I guess I’ll just talk process here. There’s lots I want to reflect on in how Kelly and I put together our Makey Makey. That being said, I want tomorrow’s presentation to maintain some element of surprise, so I’ll try not to give too much away.

When the Makey Makey project was introduced, Todd immediately said he wanted to do something with “compression.” While compression is not something that particularly interests me, I liked the idea of starting with a concept, a buzzword, something we had discussed in class that I wanted to further pursue. For me, this was “databases.” I’ve been thinking about this idea of the database since we read Manovich. And as I’ll discuss in my other post this week, Kris Cohen’s work on search engines intersected nicely with and furthered my thinking on the database – specifically in regards to questions of relationality, aesthetics, and control.

But where to go from there? Kelly brought up an interest in collective authorship. The genre of flarf poetry, something we’ve both looked at in our Millenials class, seemed to fit in well here. Flarf poetry is composed using Google search engine results, which can often result in the absurd, the nonsensical, the ridiculous, etc (it’s worth looking at; we’ll bring an example tomorrow). Flarf however, still requires some important human intervention. There’s clearly someone behind the poem making decisions, such as what to search, which results to use, what order to put them in, and how much of their own voice they want to include.

Kelly and I actually decided on using automatedbeacon.net before we knew about the Cohen, so when we got the reading it gave us some nice material to add to our discussion. Beacon for one, involves minimal keyboard/mouse intervention, which we thought would work well with the Makey Makey. Additionally, it gives us a steady stream of random data, so we didn’t have to worry about deciding ourselves exactly what we would type into a given search engine. And as Kelly mentioned, Beacon gives us search queries rather than search results, extending not only more “traditional” notions of flarf poetry, but also expanding our thinking on collective authorship in general. Don’t worry – more on this tomorrow.

We initially decided on capturing search queries through a screenshot. We were going to have everyone hooked up to the Makey Makey, although only three people would have the ability to execute the Command + Shift + 3 keyboard function, thus playing on some ideas of collective authorship and anonymity. Needless to say, when we attempted to test our prototype this morning, we ran into some major issues. For one, hooking everyone in the class up to the Makey Makey requires lots of wires, way more than we were able (or willing) to deal with. Secondly, even though you can reconfigure the keyboard, the Makey Makey does not like modifier keys, meaning you cannot program it to execute command or shift. We spent about an hour trying to come up with alternative ways to take a screenshot (even attempting to mess with the Developer Console), but to no avail. Fortunately, David (surprise surprise) came to our rescue with a feasible solution.

In conclusion? The Makey Makey is not a computer. Its functionality is limited and this can be annoying. Indeed, my frustration brought out my neoliberal/capitalist/whatever side, in that my first thought was, “why can’t we/didn’t we just buy the nicer Makey Makeys?” But ultimately we worked around the issue (rather than throw more money at it), which I think (hope?) resulted in a stronger project overall.