Embedded - 365: Barbed Wire Fence and Great WiFi

Episode Date: March 12, 2021

Cy Keener spoke with us about sensors, Arduinos, ice, and the crossover between art and science. You can see some of his field work and gallery installations at his site: cykeener.com and on his vimeo channel. Cy is an art professor at the University of Maryland (bio, youtube) Cy’s advisor at Stanford was Paul DeMarinis (pauldemarinis.org, Stanford page). Arduiniana: a blog of useful Arduino libraries We also talked about some custom sensors by Lovro Valcic of Bruncin (bruncin.com).

Welcome to Embedded. I'm Elysia White, alongside Christopher White. I don't know, should we talk about art or science this week? Maybe both. Sy Keener is our guest, so I think it will be both. Hey, Sy, how you doing? Hey, Chris, I'm doing good, and thanks for having me. Could you tell us about yourself, as if we met, hmm, as if we met at a science conference?

Well, I always feel a little awkward at science conferences. Like I don't quite belong, but I am a, um, I am a assistant professor of sculpture and emerging technology at the university of Maryland. Um, and then my niche within art is to make my own custom sensors, put them in the outside world, and then make sculptures that respond to the data, hopefully close to real time. So that is maybe why I actually do end up at science conferences. You've heard the show, so you're familiar with what Lightning Round is. Yes. Okay, are you ready?

I think so. Complete one project or start a dozen? Start two dozen, unfortunately. I wish I was different, but yeah, it's way more fun to start something new and exciting. If you could take a college course, any one, what would you want to take oh gosh this is this is going to be embarrassing but i keep trying to audit um introductory courses in c at our computer science department so i guess i would take i would take some intro cs stuff uh what's your favorite artwork a specific artwork that's kind of tough yeah that's a

horrible question i'm gonna i guess i'm gonna i'm gonna throw a slight curveball but there's a i live in the washington dc area and there is a place called the phillips collection and then they have a room of rothko's so i am not a painter. I have nothing to do with painting, but I sometimes like to go and sit there. So I guess I like artworks that enable that kind of moment of peace and contemplation. So there's a room of Mark Rothko paintings that maybe I would go to. Would you rather blow glass or solder together parts oh goodness i have no qualifications for

blowing glass i am i am the the bad lackey assistant in the in the glass blowing world so um so that is stressful to me i have a lot of um admiration for what happens there but um soldering at my desk sounds way more relaxing if you could sculpt anything out of ice what would it be oh i don't know that ice needs sculpting i think that ice is is really beautiful if it forms uh with moving water then it has no bubbles in it and then kind of depending on the the mineral content then it has it obviously takes on different colors so i think i think i would pick the um maybe just being like a collector of ice as opposed to like a a sculptor of ice. Do you have a favorite voltage?

So my answer is going to be a range, and that is 2.8 to 5, which is because I spent six months of my life in 2018 trying to get a Arduino-based circuit to work with that range, because that is kind of what is required to have things work in the arctic if you're not regulating power so you kind of have to because of the cold and the batteries um the voltage varies pretty drastically so so that's kind of that's kind of my range finally what about your favorite artist um i think the the person who influenced me uh i do not know this person personally but um trevor peglin uh is a person that has influenced me because of his research um kind of his his ability to do research as an artist. So he has an MFA, but he also got his PhD in geography at Berkeley. And then he wrote a book on decoding the top secret patches

that the different armed forces put out when they have a kind of top secret development project. So satellites or nukes or kind of different technology things. So he wrote a whole book about that. He also, during the kind of peak of the war on terror, Iraq and Afghanistan, and he was using astronomical telescopes and photography to, to record CIA rendition flights from private public lands.

So I think that anyone who can use art in that way is, is pretty amazing. You mentioned the Arctic. It's always a good opener. Did I? You did. How does that relate to art? is that I started learning Arduino kind of mid-life, I guess, in 2015. And I like the idea of progressively difficult challenges. And then in 2018,

so I'd kind of been making these ocean drifters for a little while. And then in 2018, I met this amazing individual, John Woods, who's at the time he was at NOAA and now he's at the office of naval research. And, um, he, he and I hit it off and he has enabled a bunch of artists to go to the Arctic and in different ways. And he's a kind of a project manager for putting all of the instruments out in the Arctic. So I guess that it was sort of through connections with him. And then now I'm just kind of on the team. So I guess I have some National Science Foundation funding to just keep making things in the Arctic and putting them out there.

