Phantasy week: Stories

These are the stories written on thursday.

Old toys' story (Mai):

Andy is the teddy bear of an 8 year-old boy. It used to be the most favorite toy but now, it becomes old and torn down. Therefore, the boy doesn't want to keep Andy any more, he throw it into a dustbin... Andy is very sad because it seems to be the end of its existence. However, in the dustbin, it meets other old toys which lost some of their parts and all the urban trash like tin cans, banana peels, plastic bottles. They decide to combine together to continue their lives (to be reborn) Andy lost its body, so it connect with a broken toy cars and some mechanical part to survive. Others also do the same things, they cooperate with each other and gradually change their parts to adapt to the surrounding environment. Because they are all thrown away by human beings, they hate people and don't want to see the latter again. They disguise themselves as trash or small objects on the street so that people never recognize and realize their appearance. It's difficult for the old toys to survive everyday but they are happy as they can still continue living.

The story of Steven en Elex (Marieke)

A magic can falls out of the sky… Lightening!

Little Steven, 7 years old, is walking in the mountains and discovers a pile of rubbish. When he looks closer he sees they are all body parts. He runs home. The next day he slowly approaches the pile out of curiosity. Every day he goes peeking to the pile and sees it growing. One day he goes closer and sees all the parts struggling and aimlessly moving around.
When he puts parts together, funny creatures arise. He has so much fun in doing this; he goes back every day to see if there are new parts to be put together.

He notices that there are only new creatures when there has been a thunderstorm the day before. Year after year he goes back to that spot when there had been a thunderstorm and puts together the creatures.
When months have past and there hasn’t been any lightening, Steven really gets frustrated. He tries to create his own thunder with all possible machines and electronics. This doesn’t work out.

In the meanwhile the creatures are making their own society and two groups are forming. There are creatures, called Elex, who are aiming to honor the holy can and are planning on getting back to planet Ex. When the holy can is in space again it will be able to make the creatures continuously. But there are also creatures which don’t care, the Eli, and these are planning to take over the world.
What the Elex need to do to get the holy can back into the universe is spread all over the world and by doing so create an electric field around the earth. This will split the atmosphere and lead a pathway for the holy can into space.

The story of Nanomia (Eddy)

Long long time before the homosapians, even before the dinosaurs, just after “the Big Bang” a chemical reaction created an almost invisible small construction of atoms, consisting of highly strong coal-fibbers, organic tomato DNA & logicanicy.

Over time, when the world evolved, this combination of atoms survived & evolved. In fact the size didn’t grew. Many of the atoms combination spread over the world.

One day, electricity, in form of a lightning, gave the first impulse for this ”cells” to cluster together. In fact this didn’t last for long. After every additional lightning the cluster became more and more complex.

Years & years, millions of them, passed by and the invention of permanent electricity pushed the cluster to evolve themselves to an outstanding long lasting creature who can break apart cluster back together.

Over and over was this procedure used to hide themself from the world of the way we know it.

But well the change of permanent electricity gave these creatures to evolve to be independent form electricity at all.

Out of the sudden, they lost the skill to totally break apart, now part of their can be seen.

Christopher Jam (Elien)

Christopher Jam as a motor boat. In his spare time he likes to make little trips with his boat. One day he discovers a tiny island. He decides to anchor his boat to take a look at the island. Here he finds all kinds of robot-like animals, new species.
Christopher Jam really likes the animals so he loads them all on his boat and takes them home. He is aware that if people find out that he has these rare species at home, they will confiscate the animals. But Christopher wants to keep them for himself. Therefore he hides the creatures in his closet.
But the animals hate being in the closet, so one day they decide to break loose.
Christopher Jam notices them just before they were able to walk outside. He decides to disconnect the animals’ body parts and he kept them separately so that they couldn’t re-connect themselves and they couldn’t escape again.
Years go by until Christopher Jam dies. People find the body parts in his closet, but they don’t know how to connect them. Will you help these creatures to live again?

Amadeus Dark (Elien)

Amadeus Dark is a very bright man. He is an inventor and has invented some amazing things throughout the years. Amadeuses work in progress is top secret; as soon as he made some notes or did some research, he would burn the evidence so that nobody would know what he was working on. Amadeus Dark almost finished his new invention when he dies.
People find his invention, but can’t make any sense of it. What was the purpose of mister Dark’s work.

Prosthesis factory (Elien)

In the prosthesis factory is working a robot, Festool DB110. Festool is a very smart sophisticated robot, programmed replace people doing routine jobs. One day Festool is sick of the routine work and he finds a way to escape: He takes the different prosthesis’s and attaches them to himself. This makes it possible for him to leave the factory into the open world. Festool found a nice place to live and create a family. After a few generations the robots have involved more and more.

