Uncanny, subversive, sublime & all other circuits

Explore creative uses, shapes and forms of conductive materials and experiment with hybrid and strange circuits. Follow one of the categories: #cardboard circuits #aesthetic circuits #circuit theory #circuit examples

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(via A Practical Guide to Designing PCB Art – Uri Shaked – Medium)

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Alchemy emblems & circuits: how to transform schematics into cosmologies & old emblems into function circuits?

Alchemy emblems just like circuit schematics represent something important about the relation between human, cosmic and mineral scales: a challenge of connecting electrons with human needs through electronic products based on electric circuits and on the other side, a challenge to realize your full potential as a human being and a mirror of God by working on the Magnum Opus and helping nature perfect the matter. Comparing and confronting these images and visions enables us to understand the different ontologies and values, but also ideals of knowledgeable and action: we try and fail to read the old emblems as sketches and prototypes and transforms present circuits into more aesthetic representations celebrating the relation between scales.  

We started by showing different types of representations of scales in alchemy: Ashmole’s and Nazari’s dragons and animal-planet hybrids, Mylii and Mayer’s pregnant men and earth with emphasis on landscapes, Rosarium philosophici erotic and gender-oriented representations of the 3-7-12 transformations,  Libavius and Barlet’s athanors (fournu cosmique) with complex connections. Instruments, human figures, animals, symbols everything can trigger rich erotic, political, industrial and cosmological forces that oppose our present divisions between disciplines and “concerns”. The final emblem is something between Morton’s hyperobject, Latour’s actor network, it is a moral and aesthetic matter.

We transferred various ideas and strategies on how to make the circuit on the emblem on a copper tape to “silk-screen” the design. Some retraced the curves and turned some of them into connections between the components strategically placed on the eyes of the dragons or some important points of the emblems. Others’ duplicated the curves as a parasitic structure on the top of the image. Our simple lickometer circuit, which asks the human to close the circuit used only three componets, which could be mapped to the alchemist triads: transistor as a type of mercury amplifying or switching the forces, LED as sulfur and image of light and perfection and a battery, which is the earth and the salt we need to transform into something spiritual as light... we could have spend more time rethinking the materials, which make the components: gallium, germanium or tin in the transistor etc., but everyone got more excited with the prospect with illuminating the emblem with a circuit rather than rethinking some deep connection between what we do with the minerals in the past and present.   

Once the parasitic circuit is printed & cut it has to be transfered with a tape, an alchemist would see this techniques as symbolic, as dividing and mixing the ingredients and then multiplying. It would be fun to describe the circuit making as some 7 stage process from the black to the golden phase, concept to functional circuit.  

There are two interesting differences to notice when you compare emblems and circuits: the idea of transformation and change in the 16th century is very moral concept of improving the creation and the sublunar imperfection, while now is just about balancing inputs and outputs in a cybernetic system. However, the idea of evolution as a way how inorganic nature becomes organic and creates complex organisms shares some of the obsessions with making the minerals and planets part of the human body and some story of complexity, the circuits nowadays enable us to have cities and global connection turning everything into an image of a child nourished by the forces of nature into something we can’t completely comprehend today. In the past and in the present our minerals are part of some cosmic drama of new and more complex life systems and transcending the material into more social etc. units. 

[cardboardelectronics]

[cardboardelectronics]

(via tetrazzi-osc-schematic.gif (1000×768))

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(via via Bird Techstep)

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prorotype seqaunce (via Direct ink to PCB CNC Plotter - YouTube)

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(via akihabara tour guide (967×705))

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EU debt crisis

Joule thief coin circuit, our comment to about Greece etc debt, and small tribute to Moniac wink emoticon EURO coins are so nicely conductive - copper, nickel alloys, ideal for crcuits! Almost no resistance and great for joule thieves smile emoticon. with/by denisa kera

[cardboardelectronics]

All the Unofficial Electronic Badges of DEF CON

2015 was the year of the unofficial hardware badge at DEF CON 23. There were a ton of different hardware badges designed for the love of custom electronics and I tried to catch up with the designer of...

