 Hello and welcome to the last talk of the first day of Gulösprogrammier Nacht. With me on stage as you have seen is a man who makes things work or somehow work or just make them do something. So you're probably all here for your love of car boys and computational sounds and artists and weird stuff, I think it's okay to say. So, please give a warm welcome to Dan Wilcox and his wearable one-man cyborg performance project. Thanks for the introduction. Thanks for having me here. So my name is Dan Wilcox. I'm an artist, musician, engineer and performer. If it's not obvious, I'm from the United States. Currently I work for the Zed Kayem, formerly for the Institute for Music and Acoustic and now for the Houts Lab. Mainly working on some weird projects and also stuff for the crazy Klangdome we have in the Kubas. But right now I'm talking about a personal project that has been ongoing on and off for the last 10 years or so. It's a little background. So this talk is basically it's sort of an artistic project, a technical project, an open-source project. Kind of all that stuff wrapped into one. A little bit of my background. So I'm from basically Huntsville, Alabama. My father was a rocket scientist. This is a portrait of me as a young child with rockets. I kind of in a sort of engineering approach kind of influenced by my father and all the people that he knew and worked with. I sort of view art as a way to do research and development for looking into culture and new ideas and things like that. So it's sort of like a pseudo-scientific approach. But because you're an artist and not an actual scientist, you can kind of pretend and play with being a scientist and you don't have to actually be correct most of the time. Which is fun. So this project is called Robot Cowboy and it comes from a long series of things. So when I was in college and not really that serious, not that I'm that much more serious now. This is kind of all the stuff that I wanted to do for, but it's hard to do that as a living. Playing in bands. Sort of more punk rock. Surf style. This is an old project called Seven Inch Wave. And we also had these idea of, you know, of course you all want to do the iconic computer head style thing. So you go to the thrift store, the second hand store. You buy a bunch of old TV, old monitors, skin them, and then turn them into helmets. And later on, and we use this as a whole motif for the band, it was very sort of electro drums, 80s surf guitar, sort of like a mix again of like surf rock punk 80s style. Sort of like Devo surf punk is what we called it. And so we all had our monikers. So I was Dan O'Matica, Grand Botnik was on bass. And Kaltron 2000 was on drums. And we were all engineers. See, mechanical engineer, electrical engineer and double major computer and electrical engineer. So this was the band of engineering. And then I basically ran away from the US and I went to school in Sweden for art and technology because I didn't want to work for Google or whatever. Not that my grades were good enough at the time, whatever, you know, your decisions change stuff. So I decided I want to kind of do the same thing. But now I'm in a new place and it's going to take a while to meet people, but I want to keep making stuff. So I need to figure out a way to do it myself. So I made it sort of a demo idea, which was a me, a band of just me, right? Let's just clone myself four times and make a band out of it. Maybe that works. Maybe it's a little egotistical, but it's kind of a start. And so I made some experiments and you come into this problem of where you're like in a situation like this, it's like, do I play a laptop performance behind here? For me, it doesn't work. I think now we as an audience are totally used to that, right? You know, laptop DJs and all that stuff rocking away. If you this is around 2005, 2006, when I was starting this project, and that was just at the point where that was sort of becoming people were getting used to that. And before that, people were like, didn't they didn't connect someone with a laptop on stage was actually doing something. Let's say like late 90s, if you were working with a laptop on stage and music was coming out, like people were kind of like, what's he doing checking his email? None, none now that as if that's not the case now. But anyway, I didn't want to play behind the thing. I didn't want to sort of it. I didn't want to be me in the computer. I didn't want to sort of like a literal wall to be between sort of y'all and me. I wanted us to have more of a shared experience. And I also didn't want to be stuck on a stage, right? Because if you see a lot of electroacoustic computer based performance, you're sort of all sitting on a table, right? And you're kind of anchored to the table and you can't go beyond that. So I wanted to find ways to get around it. And again, I'm influenced by Divo. So we've got to have a little bit of anti-traditionalism there, a little new traditionalism. Amon is also influenced by sort of jazz experimentalist and philosopher Sun Ra. If you've not checked him out, you should definitely check him out. Laurie Anderson is also a big influence, sort of like the use of technology, narrative, that kind of stuff. If you've not heard of her before, but this looks cool, check her out. Also, this is Mayua Denke. They are a Japanese device art band. And basically, Mayua Denke is a corporation. And all of their musical instruments are products that they do in giant shows, which are called demonstrations. And so everybody wears the corporate outfit and they all play these songs with these giant sort of electromechanical weird instruments. And yeah, these are, it's very classic Japanese, like really well done. Like all these things are actually like things you can buy. OK, so combining those influences as a young impressionable student, I was also looking to the things of like, all right, how did, if I'm thinking about trying to do everything myself, how the hell do I do it? Well, maybe