One of the projects you have done is called Digital Ice Core. Does that have any Arduinos in it? Of course. Yeah, so that one, it was a really fun project to work on. And so there's kind of a core circuit, I guess, or board that I've been working on, um, different versions of since 2015. And it has a, uh, an Arduino, a bunch of power management, um, circuitry on it. I guess when I say Arduino, then now at this point, I'm talking about nothing that has the Arduino logo, but, um, with the ATmega328 and 644 and 1284, and then using those as the kind of main processor. And then the board that's in that project also has the BMP280, this like Bosch pressure sensor,

and it has a GPS on board, an Adafruit GPS, this thing that Adafruit sells um and then it has an external temperature sensor so that was kind of my part was basically to i'd been doing a bunch of before that that iteration of the board i'd been doing a bunch of work to do power management so just kind of getting a low sleep mode with the ATmega and then turning everything on and off when I wasn't using it. And then the kind of big hurdle for that iteration was then that working the voltage range. Obviously, there's a bunch of different ways to do things. And I have a kind of different version of the board that has RTC and then regulated power. But for that one,

that was kind of a challenge. And then I worked with this amazing guy named Lavrov Vultic, who has a sensor company out of Croatia that just his shop and his life is making sensors for the Arctic. So he built these really amazing, um, temperature chains and light chain. So in, um, oceanography or, uh,

one of the tools that scientists use is to, they kind of use temperature as a proxy for different things, um, to kind of track parcels of water or to, um, to measure different, different different things it's not it's like they're using temperature but a lot of times it's a proxy for something else so um this particular set of instruments is it had a 3.2 meter um circuit like basically a flexible

pcb that had uh 160 thermistors on one side and then it had a separate circuit flex PCB on the other side that had 64 RGB sensors. And then we drilled a hole in the ice and put that through the ice. And that's a lot of technical stuff, but basically it just means that you can tell what's air or snow and what's solid ice and what's ocean. So I know one of the ways of studying climate evolution and all kinds of things is to take ice cores. This seems like a virtual ice core where you stay in the ice and measure changes over time. Do I have that sort of right?

That's a great question. So ice cores, different kinds of ice out there. So ice cores are probably most commonly associated with glaciers. So that's where you would get, you can have ice that's like 10,000 years old or this idea that you can kind of get this as you're drilling down or taking cores and you're kind of drilling through these different time epics. And then most of the stuff that I do in the Arctic has to do with sea ice. So sea ice is this whole different kind of animal that it basically forms on the surface of the ocean in the Arctic in the same way that ice would form on a lake or a pond kind of nearby your house or something. And, um, and so it forms out of the saltwater and then in a season it can grow to be about a meter thick.

And then it used to be in the Arctic that a pretty large amount of the Arctic was covered by sea ice that would stick around through the summer. And so it could get to be a couple meters thick. So this is kind of like a live or kind of like digital core of the sea ice, but it's basically it's floating on the ocean. So you kind of, you're sampling down through, through that whole layer. Okay. And the, you can, the temperature would be interesting because once you're below the ice part, the water is actually colder because it it out for a season or something, then you get this really beautiful thing where the part of the chain that's up in the air is getting warmer and colder.

So you kind of have like a warm day, cold night or something. And then the winter, you're going to get cold, cold, cold. And then the ice. And then below that, I guess it's easier to talk about the ocean. Below that, the ocean is basically always the same. The ocean is kind of the same, but drastically colder than the... Let's see, would that be right?

I feel like the ice would be colder than the ocean. Yeah, so the ocean is going to be warmer. So that is, it's kind of a strange thing. But you basically have the air cooling the surface of the ocean, and then that's what's forming the ice. So it's actually kind of the, it's the air that's in the winter season. And then you get this one surface of the ocean and then that's what's forming the ice so it's actually kind of the it's the air that's in the winter season and then you get this one part of the year in the springtime when the instrument readings all just kind of go to like there's no

they're not really worth anything because everything just starts to melt and you get water running down the thermistor strings and all this kind of stuff and they don't it's not that useful but um but there's certain times of year when you can very clearly see the difference between the bottom of the ice and the warm ocean, and then you can kind of, depending on the day, you can see the difference between the top of the ice and then the kind of warmer or cooler air. Does that make sense?

It does. It sounds lovely. But it seems like it would be very hard to see in the Arctic. I mean, do I just go up to any piece of sea ice and hope that's the one? Well, yeah. So the scientific use of these instruments is to track the thickness of the sea ice. So that's kind of what they're after. And then I like that you asked about seeing because my whole job is to make these kind of hidden things visible. So that digital ice core has two parts to it. It has the part that I deployed out there in the Arctic and then the Iridium satellite transmitter.

So there's Arduino collecting all the data, putting that out through the Iridium transmitter and then getting that back to my email or to the servers. And then I created a RGB or kind of a RGB LED light sculpture that then kind of reads back those values at the same scale. So that's kind of what I'm interested in, is if you were to walk up to that sculpture while the sensors were in ice, then you'd be looking at the color from the ice and the thickness of the ice from that day or from like six hours before. So yeah, so I think the colors to me are kind of beautiful

where the ocean is this kind of deeper green and then ice has some blue in it. And then all of the sensors that are out in the air just have the 255 values. They just come back white. So that's kind of the goal to me is to take this thing that's been created for science. But temperatures are kind of interesting um but they're you have to colorize them or make them visible somehow and so the that one had the kind of back-to-back strings or chains and so it had the temperature on one side and the rgb on the other and what i loved about the rgb is i could just put that straight through um so i did i did fuss with the

the projected um color a little bit in the ocean, and then I gave it a little bit of glimmer because I was trying to distinguish between the ocean and the bottom of the ice. But I didn't actually change the color of the ice. It's just sort of those straight RGB values. The cool thing about this, and I think I want to make sure that people visualize it properly or go to your website and see it, But it's not like a tabletop thing. This is like in the shape of an actual drilled ice core.

