October 4, 2009
As he has done for the past 4 years, Jason Sloan will be curating the Sight Sound Interaction show this year at MICA, and this year much to our pleasure Mick, Clark and my self will be showing Disco Boxing again! We’ve got a slue of improvements which I’ll be rolling out later this week which we’re going to be adding for exhibit opening November 5th in the Rosenberg Gallery in the MICA Brown Center. If you’re in the area definitely come check it out. Also check out the Exhibition website, and see the rest of the artists showing.
September 25, 2009
Last week the Baltimore City Paper compiled there list of the Best of the best in Baltimore and on page 26 of the 2009 issue, Best Festival went to Artscape Midway. It was the first time in the past three years that Artscape as a general festival did not win, and only Midway’s second year as a festival. The first mention in the City Paper article was of Disco Boxing. Midway came out on top even with festivals like Wartscape, Starscape, Station North Arts Festival, and many others so we’re all pretty proud!
Here’s a link to the CityPaper article – Best of Baltimore 2009: Baltimore Living
September 3, 2009

I’ve been talking about Disco Boxing for a long time, but now I’ve finally laid out what it is, and how it was made. This post is going to be updated until it’s entirely complete which will probably be a week or so.
Disco Boxing is an interactive boxing project created by Mick Zimmerman, Clark Agre, Mike Anderson and myself which made it’s first debut at Artscape 2009. The idea is based off of the classic “strong man” carnival competition, the harder you hit, the more lights fire off. This blog post is arranged mostly for anyone curious about how we built the Disco Box using fairly simple and inexpensive methods.
A Basic Description: Disco Boxing is comprised of two walls, 8ft tall by 8ft wide and arranged to create a corner. Hanging in the middle of the “room” is a mid weight punching bag. Inside the punching bag we implemented a system to embed pressure sensitive switches which determine how hard a punch is being thrown at the bag. From there the information is sent to a computer running Max/MSP where we created a custom program to send data to an Arduino micro-controller which is then in turn connected to all 96 lights arranged on the wall.
Unfortunately at this time I do not have the edited video documentation, that will be coming shortly though, I promise.
Here’s the rest of our photos and video,

(more…)
July 26, 2009

Now that Artscape is over and Disco Boxing has been disassembled it’s about time get some in depth documentation out. So I’m putting aside today to gather all that and maybe fix some major bugs with this blog. I’ll post it all here, so stay tuned. Also if anyone has any photos from Disco Boxing let me know, I’d love to post them on the Flickr account!
May 16, 2009
Saturday we made an order for 250 triacs, 250 opto-isolators and 1,000 15k resistors. They should be coming in some time next week and that’s when our progress will really take off. With this shipment we’ll be able to make each light bulb have independent control with an Arduino Mega, the newest Arduino micro-controller, which we’ll be able to control 2, 8 ft by 8ft panels holding 64 lights.
We’ve also launched our new website for the project, right now located at http://discobox.politeauthority.com/ Hopefully once we get the order in things will start moving faster so we’ll be ready in time for Artscape, but we’ll see!
May 5, 2009
Now that the semester is almost over I’m finally finishing up the re-design of Polite Authority, and here we are. Lot of stuff is still going to need tweaking and updating but as a whole the site is functioning and that’s more then I could say previously. I’m working on a whole bunch of different things as usual, so I’ll just lay them all out here once and leave it at that!
Disco Boxing
As I mentioned before disco boxing is moving along well and the site explaining and documenting the project is coming up shortly. The basic premise of the project is to create a box witch is 8 ft by 8ft by 8ft and covered in Edison 20 watt light bulbs, 256 to be exact. In the middle of the room there will be a punching bag suspending from the ceiling rigged with pressure sensitive switches and contact microphones to record the hits from the user. Then with that information create different lighting animations with the surrounding room, all which is being computed instantly while the user is punching the bag.
We’ve been accepted to join Artscape’s Midway this year and we’re all really excited about that. Once the semester ends this week most of my time will be dedicated to that project. Right now we are looking for sponsors, we’re able to offer advertisement space on the Midway at Artscape and we can even give a tax deduction through Artscape.
Nicaragua
This summer I’ll be going to Nicaragua for a month starting in July, and unfortunately missing Artscape. I’ll be in MICA’s summer abroad video program making a documentary about the trip and what we come across. Hopefully as the meetings leading up to the trip progress I’ll have more information about what exactly the intent of the trip is.
I also have a bunch of finals coming up, some of which I’ll want to post and I’ll make available through this site as the week progresses!
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