This week's topic for the School For Poetic Computation's Critical Theory Class is the "Internet of Things" known affectionately as Iot. I decided to focus on the idea that, in may unpredictable ways, the Internet of Things will make our lives more complicated by creating dependencies on certain telecommunication interactions with the devices in our homes.
The device I've been working on requires the owner to tweet at it within a specified period of time or its health will slowly decline. If its health reaches zero, a relay will deliver a lethal voltage to the control electronics. When the lethal voltage is applied a red liquid will also be released indicating that the device is indeed dead.
The owner will know how much life the device has remaining by locally watching the LED bar-graph mounted on its back, or by following the device on twitter to receive its hourly health tweets.
Each time the owner tweets the word FEED @resist_death, the device regains five bars of energy. If the owner decides to punish the device, the word IGNORE can tweeted @resist_death and five bars of energy will be deducted. The life of the device is calculated and updated every hour.
Progress: All basic communication structures and bar-graph working.
To do: Work out "death sequence". Design and make "skin." Final Assembly.
Prototyped Electronics
Concept Drawing
@resist_death twitter feed