It's three meters tall, four meters tall. Column of light. Yeah, it's very cool and extremely big. I think that's kind of my job is to take the data from these far off places and put it into a form that people can understand and hopefully put it in the form that is interesting or makes meters, so that sculpture is 3.2 meters tall. And I really like working at this one-to-one scale where when you see one of my pieces, then I'm usually trying to recreate something that's been sampled in the field at that same scale. So instead of making a graph or like data viz or something that I'm trying to, to come up with a way for you to experience it, um, to some degree as, as you might encounter it. But the, the sea ice is kind of neat

because you can't, when you're standing out there, like we, we drove out with snowmobiles and then drilled this hole in the ice, but when you're standing out there, it's quiet and you're standing on six feet of ice so that you have no, there's no motion or anything like you, it's kind of a mental trick to remind yourself that you're actually standing on ice. So it's, it's a really, really strange and interesting environment. Walking on water. Yeah. Below the ice.

Yeah. Not just water, but the ocean. You also had a project that was a rain recorder that used a special paper could you tell us about that yeah that's a it's a fun one to talk about because it's the it's one of those it's very visual so perfect for a podcast right right but it's it's one of those awkward kind of teenage projects where you're in transition from one thing to another. But I showed up at the Stanford set to really use Arduino or to do sensors or to do any of that stuff yet. But I wanted to see what a rainstorm or just like not even a storm, but just like a second of rain looked like as it was coming down. So if you were to be able to just kind of freeze a small chunk of a rainstorm and then be able to just walk around it and kind of look at it. So the method that I figured out how to do that was that there's these papers that are manufactured for agriculture at

this point. So it's a yellow paper that turns blue whenever moisture gets on it. And what they do is they just put these little pieces of paper on, um, on the field, on the crops, and then they spray with whatever, whatever thing that they're spraying. And then, um, I think at this point, there's probably just like a phone app where you can kind of take a picture of that little card and then it'll tell you what your, how much you sprayed. So so like what your drop distribution like how many gallons per foot or acre or whatever it is they're measuring um but it's this really beautiful paper that's just bright bright yellow and then it just turns blue wherever um wherever the rain touches it so my thought was that i could just use a video camera to record the rain hitting that. And then

I kind of treated those pieces of paper like a negative, like a photographic negative. So I scanned them in and then I sat there in CAD, in AutoCAD, and I just, I measured all the drops. And then I would watch the film until I figured out what what um frame the drop landed on and then from that I could just do some simple math and kind of build the rain or sorry the where all of the rain was like when the first drop hit so it was kind of this this little exercise in trying to to model something that you can't really see in real life, or you kind of see it very briefly. And the results were water splattered paper, where the paper was yellow,

and the raindrops were dark blue. Was it that contrast to start with? Or did you play with some of those pictures no those are so there's i guess i'm kind of consistent in the way that i work so a lot of my work has a field side and then kind of a gallery side or like a representation side so those were the the field recordings um and those those colors are natural that's the magic of the chemistry that's not my my sort sort of Photoshopping or anything. That's just the, the Swiss company that makes that, that beautiful paper. But, um, but what I did do is I made a series of three recordings and then I built a, a room, sort of a dark room, um, that had about 1500 fiber optic sort of strands.

And then those strands had a bunch of different sizes to represent the sizes of the raindrops. And then I would score those strands with the location of the raindrop. So I kind of made a sculpture that allowed you to walk into this dark room and just see where the raindrops were before they landed. So the rain recorder is kind of like half of that piece that's like the field side.

Kind of like in DigitalizeCore, how there's the buoy or the kind of electronics enclosure and stuff that goes out in the field. And then there's that 12 foot tall tube of LEDs. So you said that that was before you were familiar with Arduino. Was there a moment or a time when you saw it and said, oh, I don't want to do this data collection stuff. I want to play with hardware. Well, I knew, I knew that's why I was at Stanford because there's a lot of people, a lot of places you can go to get your master's of fine art. And most people did not select engineering schools, but I was down to MIT, Stanford, or UC San Diego. And then I,

so I showed up there with scientific instruments purchased off eBay and a bunch of like dreams about what I was going to do with them. And then my advisor was this really amazing guy, Paul DeMarinis, who's the chair of the department. And he's been a Bay area electronic and sound artist for a long time. He actually worked at Xerox park and he worked at Atari. So he's been around tech for, for a while. And, and I said, well, Paul, I want to buy,

I've got this instrument and I need to buy a data logger. And then he just looked at me and he's like, well, you don't, he's like, nobody buys data loggers anymore. You need a data logger. He's like, just use an Arduino. And then I was like, well, what is an Arduino? And so that's the, um, that's the beginning of it. And then I, I think in our subsequent conversation, I was like, well, what can you do with an Arduino? And he said, well, that's kind of like asking, what can you do with glue? So that's kind of where I got my start. And then Stanford had, I guess I never took a coding class, but I did take an environmental and civil engineering class on sensor networks. So that was kind of as deep as I got into the technical side outside of art.

