Welcome to the Circuit Python Show. I'm your host, Paul Cutler. This episode I'm joined
by Max Lupo. Max is a Canadian multimedia artist who constructs odd inventions. His
work strives to find meaning in process, value in translation, and creativity in discarded
or mostly useless things. In 2017, he graduated from OCAD U's Interdisciplinary Art, Media,
and Design program with a master's in fine arts. He teaches sculpture at a community
college in Ontario, Canada and is the community librarian for the Innisfil ideaLAB and library.
Max, welcome to the show. Thank you. Thank you for having me. I'm glad you're here. How
did you first get started with computers and electronics? Once upon a time, way back in
my first round of art school, I was gifted a MacBook and that was fun for a long time
and eventually Linux ended up on that computer. I started using Debian for a while and once
that got there, it was kind of a gateway into tinkering in the computer itself and that
was necessitated partly because Debian at the time didn't have great control of the
fan or temperature of the computer it seemed and so I had to do something about that. I
wrote a Python script that later became kind of a graphic user interface for myself to
manually turn on the fan and then from there learning more about Python through some great
books by Al Sweigart making little games, text adventure games and some of that was
able to intertwine with my arts education and making projects that had some degree of
interactivity to them, whether that was a simple button press or later on more complicated
interactions. But yeah, it all started wanting to solve a problem for myself and then kind
of learning Python as a way to do that. Your art pieces over the years have used Arduino,
MicroPython and CircuitPython. How do you know which language is best for each piece?
When I first started making projects, the Arduino was available and it was great. Being
able to use a microcontroller for the first time and having resources and guides available
was so exciting. Being able to add interactivity into a project and so the Arduino Uno really
did a lot for me for a long time. As projects became more complex and as the Raspberry Pi
kind of became available, those first single board computers, it again felt like a kind
of a new world opening up and a lot of possibilities. As it was described to me many years ago,
trying to choose between an Arduino or microcontroller and a Raspberry Pi, thinking about how many
ands are in your project and so if you need to create a text model and make an animated
GIF and display that onto a screen, a Raspberry Pi is probably your best option. Later on
in my art education, I was working on my master's thesis, MicroPython burst onto the scene and
again it was this opening up of creativity and possibility just by virtue of being able
to do so much on one little board and then of course as time goes on, CircuitPython became
available and so now it's really kind of about the availability of the hardware itself, the
availability of learning resources through Adafruit which really makes CircuitPython
a great package deal and even so far now as when I'm thinking of a new project and it
might need a Raspberry Pi, I'm inclined to try to think of a version of that experience
that could live on a CircuitPython board by maybe pre-computing a text model and then
just dealing with the text itself on a CircuitPython board perhaps. So yeah, that's mostly where
I'm at now these days.
Let's talk about some of the pieces you've created and shown at various exhibitions.
You have a master's in fine arts and your master's thesis abstract starts with, Beep
Boopatronics addresses discarded consumer goods, nostalgia, and the creativity inherent
in adapting one object into another. Tell me about Beep Boopatronics.
Well I'm so glad that we got to Beep Boopatronics. So this, yes, was part of a master's thesis
project. It works something like this. I had a discarded chord organ. This is, imagine
kind of an accordion but standing still or sitting still and so it needs air. Air comes
from somewhere, you depress the keys and then sound is generated and originally it had kind
of an internal motor to make sound and you would play your kind of compositions. So that's
the central piece in the show in a way. But of course the motor was broken, the outer
shell was broken, so it was kind of garbage except for the fact that the keys themselves
still worked. You can press the keys and that was just fine as a starting point.
Elsewhere in the installation there was a small radio that I had taken apart and reworked
so that where you would normally choose a station, the little kind of slider, that was
now just an opening to accept a punch card. And so this huge punch card roll had a composition,
a musical composition punched in it as a series of holes. You would put it in the radio and
it would generate MIDI notes and so kind of musical information and put that over a wire.