we look at how people used to do it, right? So you have an Elizabethan one man band. You have Joe Barrick, who was basically a Native American who built a sort of his own rock band that he has like a drum set and he has like a little organ he can play with his keys, et cetera. You have Roland Rauchan Kirk, or sorry, Rauchan Roland Kirk, who could play three clarinet sort of wind instruments at the same time. So like three embouchures on his mouth. But if you've ever played anything like that with your mouth, it's hard enough with one. You should watch them, find some videos of him on YouTube or hear some of his stuff. It's pretty amazing. And of course, you have the classic, you know, when you walk, it goes like, donch, donch, that kind of thing. So OK, so I'm thinking about like, why don't we do a version of that? How do I approach doing that with sort of like, maybe, you know, with software electronics, sort of like new techniques for an old problem? So basically it's just coming up with, you know, I have some sort of control like, how am I going to like build the systems? Basically, this is the system engineering design more or less. I have audio coming in and out. I have some processing of the audio. I have some sort of control. I have some mappings and then I have some visual output because for me, it was important that I could have the option of having a visual because, you know, like you always have DJ on the stage and then you have some bullshit algorithmic thing flashing around behind him. Right. So I need to have something like that. Otherwise, no one's going to bother with me. At least that was the idea. And I had ideas for a manifesto and more or less the manifesto was just sort of like, OK, I need to make stuff that is embodying, that is bringing sort of the computation to the body. So basically one of the main ideas was that I need to wear all the stuff. So instead of like me playing like this, and let's say if I play with a guitar, I have a guitar plugged in the computer and I'm like this, you know, and I got a tail and it's like, you know, it's almost like the computer is standing there on stage with you as like a separate thing to me conceptually. Right. It's like you and the computer, which is fine, but I don't want it essentially to be that way, at least how the experience is. I want it to be me and the computer. I want to be the cyborg, right, sort of like not me in the glasses. I want the glasses to fix my sight. I want the glasses to give me sort of a new enhancement. So I want the computer to be an enhancing to me. But I also an also important part of this is that I want myself to be the imperfection in the system. So I don't want it to be like I don't want to basically press a button and then just dance around because the computer makes everything perfect. I want the computer and the system to take input from me to make it a little bit imperfect because sort of like live music and from my background, I've come in with playing from more of a rock band kind of perspective. I wanted it to be that you haven't you still have that edge of danger, right, when you go out to play, you can always screw up at any moment. And I think that's important, even when you're playing with systems that can be more or less perfect and perfect in time and all of that. So there are tricks to do that are ways to build systems in this way. So I wanted to be perfect and I wanted it to fail. So things like this happened. And that's actually as part of the show in a way. So the original design was essentially this that again, this is 2005. So this is before like something like a Raspberry Pi. There were there were some single board computers, but they were really too slow to be useful for things like that. Laptops are still too big and too heavy. I didn't want to carry a black wrap topping around in a backpack. So basically what I found is that around this time, late 90s, early 2000s, wearable computing was the thing that everyone was going to walk around like a like an iBorg with a webcam on one eye and they were going to have the output here. So think of Google last, but with a whole bunch of old gear that you have to plug in to run it. And a lot of places bought in on this. And so in early 2000s, a lot of companies made these wearable computers. And by the mid 2000s, when I was doing this project, everyone had moved to these sort of more like dumb tablets where you do work through Wi-Fi and then you talk to a central server. So nobody wanted these heavy bulky things around anymore. So for 200 bucks, I got what used to be a $10,000 computer at the time. Now, this is not super fast. It was a it's a Zybernaut MA5. It's a 500 megahertz Pentium 3 with 256 mega RAM. And I think I had 16 megs of video memory, which I didn't really use. But essentially, this was your package. It's basically like a toaster. It doesn't have a fan. It has just an exposed t-sync. So it could get pretty hot since I'm running real-time audio. Which is one of the one of the fun things is if I let it run too long, it would heat up and get unstable. And then I would reboot it and let it cool down. That's those are other long stories. So essentially, I have the computer that's that actually has a VGA port out going on it. I can connect to fire our devices, which I never actually ended up needing USB devices. So like inputs, mainly game pads like PlayStation 2. Actually a lot of I use a lot of PlayStation 1 and PlayStation 2 controllers through adapters because you could buy them super cheap. Like people were throwing them away when they upgrade their playstations. So and then mainly my main interface is I have a sound card. So I have a it's an old Roland. It's just a USB one compliant. So it works with anything. No driver. So I have two channel audio in and out. I also have can do MIDI in and out. And with all that with all that setup, I also needed some way to control it. This is sort of the second version of this. So basically you have a box. This is your