#andy cavatorta

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Bjork’s / Andy Cavatora’s invented instrument, the “Gravity Harp”.

Bjork and Andy wanted to explain the idea of counterpoints in music using nature. They found that the natural phenomenon of gravity did this very concisely. The pendulums swing at just the right time to create beautiful music generated by the Earth itself.

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SOLID 2015: Possibilities and Perils on the Way to the Future

Sound filled the enormous hall, ethereal and technical, familiar and mysterious. The 2015 SOLID conference, a celebration of the increasingly blurred lines between software, hardware and biology, was ushered in by The Dervishes, a room-size instrument created by Andy Cavatorta, designer, inventor and like so many others here, an MIT Media Lab alum. True to its Sufi inspiration, The Dervishes, a series of tubes capped by plastic funnels that could have come from the local hardware store, whirled in circles at computer-programmed speeds, making music in a most analog way: through the physics of wind.

Software and hardware connected to biology. Our biology. Sound waves lapped at ear drums and reverberated through bodies. Stray thoughts paused their morning pirouettes. We were (at)tuned, ready to be dazzled and awed by the no-longer-impossible, the inevitable and the next.

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In just its second year, the SOLID conference has doubled in size to 1,800 attendees, packing dozens of presentations. The companion trade show was filled with vendors offering everything from Artificial Intelligence services (IBM Watson) and enterprise-level Internet of Things support (Cisco) to warehouse robots (Fetch), space satellites (Planet Labs), DIY synthetic biology kits (Synbiota), design and innovation insights (Fjord) and custom 3D printed shoe insoles (Sol). It was sprawling, eclectic, down-the-rabbit-hole fascinating, yet if there was a unifying theme, it was about the opposite of solid: permeability. Trends are converging, disciplines overlapping and business models morphing. 

A SOLID “Pop-up Factory” set up on the trade show floor churned out wristband sensors (attendees could click wrists and the sensors would glow a pleasing green to indicate shared interests). It took six teams from three countries spanning two hemispheres just eight weeks to pull off. Long after the wristband itself has been relegated to the swag heap, the lessons learned from its telescoped production process—which included the use of 3D printer “farms,” trips to Shenzhen factories and a local assembly crew hired at the last minute via Craig’s List—will resonate.  

In a very real sense, we are at a crossroads: 

While robots and pervasive computing are rebooting science, an old copyright law threatens to leave smart devices chronically vulnerable to security flaws, quashing innovation. 

While advances in synthetic microbiology, galloping along at a rate estimated to be as much as 5 or 6x Moore’s Law, make it possible to design and build microbes with speedy ease, biology writ large is in crisis: the planet’s sixth mass extinction is well underway. 

While breakthroughs in digital manufacturing and robotics promise dramatic gains in efficiency and quality, uncomfortable questions are being raised about the future of work for humans. 

Even the basics of how we interact with computers is shifting as screens give way to the “invisible interface” of objects and places (to borrow a phrase from innovation consultant Rob Wolcott). Technologist and SOLID presenter Linda Stone has spent years analyzing how our screen-dominated lives have reprogrammed us, leading to states of “continuous partial attention” and bouts of “screen apnea.” Could the transition to gestures, speech and other ways of interacting with embedded computers be designed to make us healthier and more engaged? 

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                                                 CONVERGENCE

“What happens when things wake up?” asks Mickey McManus, designer, innovation consultant and futurist. “How do we shape the world of networked matter? How are we going to design ecologies?” McManus, co-founder of MAYA Design and co-author of Trillions: Thriving in the Emerging Information Ecology, is currently trying to answer such questions as a Visiting Research Fellow at Autodesk.

