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In the morning of new year’s day I pondered, horizontally and from my bed, on how I liked my bedroom window. How it has given me joy, and made me wake up happy. Then I thought I should do a window myself.

Construction of a Window, in which I will make a window on a solid outer wall of preferably a museum, but only after commissioning several painters to paint what they imagine to be the view the finished window will give us in the end.

I’m wondering whether this project has something to do with Angles and Shadows and a little bit of physical computing. I’m also thinking of it in light of my previous works with visual references to bureaucratic material.

In the meanwhile, I’m surveying the logistics of it. It seems to be able to be done in a few hours, so perhaps it is possible to make a whole window in an exhibition opening. It seems to be simple enough, provided the wall is not a bearing wall, to do it myself. It seems that I will have to get a building permission, and I have yet no idea how, how much and how long. Other than that it seems to be not so costly to do. Perhaps it is even possible to work with my audience again. And it would be nice to do another Do It Yourself video out of it.

I ran the idea through Daniel, and his response was “I always think of windows as borders as distancing as walls because you are now aware of what is over there but can remain separate, and this time through choice.” Good. It might work well.

There are more details to be thought about. Maybe there’s a machine that helps people demolish the necessary part of the wall and so that machine can also be controllable through the internet. The paintings are like people talking about culture from a distance. Physical distance, like what theorists do, and temporal distance, like interpretation of history. The wall is simply a wall. The window is a willingness to see, or sometimes it’s a pretense to see, but not seeing anyway. Window as a construct. Only to provide view. When it’s dark inside, we are not visible from the outside. Light will come in, and that’s beneficial. but you are separated anyway. Which brings me to another question: will the window be closed (with glass) or openable, or what?

This needs more thoughts.

I hope I’ll be able to do this project soon. Gimme gimme gimme a museum wall.

Last Monday I checked out O’Sullivan and Igoe’s Physical Computing from the library and started reading it earlier today. It’s putting my scattered mind into place. Now I know that toy 1 has digital I/O (input/output) and serial events, toy 2 has digital I/O and parallel events, and toy 3 has analog I/O and serial events.

Projects with digital I/O and serial events, like toy 1, are “easy.” Projects with digital I/O and parallel events like toy 2 are “time consuming, but not too hard.” Projects with analog I/O and serial events, in my case toy 3, are a “bit more difficult”. “The most challenging” projects, according to the book, are ones that have analog I/O and parallel events.

I want to eventually get to projects that have analog I/O and parallel events. That would be a perfect exercise. But first things first.

When I arrived at Savers Brunswick last Sunday, I was quite disappointed to see that the infrared toy that I have been eyeing and thinking about was not there anymore. Have I been thinking too much? Should I have just bought it right away when I saw it? I decided to accept the mystery. I also decided I should just be happy. What made me happy was this: just half an hour before that disappointment, I managed to find a very cool toy at Savers Footscray, and I decided to just buy it immediately!

Radica’s Girl Tech Password Journal® 2 seems to have been disappointing many, many little girls, and temporarily entertaining only several other little girls, in various parts of our little blue earth. Released in 2000, and that’s a nice nine years ago, mind you, some girls actually had to wait for a few years until they could get it as a christmas present, only to realise that what was advertised as voice recognition seemed to be either too simply or at times too complicatedly recognising mere soundwaves.

Before I read all the customer reviews online, however, I was shrieking with joy in my studio when I first managed to figure out what this toy does. First, it asked for the time. “Hour, please,” it said. Lucky I understood that somehow the “select” button has something to do with it. It then asked for the date, and the month. And then: birthday! Of course I came up with a fake birthday, and so right after my fake midnight, when I opened it on my fake birthday, it said “password accepted, welcome back. Happy birthday!” Shriek! Joy!

Another thing that made me happy was to find out that the lock mechanism is ran by a motor that is duly activated after the device decides that the password matches. Plus sound effects! Goodness gracious, I can definitely use this heck of a machine. Even when most other little girls around the world have agreed to dump it in the garbage.

Toy three, here I come.