transport. And in musical terms, it just means my start, my stop, my. Go to the next song, go back, go to the next song. And I have one other button, which is my communicator. So it basically gives me a NASA quindar tone, like in the Apollo 11 Apollo recording. So beep, beep, beep. So I can always buzz in when I need to. That's my astronaut stick. And of course, the whole thing needs to be portable. So this was this was actually a thesis project for my master of science in Sweden. So this was my presentation because the idea was you can kind of play. This is it. Like everything is embodied. Everything I'm ready to go. I plug into speakers. I plug into power. I have my controller. Maybe I can plug in a guitar or whatever. But that's it. That's all I need to play because I'm wearing the computer. All right, so that visually became this a phase that I call cable madness. So this is influenced by a couple of other artists who you may or may not know. So there's Mika Weissfitz, who is famous for basically building the first real time gestural controllers called the hands. This is like early. No, this is mid 80s or so when MIDI was first being standardized. You should check him out if you're into that kind of stuff. This is the aphasia project, which is basically like a cyborg controlling video clips in multimedia and he has a tongue controller. And yeah, it's very weird, but it's it's very cool. But basically seeing something like that told me like, OK, we can we can hook all these computer systems together and we can make something interesting in multimedia and artistic. This is a Tao Tanaka. He works with the the biosense controller, which is basically working from muscular controls, muscular sensors. They also did the sensor web. This is called sensor band. So the Tao Tanaka and two others from Steinman, Amsterdam. This is a mid 90s or so. So basically this is a giant construction with ropes. And when you pull on the rope, there is a potentiometer inside so that you can use it as like a slider, right? So I can as I climb to the next thing, it goes like so as they're playing basically they're playing it by climbing up and down it. Yeah, I don't know why nobody does this now, right? It's like, that's pretty cool. Why do we why do we keep doing that? We should have we should have like people climbing up and down outside there, right? Maybe next year. Let me know. I'd love to do it. I can get my bosses to let me work on it. There's Stellark, too, which I could talk about. Select forever. He is the original crazy cyborg man. If you don't know about him, just check him out. S-T-E-L-A-R-C. Even he he laughs. He sounds like a mad scientist. You should check him out. All right. Anyway, all of that, all that input and sort of artistic input and sort of tinkering around with a lot of Linux, building my own Linux kernels and train to run them on these really old wearable computers. I ended up with this basic running system here and this character. So this is essentially the original Robot Cowboy. So it was, this is sort of a Robot Cowboy's first time about town. This is actually an earlier version. This is the Cybernaut MA4, which is actually a Pentium 1. So it was like 166 megahertz. It was too slow to really do much other than I had some fun camera going to console frame but for ASCII art kind of thing. But, so that was the original idea. So that was the working system. And then it's like, all right, now with this idea I will actually build all the stuff into it. So again, we have all the inputs. We have the power cord. It's very important to me that I have this power tail because it anchors me to electricity, to power, to being part of the cyborg. MIDI guitar, other different ideas going together. All right, here's sort of the original assemblage of things, right? Gum drum pads, webcam glove, blah, blah, blah. Based on all sorts of stuff. And anything that was standing around you could connect serial devices to it or MIDI devices or dance mats. And how many of y'all recognize what this is? A couple of y'all. All right, this is pure data. If it looks ugly to you, then you're probably using Macs. That's fine, whatever, same idea. So this is essentially an object-oriented graphical programming environment for audio, also now for multimedia. So these are basically all little DSP or control objects. So if I like, I can't zoom on on here. But for instance, this is a sequence player. It holds like six notes. And then when the note comes out, it triggers this thing which triggers, goes through your filter, and then makes all of this and blah, blah, blah. So all of my songs are written in this environment. It's open source. I contribute to it online. And it's very fast and slim and runs on all sorts of things, on old computers on, I'll talk about it later, on phones. So it's sort of a lingua franca of running sort of like DSP. So I basically like songs like generation of tunes, processing of inputs, generating outputs, et cetera. And that's what all of my songs are written in. So I'm essentially composing my programming, but through, in my mind, it's sort of like, oops, sorry. It's sort of like you have guitar pedals and then you're hooking inputs and outputs, or like modular synths, but this is all digital. So it's a lot cheaper and easier to carry. So it's sort of like a general stage layout. So I can have a projection. I have a wireless router. I call it a stage router so that I can actually communicate between maybe multiple computers that are running the visuals and then myself. And then I'll really only need stereo out and power. All right. And so this is, oh yeah. The helmet actually became our actual visual element. So it wasn't just the thing that I walked around with. I actually had a visual program running on it. This was again on the Pentium III 500 megahertz. So this was actually running very early. It was basically running SDL to the console frame buffer. So I could really only do blocks, a bit color, no alpha blending. If I did alpha