[Chris Combs] is a full time artist who loves using technology to create unique art projects and has been building blinky artwork since about a decade now. In his 2022 Supercon talk “Art-World Compatibility Layer: How to Hang and Sell Your Blinky Goodness as Art” (Slides, PDF), [Chris] takes us behind the scenes and shows us how to turn our blinky doodads in to coveted art works. There is a big difference between a project that just works, and a work of art, and it’s the attention to small details that differentiates the two.
Just like the field of engineering and technology, the art world has its own jargon and requires knowledge of essential skills that make it intimidating to newcomers. It’s not very easy to define what makes an artwork “art” or even “Art”, and sometimes it’s difficult to distinguish if you are looking at a child’s scrawls or a master’s brushstrokes. But there are a few distinguishing requirements that a piece of artwork, particularly one revolving around the use of technology, must meet.
What People Expect From Artwork
One important feature a technical artwork must have is the ability to turn on as soon as it is plugged in, without requiring any further user intervention. [Chris] recommends that it should be plug and play and this might require “not” using a power button if you can get away with it.
An artwork can be hung on a wall, or placed on a tabletop, pedestal or on the floor. A wall hanging artwork requires special hardware for mounting. One easy method is to use a taut wire to hang it from a wall hook. There are several options available for wired mounting, and [Chris] gives a nice rundown of their pros and cons. Another option for wall mounting is by using keyhole slots. You can use metal screw-on plates or add your own CNC or 3D printed slot plates. Sometimes, art galleries will have an exotic hanging system, but with some hacking, it ought to be possible to adapt either a wired mount or keyhole slots to work with them.
If your artwork runs software, then make sure that it never needs a software upgrade. People don’t expect software bugs in their artwork. This means ensuring your code is robust, and any bugs that surface later can hopefully be attributed as features. Dependence on a network connection is another challenge, so it is best to avoid using it. If a network connection is essential, then ensure that the configuration process is easy and foolproof.
Besides the artwork, accessories such as power supply, connectors, and cables need special attention too. Cables need to be offered in multiple colors and lengths. For power connections, barrel sockets and jacks are a good choice, but it is essential to include reverse polarity protection to avoid losing all the magic smoke if someone connects a power supply with inverted polarity. Using the widely available USB-C connector breakout boards is another great alternative, specially since USB-C cables are available in all kinds of colors and it’s possible to negotiate voltage and current requirements as desired. Finally, be careful with the choice of power supply provided with your artwork. An artwork is expected to last a really long time, and the power supply must be easily replaceable. There are quite a number of additional expectations that an artwork must comply with, and [Chris] covers those in the next part of his talk.
Making It Reliable
Artwork ought to function reliably for a long time. This requires special attention to design, construction and choice of materials and parts. For example, on the electronics hardware, it helps to add all the protection you can think of, such as surge suppression MOV’s, PTC thermal fuses, TVS diodes on signal connections and reverse polarity protection on the power input.
Making the software reliable requires some special effort too. If you are using a single board computer such as the Raspberry Pi, make sure to implement a read only file system, or minimise writes to the file system. Simulate various error conditions such as a file system that bloats due to temp and log files, and confirm that your software is able to recover gracefully. Consider how your system reacts to loss of network or failure of an RTC module or maybe a timer overflow in a microcontroller.
What A Venue Expects From The Artist
A venue or gallery will expect your artwork to have a title, a list of the main visible materials used, date of creation, dimensions and batch size or edition size. When corresponding about the artwork, you will also need to share clear photographs, a short biography and an artist’s statement about the artwork. [Chris] offers useful and relevant tips covering all of these requirements.
During the last part of his talk, [Chris] covers the important aspect of marketing and selling your artwork. Manually scouting for venues and finding upcoming shows can be tedious and time consuming, so he shows us some nifty methods of automating the task. He recommends using a combination of RSS feeds, web scraping, and filtering email newsletters to identify target keywords, and then collating all the data in a task tracker which reminds you when it’s time to apply.
Despite using all of these methods, [Chris] has had an acceptance rate of just 15%. So if you plan to walk down this path to artistic glory, be prepared to face lots of rejection letters. [Chris]’s tips and techniques ought to be useful to the growing number of hacker-artists we have seen in recent years who create stunning pieces of technical artwork but find it difficult to make a mark in the art circuit.