But basically all of the coding and electronic stuff that I know is learned in an art context and then through just a ton of help from a bunch of different folks. How much are you in it for the art or for the science? Is it mostly about showing the science or is it about doing the science? I think there's a clarification here. I think that it's like, I have a ton of respect for what scientists do. And I don't really think that I do science. I think that I'm kind of on a little bit of a mission in regards to the Arctic with trying to get more sensors out there and the Arctic, I'm now in the position where the Arctic sensors that I place are reporting to, um, the servers that kind of, that scientists use to monitor the Arctic and to do climate change, um, modeling and analysis. But I definitely don't, I think of myself as an artist who's there to use scientific tools in the same way that like a photographer would use a camera or a painter would use a brush.

So I think it's just that those are my chosen tools, but I don't really confuse what I'm doing with science um so I think I think that that's that's kind of a a strange answer but that's that's sort of where where I'm at do you see yourself as communicating science or is it really about art? Yeah, that's a really great question too. And I think that the art has to work when you don't know anything about it. For art to be good, you have to see it or hear it and then want to spend time around it and want to try to understand it better. And then if something more interesting and more complex unfolds in that getting to know the piece, then I think that that's a really beautiful thing and kind of a magic moment. So I think I'm not personally interested in...

Gosh, this kind of sounds bad, but I think I'm not interested in didactic information or displays like for a science museum. But I'm interested in making really beautiful, intriguing objects that then if you get to spend time around or, you know, a little bit of the physics or the oceanography or something like that behind it, then you have a different appreciation of it. So I think that those are, yeah, there's a lot of different things out there. There's sort of science education, there's science communication, and then there's art, and then there's doing science. So sorry to kind of parse all of those things into different bits, but I think that that's the weird territory that I aim for. And I think you can, as an artist, you can kind of aim for something and then people perceive

the work how they perceive the work. So that part's a little bit out of my control, but that's what I'm aiming for. There's also, I mean, yes, those are some of the titles, but there is also an element of the maker movement. I think just by picking up an Arduino, you become a maker. And there's the building parts of it are, are engineering and there's just so many titles roaming around and you are an artist. We've had people on the show who make art, but don't accept the identity. How did, when did you become an artist? I, I don't know that. So I'm a, I'm an assistant professor in an art department so to some degree I have to call myself an artist but I think that it means a lot of different

things and as someone who does I'm part of tech art I guess like I'm part of this branch of art where people focus more on using technology and digital things. And so then that's kind of this weird branch or this sort of like subgroup of art. And in that sense, it's not like tech art is kind of, I don't know. It's not, it's less the kind of like the beautiful people and the fancy, the fancy art. Um, and so, uh, I'm already kind of, kind of on the sidelines to some degree of,

of like contemporary art or of these other kind of things. So I think, um, I think those conversations are important and, and I understand other people's hesitancy or kind of moves them on some level. So I think that that skill set can be a lot of different things and it could be making or using Arduino or that skill set could be coding or that skill set could be, you know, cutting and welding things or, or painting with a canvas. So, um, I think that that's maybe that's why I get the earlier in the show, I brought up, I brought up the, um, Trevor Paglen example. Cause I think over the last 15 or 20 years, art has gotten a lot bigger, um, than, than what people think of as the traditional arts. And I feel like because of

that expansion, then there's room for me to be in there. But the way you do it is so complicated. I mean, you could just have pencils and ink, but no, you have Fusion 360 and CNC Million and Eagle and Excel and programming and Arduinos. Is the complication part of the draw for you? I'm a little hesitant to say that the complication is the draw, but I am only interested in doing things if I'm not sure that I can pull it off. Oh, that was definitely yes, by the way. And so, and I think that sometimes complication is part of that. And then I feel like the other side of it is, is also collaboration. So, um, like I mentioned before, I'm now on basically on this team that of people that, um,

that are responsible for deploying all of the instruments, all of the meteorological and climate instruments in the Arctic ocean. And so that's kind of part of my, my collaborators now. And then I'm super, super lucky because of, of Dave Eldenberg is my uncle. And he has probably put in a thousand hours into taking the kind of bad Arduino code that I hacked together and making it into something

that can run autonomously for a year. So it just so happened that when I was getting Arduino, he retired from being a software engineer at Seagate and storage tech. And he basically had a 30 year career of, of writing software for hardware at a pretty low level. So I kind of,

I'm interested in taking on these big projects that I can't really do on my own. And then I really like the conversations that come out of making things. And then I've been really fortunate to just be able to build my skillset. So I think that the thing that you're asking about is like, why is it so complicated? But I don't, I think to me, any good project should be like a 20 year project or something.