How did that musical information get there? Well of course it was a micropython board
that accepted the light pulses as notes corresponding to positions on the grid. All that information
was piped through MIDI over a wire to a second micropython board that controlled an array
of servos to depress keys on the chord organ. So we have of course now a musical instrument.
The chord organ as I mentioned needs air and so part of this installation if you haven't
kind of seen the mild humor in play, part of the installation was me constantly pushing
up and down a hand pump to create enough air pressure in the system when a composition
would play you would be able to hear the sound because the servos would press the keys, I
would be making air, it would all make terrible kind of music, it would make something similar
to music but only just barely related to it. And then eventually of course I would have
to stop pumping, put in a new song, then run back to the pump. Eventually there was a motor,
a fan involved to kind of keep some bass line pressure. But the whole idea of it, like why
do any of these things, the thesis project generally was about this idea, what do we
do and how do we think about all this stuff. The chord organ certainly for a modern musician
or really anybody isn't maybe that appealing. The radio on its own, places all around the
world are discontinuing analog broadcasts and so there's a future where that analog
radio doesn't have a purpose anymore. So these two almost useless objects are here and I
have them and I can think about them for some reason and the reason being to kind of just
see what happens when we make them interact. The thesis, you know because it was a master's
thesis it had to really sit in some sort of ideological space. This idea of like adapting
one thing into another and all these kind of maybe bigger ideas but in a simple way
it was just kind of a challenge in a way. We have these two disparate objects, they're
both related to music some way, they're both mostly discarded. What can I do to make something
interesting happen by kind of forcing them to interact together?
Sure, and I'll make sure that I link to all of these in the show notes too so people can
see pictures and not just have the audio descriptions to go with it.
Oh great.
Your latest exhibition ran through December 6th and is called Continuous Memory where you
explore the power and playfulness of words using technology. But not just any technology,
you used obsolete technology.
Yeah, and so it's all kind of part of this these little pieces of the puzzle of we have
all these items and so Continuous Memory was a two-person show curated and put up here
in Ontario and the show itself has a old Centronics electric typewriter. And so yeah, definitely
an obsolete little piece of equipment but in itself was a part of an ecosystem and so
the typewriter you could type on it as much as you wanted of course using the keyboard
but then also it had a parallel port on the side. And so how interesting that it had like
this connection to the outside world and so the obsolete aspect of it is in some ways
an opportunity to again try to create something new, a new experience using like a circuit
Python board that then communicates over the parallel port to make it type out, you know,
whatever I wanted to type. And in this particular exhibition, it was meaningful because the
things that would type out were sort of selections of stories from my own family's history as
part of their kind of immigration to Canada from Italy. And so my father came over when
he was 13 or 16 and I was able to take those stories and the typewriter at the press of
a button will type out a story from his perspective but then elsewhere in the show there's a phone,
there's all these old rotary dial telephones, then when you pick it up it tells a perhaps
the same story or a similar story from one of my other family members perspective. And
so this whole idea of like the past, nostalgia, these obsolete objects in a way as you go
through the show or at least my work in the show is meant to sort of push you towards
kind of these feelings of memory and trying to pick up the pieces between something familiar,
this typewriter, this story, for example. And then as you find these other objects,
you know, that story becomes more complicated. Hopefully your memories about your own sort
of past experiences become more complicated. And so the obsolete objects are, in this show
anyway, are kind of a way into hopefully that feeling of the past and recollection and things
like that.
Tell me about your collaboration on the margin maker, which is described as a meditation
on space, time, and the body and the ways in which our corporatized nation state enacts
order on all three and how one becomes marginal when they are unable to follow acceptable
socio-cultural margins.