It may also help to familiarize yourself with the vocabulary of art-wankery, better known as International Art English. There’s a fantastic article by that name (and various rebuttals to it), which are worth a few minutes of your time.
I don’t agree. Speaking plainly works well in art too.
You mean, intersecting the fine line of banality just enough for establishing a juxtaposition of the creator with the created, not in the Godlike fashion but concretely and humanely?
I’m totally not the market here so my opinion is meaningless…
But I HATE things without power switches.
Nothing needs to sit there 24×7 wasting energy when no one is around to see it.
But plugging and unplugging is an installation job, it’s what you do the day you bring the gadget home and maybe again each time you re-arrange the room. It should not be part of every-day operation.
Of course.. ideally if I decorated a room with light-up art it would all get plugged into a circuit that is switched with a single wall switch. But that requires the room be wired for it. And in the case a power switch on the art item can just be left in the on position to get the same effect.
But that’s just my 0¢.
Wall switches is the way. Last person leaves the room, turns the lights (and the art) off for the night. It’s the minimal possible system. Anything else — rooting around for all of the switches on individual pieces of art, and trying to remember each one — is madness.
I totally get that perspective. It is a cultural difference between the domains. One nice (IMHO) in-between option is something like a PIR sensor or RCWL-0516 that only activates the power-hungry stuff upon occupancy detection… And that can also be nice for making an artwork feel more interactive.
Great talk! A lot of the advice applies to any widget released into the world, whether it’s a commercial product or an open source project.
Having worked on one art piece, and stumbled into/over most of the problems that Chris is warning you against here — this talk is _absolutely_ gold if you’re going to get into art.
Everything he says is also extremely practical. This is not about theory or anything hand-wavy. This is why you want to be able to accomodate white power cables and why you need to figure out an edition size, etc.
aw thanks!! Happy to answer any Qs that come up.
Thank you for this interesting and informative talk.
After some artwork I have produced myself, this talk would have saved me some subsequent headaches years ago :-)
Especially interactive installations are much more complex than classical paintings. What is sometimes also thought only at the end, are storage and transport. I thought to myself already a few times: My next art piece should fit into a small case and work on a pedestal :-)
here a link to one of my artworks: https://youtu.be/22SDMyceDkc
Love it.
One important feature a phone is that it must have is the ability to receive and answer calls as soon as they are made without requiring any further user intervention. I recommend that it should be plug and play and this might require “not” using a power button if you can get away with it. Also one should not have to enable/disable bluetooth or volume buttons or figure out why the phone is not transmitting or receiving properly.
A phone can be hung on a wall, or placed on a tabletop, pedestal or on the floor. Or placed in a pocket. There should be several options available for wired mounting.
If your phone runs software, then make sure that it never needs a software upgrade. People don’t expect software bugs or updates in their phone. This means ensuring your code is robust, and any bugs that surface later can hopefully be attributed as features. Dependence on a network connection is another challenge, so it is best to avoid using it. If a network connection is essential, then ensure that the configuration process is easy and foolproof.
Besides the phone, accessories such as power supply, connectors, and cables need special attention too. Cables need to be offered in multiple colors and lengths. For power connections, barrel sockets and jacks are a good choice, but it is essential to include reverse polarity protection to avoid losing all the magic smoke if someone connects a power supply with inverted polarity. I highly recommend wireless charging to save the usb port for rarely used hard wired data connections.
Using the widely available USB-C connector breakout boards is another great alternative, specially since USB-C cables are available in all kinds of colors and it’s possible to negotiate voltage and current requirements as desired.
Phones ought to function reliably for a long time. This requires special attention to design, construction and choice of materials and parts. For example, the display ought to function reliably for a long time. This requires special attention to design, construction and choice of materials and parts. For example, if you accidentally drop your phone it should not break. Nor should it require an external case or screen protector to insure its reliability.
Making the software reliable requires some special effort too. If you are using a single board computer such as the Raspberry Pi, make sure to implement a read only file system, or minimize writes to the file system. The operating system should not be vulnerable to viruses or unwanted attack.
Great advice.
Been waiting for this one to go up since the day after Supercon ended so I could send it to all my friends. One of the most concise, practical and entertaining talks I’ve seen in a long time, Hackaday or otherwise. Rock on Chris!