blending, it would kill it. But if I did solid colors, that was actually pretty fast. So the idea with the helmet is that I would have live output of my control of what's going on connected with the generation of the sound. I also had a welder's mask that had about 160 LED panel all the way around that was custom made. That was controlled over a serial port using like the original Arduino Mini or whatever. I didn't do too much with that, but it was pretty cool because they were high brightness LEDs so I could really get a good pattern going. Yeah, there it is in test mode. And so when all this was together and in 2006, no, 2008, sorry, I moved back to the US and I did a tour where their friend was two months, about 48 dates around the US, did almost a big circuit except for we got sick here so he missed the South Dakota stuff. But that was very important for me because I didn't wanna do this whole thing of like, I go to school, graduate school and I make a cool project and then I write a paper and then nothing happens, right? I wanted to make a project that it was like, all right, now I'm gonna take it into the real world, I'm gonna beat the shit out of it and see if it actually works. Because part of the idea is I wanted to build a system that could actually take road punishment. So I brought a sider and iron with me and I had to do some hot gluing and soldering, mainly because the USB ports would kinda get pulled a little bit and I had to, you know, the pads would lift off and I'd have to re-solder them and re-glue them. It's fun to do that on stage an hour before you're playing, but you know, experience, right? Okay, so you're probably like, stop talking and show me something, right? So, since I can't do the other demo. So here's an early, here's some early stuff. This is from 2006 in Montreal. There's the MIDI guitar. Oh, this is a part too. Not with the keyboard on your wrist. All right, this is the test. So there, this was sort of a long running incarnation. There's a couple of music videos. Let's see, where was I? I have to go back here. And as compared to my earlier patch, this was maybe a four years later. This is how my pure data patches started to look. Become a lot easier. So internally, I basically have my own mixer. I have this whole sort of like general control program that runs a playlist. So each song is its own patch more or less. That just gets inputs and outputs. The inputs are basically like, hey, start the song and the song is running this fast and the song is here. And here's audio in and here's audio out. And through routing from that, I can then sort of have like a pretty good mix and send the stereo out. And if you've ever done any sound work and someone is like, I've got 10 channels and we need to pre-mix them before the show, you're like, I hate you. And then I can always just say, all right, here's my two stereo channels and it sounds good, just turn it up. So that's one of the useful things. So robot cowboy could be a rogue character going out and about. Later on, I started to add, so what you saw earlier was more of the sort of the experimental stuff. So that was controlled with a lot of basically hacked game controllers. And I started to add more of the rock and roll aspect so it's sort of trying to find ways to bring the guitar back in. But still, this is actually, I have a MIDI guitar converter here so that I can actually grab the note data and send it in digitally. And this is me performing at the robot film fest, the second annual robot film festival in New York. And I also performed on a building in Linz. This is the Ars Electronica Center. It was about six months old at the time. And let's go here. I can find that video. No, let's find it here. Let's go here. Nope, it's a wrong keyboard. It's worth it. It's fun. Here, no, no, that's not it. That's a different project. Here it is. So this is the, yeah, 2009. So this is essentially, I took the system and again, it's modular so actually that's a later slide but essentially you have the main audio program which is also running most of the mapping and the logic and then you have an input program that's feeding all of the game controllers coming in and then I have a video program but all of it is connected through OSC. Open Sound Control is essentially a protocol on top of networking, sort of raw networking sockets. A lot of music and sort of creative coding environments use it so it makes it pretty easy to communicate back and forth. So all I had to do was build an interface to the facade that could just basically take my control data and then draw on top of it. So I was able to run essentially the same visuals but on the side of the building, on four sides. The simple rectangular, the block-based visuals work really well on essentially what is only blocks. I grew up in the Atari 2600 so I really like the format of the pixels on this one. Yeah, next time I get video from across the river so you could see the whole thing but yeah, that was a lot of fun, I was glad I was able to do that. Okay, so sort of a lot of different work in that area but in some ways, musically you kind of get, or at least artistically you kind of get stuck into a hole so I was playing some, no, don't do automatic. You start to play some, a few music festivals with this setup and a lot of people want the helmet and only the helmet because I mean, yeah, of course it is an interesting visual element and it's cool but it was always four kilos on my head at least and I had, essentially I had, I could see I had a small mono camera, a little video camera and I had video goggles, basically this video inside but it's mono so I have no depth perception and it was essentially like you're seeing the world through like a 13 inch TV about half a meter in front of your face, right? So like to walk around, to see the table, it was very fun because I would say I would see the table and then I would have to remember what it was because I couldn't see it anymore. You learn to be good to