Ancient Civilization (Timo)

A very long time ago, even before the existence of the dinosaurs, there was a race of extremely intelligent creatures. They were so smart that they could make a machine to look into the future. With this they saw their own future: total annihilation of their own people. In the hope to save their culture, technology and knowledge they created a vast amount of autonomous machines. All these machines symbolized one of the cultural, technological or knowledge aspects of the race. When the day came which would wipe out the race, they spread all the machines over the whole world in separate parts, improving the chance that a large number of parts would survive. For millions of years these robots have been inactive in the ground, even underneath the first dinosaur fossils. A few years ago the first part was dug up. A lot of scientist researched the part and came to the conclusion there should be more hidden in our world. Only by finding, collecting and putting all the parts together the mystery of this ancient civilization can be solved.

The Story of Extreme Awesomeness (Tomas)

Intelegent creatures on a distant planet found out that rather than evolving,

it's much more efficient to share useful characteristics.

After many years of sharing and exchanging limbs the Fauna had changed completely.

Natural selection was taken to a whole new level, but as in every environment where creatures live together..

.. some creatures played by different rules. Fearless creatures which tried to steal limbs and body parts

from the other creatures

So the creatures fled their planet in ships created from their own bodies and limbs.
But the fearless ones followed them.

The creatures finally found a planet which seemed friendly:
Earth

But on entering the atmosphere the ships got shredded and many of the creatures and limbs got separated

raining down on the earth the creatures had to start over. Combining and finding new possibilities in their new environment

NB: On planet earth the creatures can combine with their alien parts, but also with parts from creatures, object or other things that exist here on earth.

Because the greedy, fearless creatures also landed on earth this can create some sort of dynamic story and reason behind the creatures actions.

From ordinary to extraordinary (Enitia)

In our daily life we meet stones, leaves, nuts and more things we see as ordinary. But what if these objects weren't ordinary at all...? A long time ago there was a war on Planetopia, and the civilians of this planet (the aliens) fled to earth. They took their rocket and landed on earth, but as soon as they touched the earth they changed into ordinary objects and were not able to control their movement anymore. The wind brought them to different places, so did human and nature did and the lost each other...And suddenly after thousands of years, they changed back to their normal state only... where their body parts separated too! Will you help them to be one again?

Escape of the android parts (Luuk)

In a laboratory in the Netherlands, scientists were secretly developing a project called 'Prolatus'. They tecnologically made human extensions, allowing man to survive in the most extreme environmental circumstances, such as extreme heat or cold and extreme heights and depths. What's more, the extensions all functioned autonomously. Artificial intelligence (AI) allowed the parts to act on its own, based on environmental input.

Then, one night, something that none of the scientists had expected happened.The emotional and survival classes within the extensions' AI had concluded that it was best for them to live as fas as possible from human beings. And so, one night, it happened. When the scientists were gone, the extensions crawled towards each other and connected, creating whole bodies. They broke free from the lab and fled to the outskirts of the world, where the most extreme conditions would prevent man from interfering with their lives.

Phantasy week: Creatures

These are the creatures, designed for the environments from last post.

For Jungle environment (Timo)

Alga Hospes

“Happycute-algea”

Little is known about these algae. It lives inside the plants; they eat leftovers from the plant and help the plant stay clean from the inside. They are very small and glow slightly blue

4. Qualtor Fulcio

“Choptopus”

Locals have a word which translates to: “Chair you will never sit on at least you will never get off”

The creature is covered in a sticky material. The animal itself almost works like a flycatcher without doing anything. Speculation goes that it used to catch Flies with this stickiness. But because the Flies are of course not dumb, they just started flying higher. Nowadays the Choptopus uses its stickiness to catch a snake and form a Snakeplant with it. This way, both animals can catch dinner. There is a story that a local man once thought it was a funny hat and put it on his head. The Choptobus lamped its tentacles on the man’s head and never let go anymore. The end of the story is discussable. Some say the man and Choptopus became best friends and stayed together their whole life. Others say that there is still a rather large “Snakeplant” walking around the forest.

3. Serpens Cunctor Cuniuratio

“Snakeplant” (name incorrect)

Acts like plants to attract the Fly. When Fly flies over, the head pops out and devours the Fly. It closes its leaves after catching a Fly. Actually the creature if formed of two different creatures on top of eachother. By using a dead plant as clothing it seems like one animal. Snake shares his caught food with the lower part. Neither scientists nor locals have ever seen the two animals teaming up and covering themselves with a dead plant. They just seem to be there.