His project, called Primoridial (hat tip to the primordial soup that gave rise to life in Earth’s ancient oceans), focuses on the confluence of three trends:

Internet of Things (IoT)

Digital Manufacturing 

Machine Learning 

The infrastructure of “the trillion node network,” as McManus calls it, was laid decades ago when microprocessors began replacing mechanical components in consumer products. It was a shift driven by simple economics: It is much cheaper to design software as one-time expense than to design, then fabricate physical parts, which are calculated as per unit costs. Today, there are more microprocessors—tiny computers—produced in a year than there are people on the planet. We are surrounded and enabled by computers. They are in our products, buildings, cars and, through embedded medical devices, even inside of us. Now our things are starting connect en masse to the Internet, waking up and glowing with data.     

As objects have become more animated, matter itself has become malleable. Software such as 123D Catch makes it easy to “rip atoms into bits,” notes McManus. The bits can then be reconstituted back into atoms through 3D printing at any time or place. A wrench, for example, can be printed in an orbiting space station, saving the “$20,000 per pound shipping charges.” Perhaps more astounding is how quickly we have come to accept that as a matter of course. 

By year’s end, McManus will launch a competition under the “Primordial Motors” banner, equipping small teams—as small as three kids in a dorm room—with Autodesk software to give them the “power of 10,000 engineers” to design and build a better car. Instead of hotrods, they will create hackrods. “What if a factory wasn’t a place any more, but was actually a social network?” What if, indeed. 

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                                                           CARS

Very quickly, cars emerged as a major theme of the conference, with two more auto-related keynotes, one by Kenyan rally car wunderkind Quentin Mitchell, and the other by Kevin Czinger, a nattily dressed former Marine, lawyer and serial entrepreneur on a mission to “dematerialize” and distribute manufacturing. While Mitchell’s team scrappily hacked a used car into a ready-for-anything racing machine in just two days, Czinger unveiled a one-seater 3D printed “supercar” called the Blade with a 700 HP bi-fuel engine (compressed gas or gasoline), able to v’room from zero to 60 mph in two seconds and weighing in at an auto-anorexic 1,400 pounds. 

That last stat is key. When Czinger, founder and CEO of Divergent Microfactories, Inc., realized that the electric cars he had previously been developing really weren’t much better than conventional gas guzzlers once manufacturing emissions were tallied in, he set out to dramatically reduce material inputs—dematerialize—of car manufacturing and rethink the rules of manufacturing at scale. “I came to understand all the inputs, materials and energy that go into building a complex product like a car—and their combined impacts on us and our environment,” says Czinger.

His solution is the “carduino,” a 3D printed aluminum alloy connector that attaches to aerospace-grade carbon fiber tubing to create a super lightweight, structurally sturdy chassis. Like its namesake Arduino, a modular electronics platform, carduino “hides its complexity behind an easy to use interface,” Czinger explains. All the parts to build a complete chassis can fit in a Patagonia bag, too, kind of like an oversize children’s K’Nex set. 

Czinger envisions a distributed network of micro factories, each costing just $20 million to boot up, rather than the hundreds of millions of dollars required for a traditional assembly line. Each would be able to produce 10,000 cars per year for local use. Still, engines, tires and other car parts would have to be shipped in, creating a considerable “farm to fork” carbon footprint. 

Czinger’s dramatic unveiling of a sexy James Bond-worthy sports car thrilled the crowd, but I found myself wondering whether the concept of a car altogether wasn’t more a part of the past rather than the future. According to Czinger, as many as six billion cars will be built between now and 2050. That would be a threefold increase from the number of cars built to date. Beyond the   incomprehensible environmental costs, the ability to go from zero to 60 mph simply doesn’t mean much when global traffic is in chronic gridlock. Also, as a native of Chicago, where sturdiness is a virtue and it really can get quite windy, a bantamweight car fails to inspire confidence. For that matter, a self-driving car—another SOLID darling—would need to prove its sensors to be as tough as a postman, impervious to snow, sleet, ice, slush, rain and all combinations thereof before taking on our pot-holed terrain. 