move around without anything to feel where things are. Like I would be honest if I would fall on my ass or something. I did run into some troubles with that like accidentally pushing drunk girls whose drunk boyfriends were around because I couldn't see and they didn't quite understand that but whatever, that's in Texas in the US so who knows what happens. So a lot of interesting things happened for that and another aspect of it is again like I'm running this computer that was never designed and I was running a custom Linux kernel on it and I was running this real-time audio process and I was running a lot of very, I was using nice a lot so that a lot of the stuff was not nice and it was running very hot. So I mean after about three or four years of that the computer was essentially saying all right, I'm kind of done with this. So all right, decided to switch gears, decided to return to my interest in space because I was also wanting to look into maybe a new kind of theme but keep working with this project. The idea of this project again is that okay, if I have a system that I wear I can explore kind of anything with it like different ideas, different whatever. It doesn't always have to be the thing with the head. So this was an exploration into going to Mars and really it sort of built on this idea that like we could have been at Mars like 23 years ago or even 30 years ago if we really wanted but we kind of maybe got sidetracked with stuff that was probably easier and did help the world but kind of doesn't make us go to cool places on the other side, off the earth. So and also it was fun to think about this idea like where will we be? Like what is the next stage of evolution? I suppose one thing is the singularity. I kind of feel like maybe the other thing is that if we go to other planets then we'll start to become different humans, different species as we grow up on other planets and like what does that mean? Right, that's kind of interesting. So part of this was also, hey we should, I wanted to get some experience out of this. I wanted to like feel what it was like. So I found this place. It's run by the Mars Society. It's based in the U.S. but it's an international organization. It's basically a non-profit that pushes the space agencies to hey, why don't we go to Mars? Hey, why don't we go to Mars? Hey, why don't we go to Mars? So it runs all these different things. It's outreach programs, sends people to Washington every year in January to poke our crappy government to maybe spend more money on NASA instead of blowing other parts of the world up. And yeah, that's a whole story there. So I basically decided to go to this environment they have in the Utah High Desert called the Mars Desert Research Station, the MDRS. They run several of these. They also run one in Canada called, I forget what it's called, F Mars I think. And there's one that they ran also in Hawaii in the volcanic area. So you're basically out in the desert in a very like Mars-like environment and you're living there. You're running in crew rotations of every two weeks and you're basically running with engineers and scientists and people working in aerospace. Everyone has a role. You have a crew commander, you have a crew engineer. You have, yeah, I mean, they hate it if you call it space camp, but it is basically like really cool, like adult space camp. Like we have a green hab, we have to count our water, we have to like conserve energy. We have to wear space suits. We live all together in the habitat. We cooked everything without water, well with water, but everything was dehydrated and we had to sort of come up with different ways to make interesting things with 10 ingredients. And then we had to explore. So we basically, we spent our two weeks as a crew that was exploring Mars for the first time, sort of like mapping this feeling of like you go over a hill and then you're like, oh, I'm the first person that's ever looked there ever for the first time. That's pretty amazing, this feeling actually. And it was very easy because we were the first ones in that season, so it had taken about, it was about six months after the last crew rotation. So there was plenty of time for the wind to smooth all the foot tracks down and for the rover tracks to go away. So it kind of felt like you were really the only people there. And when you look out that window, except for the clouds and the sky color, right, it could be Mars. So I did a number of projects in this sort of research area for my robot cowboy project. So this was essentially a collected different colored soil samples to create a color palette for Mars and with GPS coordinates. I mean, we're also tracking roads. We were tracking our paths. We were sort of designing a road network as well. That's the road network from the mapping that I did. Yeah, here you can see where the habitat landed. And yeah, it's very beautiful. It was very surreal, two weeks and felt very disappointing to return to civilization, actually, because it's very much this ideal. If any of you all have read Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robertson, it very much felt like the beginning of that book. It's like, hey, we're all smart people and we're the only ones here and this is our playground and we can do really fun stuff and nobody else is here to muck it up with stupidity and money and all of that. So that part was great. So from that experience, I made an artist book. This was basically, part of my role was that it was a journalist, so I was basically writing a report as if we were on Mars, taking pictures and all of that, as well as the other duties. And I took notes and I basically put that into an artist's book. And this project has actually been picked up by other places. So some of a lot of my pictures, I put them on Flickr and they're being used in, so this is an architecture magazine and this is a sort of an art magazine in Brooklyn, sort of picked it up. That's cool. So from that aesthetic, it was