Äänimuseo [Sound Museum]

March 12th, 2012

Äänimuseo [Sound Museum] is an interactive sound installation that was created for the Koukkuniemi Home for the Elderly in spring 2011. It is a tool that allows the people living in Koukkuniemi to reminisce and share their memories with the help of auditory and haptic cues.

All photographs on this page are by Antti Sompinmäki

There are different kinds of objects laid out on the table and each object has its corresponding sound. The sound starts playing when the object is placed on the elevated area in the middle of the table. More complex soundscapes can be created by placing multiple objects on the table at the same time. The objects and their sounds are divided into four different categories: Tampere, nature, work and leisure.

Video of the table on YLE Areena

More information about the project (in Finnish).

The team working on the project:

  • Production: Rupriikki Media Museum (as a part of the Kulttuurikaari project)
  • Producer & Designer: Niklas Nylund
  • Programming & Interaction Design: Matti Niinimäki
  • Sound Design: Mikko Koskinen
  • Models: Lauri Karskela

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Posted in Art, Electronics, Programming | 1 Comment »

The Race Code – Kluuvin galleria

February 25th, 2012

I haven’t updated the site in a looong time. Not sure if anyone is reading this anymore… A lot of things have happened both professionally and personally and I’ll try to post something more as soon as possible.

Most importantly, I wanted to post something about The Race Code. An installation I made together with Timo Wright. It is currently on display at Kluuvin galleria in Helsinki as a part of Timo’s exhibition If You Tolerate This…

Timo Wright: IF YOU TOLERATE THIS…

February 17 to March 4, 2012
Wed–Sun 11-18

Kluuvi Gallery
Unioninkatu 28 B
(4th floor, courtyard)
Helsinki, Finland

Free admission

The Race Code

The Race Code is an installation that comments on the growing atmosphere of racism in Finland. The visitor enters the exhibition space where a large grid of portrait pictures of the previous visitors are displayed. The visitor can then enter a photo booth where they can have their picture taken. The software analyzes the facial features of the person and compares those features to a certain ‘ideal face’. The picture is then added to the grid. The closer the facial features are to that ideal, the higher the picture is placed on the grid, arranging the visitors into ‘higher and lower races’.

I will write about this more in detail when we have some video documentation

The original concept is by Timo Wright. Programming and visual design by me.

The Long Journey Home

The other work in the exhibition is called The Long Journey Home. A very powerful sound installation. I highly recommend listening to the stories carefully (if you understand Finnish). I wasn’t really officially involved in this project, but I helped Aki Päivärinne and Janne Koivula with the programming and electronics.

The Long Journey Home is a sound installation in which the experiences of today’s refugees’, the Finnish war children’s’ and the Karelian refugees’ are combined into a single touching experience.

The Long Journey Home

Posted in Art, Photography, Programming | 2 Comments »

Attack of the Persu Snakes – A Kinect-Based Game Prototype

April 14th, 2011

I was messing around with Quartz Composer and Kinect yesterday. I started to make a drum machine, but something went horribly wrong and this came out. Evil Super Snakes are attacking the world (or perhaps a plane?) and you must try to destroy them.

Posted in Programming, Randomness | 1 Comment »

Månsteri Store Now Open

April 13th, 2011

Now you can get your daily Arduino and sensor fix from me, your friendly neighborhood pusher man!

Månsteri Store

Månsteri Store is a place where you can get Arduino boards in its many varieties, sensors, basic electronic components, prototyping tools and much much more for your interactive art projects. Currently, I have distribution agreements with Arduino and SparkFun, but there might be some others in the near future. I try to only stock items that I have personally used and found to be useful in my own projects, but feel free to send me an email if you would like to get some specific stuff that is not on the website.

I already thought about doing this back in 2007 when I first started messing with the Arduino. Back then there were no Finnish Arduino distributors around and not so many elsewhere in Europe either. I couldn’t do it then, but the idea was stuck in my head.

Fast forward to 2011 and suddenly I have the resources to do it, so I thought: “Why not? It’s not like I’m working part-time at the university, doing dozens of art and design projects and trying to finish my MA studies at the same time. I have plenty of time to run an online store!”

