Project Longarm

Project Longarm for Sheffield's 2012 Festival of the Mind was a collaboration with the artist  Mattias Jones to make a tsp solution drawing robot. The robots drew one line pattern solutions, the shortest line possible, derived from theories on how bees fly from flower to flower. It ended up covering three walls and the floor of a twenty foot cube in one unbroken line.

The code to convert the the tsp solutions svg files to motor movements was made completely by Tom Whiston in max/msp, as was the microcontroller code for the robot.

During the exhibition the sound of the robot was used to create droning audio soundscapes by using contact mics and max/msp. This was a collaboration between Tom Whiston and James Griffiths, which you can hear in the video (contact mics made by Dave TechDiff).