like, sorry, how do I translate to that, to the stage, to the new project? So I'm from Huntsville, Alabama, which is a NASA town. My father worked in aerospace. I knew a lot of people who worked for NASA, older people. So we basically, that's where SpaceGank is. I went to space camp in school. We basically saved money for a year and we all went as a class because it's in town. We didn't have to fly anywhere. So I was lucky to do that. So a friend gave me this. This was from a thrift store. If you work at space camp, you have to wear that so then you can give them back to the secondhand store so I got lucky on that too. So the new project was called Robot Cowboy Onward to Mars and it's a story about the first person going to Mars on a one-way trip. So we built a new suit. So basically the wearable became a space suit, which is essentially its own kind of wearable. So the original Apollo-style portable life support system becomes the portable audio support system. The PLSS becomes the P-A-S-S. And the wearable, this is where the wearable is built in. So here you have an embedded Udo board. This was a four core Udo board, I think one gigahertz or so. So USB hub actually had a battery. Again, the sound card, a bunch of power conversion and USB in and outs. And also from my experience at the MDRS, this backpack was functioning in the same way that the MDRSs were, that it has a fan, because it blows air into the helmet. That way you keep the helmet from fogging up. And also yourself from suffocating. So yeah, here's a better picture. So yeah, Linux inside on this one. So using the same setup that I had, just running on a much better computer. And this was actually supported through a grant in a small black box theater and was living in Pittsburgh at the time where I was studying fine art. So this was supported with a grant funded show that I basically got some money and I got a space to work on it. So that was fortunate. This was sort of the urine collection kit. It was very important to me that some of the things that I learned, like being an astronaut is actually kind of boring. And in many ways you have to do a lot of checklists. Like we had to spend a lot of time communicating with Mission Control, saying, hey, we used 140 liters today. This is how much energy we use today. This is the stocks because they need to know, they need to know the status of how much of everything do you have and what happened? Because if something happens to you, you have like, you know what, eight billion people here on Earth who can potentially help you figure it out. And if you're on Mars with five people, it's nice to know that eight billion people can help you figure something out, but they gotta know what's going on. So you gotta constantly do all these checklists. And it's really boring. And you have other things like that. If you're going on a long EVA, you have to wear a urine collection kit. Those kind of fun things, which we did have those, although we didn't go. We didn't really want to try them. So they look kind of old. So this is a whole project built around that idea. Onward to Mars. So actually built a whole color scheme, a mission patch. You have to have your own mission patch to go with the whole setup with my EVA patch as well. So again, this element of thinking about going to another planet, maybe we become a new species. This is sort of the layout. So again, similar layout. We have a visual program. Now you can see this is a bit more of an advanced visual program. I have more than blocks that are only eight bit color. I can use images, that kind of stuff. Before we actually did the show, nobody was led in the theater. And we did a press conference. So I was interviewed before I went to Mars. And then when that interview was over, we could also take questions from the audience. And when the interview was over, people went in and then I actually began my journey from the other side of the stage. And yeah, this was a very fun experience. I basically pitched it as Lori Anderson, Devo and Carl Sagan. No, Lori Anderson and Carl Sagan meet Devo on the red planet. This was the rocket ship. These are mylar, sort of space age mylar inflatables made by my wife, Annika Herot. She also helped me build the space suit. And I had several musical sonic instruments. So part of the project was also that I was, the first person on Mars and I had to discover the music of Mars, the frequencies of Mars to be able for humans to live there. So I had different instruments, sort of like musical instruments to figure out what's going on. This was a soil penetration tester. And then of course the space guitar. And yeah. So that was some time ago and I've had to figure out things like make a living, trying to be an artist and working on software when you can, when you can't. And now I have a small child. So it's been a long project but I've not been able to do as much time on it as I want. But now that I have this job currently at the ZKM, they basically support some of my activities. So I have a new project. It's called RoboCabby Elements. And I have a new setup. So this is an overview of the setup. This is sort of a long time coming. If any of you all have started open source software projects they kind of take over your life and you kind of forget to do other things for a while. That's what I've been through. So this is basically the setup that I have now. The wearable computer is essentially an iPhone. I know for those of you that hate Apple, I'm sorry. We can argue about it later. But at the time I chose iOS. So essentially what it is I'm running the whole, most of the system is running in a custom made app which is open source and free if you want to try it, if you have iOS. That runs peer data. For any of you all that use peer data and have used libpd I'm pretty involved with that project and this is the reason why. Essentially I wanted the option to run my system on what it was essentially a pretty relatively cheap and high performance mass, easy to find