Like when I, when I was in middle school, one of my friend's fathers was this Dutch guy named Trimpen. That's his artist, his art name. And he had moved to Seattle so that he could be near Boeing and Microsoft so that he could figure out how to make his own musical instruments that were played by mechatronic systems so that he could compose for those kind of new instruments so there's nothing there's no synthesizers involved it was like figuring out how to play actual instruments or kind of hacked versions of instruments so i think when i got into this this idea of like

putting sensors out then it was at the in that kind of understanding of a 20-year project. So, I mean, if you put enough time into things, then you figure them out eventually. Do you have any new projects going on? This one that's been in development just since the, I guess in September, which is kind of fun, which is just taking the kind of a version of my Arctic electronics and trying to make it survive being dropped out of an airplane. So one of the crazy things about the Arctic Ocean is that it's about the size of the United States, but it doesn't have, it's pretty inaccessible. And then, so it's hard to get to.

You can fly over it or you can get there by boat or you can kind of snowmobile out when it's frozen. But in order to deploy a bunch of sensors, you kind of need to be able to throw them out the back of a C-130 or have them drop out of a Sonobuoy chute. And that's what my collaborators do. So that my kind of current project has been trying to figure out how to do that cheaply with this idea that we could then take a flight and be able to deploy like 40 or 50 sensors over maybe a 600 mile path or something like that. So, um, that's a way out

of my area of expertise. It's been, it's been super fun to figure out, um, all of those things. And I've had a really amazing undergraduate assistant that helps that's helped with that. And then a good friend who, um, used to work at SpaceX, um, and now works for a Bay area aerospace startup, um, who's also been helpful. So I think that that's another one of those things where I just, I'm not sure I can do it, but it sounds like a really cool thing if I could do it. So I've been putting my time there. If you deploy the sensors as you want, how will you do the other half? What will the installation look like? Yeah, so this kind of comes back to the science part. And I know I spend most of my time saying that I don't really do science, but right now, so I think I mentioned that the Arctic Ocean

is the size of the US. And right now, at any one time, there's only about 150 instruments out there. And I feel like with my tech that there's a chance that maybe I could double that in a couple of years. So, um, I, it became kind of my COVID project and I don't, I don't know what, um, I don't know what the installation is or what it will look like at this, at some point in the future. But I think if we could double the number of sensors out there, then that would be super amazing. You have an NSF grant, a National Science Foundation grant. How does an art professor get an NSF grant?

I do. So there's this kind of interesting thing where the NSF, I might get my timing wrong here, but I think it was maybe a decade ago, but that they, they made this, one of the criteria for deciding who gets the grants, they made this criteria called broader impacts, much greater emphasis. So in kind of theory on paper, then 50% of your evaluation is, is due to your intellectual merit. And then 50% is due to broader impacts. And so, um, I've been, I'm on a couple of NSF grants and then I've applied for a few more.

Um, but sometimes that that's the role that i play so with this group of collaborators that puts buoys out in the arctic i think um initially i am kind of on there in this communication role or this ability to um to share what i do through arts and then also um with that same group i teach some stim classes some high school stim classes through the U.S. Navy where we teach high schoolers how to build an artist. So then the other kind of half of at least my, my part of that grant is to, to push forward these open source and kind of low cost electronic options and to, to see if we can kind of move the needle of the science that way. So, um, so it, it kind of sounds strange to have a, an NSF grant as an artist, but, um, the way that they run the grants has kind of opened the door to that a little bit. You started the show by saying you make custom sensors, but the sensor we've

been talking about isn't yours. What custom sensors do you make? This is good so um custom means means different things i definitely don't i don't make custom sensors um i guess when i speak to a lay audience then then i can get away with saying that i make custom sensors but um but more more often i'm taking sensors that are available um through the kind of larger arduino environment and adafruit and sparkfun and through the kind of larger Arduino environment and Adafruit and SparkFun, and then kind of using those to figure out a piece. So I have an ocean drifter piece that measures wave motion with an IMU. It's a Bosch IMU.

