Photo by Lisa Tolentino
Our talk focused on the common issue in digital art of computing performance vs. cost. How do artists utilize portable computing devices (e.g the Arduino, BeagleBoard, Raspberry Pi) to suit their artistic needs? It is a cost benefit analyst that gets quite complex. One device is easier to use but not as powerful, the other more powerful but more difficult to use. Price is also an issue, a laptop is easy to use an very powerful, but the price on a large scale art project is prohibitive. An Arduino is much cheaper but the audio quality (a very important part of our Intonarumori 2013 project) is very limited.
So our current solution is the Raspberry Pi, which has all the capabilities of a Macintosh G3 from about ten to twelve years ago, and runs on Debian Linux. We are running Pure Data on the Pi, which has proven to be difficult, but will give us much more digital signal processing power for audio.
The realm of digital art is a fun, complicated and time consuming process, but so is most art. See urbanSTEW.org for more information and updates on this project.