I’ve recently found myself in a position where I’m not quite sure what to ask anymore, in terms of receiving feedback. But thankfully, some recent office hours have been the source of some great conversation and feedback.

Recently I spoke with Akshita, and she really helped me get my head on straight last week. I’ve been in a bit of a time crunch, as I’m trying to finish up 99% of my thesis, by the end of this Wednesday. With that self-assigned deadline, I was having a hard time aligning all my thoughts and prioritizing what needs to get done. Essentially, what I really needed was someone to tell me to stop – and thankfully Akshita did that for me. I can keep going down a rabbit hole of experimenting with different functions, equations, and creating different modes, so what I really needed to do was narrow it down and finalize a set amount of modes. In addition to this, she also gave me a few things to think about regarding functionality — should there be an individual takeaway from this? Similar to last semester at the Winter Show, sometimes I would let people create their own piece of work to take home with them. Although this ADM V2 is in a bigger scale, I have made it so adjustable so I could put down a smaller piece of paper for individual creations.

Which brings me to feedback I received from David Rios. Do I want this interaction to be an individual experience (with a personal takeaway) or a collaborative art piece — but with the collaboration, how can I make it so that each person who interacts with it can see their individual mark in comparison to all those who have contributed? He also has me thinking more of the context or where I’d like to see this installed at — a playground, a street, a hallway with lots of traffic — I’m not quite sure.

Some additional feedback/conversation I had with David was the why behind this project, which is something I’ve struggled a bit with through this thesis journey. A lot of my thesis project is the process of building this drawing machine — creating an Arduino library to streamline functions of this drawing machine in this specific format, not only a library but an entire ‘how-to’ of creating your own version of ADM. Aside from the creating process, I wanted to make an interactive art installation that could invite people to be curious, to discover and play and (hopefully) have a fun time interacting with ADM.

I am installing ADM into room 404 all day tomorrow April 11th, to get some documentation and hopefully some more user feedback.