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| My First Studio at the Art Academy in Trondheim |
It was during my first year at the art school that I managed to tap my old 486 into the Internet. A network hub just happened to be located in a technical switch gear room next to the academy's printing shop. One week later, this gateway to the world was locked by the local telephone company. But for one reason or the other, no one ever spotted my obnoxious connection. However, that was the time I got introduced to IP numbers, RJ45’s and twisted pairs. At first I tried to feed a secondhand 3C503 EtherLink card through a 2 paired homespun cable. I wasn’t getting anywhere. Two days later I started to take into consideration some 35 odd meters of appearantly well conducting material. By the way, this was just about how far off I was from the graphics department at the time. To put things short, I made an investment in proper cabling, and bit by bit slowly the world became accessible. Ok, but what have all this to do with Detox and the Cybernetes group? Not much, really. It’s just how I got started that is, without knowing shit about what I was about to do.
One day two fellow students came by my workshop asking me to join them on a project. One of the guys, Bård Løftingsmo, had a radio-controlled 3 wheeled motion device built into a stripped housing of a late computer power supply. This apparatus had a small black and white video surveillance camera interlocked with the front wheel. Something he managed to do by attaching everything onto a common vertical steering rod. The thing looked like a mechanical puppy (and had been used in an earlier project called Zoot).
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| Zoot, the very first prototype |
Anyway, the one of the two who actually did most of the talking whenever I took a break was Atle Barcley. I am still convinced he can speak native html, although I have never ever heard him pronounce any of the tags. The job was splitted between us. Bård were going to improve the drone (he later rebuilt it), complete with a VHF video transmitter, stronger and longer lasting batteries, etc., etc. Atle, on the other hand, were going to be responsible for the implementation of a web site interface (including live video streaming). My job was to hook up a dedicated computer running the web server with the drone’s remote radio control unit. I had told them it was feasable. At that time we did not even have the adequate hardware (or software) to run or accomplish anything like what we were talking about. We also needed money. As you can see, almost everything in life starts and ends with paperwork concerning financial means. I hate both ends, (even if they had to meet to get this thing going off in the right direction).
So how did I approach my part of the deal? Searching the net for wisdom. For a long while I hoped to find the answers by subscribing to the HBRobotics, a rather aggrevating mailing list if you’re located too far away from the other subscribers. Ten years ago as a californian resident myself I could easily have taken my car over to one of their meetings. But none of their freeways have exits to Trondheim (or the other way round), so I decided to look elsewhere. Besides, I don’t have a car anymore, so as a registered student with the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim well, I manually turned to my own people for help. After all, this institution had spent a fair amount of money promoting interdisciplinary activities on projects. However, their practice so far shows that artists are invited to participate only if someone else needs a cultural alibi or a mere spectacular visual decoration of some sort. That is when you start buying books. Reading and trying to understand by copying code and/or building small experimental circuitries as described in these "Learn Yourself What You Don’t Know in 30 seconds" kind of litterature. Slowly you gain some sort of insight it’s just that these publications hardly show you how to implement the things you’re looking for. So you have to improvise, assuming you don’t ruin anything by trial and error. Those are the periods when you gain lots of experience using your own imagination and stubborness.
CGI scripts was considered to be too slow the respond time was thought to be unacceptable since the three of us dreamed of video streaming in real time. It later proved to be at least a 20 seconds lag on the video, while the steering control came into effect almost instantaneously whenever you pressed a button on our web page. So maybe the use of CGI would not have been so stupid it first were assumed to be. At least the video and control lag had been more consistent with each other. But we also had to consider the consept of art, i.e. the governing idea behind all this something I will come around to in awhile. Java, on the other hand, is an object-oriented programming language that was designed to be portable across multiple platforms and operating systems. It would give me the option to write the drone steering control program as an applet that would be downloaded automatically by the client’s browser - from the server - whenever needed and executed inside the web page. Simple as that, I thought now I just had to teach myself Java. I had been told it was modeled after C++, but that didn’t help me much since the only C that I knew didn’t have these extra plus signs added. Up until now I had done all my programming in either plain C or mostly though, in Turbo Pascal (you can download such developing tools from the Borland Museum. Everything I did was procedural and had to do with direct hardware control of my own art installations. So you see, there was absolutely no experience or knowledge about neither networks nor any graphical user interfaces. I had been quite comfortable within the now, for most people, more or less obsolete DOS text mode environment (download a free version here).
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| K8000 Computer Interface Card |
I started by writing an applet that didn’t do much more than showed itself when you opened a web page. That was easy to produce something similar to a standard "hello, world!" every thinkable compiler in the world is capable of doing. But it was impossible to get any cooperation from the Microsoft Internet Information Server (that comes with the Win NT 4.0 Server operating system). Forced to do something else I eventually gained enough knowledge to make a special purpose server in Java that worked. Well, at first all it did was to confirm (on the server side) that a client had pressed a button in his browser window. It was quite an achievement, the only thing missing now was to have my Java coded server to deliver that incoming data (that somebody out there had pressed this or that button) to the printer port. Then it would just be a matter of plugging in my Welleman K8000 Computer Interface Card and let it convert the digital data to analog signals.
However, it turned out to be a tremendous problem to have the NT Server sending data anywhere near anything hardwired (something Bill Gates once decided). I still don’t know how to implement this in DOS, because if I knew, it would have a piece of cake. How can I say a stupid thing like that? I guess it means something like I know how to talk to hardware, but haven’t got a clue about server programming at that level. So, if someone could lead me in the right direction, please send me an e-mail. But here I was, left with a brand new 400 MHz Pentium II running an operative system designed to overprotect me. I had to find a way out of this, quicly because time was running out. We had a contract and a closing date with the National Touring Exhibitions, Norway (and Detox was sort of their contribution to the new millenium). But, doesn’t it appear to be third-parties offering solutions to everything? In this case it was called Solutions Consulting. How could it be called anything else? They claimed that if I had a device to plug into a serial port, their product would help me communicate with it. So I forgot about the printer port and was left with nothing. The thing is, I didn’t have anything to plug into an RS232 serial port. And what was needed had better be intelligent. I decided to build something around another Welleman do-it-yourself kit, the now discontinued K2612 Intelligent Motherboard.
To be continued
COPYWRITE © 1999 JENS LALAND·BRYNE