But what if Divergent Microfactories and Primordial Motors were to take the combined power of massive design libraries, pervasive computing, digital fabrication and distributed manufacturing to rethink the components of a transportation network? Services such as Zip Car and Uber have demonstrated that people don’t necessarily care whether they own a car. What is needed is a range of options: different kinds of vehicles for different kinds of trips (see Vancouver’s VeloCar or San Francisco’s marvelously anachronistic, but effective street cars. Imagine an interstate lane adapted for high-speed, self-driving, long-haul street cars...).

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                                         SECURITY | OWNERSHIP

For author and digital rights activist Corey Doctorow, the most salient fact about a car isn’t its styling or weight, but its informatics and security model. “At every single DEFcon, at every single Blackhat, at every single CCC, someone will stand up and show you how you can compromise the informatics in a car by going in through something as innocuous as the Bluetooth sound interface and take over the steering and the breaks,” notes Doctorow. 

It gets worse. The 1998 Digital Millennial Copyright Act (DMCA), developed long before smart cars, smart homes and smart everythings, gave the bad guys strategic advantage by making it illegal to “jailbreak” software locks. Criminals, of course, don’t care. The rest of us simply have to trust that the systems are secure. 

It turns out to be a classic Catch-22: 

“In order to preserve the software locks’ integrity, the DMCA makes it a felony to disclose information about defects, errors and vulnerabilities in systems that have software locks. So if there is a bug in a system that you own and rely on, it’s against the law to tell you about that bug because if you knew about that bug, it might help you jailbreak the system...

For Doctorow, the follies of the alchemical past could be prologue if the law isn’t reversed:   

...Before we had modern science, we had a thing that looked a lot like science called alchemy. Alchemists did a lot of what scientists did: They would form a hypothesis about  some natural phenomenon in the world. They would formulate an experiment. And they would test their hypothesis. But then they wouldn’t tell anyone what they learned because they didn’t want anyone beating them in the race to turn lead into gold.... That’s why every alchemist discovered for himself in the hardest way possible that drinking mercury was a bad idea. That’s why for 500 years, alchemy produced no dividends.

And then alchemists actually did something alchemical: They turned something base into something precious. They started publishing. They started telling other people what they thought they had learned through their experiments and subjecting themselves to adversarial peer review: that’s when your friends tell you about the mistakes that you’ve made and your enemies tell you what an idiot you were to have made them. In so doing, they converted the base metal of alchemy and superstition into the precious metal of science. And we call that moment the Enlightenment.”

The DMCA also quashes innovation. What may seem like a smart move locking  in customers can backfire: 

“It must be said that nobody who’s buying stuff wants this. They may buy it in spite of it, but no one buys it because of it. No one ever woke up in the morning and said, ‘Gosh, I wish there was a way I could do less with my books. I wish there were fewer vendors allowed to sell stuff into this platform I’ve just installed in my home. I wish there were fewer places to buy consumables for my implanted medical device.’” 

On the other hand, companies that embrace a more open approach, adding intelligence to products in ways that make them more durable, compatible, resilient and safe, stand to win over the long term. Consumers will welcome an alternative to glitchy appliances, eager to cut the cord to companies that no longer support their products or may even no longer be in business. 

By contrast, in Shenzhen, China—“the Silicon Valley of hardware where everything is happening”— there are no such restrictions, notes Joi Ito, SOLID program co-chair and director of MIT Media Lab. “Everything is so fast and iterative, the kids make cell phones in sort of the same way people in Silicon Valley make websites and apps. It’s this agile, emergent craziness... Innovation is getting pushed to the edges because it’s so fast and the costs are so cheap.” 

To keep us from slipping into a legally-induced Dark Ages, Doctorow is working with the Electronic Frontier Foundation on the “Apollo 1201″ project (named after the “jailbreak” section in the DMCA), designed to end all such laws globally within the next decade. 

