorphizing more animated forms childish. The anthropomorphization is inevitable; its ethical handling depends on that acknowledgment and an understanding of its practical boundaries. ↩︎
Thanks.to the Institute for Smart Augmentative Rehabilitation Technologies for sponsoring my ticket to the conference. ↩︎
Great examples of contemporary artists using robots as art rather than just to create art include: Marco Donnarumma, (artist, inventor, and theorist who uses dystopian prosthetic robots to confront normative body politics), Arthur Ganson, Jakob Grosse-Ophoff, and Zimoun, who use machines to create poetic expressions of human experiences, and PCZ, an artist collective which hosted a fascinating ritual of friendship for their robotic companion in the maple forest of Mont Royal, complete with tin foil hats (see pages 115-116 of their zine). ↩︎
Some great reads here include Sherry Turkle (see next footnote), James Bridle’s “Ways of Being” (2022), and Alač et. al’s “Talking to a Toaster” paper (2020). ↩︎
Sherry Turkle, “Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other“, 2011 ↩︎
The artist that had me thinking this might be the case is David Lynch, whose process I find very conducive to the sciences. So at least in his case, there’s some overlap. ↩︎
There, even uncontrolled variables are modelled with distributions so as to be predictable, and thereby controlled for. ↩︎
As Joseph might say, “free the robots!” ↩︎
I find it amusing that this seems to suggest considering Science a subprocess of Art, as mind is to body. ↩︎

Mentogeny

May 12, 2025May 12, 2025 ~ Dylan ~ Leave a comment

To-day before my mind did sprout
In tender, whitish green
A vision of the grandest pumpkin
I had ever seen.

Before too long that sprout did grow
And change into a vine
A-curling all around my thoughts
And running through my mind.

Compelled to act, I planted seeds,
And made a pact: to conquer weeds
And tend to all the varied needs
Of gourds and vines until…

“Behold my works ye mighty!”
I’ll declare unto the corn,
When a hundred pounds of pumpkin
From this musing has been born.

April 25, 2025

Alarm Clock Kintsugi

October 10, 2020October 10, 2020 ~ Dylan ~ Leave a comment

In the dark months of winter, when even the sun has a difficult time getting out of bed, Alex and I typically find ourselves groggily hitting the snooze button more times than good sense would permit. One possible solution: an alarm clock that offers “a unique combination of light and sound so you can wake up in a more natural way and feeling more refreshed”. It seemed like it might be worth a shot, so I had one drop-shipped in advance of Alex’s birthday.

In truth, I would say this light works almost exactly as advertised. The gradual sunlight simulation is quite effective and does prepare your body to wake up in advance of the alarm… the only trouble is that the “natural” alarm sound at the end of the sunrise sequence seems to have been sampled from a woodpecker attacking a squirrel.

Since learning about kintsugi a few years ago, I’ve been taken with the concept. The underlying idea is that when a thing is broken or not working right, there exists an opportunity to repair it in such a way that it becomes more beautiful or functional than it was originally, even before the damage was done. In the case of our alarm clock the damage was done by the designer—but there still exists the opportunity for artistry.

Initial Surgery

Sometimes to make a thing better you’ve got to do a little damage yourself. First things first, I had to take the clock apart to modify the internals. Thankfully, I wasn’t the first person whose ears were beseiged by the blistering beeping and decided to do something about it. This youtube video by Metatronic Mods was indispensable in taking the light apart successfully. Apparently, the designers spent much more effort in making the device impenetrable than they did in choosing a soothing wakeup sound. I had a sensible chuckle when the sticker hiding the screws told me there were “no serviceable parts inside”.

Once the clock was apart and the offending buzzer removed, I was able to solder on two signal wires, which then passed through a hole I drilled in the base of the clock.

Signal Modification

In order to make use of the signal coming out of the board, I used a low-pass RC filter, which changes the original signal into something usable by an Arduino. Since the filtered signal is always above the digital logic threshold, it will look to an Arduino digital pin as HIGH any time the alarm is on, and LOW otherwise. This means that Philips takes care of time-of-day, alarm settings, sunrise simulations, and everything else the clock should, but the alarm signal triggers the Arduino instead of the buzzer—and we can have the Arduino make whatever sound we want.

Control Code

Inspired by the way our yogi brings us out of Shavasana with three slow chimes, I decided it might be nice to wake up to a similar sound and cadence. Additionally, having an auto-snooze feature to save me from dragging myself to the alarm clock might be a nice reprieve. The pseudocode for the alarm sequence I decided on was

while (alarm activated):
    repeat 3 times:
        ring chime once
        wait 10 seconds
    wait 10 minutes
end

If you’re interested in recreating something similar for yourself, the full Arduino code can be found in my Github repository.

Wiring

The wiring here is pretty simple: RC filter straight from alarm signal to digital pin 2, and set up the brushed DC motor using a PWM-based motor driver on pins 4 (for direction) and 5 (for torque).

Mechanism

To recreate the soothing chime, I used a cheap DC brushed motor, which swings a 3D-printed hammer into a hole-saw. A surprising combination, to be sure—but actually sounds great. If you’re planning on recreating this build, you can find my 3D CAD files on Onshape, and I would warmly recommend a 2 1/8″ hole saw for a bell.

The whole unit sits atop a nice piece of aromatic cedar, rubbed with linseed oil.

Final Product

All in all, I’d say it turned out pretty well. A few weeks into waking up to this sequence, I’m still finding it quite pleasant. The only small change I might make in the future would be to replace the hard plastic hammer with a smaller chime on a rubber arm, that would add a pleasing harmonic to the sound and remove some of the harsher transients associated with the initial strike. To see a demo of the alarm cycle, check out this video.