[cardboardelectronics]

David Tudor (1926–1996) (via Rainforest Diagram 73)

[cardboardelectronics]

(via DAVID TUDOR: Electronics)

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(via history of encoding, in pictures)

[brvrbt]

[cardboardelectronics]

see Viable_system_model taken from "Brain of the Firm", Beer Allen Lane, 1972

[cardboardelectronics]

Energy-centric anthropology & circuits...

We are just circuit making organisms from the right begging! All ecology is about creating complex and strange circuits and even human values are nothing more than some effects of these evolutionary defined mega-circuits running energy storage and consumption! Odum’s hardware prototypes simulating & testing ecosystem models based on energy flows and their analogy to circuits have a funny revival in this "energy-centric" thinking in a strange form of cultural analytics - Ian Moriss' "energy capture" measured in kcal/cap/day  (food energy person has for its disposal per day & even non-food energy) and his crazy comparisons between foraging, farming, and fossil-fuel production as something having correlation to social organization and human values... so the egalitarian nomads consume something of 6 000 kcal/cap/day, hierarchical farmers in agricultural civilization anything from 20 000 to 80 000 and then plural, democratic, nonviolent modern man has up to 110 000 kcal/cap/day....  and he is inspired by this other energy weirdo Leslie White who in 1940 reduced all anthropological questions to a piece of bad math - history as C (culture) = E (energy) x T (tech)... the multiplication for him is rather "metaphorical" (he wants to state some strange function - more energy we harness per capita per year/more culture we develop OR technological means of using this energy in work)....  The social networks of the future will be like some carbon markets of kcal/cap/day stock market so we finally embody this ideal Pythagorean utopia... You have to love these guys, it is all quirky and playful in a way, but where does this cybernetic need to have input/output model come from? The love of thermodynamics, which reached its peak with Rolf Landauer famous 1961 principle, which basically states that all information equals the amount of energy, heat, entropy created when we try to delete that bit or unit of information... and this whole obsession with order and disorder, destruction, irreversibility behind thermodynamics as some law that rules everything is questioned only on the quantum scale (wonderful  summary)... But back to the circuits, they are not just blueprints of machines nor some embodied and materialized cybernetic feedback mechanisms, maybe they are our last attempt to save the great chain of being, claim there is something of a soul or energy, which wonders across organisms, materials and spaces through which we can connect everything, influence, translate and conquer... and simply ignore that we exist surrounded and immersed in scales of incomprehensible complexity that are so good in ignoring us both in space and time and even energy ;-)  This energy-centric thinking is a plea for pure immanence or something of that kind... where circuits are like mirrors, desperate attempts to make everything around talk to us, acknowledge us, become part of us.

[cardboardelectronics]

[cardboardelectronics]

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Odum’s 1960s hardware kits

Father of ecology, H.T.Odum designed circuits and build electronics to simulate ecosystems... I can’t find any photos of the actual hardware (computational device he would call it, because there were no computers), which consisted of battery, wire, resistors and capacitors “scaled  to  a  particular  ecosystem  by quantitatively  adjusting  the  sizes  of  the  electrical components  used.  Thus,  the  Silver  Springs  model was  scaled  with  13.9 mA/g/m2/year  of  carbon  flow (Odum,  1960a).  Milliammeters  and  voltmeters  were used to make measurements of flows and storages at various locations on the network for examining simulations.” Odum later moved to computer simulations and designed a symbolic, energy modeling circuit  language, which are also interesting, but I would really like to see the original hardware simulations, which are mini-computers & ecosystems at the same time, and I would like to design one :-) "He then explored this idea by constructing and simulating an electrical circuit of the Silver Springs ecosystem in which ... resistances are grouped at locations of the producing and consuming populations. Batteries supply the concentrated energy representing the sun and the energy imported as organic matter from the outside. The various branching flows of food energy to consumers are presented with branching electrical wires. Variable resistances and switches permit the observer to set up various special situations and combinations. (Odum, 1960,p.5)