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                “BIOLOGY IS THE NEW DIGITAL” — Nicholas Negroponte

Meanwhile, scientists are busy restoring the enlightened foundations of peer review through a clever mashup of code and robotics. Reproducing experiments has become so challenging and expensive, it has been said that science itself has been broken. To fix it, San Francisco-based startup Emerald Cloud Laboratory (ECL) has come up with a way to standardize the experimentation process. Experiments conducted by robots in a wet lab are meticulously documented in code, then uploaded to a cloud-based virtual lab. 

“If somebody wanted to question an experiment, they could go audit it,” explains Ito. “The interesting thing is that a lot of people running things in synthetic biology and biology are not the biologists, but ex computer science and robots people. So this another part of the convergence: The people are crossing over.”  

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SOLID 2015: Possibilities and Perils on the Way to the Future (continued)

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For those without the funds for a fancy robotic lab set up, a Toronto-based company called Synbiota makes kits for DIY bioengineers. 

“So you can take all these little gene bricks—these little parts of genetic code—categorize them as if they were pieces of code, write software using a computer, stick them in a bacteria, reboot the bacteria and just as with computers, it usually it does what you think it will do,” say Ito. “A couple of decades ago, this would have been a Nobel Prize. Now you’ve got hundreds of people doing this in their kitchens.” 

Of course, to really get the synth-bio party started, you have to be able to work at a speed and scale that rivals biology itself, which is exactly what Joe Jacobson, head of MIT Media Lab’s Molecular Machines research group has been working on. 

There are strong parallels between cell parts and electronics. A ribosome, for example, reads groups of DNA bases called codons in a process similar to how early computers read long strings of coded tape. Likewise, a plasmid can be programmed to perform just like a ring oscillator test circuit. But the cell machinery that Jacobson and his colleagues from Harvard and Stanford wanted to mimic most was polymerase, a protein that zips along copying 1,000 DNA bases per second. The very best human-made DNA synthesizer was able to  manage a ploddy single DNA strand every 300 seconds. 

Taking inspiration from both polymerase and the microchips that fueled the computer revolution, they developed a chip-based gene synthesizer. “We can design on the computer the programs that we want, then go build those onto a chip. These chips...have about about a million spots of DNA that are all separately programmable. We can, as we build, correct any errors that occur. This really allows us for the first time to build DNA in a Moore’s Law or geometrically scaling way,” explains Jacobson.  

Using the iGEM Registry of Standard Biological Parts, a design library of genetic circuits, biologists can basically plug’n’play:  

“Let’s say you want to build a little bacteria that lives inside of you,” explained Jacobson. “It has little sensors. It has little data-logging. You go here and pick out all those parts and now you can go to this fab capability, design it on a screen, press a button and start to build these apps and devices inside of synthetic biology.” 

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                P2P PICTURES: WHAT YOU SEE IS WHAT YOU GET BUY

In a sense David Rose, author of Enchanted Objects: Design, Human Desire, and the Internet of Things and CEO of ditto, a “proprietary logo detection engine” capable of analyzing the 1.8 billion photos uploaded to social media daily, is putting together a kind of real time design library of human wants. 

“We have classifiers that are looking for: 

5,000 brands—the companies with the biggest budgets in the world

1,000 objects, like cats and dogs and jewelry and everything else

500 contexts or scenes, so we can find where a product is being used and by whom and with what and whether they are smiling and more”

Whatever ones sees in an image can be turned into a sales opportunity. “The ad hoc social influence that already occurs through photos with nearly everything today will become actionable...We’ll see the glasses our friends are wearing and we will see these as a choice. The ability to click and act on those things will change how we buy glasses from Warby...” explains Rose.

This is Pinterest on steroids, a life where the shopping never stops and every detail is mined for marketing intel. “French’s mustard wanted to know what people are putting their mustard on these days. So they can look at a photo and see it’s broccoli. Who would have known?” asks Rose.

