Video produced by Migros Kulturprozent and Christoph Merian Verlag for the DVD publication "Digital Culture and Media Art from Switzerland - Edition 2010". You can find the full publication on digital brainstorming.

Link to Video

I have been finally working on a new instrument: the Gmöttophon A/V. After the earlier series of musical/noise instruments, i wanted to build a new one that combines audio and visual experimentation, while keeping everything small. Earlier discussions and projects with Niklas Roy, seeing his vektron modular, and the experiment with the NanoŠmano TV during the session in Ljubljana with Stefan Doepner and Feargal Parkes.

Thanks to Haunz, who found an old video-camera on Boxi, i got my hands on a tiny little CRT monitor from the viewfinder. these little things are beautiful small cathode ray tubes, that allow a lot of messing up with the video signal or directly of through coils. they are quite easy to reengineer to figure out where to connect power (usually around 5 V) and GND, and then just try to connect a composite video to the other cables until you find it. The first experiment, see image below, sadly failed, cos when trying to remove the cover, we cracked the tube and lost the vacuum... it was a nice round one though.

Anyway, i managed to build the first prototype ot the Gmöttophon A/V, and in fact its bloody awesome. a bit like Ryoji Ikeda for you pocket
Its controlled by an ultra simple circuit with two oscillators using a 4093 and an amp LM386, then there is various ways to patch the signals togehter. as video source i used a small surveillance camera, from the chinese market in Budapest. The options are endless... The video above just shows one of the late night experiments.

so we tried to cut tape glued on top of microscopy slides, to be used as master for casting PDMS microchannels, see my article on homemade microfluidics, to be published in chips&tips. with these structures i will be able to do nice practical lab experiments on microfluidics with the students from FHNW.

more than that, of course we had the laser power all the way up, cos its fun, creates a lot of smoke and is spectacular to watch. and it seems the laser cut right into the glass slides.... hmmm that looked like fun. so we spent the rest of the evening carving our custom made microsocpy slides, see pictures below.

of course we didnt stop there and tested the laser micro-projector, see older post, and could beautifully project through the glass slides and get a nice, sharp and clear image of the dusjagr icon projected on our neighbors wall. hmmm that also looks quite interesting.

here is a short clip:

and it was even in the indonesian press...

maybe i shouldnt drink that water on hagen again...

Finally the cultures arrived from sciento, UK. I got some amoebae, rotifers, tardigrades and a weird little japanese swimming thing i forgot the name of. they all seem happy and lively and obviously survived the travel in the mail.

first experiments using the webcam as a microscope revealed nice images, see above. and a newly made pd-patch allows me to record nice time-lapse movies to check out the amoebae....

i entered 3 movies to the competion, the classics like "hase znacht - short version" and "duell" and both of them got nominated for the award taking place on sunday, 23th, november, 2008. everybody should come and clap their hands!!!!

in addition i made a new movie for minimotion with haunz:

The First Encounter

Its tale of science fiction, tea bags, special effects and lots of mouse clicks... sadly we forgot to tell a story. and they didnt want it @ minimotion. but so what, not too much unlike in hollywood, in some cases you just focus too much on special effects than on a good movie. and by the way all special effects were done purely by the use of tea bags!

wait for the "Directors's Cut, Extended Edition deluxe, Alternate Ending" of it.....

This is a movie i got with help from alexa kiss and gabor csucs from the LMC @ ETHZ. It shows a time lapse microscopy recording of HeLa cells growing on a patterned substrate showing the logo of my current university, FHNW, where i teach a course in micro- and nanosystems for lifesciences. of course the movie has no specific scientific purpose, but it looks nice! check my research section to learn more about cell patterning...