Blowing up balloons with a firehose

Project concept and thoughtlines

I have never been at the real cusp of a technology, never felt that I was there at the start, but then along came Twitter. True it could be said of Twitter that it isn't really that new any more there is probably something newer steaming along, but at just two years old it seems young and in terms of take up it is massively expanding, so for this technology it still feels like early days.

Probably because of this I decided to look at making a piece of work with Twitter, that and the fact that it is truly an 'auto in - opt out' process. That means people don't mind others seeing what they send and for me this is refreshing, of course you can restrict who sees what, but that isn't the ethos. I also like it because Twitter is paired down, it is a new technology that has more in common with texting than almost anything else, texting is hugely popular as a means of communicating and twitter adds a new dimension onto this behaviour.

what really grabbed me however was my first experience of seeing a little spurt from the firehose. The firehose is a description for the flow of data that goes through Twitter, better known as the public timeline. This is basically all the public messages that flow through Twitter and can be described as a torrent of messages. The firehose has been inaccessible for a time because of technical problems and it will probably be available to a certain few in the future.

However I found out that I could use tools to mine that real time data flow 'the firehose' and search it. Twitter offers simple API tools to interogate the flow of data and pull out things that are of interest. My first experiment was to do a word search on the real time feed and I chose the word 'dinner'.


It is quite rare that you get really shocked by a result, especially in programming, but when I typed in the search 'dinner' I got a sea of messages all written in the last few seconds from all over the world, all of them thinking about there bellies. The first level of excitement was that my Python coding worked then I began to look at this totally public authored stream of diatribe and I was touched by a certain innocence and beauty of it. I guess it depends on the word you search for. For a test try curseBird it pulls out all the Twitters with swearing. To me curseBird still gives me the same feeling, maybe because it is public realm?

Often it is the new uptakers of a technology that decide or describe that technologies etiquette and it made me giggle to find that a big annoyance to the original twitterers was new users 'telling everyone what they are having for dinner'(link). So now I am thinking I am really onto something, I would like to pull out and play with the throw away 'I am...' messages, sort of treat them as some sort of play thing that perhaps will have unexpected connotations.

How might it look?

I want to make this piece of work interactive in some form and possibly experiment with varying levels of interactivity, i.e. in actual space physical interaction and the web. I visited the Barbican curve and participated in Lozano-Hemmers piece of work and the high level of bodily interaction was really inspiring and makes me feel like I want the viewers to truly participate in the work. As in Hemmers work in the curve Twitter offers near real time function, data is put in by a user and then just spills out.

http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/commonwealth/

Coding the project

I decided to use Python as the language, the plan is to use it for all objects of the piece, including creating some user interaction for some text input, talking to Twitter API and searching and sorting the result, storing and displaying it and uploading data to arduino.

I have nearly coded the project with all the objects in the diagram below. I have used some different modules including pyserial, wx (for graphical interface) thread, and some xml modules to talk to Twitter. A big difficulty with the programming was using threads with wx.app as wx has its own threads so there needs to be some custom event handlers to talk from the threads to the wx display. Other than that it has been a breeze and seems to work very easily. I have found that working with Python lists is so straight forward and the process of strong indentation is very natural after a while. To view the code click here

The link below is for meade who were helpful with lots of info about the types of valves that I need to use to blow up the balloons. I was told that a two way valve would be ok. It just blows up or holds or deflates the balloon. The deflation can be controlled by a needle valve which essentially is just a needle hole in something that fits into the exhaust hole.
http://www.mead.co.uk/prod_isonic_valves.html

The link below goes to a site for a company in Scotland that sells 3 way solenoid valves and also small compressors and accessories. There is a good diagram on their site describing the parts necessary for a pneumatic system.
http://www.robotstoreuk.com/ACTUATORS/AIR_SYS_COMPONENTS/AIR-VALVEs-2.htm

I am using isonic valves with an arduino and linking the valves to the higher voltage with a H-Bridge. See Arduino code here