Rose’s vision may be inevitable and without doubt is a marketer’s dream. Mustard on broccoli may even be worth a try. But it made me think of Ram Dass famous advice to “Be here now.” When did we go from celebrating being present in the moment to savoring every moment for its sales potential? “Buy here now”? No, thanks. I share pictures to share experiences, to stay in touch with friends and to learn. And now that I have learned a “ditto” bot is surveilling my public photos, flattening me into an “actionable” object, I may take a page from William Gibson’s heroine Casey Pollard (Pattern Recognition) and start clipping the labels off my clothes. 

Rose walks the talk, though, documenting his every move as conscientiously as a ditto bot, wearing a Narrative Communications camera sewn into his blazer pocket to snap a picture every 30 seconds. “All the things you might want to know about yourself with a Quantified Self sensor you can see,” he explains. “You can see how often I interact with people versus screens.... You can see how often you snack, what you eat, whether the people you interact with are depressed like you are or whether they’re smiling. So all these sensors can capture an incredible amount, but all these photos want image recognition, because it’s just unmanageable otherwise.” 

Or you can just live your life the old fashioned way, paying attention, taking notes and perhaps keeping a journal. 

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                TECHNOARCHEOLOGY: BRINGING BITS BACK TO LIFE

Rose’s material ambitions rest on a notably immaterial substrate: code stored in the “cloud,” a somewhat misleading euphemism for floor to ceiling stacks of computer processors housed in earth-bound warehouses. Atoms still have it over bits. 

From the infamous 8-track cassette to the collection of external hard drives abandoned on my bookshelf because my latest laptop has no slots to fit their cords, tech obsolescence is a harsh reality. Occasionally what was once cutting edge becomed a valued museum piece, but mostly old tech is junk tech, a disposal problem, e-waste. 

Self-styled “certified technoarcheologist” Dennis Wingo specializes in a very narrow category of outdated tech: NASA computers designed for missions from decades past. 

In the mid-1960s, NASA launched several unmanned missions to the Moon to take reconnaissance photos in preparation for the Apollo program. Using a 70mm camera, film was processed on board, then scanned and transmitted back to Earth where the data were stored on large reels of magnetic tape. The most powerful computer then on the planet—a UNIVAC 11 with 256K of RAM—digitally converted the tape data and photographs were printed out in large sheets for NASA scientists to study.

“No one in history had ever seen the moon up close. Think about this. At one meter resolution, no one in all of human history until the mid-1960s had seen the moon that up close,” marvels Wingo. “They printed out these big pictures and walked around going, ‘Oh that looks like a good place to land. There are too many rocks there. Look at all those craters!’” It was Google Streetview v. Prehistoric.  

Nearly twenty years later, the tapes were moved from the Federal Archives to a shelf at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). “Nancy Evans—she worked on the Viking Program—she saved the tapes. This what people do all over to save our history. She found the drives and tried to bring them back. But they couldn’t because in the late 1980s, the technology really wasn’t there to do the kind of stuff that we can do today,” explains Wingo. 

Another twenty years rolled by before Wingo found the drives in storage at Evans’ home outside L.A. Meanwhile the tapes, ignored for decades, were slated for destruction at JPL. 

Wingo managed to get permission to work on the computer drives and the tapes, moving them to an abandoned McDonald’s (rechristened “McMoon’s”) on a closed Navy base in Santa Clara, California. His rag-tag team, which included high school students, managed to revive the last machine that could read the last tapes of those NASA missions. Then, using modern computers, they were able to pull out so much data that the National Snow and Ice Data Center was able to use the images to chart the edge of the Antarctic ice pack. Forty years ago, pictures of Earth from space were few and far between, so this was a quite a find. 

Wingo was also part of team that crowdfunded $160,000 to attempt to reboot ISEE-3, a satellite launched in 1978 to study the sun. Later, ISEE-3 was repurposed to become the first satellite to fly through the tail of a comet and programmed to return to Earth in 2014. “The only thing they didn’t plan for was NASA not having money.” said Wingo. 

The project was a partial success. Comet dust had wrecked the spacecraft’s fuel system, but communication was established and thanks to the ingenuity of a handful of dedicated space hackers, not only was a bit of our space history saved, it was made as well. 