And then I have this wind piece that i did that has a digital compass and then uh it's actually a hot wire thermistor that measures the wind speed so you can get wind speed and direction so i guess i make i make that's that that counts those are sensors all right but yeah no i think i think that i did I got intimidated with the idea of getting my electronics to report from the Arctic consistently. And I was like, that's a big enough problem for me to take on. And then this other guy has this thing that he's working on. And actually when he just published a paper on the light sensors, but at the time in 2019 um they weren't really a scientific instrument yet like they didn't have the data to even know if they were useful so it was kind of like i i borrowed

this kind of experimental technology which they were basically looking for a less expensive way for some reason rgb sensors are cheaper than thermistors um so they were looking for a less expensive way to to do the same thing or to collect similar data but I was like well that's like RGB sensors way more exciting than a thermistor for for my purposes so yeah so I think that that's um I think that one of the one of the kind of interesting things about art is that you you have to decide what your what your level of authorship is. And so every artist has to kind of figure that out for themselves. And for some reason, I love working, I guess,

because I had a background in kind of architecture and drawing and CAD that I've kind of fallen in love with circuit design just as a place to to spend my time and be kind of constantly tweaking things but um I've grown my skills but I'm not I like being able to to work in this world where I can kind of grab somebody else's eagle files for four different projects and kind of mix and match and get in my own power management stuff there and and and kind of um go at it that way i should ask you about the power management and all of that but what i want to know is these these sensors you've mentioned the wind sensor um it has a an installation component

that was maybe you should describe it yeah Yeah, so it's again the same kind of premise of the one-to-one scale. So there is a, I did this project while I was at Stanford and Stanford runs this amazing place called Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve that's about four

miles up the hill from Stanford by the collider up there. And I got permission to put, is this where the dishes? It's kind of behind the hill with the dish. Okay. It's a little bit around the, around the corner. It's on the other side of the freeway. Okay. Yeah. So it's just, it's back there and it's barbed wire fenced and then it has great wifi.

So, so it was the perfect place for all my kind of delicate about to fall apart homemade sensors um and so i i got permission to work up there and i placed 30 of these homemade anemometers basically like a wind sensor that can do speed and direction and but i made them into these bird shapes um so i placed 30 of them out there in the field, but they were at the same time that I was, I was kind of designing the field side and the gallery side. And at the same time, I had gotten permission to use this 19 foot by 50 foot wall that was part of this new building at Stanford. And, and so basically I put the sensors out there in the same way that I could stage some servos and lights on a wall back at the Stanford campus. And then I used the particle, one of the particle Wi-Fi devices where you can kind of do this publish and subscribe thing with.

And so I had 30 of these particle devices out in the ridge reporting to the Wi-Fi. And then I had 30 devices on these little cantilever arms coming out from this glass and projecting these flashlight things on the wall. And so the idea was that you could see the piece kind of began with just watching the wind move across a field of grass, kind of like taller grass out in the, um, in the wilds. Um, and I wanted to just be able to kind of see that, um, take place. So there's 30 of these independently operating anemometers and they're spaced about five feet apart, um, both in the field. And then there's 30 of these lights and servo accommodations that are, um, five feet apart on the wall the field. And then there's 30 of these lights and servo accommodations

that are five feet apart on the wall. So if you're looking at the wall, the north is up and you can see which way the wind's coming from. And then the wind speed gets translated to the LED brightness. So if the lights are really bright and all in one direction, then that kind of meant that it was maybe a 20 mile an hour wind kind of event. And then if the lights were all just barely on and wandering around aimlessly and looking like the thing was broken, then, um, that meant, that meant it was a low wind day. So, um, yeah, so that was, that was kind of the of the idea of the piece.

And the floaters? The buoys? Drifters. Drifters, yeah. So I had kind of done that. When you're in any university program, then there's like these things you're supposed to do to graduate. Like you're kind of on this schedule or this clock, but I had done that,

that wind piece kind of at a weird time. I had done that in the fall of my last year, but it was a lot of work. And then I kind of, that same guy, Paul, like I was talking to him after that thing was done. I was kind of like, I don't really need to do a thesis. Do I? Like that was a lot of work. And he's like, Oh, of course you need to do a thesis. Like you need to, there's still, there's still a semester left. Like you have to do another project. Um, and so I think that that the drifters kind of

came about as this, just the question of how far I could take it. It's kind of like, well, I know I can get an Arduino to like get some sensor data and like make something work if they're in the same room or on the same circuit. And then I, I kind of jumped this hurdle of, of wifi. And then it was just like, well, why can't like, can I make somebody that can go someplace that I can't go as opposed to like having, having something in, you know, the mountain range next door four miles away. And so then that, that kind of set me off on, uh, learning about batteries and solar power and iridium satellite transmission. And, um, this really amazing guy, uh, Michael Hart, uh, who he has a website,

which I always mispronounce cause I never say it, but I think it's Arduino, Arduino Anna. Um, but he, he wrote some code up and published it and make magazine. And, and it was basically like, how can you can use a Arduino, um, uh, out of fruit GPS. And then this other thing called a rock block, which was like this, this UK company that makes the Iridium satellite, um, modem kind of Arduino friendly. And so that was where that started.