For those who don’t know me personally, that is exactly what I’m doing + trying to have an actual life on top of that. Sometimes my stupidity surprises me…

Anyway, it’s been fun for the first few days since the store opened and the feedback has been great. A big thank you to all those supporting me! So head over to http://store.mansteri.com/ and shop til your voltage drops.

Månsteri Store is also on Facebook.

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Posted in Electronics, Store | No Comments »

Mixed Up Performance – Jyväskylä Art Museum

March 11th, 2011

I did a small performance last night at The Jyväskylä Art Museum as a part of the Live Herring ’11 events.

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Posted in Art, Music/DJ, Performance | No Comments »

Live Herring ’11 in Jyväskylä

March 10th, 2011

This week in Jyväskylä:

Thu 10/03/2011, 4:30 PM – Artist Talk

I will do a small artist talk/Q&A session at The Jyväskylä Art Museum. I will also do a small performance using The Beat Blender and Made In Iron controllers.

Fri 11/3/2011, 6 PM – The Future Roots & VJ Månsteri

I will be VJing to the sounds of The Future Roots in The Jyväkylä Art Museum. The visuals will be based on the cover art made by Minja Revonkorpi & Rita Vargas.

Sat 12/3 & Sun 13/3 – Arduino Workshop

On saturday and sunday I will do an Introduction to Arduino workshop. I’ll try to post some pictures about that during the weekend All the places for the workshop are reserved already.

More info about the whole Live Herring ’11 event. Lots of exhibitions, gigs, artist talks etc. Check it out.

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Posted in Art, Electronics, Music/DJ, Performance, Video/VJ | No Comments »

Kamalallallaa! – Mediamaja, Kouvola

March 7th, 2011

This exhibition is still running until thursday! Go see it if you are in Kouvola (who wouldn’t be there?).

More info:
Mediamaja
Facebook

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Posted in Art, Electronics | No Comments »

Animoitu Liike Pt. 2 – Testing With The Kinect and OSCeleton

February 8th, 2011

Some of you might have seen the Animoitu liike -workshop I did in collaboration with Päivi Hintsanen and Live Herring in Jyväskylä public library (September 2009) http://www.liveherring.org/animoitu_liike/

This week I’m going to do part 2 of the workshop in Jyväskylä in collaboration with Loiskis. The Kinect sensor has greatly improved the project as I no longer need to use IR markers.

Here is a small demo. Running with a customized build of OSCeleton, Quartz Composer and Animata.

For demonstration purposes, I’m changing the character and the background by clapping my hands.

The drawings were made by students from the Keski-Palokka elementary school.

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Posted in Animation, Art, Programming, Video/VJ | 3 Comments »

Mnstri OSC Tools 1.0

January 22nd, 2011

I decided to combine my two Quartz Composer plugins (Animata OSC and Månsteri OSC Sender) into one.

At the same time I fixed a major issue that had been there since I made the plugins. I’m using the VVOSC and VVBasics frameworks from http://code.google.com/p/vvopensource/ and I finally changed the class names to get rid of some errors when using the plugin with other software that uses the same frameworks.

Download from the Software page.

IMPORTANT!

Please remove all of my previous OSC plugins (AnimataOSC and MonsteriOSCSender) before installing this new plugin.

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Posted in Programming | 1 Comment »

OSCeleton With Quartz Composer

January 11th, 2011

Trying out the very awesome OSCeleton http://github.com/Sensebloom/OSCeleton with Quartz Composer.

What is OSCeleton?
“As the title says, it’s just a small program takes Kinect skeleton data from the OpenNI framework and spits out the coordinates of the skeleton’s joints via OSC messages. These can can then be used on your language / framework of choice.”

It works straight out of the box with Animata and many other software, but the OSC formatting is not compatible with Quartz Composer. So I made a little Max/MSP patch that converts the messages to a format QC understands. I will try to write a tutorial about how to get the whole thing running pretty soon. But here is a quick rundown.

./osceleton-osx -p 8110 -mx 2 -my -2 -mz -1 -ox -1 -oy 0.75 -oz 1 -a 127.0.0.1

The options are to scale the values to something that makes sense in QC. You can play around with them. Check the OSCeleton readme for more information about the different options.

Let me know if the Max/MSP app or something else is not working properly.

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Posted in Animation, Programming, Video/VJ | 26 Comments »

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