device. You have a touchscreen, you have a lot of sensors, you have, core audio is very fast. I can get two to six millisecond latency with my system now when I never could before. So essentially everything is running on a phone and we have again this core patch talking to the individual song patches and then we have, this can be external or this is also internal using, I can actually still use game control as I use the ones that are compatible with iOS. They just work in my system, which is nice. And then I still communicate to a laptop. This is another open source project. I contribute to open frameworks. If it's a C++ creative coding toolkit, if any of you all used it, I built an application that uses it that actually has Lua bindings for it so that I can actually create my visuals in the Lua scripting language, which is a lot faster. Instead of having to basically write a thing, recompile it or whatever, I can just write a script, reload it, whatever. So it's very fast. So patching is essentially live patching is I create some boxes, I just connect them, I get sound. Now I can just write a script real quick, connect it to my system and then run it. And some of the elements of this are kind of getting back to my roots. So my father, again, was aerospace engineer and he worked on a lot of ballistic missile defense. So very large scale stuff on the US, obviously with the Cold War. So I'm looking into this kind of stuff. I messed out on this. My family, before I existed, like four years before I existed, they got to live in the South Seas and seize things like this. This is the Quadriland Atoll where we tested, we would launch ballistic missile test targets from California down into the South Pacific and my family was living there where my father was working. And then of course a lot of the space based stuff. So different elements. So getting back to things. And this right now is my current new system. This is the entire thing. So essentially it's pretty similar to the old one. It's just now everything is running on an iPhone because now as of iOS 8, you could basically run MIDI and core audio on the phone and it's fast. And my phone isn't even the newest one, it's the 5S and it runs everything really fast. It's pretty amazing. I don't really have time for a demo and not all my stuff is working. But I will be around. I'll be playing. If you're interested in finding out what I do, you can check me out at robotcowboy.com And yeah. If you wanna see a little of this project. No, I don't have the video there. No. No. Okay. I'll show you, okay. Since I have some, actually I have a little bit of time. Let me show you some other dumb projects with a similar idea. So here is. This is a different exploration before I got into the music performance. So this is the explorations of what you can do with this character that has a screen for a head. 195. Incompatibility. Does anyone know what that means? Can you please back up on the back of my hand? Yeah. Easy to sing the words when all you can see are the words. So I had the video, the video display on the inside. I couldn't see out, but I could just see the words. So with this particular show, this was the beginning. With this particular show, the audience would pick up the karaoke part. But they had to follow me. I would basically sort of run around and they would have to follow me to actually be able to see the words. So when I talk about different ways of exploring wearable computing, that's one part of it. And the last part is, I mentioned real quick. So again, this is a long running project. So this is the PD party. For those of you that have used Pure Data or Max before and you want to essentially run your Pure Data patches on your mobile device, Android as well, you totally can. You're not stuck with just having a control. You can run all the DSP on the device. This is one option is called PD party. The idea is that you create patches with the little GUIs and then it just runs them directly on the phone. You can download it, try it out. I've got a lot of information on how it works. And yeah, and if you run Android, there's another one called PD droid party, which is essentially the same idea that my project's influenced from that. And there's another one that was also for iOS and Android, which is called mobmooplat, mobile music platform. It's kind of a dumb name, but whatever. Mobmooplat, am I good on time? Yeah, okay. So any questions or? So one thing is I do have, for those of you that are like, what is this Pure Data thing that looks kind of weird? I would like to know more about it. Or how do I make weird sounds on a computer? Then I'm doing a workshop tomorrow. It's at 5.30, 5.30 to 8.30. Just bring a laptop. You can run Pure Data, especially as an intro to Pure Data, it's called Micro Orchestra. And you can run Pure Data on Windows, Mac, and Linux. So just bring a laptop, bring some weird sounding stuff and I'll get you making some weird noises. So. Thank you very much, Dan. Thank you. You were excellent on time. We still have seven to eight minutes left for questions. So I have a microphone with me. So if I have a question, please raise your hand. I will bring you the microphone and you can ask Dan anything you want to know about robot car boys and making strange sounds and stuff. So please, any questions? Come on. It's not that late. Ah, yeah. Just a sec. Do you plan another tour with your new setup? Yeah, definitely. I need to make some new. Well, I have, I'm actually, it may be playing at an art space next week. And then I have a, I'm performing in the US in Virginia in the beginning of June at the new musical, new interfaces for musical expression conference, the nine conference. So that's sort of like a bidding into that. And then through the summer, I want to put some more songs out. And I've been playing around this idea for a while, which is I want to do like a song a week. Maybe that's way too hard. Maybe a song a month would be better. But definitely that's been on