It was just, well, can I, if I learn about batteries and solar and switch to satellite comms, then maybe I can put this thing somewhere that I actually can't go. So that was kind of the, that was the first iteration of that. And then I, artists kind of just repeat themselves or they just kind of keep doing variations of the same thing so I was never really satisfied with the different variations of that project so I kept kept doing different versions of it I spent almost a year at Autodesk kind of making these yeah these blown glass version of it. And, and, um, that was an effort to try to make it, um, not just a bunch of plastic junk that we're putting in the ocean, um, and to try to use,

um, some, some a little bit greener materials. And then, um, and then I did another version of it with an IMU that tries to measure the, um, the wave movements and then translate that to this laser light that projects around a room. So the idea that you could start to experience the ocean at the location of that buoy when it's transmitting and kind of see if the ocean's just flat and kind of mellow that day or if it has these big swells or, um, or something like that. So, um, so yeah, so that was the kind of the transition from, from one, one project to another. So I guess I keep, I keep going like that. Like it's, if I can get it to work, then maybe can I get it to

work in the Arctic? And then if I can get it to work in the Arctic, maybe can I get it so it falls out of an airplane and then still works in the Arctic? Space is next. Oh, gosh. Yeah, I don't know. So how do you think you ended up here? First off, with like the environmental science and visualization and art surrounding that uh i mean looking at your history you didn't start out with working in oceanography or meteorology was it just that first project and then you got into that and like you said repeated and iterated or was there an

interest that had been kind of kindled some other way yeah um i i, I, I grew up in Seattle and I was lucky that my parents introduced me to outdoor stuff a little bit, but then when I, when I was 15, I got, I kind of got hooked into rock climbing and then that became like maybe a 10 or 15 year obsession. Um, and the reason that that's part of the story is just because I got to travel a bunch and go to places that people just don't get to go to and, and just kind of experience these environments like the side of El Capitan or just like a, um, you know, some glacier or a kind of, um,

mountain in winter or, or things like that. So I think, I think it just comes from the environmental side is it started just as a way of like, I'm having these experiences and these kind of moments outside and trying to look for a way of sharing those with people. So I kind of had this other art career before Arduino, before the MFA, where I was doing art installation. So installation just means that you take a room or a space and you kind of transform glacial cave experience um using a bunch of cnc cut plywood and um tyvek and um and a bunch of every every tuesday we would load 2500 pounds of cocktail ice up into this skylight kind of tray this acrylic tray and then then, um, there was a, there was a actual skylight in the roof of the

museum above that. So when you, you got to kind of walk into this cave where the only light in the cave was from sunlight filtered through ice. And then it kind of changed over the course of the week as the, as the ice melted. So sometimes you would have thick ice and sometimes you would have thin ice. So, um, so yeah, so I kind of had this period of of analog installations and then when that period ended then that was when i i got more curious about the kind of technical side of things of like we're we're making these pieces about kind of experiencing nature but what if we could actually just use the data that are kind of like recordings from nature as opposed to kind of making our own constructions or our own kind of riffs.

Is climate change an intentional part of your work? It is. And I think that that's evolved over time as well. Um, and it's involved in a couple, a couple of interesting ways, some, some kind of reactionary, but, um, but I think as a, I think I gave this kind of labored answer to like, are you an artist or not? And I think that, that for a while I was kind of, um, I did not want to be an environmental artist. Like I thought that what I was doing was kind of, um, like, like I believe, like I mentioned

that art should just be, um, sort of judged on its, on its sort of face value, um, in some sense. And so I didn't like, just because art is about something doesn't make it better. It's like one of the things that I remind my students sometimes. And so I think I was stuck in that limbo for a while. And then we elected a new president in 2016. And then it seemed like that that was just not important anymore. And the things that the kind of direction that our country was headed in, in terms of environmental stuff was just not, not okay. And then I think the other pieces would be having, having a son.

I have a three-year-old son and kind of thinking about what we're leaving him. And then I think the last of it is just seeing, getting to go to the Arctic and getting to see what happened, what's already happened in the Arctic. Like, I think when I was kind of growing up and, and in my, um, twenties and climate change was always this thing that was going to happen someday. And then, um, there's these really amazing animations, um, on YouTube by, by Noah that showed the, the thickness and the extent of sea ice in the Arctic and between the 80s and between the mid or kind of like mid-20 teens, the thick ice, the stuff that I was talking about earlier that survives the summer pretty much went away.

And I think that just learning about that and seeing that this is a thing that has already happened kind of um it had an impact on me as i think i think we've been operating for a while and this this idea about climate change is this thing that like well if we don't get our together then it's it might be out there it might really happen or something and then i feel like over the last five or ten years, then we've shifted to this whole new place where it's something that we've already, it's here, it's something that we've already done, and then we have a kind of time window in which we need to change the way that we do things.

So I think that, that, um, that, that, that is where I am at now. And I, and I feel like part of my work is in communicating, uh, climate stuff to people. And then part of it is a little bit, um, and it's not really a pessimistic way, but it's kind of like being the bug collector with the safari suit in the 19th century. In the sense that I'm kind of out there to record these things that are going away. So both with sea ice and with glaciers, like I'm interested in making these recordings of things that are not going to be there when my son is my age or, you know, for sort of future generations.

