Murale Interactive Wall
After making Esperanto 2.0, I kept dreaming about making it in physical space. Until when I came across the “Jaaga” and “The Living Building”:
“The Living Building project seeks to extend the notion of the pallet-rack shelving as the skeleton of the living building by evolving the metaphor and design philosophy to include other organs such as tissue made of living vertical and rooftop gardens and a cascading aquaponic farm, a circulatory system complete with rainwater harvesting and hydroponic drip irrigation, a digestive system that houses worms which generate beautiful compost out of our organic waste, a metabolic system responsible for taking the energy harvested from our solar panels to light our space, connect us with wireless Internet, and drive the pumps that circulate our harvested water.
Eventually the Living Building will even develop a nervous system that senses and communicates. It is the intent that with each iteration of growth the building comes one step closer to reaching full consciousness. This is the dream.”
It was perfect, a Living Building, am inanimate system that was becoming an animate organism. The Living Building was like my imaginary world, I just needed to add a touch of organic and sensual shapes.
I just needed to make this shapes sound.
This was the time when Murale was ideated.
Murale is a multi-sensorial, modular climbing plant. When the sensors are triggered the wall responds through movement and sounds. Murale from Latin “muralis “of a wall,” from murus “wall” in Italian means both: “climbing plant” and “wall paint”.
It is a parasite of the “Living Building” because no system-organism is perfect and “There is no system without parasites” (Michel Serres, The Parasite).
“The parasite doesn’t stop. It doesn’t stop eating or drinking or yelling or burping or making thousands of noises or filling space with its swarming and din. The parasite is an expansion; it runs and grows.
It invades and occupies. It overflows, all of a sudden, from these pages. Inundation, swelling waters”. (Michel Serres, The Parasite).
It was time now to start Designing.
It has been a very thought time. First of all I had to get to know Bangalore as well as the resources and the possibilities.
Where to find material? What material are available? What technologies are available?
I spent a few weeks initially only looking around. Getting to know S.P. road (a very fascinating place at first but also an horrendous
chaos), asking people, meeting people, researching online.
S.P. road is a very interesting place. It’s fundamentally a huge market in Bangalore where it’s possible to find everything, from computers to speakers, from metal to raw plastic. Components for anything you can think of.
The problem is that each physical area of the market you will only be able to find one kind of item, and nothing never is on display.
I’ve been walking around the very dirty and smelly S.P. road and surrounding under the sun for hours. Asking each shop about something.
Trying to understand and to make them understand what I needed, and English is not at all the first language there… plus my knowledge of English regarding tools is very poor as well.
I’ve been waiting for very long time in shops before they brought me something I asked to be shown for then finding out it wasn’t the right thing. Desperately tried to find things that I needed, I literary explored it all. It must be said that many times I was looking for things that couldn’t be found there or in India in general. Certain material or kind of rivets or tools do not exist in India unless you import them.
I was lucky enough in fact, to meet Manjunath Bhat who helped me to find a way to import some Polypropylene from the UK which I used for making the flowers.
I choose to use Acrylic for the modular element. I used metal rivets for bags for attaching the 2 parts of the polypropylene flowers.
Being Murale as parasite it was very important for me to have a growing modular element in the design (a little bit like Jaaga, that now is moving and will grow a bit in size).
Murale can in fact be placed anywhere really, it can change size and shape, it moves with Jaaga and live with Jaaga to make it more beautiful.
So I took very long time to solve all the design problems. Deciding where to place the speakers and how. How to make the flower work as its best. How to cut this shapes out. With acrylic it was quite straight forward: laser cut is the best way.
But polypropylene doesn’t work as well with laser cut. But it was to complicated to access other kind of processes considering the small quantity of material I had to cut. I was luck enough to find a very good laser cutter and it worked out quite well in the end.
After the design was done and the wall mounted it was time to think about the electronics. Since the start I had planned to have 1 motor driving 3 flowers. The spring-flower would be attached to a thin metal cable ending on a wheel attached to the motor. I would use clamps to regulate the tension of the cables. The wheel rotating would pull the spring-flower making it closing at opening. Blooming.
In theory the mechanism would work even with the wheel rotating only in one direction, but in practise the wire gets twisted. The solution is to have the motor rotating in one direction for a few seconds and then in the other for the same amount of time.
To rotate the motor in 2 directions with an H-bridge and an Arduino looks like a simple task. Of course when thinking of the output I would had had I was already preparing and experimenting. I had already an H-bridge circuit perfectly working on the breadboard.
It is when I started soldering the circuit for the 4 motors and 4 sensors that the problems showed up. It was the first time and even soldered some wire, imagine how difficult I found it to solder a circuit.
I spent nearly a week soldering the circuit. Tobias Rosemberg taught me how to do and so I did. And it worked the first time we tested it.
But it never did after…
I started it from scratch 4 times. I don’t know if it was because I’m terribly bad at soldering or because I didn’t test it properly, but I
never got it to work again.
So I decided to take a different way. I discovered the ready made relay. At OM in S.P. road they had one which could take 4 motors. Perfect!
I attached the motors to the relay and attached the relay to Arduino and the motors would let my computer controlling them.
I needed now someone to help me with the code. I luckily found …..
We uploaded this code on the Arduino Board.
It worked perfectly after we found out that the sensors required an independent 5V power supply.
The motors on the other hand needed 12V with at least 3 amperes.
Now was time to make the sound work as well.
I couldn’t use maxuino (mainly because I couldn’t get it to work for the motors) for the sound because I had already had some code uploaded on the board. I found some examples on how to use just read Arduino’s serial port with Max/msp through Processing.
It worked!
Ok admittedly I never properly cleaned the Max code… it still, in fact has all the colour changing part… But, hey, it looked cooler!
And here we are. Murare works! It’s there and the opening has been brilliant!
Here a video by Clemence Barret on the opening:
Also, there is a short documentary about me building Murale by Madhu Reddy.
Category
Art