the board for too long because for those of you that makes software, it's software's never finished, right? And so it's like, this project has been, the beginning was like, let's make a lot of cool stuff. And then it was like, all right, let's make it better. And then it was like, okay, we're making it way too, too good. I'm making writing software all the time and I'm not actually making music with it. And now I'm at the point where like, all right, fuck software, I'm done with this. My stuff works. Now I want to make a lot of stuff again. So yeah, the next six months, I think is going to only be making music finally. You know, there's us Electronica in September again. Oh yeah. Just saying. Yeah, yeah. I should bug them. Yeah. Any further questions? The one with the tool was excellent. The two dates are probably on RobotCo. Yeah, I have a basic, this website is kind of a mess because I'm in this transition of fixing it. But yeah, I have. They all are. Yeah. You're not alone. Yeah. RobotCo, boy. No, that's a Z. Sorry. I'm lazy. I have the English keyboard in my office. Yeah, so I have some show dates there. Awesome. Yeah. Just a second. So with all these delicate electronics hanging around your body, what was the worst thing that ever happened during a performance? Oh, the worst would be, again, this is a software engineering thing. So you have a working system, but you just want to add one more thing, right? The night before a show, a show that you're headlining in a cool place and it runs fine. And then at the end of the first song, that crashes the computer. And then you're like, okay, that's fine. This happens before, because the computer is very unstable, whatever. That's part of it, right? I deal with it. And that was always part of the show. If it would only happen once or twice, right? Because you as the audience would be like, oh, that's cool, because basically with the head, I would fall over dead and then I would reboot myself. And then you would see the Linux kernel booting, right? And people were like, oh, that looks nerdy and cool. Duh-duh-duh. Linux people were like, oh, I can see what system, you know, what is running there? Or Debbie, and I don't know how to pronounce it, whatever. And that was great. And that was always, again, part of the show. But there was one point where that particular thing happened and I got a bit too away from my testing practices. And I was headlining this event. So there was a lot of people were there. It was a Saturday night in this small music festival, but a really nicely run one. And my stuff crashed. And then I go, okay, I reboot it, and it crashed again. And okay, I reboot it, and it crashed, and it crashed, and it crashed the same thing over and over again. And then it just, it just, it just, it just crashes, everybody just left. That's the worst feeling, right? Everybody just slowly leaves, like disappointed and blah, blah, blah. Then you get yelled at and duh-duh-duh for being unprofessional. Yeah, that was the worst part. A better example would be a situation where let's say I have this laptop in a chair down in front. I'm wearing the whole setup with the helmet on. I can see. It was actually really fun in small spaces that you could see. That I could walk up and I would touch people on the nose because people didn't think that you could see. Most people couldn't see the, the camera was in this little black hole and you couldn't really see it easily unless you were looking for it. So I would just walk up and I would touch people or I would shake their hand or whatever, and I would kind of weird people out. But I could still do some things, but it was kind of difficult. And so what it was, was the visual program crashed at the beginning of a show. And this was in Amsterdam and the Dutch are really into fun, weird stuff. So I always like to go to the Netherlands. And so they were very, they helped me out. But basically what it is, I had the helmet on and I went over to use the computer, but the resolution is very, I mean it's like 320 at most and I'm trying to look at a monitor and I just needed to click on something. And basically what it is at some point, someone was like up, up, right, right. And so I could see the mouse and they were telling me where to go. And I could click and then I would type and then like H, blah, blah, blah. They figured out what I was doing and then I hit it and then it restarted and everyone was like yay. And then we did the show again. And there's plenty of other times where I would pull out a thing accidentally and someone would have come behind me and plug it in. I could kind of point where it was because I couldn't really, you have to have to feel around for it. And with the original setup, that was always a part of it where it was, it was partial. I'm wearing all the stuff and I'm also trying to engage the audience and break what's called the fourth wall, which is literally this thing, right. So I would usually never play in a stage because I have this long cable so I can go down into the middle of y'all. Y'all can surround me or whatever. We can do this thing together. And if something breaks, then everyone, one of y'all can come and hook me up again. And that was always the fun part of it. Or if I would die, I would sometimes wait, maybe someone would come and like come down close to me and then that would cause me to reboot myself. So like as a theatrical element, that worked really great. But again, only if it happens once or twice. More than that? No, people are done with it, so. So you would be fine if someone comes up afterwards and take a look at your stuff. Yeah, I mean, there's not too much to see with this but you can see the basic layout. Everything is so much more compact. And again, the old wearable was dead and it's in my mom's basement right now. 3,000 miles away, so. Next time for that. Any further questions? Otherwise I would say please, another big round for Dan Velcox. Thank you very much. Yeah, thanks for coming out.