So, yeah, so I think part of it is just wanting to make a contribution to the science as in that kind of open source, long, low cost thing of like, if we can get more sensors out there, that's better. I think part of it is in, um, doing art to raise awareness. And then I think part of it is in kind of making these recordings and, and really trying to document what's here now. Cause it's, um, cause it's not going to be there for much longer, depending on what we do. I don't want to end it on the, I don't want to end that on this sad note. There's, there's still, um, so much, so much that we can do in the, in, and it's not at all a hopeless situation. So I think that that's an important part of this discussion.

It is an important part. Thinking about climate change is often hard. I feel powerless, so I just can't deal with that stress. There's nothing I can do. It makes me want to look away. And your ice columns, being able to see those, I would love to see those in person because it's beautiful. And I think that's part of it being art and does that make do you think it helps people look at it and think about climate change as opposed to all of the other things we look at

for climate change all of the more depressing things i mean i i would like that to be an affect or a result of my work. I think that humans are, I totally identify with what you're saying. Like on my phone yesterday, there was this changing New York Times article about the changing of the ocean currents. And I was like, ooh, don't have the energy to read that right now. Like, I think that there is, um, there is a part of that. And I think that that's, that that's kind of natural. And then, but I think that as, as humans, we're just not, we're not really well equipped to care about things that are far away from us. And I think we're not really well equipped to, to of life-altering decisions based on some charts and graphs and some predicted future situations. And so I think that's why I like sticking at this one-to-one scale or I like trying to communicate what's happening now. So that's the, that's kind of why I go through all of this hurdle of the sensors and the,

the kind of attempt to be close to real time and all of that is just a bridge. I see the technology just as a way to bridge distance and to, um, and to try to see things kind of at full scale or, or in a experiential way, I guess maybe the, like, I think that's great that you want to see or see the digital ice core in person because it was meant to be moved around as opposed to sort of consumed with your intellect.

And I feel like that that's the territory of the artist. Like the scientists have to come up with all of their, their kind of come up with the data, figure it out, share it with us, get that in the media and have us kind of digest it. But I think that that's, that's only one way of knowing. And that my goal is to kind of help people, um, engage with other ways of knowing, which is like just being in your body and seeing something that is, is your size. Like, I think just the idea that there's

six feet thick of ice sitting on the ocean somewhere is kind of an amazing fact that you can just like walk around. Um, and I think that if, if more people knew about that, then we might, we might think about the situation differently. Uh, we had one listener question this week it's from maddie c what is your most dangerous deployment or what is your most dangerous art installation where is the danger in your life so interested in danger and explosions and um i i think maybe it's because i mentioned that i have a background in climbing, but I think of what I do as being fairly tame. But maybe my most dangerous and exciting installation is still in the future.

Who knows what's going to happen with COVID. But in theory, in August, I might get to go on board one of the Air Force C-130s. And I don't think I personally get to throw things out the back but someone will be throwing my stuff out the back and that sounds super exciting and then there's a chance i'll get to go on board a danish naval vessel um near greenland and um and we're going to be taking icebergs with a drone so so that sounds kind of exciting i don't i really i do not i i do not think of my, my work as being highly risk-taking, but I will say we did, we did snowmobile past

some polar bear tracks. And when I saw those, I was just like, oh, I never want to see a polar bear. So, so yeah, I think that that's, I don't think of what I do is terribly risk-taking, but I think it's, it's super fun to be able to get out there and, um, kind of engage in these, these different environments. Well, Zai, it has been wonderful to talk to you. I look forward to seeing your work and to hearing more about it. Do you have any thoughts you'd like to leave us with? I guess I would just like to say thank you to the community in the sense that what I do is possible because of people that know a ton more than I do have been really generous with their

time. Um, and that's been on the hardware side and on the software side and, um, and kind of all through that. So I think, um, that I'm, I'm just really appreciative that the, that I can engage in what I do and I can do what I do. I do not have an EE degree and I do not have a CS degree. And I, and that is, it is because of the generosity of the folks behind Arduino and SparkFun and

Adafruit and my uncle Dave and Paolo Salvaggioni is a, another Bay area person who's my ee guru and spirit guide and he's um donated hundreds of hours to looking over my eagle circuits and making fun of me and making them better um and uh malcolm knapp is also somebody who had this engineer accelerator program that tried to introduce me to the kind of project management basics for embedded systems and Paul DeMarenis for not letting me buy a data logger. So I think that just thank you to this audience and to everyone out there who has worked to make the tech

that you guys use more accessible. Our guest has been Cy Keener, professor of art at the University of Maryland. That's Cy as in Charlie Yankee and Keener, K-E-E-N-E-R.com. Thanks, Cy. Thank you. Thank you to Christopher for producing and co-hosting.

Thank you to Maddie C for pointing me towards Sai and our Patreon supporters for Sai's microphone. Although he became a Patreon supporter for his microphone too. That's very confusing, but we appreciate it. Also, thank you for listening. You can always contact us at show at embedded.fm or hit the contact link on Embedded FM. And now a quote to leave you with from Dr. Jane Goodall. What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.