Yes, and so this was an exhibition in Montreal with a fabulous exhibition partner, Pascaline
Knight, another great artist. And Pascaline is left-handed. And in Canada, we have copious
examples in our education history of this Hillroy exercise book. It's a pastel color
book with a map of Canada on the front. And inside, it's, you know, these beautifully
set lined pages to, of course, the classic blue and red little margin lines and things
like that. And so for Pascaline, in her experience, being left-handed and having to learn how
to write in these little books and things of that nature, the left hand, you know, goes
forward as the right hand does, but your arm, if you're left-handed, is constantly covering
the margin. So when you go to return back to that line, you're always obscuring your
point of return, your writing looks messy, you're scolded by your teacher for not having
good penmanship, and all these little things start to happen. And your approach to language
is kind of informed by those experiences. And so Pascaline and I set about to take the
form of this exercise book, these blue and red lines, and complicate them, make them
strange in a variety of different ways. And so Pascaline in her practice, she's a printmaker,
so a lot of screen printing, different versions of the exercise book was her contribution
to the show. And then I made a little circuit playground express power device, which draws
a circular margin around a page, kind of like what a record player would do if you put some
pens on the arm. All these things together are meant to kind of complicate and challenge
this idea of like, yeah, that perfect ruled line that we're all bound by when we're trying
to write on a page. And then the essay that you quoted was by a great curator and friend
who wrote some observations on the show, and her observations, yeah, we're kind of extending
this idea outward into what happens when you don't fit into a box. And I'm sure we all
have experiences on a government forum or something like that, where you're trying to
write your answer, and literally your answer doesn't fit into the box, like your penmanship
cannot be contained inside this little box. But then also potentially like the boxes that
are available for you to check or fill out, don't really match your lived experience,
and you have to just do the closest one. That makes sense for you. And so there's all these
little examples where, as soon as there's a rule, there's a margin, which is technically
passable, we can always write in between the margins. But doing so comes with some sort
of usually like weight, or at least some degree of consideration on your part that, you know,
we no longer fit in between these lines. And so the show is playful, all these kind of
big ideas sound like big ideas, but this was very playful and silly. There were opportunities
for people to run their own little drawing devices that were more mechanical, and have
that kind of experience of making those lines in red or blue ink for sure.
How did CircuitPython help with the installation?
Ideally, CircuitPython was there to kind of be a collaborative point since CircuitPython
text is just Python, and it's almost plain language as if you were to read, you know,
what a program was doing. And that was ideally meant to kind of be a point of collaboration
between Pascaline and I. As the show went on, you know, I became kind of just more responsible
for the coding part of it. But having that opportunity there to quickly prototype and
be able to get feedback from Pascaline about what machine was doing and how she would like
it to work or this or that or seeing her kind of work with a certain part of it, just being
able to kind of go back to the code so easily, make minor adjustments. And since it was a
Circuit playground express, being able to give kind of feedback to the user in the sense
of like the LED lights and things like that was really useful for sure.
That's fantastic. Last question I ask each guest. You're starting a new project or prototype.
Which microcontroller board do you reach for?
Ah, yes. So these days I'm really excited by the KB2040. It's the Adafruit board that
fits the Arduino Pro Micro footprint. And it's great. It has a USB-C port, which apparently
is a requirement for me these days. I don't know why. It has a lot of onboard storage
space, very compact. It used to come in purple. I still have a few of the purple ones. I wish
the purple one would come back. But yeah, that's my favorite these days for sure.
Well, if LadyAda is listening, maybe she'll get that feedback. And I'm with you on the
USB-C. I've got a couple of picos and every time I have to use micro USB, I just kind
of sigh and wish for a USB-C powered board.
I know.
And if anyone wants to learn more about you or your work, where should they go?
Yeah. And so please go to maxlupo.com. It's a blog. You can subscribe and get an email
update or put that URL in your favorite RSS reader that should know what to do. I'm maxlupo
underscore on Instagram, which where more of the art stuff is. And then follow the links
to find where I am on Mastodon. I never remember the full URL, but I'm there too for more of
a technical kind of approach to my work and what I'm up to. Those posts end up there.
Well, that's great. I'll make sure to link to all of those in the show notes as well.
Max, thanks so much for being on the show.
No, thank you, Paul. It's been great.
Thank you for listening. For show notes, visit www.circuitpythonshow.com and transcripts
are available in your favorite podcast player. Until next time, stay positive.
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