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                                              HACKERS & MAKERS

Throughout the SOLID conference, the idea that innovation happens at the edges—what Joi Ito termed, “agile, emergent craziness.”—was repeated like a mantra. From Mickey McManus’ plan to leverage small teams with powerful design software for the “Hackrods” competition, to Synbiota’s DIY synthetic biology kits and from Kevin Czinger’s vision of distributed microfactories to Dennis Wingo’s merry band of technoarcheologists, the virtues of small, scalable, flexible, leverage-able, speedy, clever and low cost were put forth not only as best the way forward, but also as a path of hope no matter the odds: a self-fulfilling can-do spirit. 

Mark Hatch, the boundlessly enthusiastic CEO of Techshop, a Silicon Valley-based chain of makerspaces founded nine years ago, used his keynote to rattle off a long list of hardware bootstrap success stories:

Oru, a lightweight foldable kayak that raised $440,000 on Kickstarter and $500,000 more on Shark Tank

Square, the ubiquitous smart phone credit card reader that was rejected by VCs until the developers built a working prototype

DODOcase, a bamboo and leather iPadcase that sold $1 million in product within its first 90 days 

Not every maker makes money, or is even in it for the money, but there is an undeniable joie de vivre at the possibility of turning ideas into something tangible, something that just might make a difference.  

(*Tumbler limits the number of videos per post to five. If the video below does not display, click here for the link.) 

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SOLID ended without much fanfare. Crews began dismantling the trade show before the final breakout sessions wrapped. I wandered into a talk by Roger Chen titled, “Machine Intelligence to free human intelligence: How automation helps you win.” Mostly it was about how to calculate the return on investment (ROI) to determine whether or not adding robots to the mix made sense.

Chen, a principal at O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures (OATV), a Bay area seed stage investment firm, was careful not to paint an overly rosy picture—robots are not a one-size-fits-all answer—but it seemed clear that we were in the middle of a game being changed. Less clear were the social ramifications of freeing all that human intelligence.

Afterwards, I sat on a bench, watching pelicans fly across the Bay, trying to make sense of all that I had seen and heard. Like Andy Cavatorta’s Dervishes, my head just kept spinning. “What happens when things wake up?” asked Mickey McManus, a question that could have a come from a fairy tale, or a nightmare. What happens when technology blurs into biology? What happens when we live inside computers and they live inside us? Is the Singularity already a done deal, with human and machine intelligences forever entwined? How will the shift from screens and keyboards to interfaces animated by touch, vibration, light, gesture and voice change us? 

Remember to breathe, advised Linda Stone. 

Yes, breathe... 

— J. A. Ginsburg / @TrackerNews

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[dustincohen]

The Chalice Symphony documentary I made for Stella Artois is finally out for the world to see. Give it a watch if you have some time! Featuring musical-craftsman-mastermind Andy Cavatorta and the amazing Cold War Kids

There are FAR too many people to thank as this was a massive collaboration between a lot of wonderful, creative people and I am incredibly grateful to you all.

[nicklikesmusicbutnotblogging]

THIS MAN MADE MUSIC OUT OF BEER

This is pretty sweet, both in terms of the project and the way the instruments and song turned out.

"Last March Stella commissioned an M.I.T. sound engineer to spend a year building four elaborate instruments that draw their power from Stella chalices. Why? Because sound is the only sense that beer has yet to engage (seriously, this is why). To give us the beer sound we crave, they hired the Cold War Kids to write a song using these special chalice-adorned instruments." - via Esquire

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Cool little video featuring a playable rain machine that creates music from falling droplets. I recorded the music performance. (I didn't record any of the dialog for the video.) The architect of the machine, Andy Cavatorta, does some pretty amazing work.

[fieldmic]

Andy Cavatorta: The Sound Artist at Work

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Gravity Harps by Andy Cavatorta

source: the creators project blog