2. Musco Celebrer

“Fly”

Locals just call it “The Fly” because it is the only fly in the realm. Flywalkers also mimic this fly with their antenna. Front legs are highly developed; sometimes they even look similar to human hands. Rumor has it that locals sometimes see them using small tools. The snout seems also not biological but artificial. Eat Algea Hospes.

1. Testudo Illusio Musca

“Flywalker”

Locals have a word which translates to: “the don’t step on it rocks”Antenna on the head is used to “Lure” plants and distract them. The Flywalker is a herbivore.

It spikes make sure plant don’t mistake Flywalker for dinner.

Tail works as a sort of radar, making sure the Flywalker can avoid surprise attacks. Because of its heavy shell, it can’t turn around very fast. Scientists speculate if this was originally the head-side of the animal. Head and tail are retractable.

For rubbish cave environment (Enitia)

The environment had a lot of hostiles to deal with, for example the glass eater, the flesh eating plan and the plastic eater. Besides that, there was also a poisonous snake living in the garbage cave. Solution: a cardboard dog. This dog was fully made of cardboard and was able to hide for the snake by blending into the environment and fold itself to a cardboard box.

For the hot spring environment (Marieke)

In the landscape there are craters and hot springs. The steam condenses on the wall and then drips down. The animals should be able to bear great heat and moist. I assume there is not much light on this planet, so the animals might need different visual aids.

There are nutritious algae and mosses growing on the wall. In order to get to the food, the animal has to get to the wall. I decided my first animal has wings. It is a snake/worm like creature with wings. It can suck the food of the wall.
There is also an animal which hasn’t got wings. In order to get to the food he places himself on top of a hot spring and waits for it to erupt. The animal will fly up, and during this flight it will flap it’s petal shaped legs up and so can suck itself to the wall. This animal doesn’t have eyes, it ‘sees’ through echo-location.

For All-round environment (Tomas)

The Grazer

On the grass lands of this environment live large hurdes of grazers. Firm and big creatures which protect themselves by staying together and use their horns for fighting of predators.
They have such large bellies because they only live on grass and therefore have multiple stomachs.

The Fly

Due to the hot temperatures on the rocks this fly has many wings. In these wings the fly circulates his blood, which helps him to stay cool.

These flies live of the blood of the grazers. Every evening they fly out of their homes in the cool caves and circle around on the grasslands to feed on the sleeping grazers.
They are on the menu of multiple other animals, but because there are so many of them around, this doesn't have effect on their population.

The Reptile

Living on the rocks to stay warm the reptile waits till the evening falls and the flies come out of their hiding. Once the flies exit their caves in large numbers the reptile uses his tail to confuse the flies and slap them out of the sky.
The reptile has a family member which can survive in much cooler atmospheres and lives in the grasslands. This one also lives of flies, but he catches them by climbing on the back of a sleeping grazer and waiting for the flies to land.

The Licker

A small but diverse creature living in between the rocks, thats the best way to describe a licker. Feeding on both reptiles, flies and grass this creature is never out of food to eat. However because they have rather large fat reserves, they are a juicy meal for a predator.

In order to escape from his predator he runs fast between the rocks using his tail for stability and steering. He runs slower than the predators, but because he is much more flexible he can easily outrun them in the rocky parts of the land.
Their most vulnerable moments are when they come out of the rocks to eat grass. Even though they never go far away from their save heaven, they often get eaten when they are out on the grass.

In order to eat the use their long tung to grab insects, grass and reptiles. However, the reptiles are bigger and harder to catch, so you often see the lickers struggling and stamping on reptiles, before they can eat them.

The Predator

Crawing through the grass goes the most dangerous creature of the lands. The predator uses the long grass for cover and surprises his prey. It's a rather fast sprinter, but it can't run very long.

It mostly feeds on lickers, but when it sees a possibility it also tries to grab a young grazer. Both of his preys will outrun them if they aren't killed instantaneously, therefore it has developed great sneaking skills and is almost soundless when crawling.

For Factory environment (Luuk)

This is a day in the life of Volatilis Ulterius, the flying fart.

Volatilis ulterius lives inside industrial chimneys near the sea. At night, it hangs from its leash, a strong chord attached to the inside of a chimney. While it sleeps, it breathes in deadly gases but instead of getting poisoned by them, Volatilis ulterius filters out the poisoneous parts of the air and saves it inside its balloon-like body.

When day breaks, Volatilis ulterius spreads its umbrella-like wings and floats up with the hot air in the chimney, leaving its leash anchored inside the chimney.

When Volatilis ulterius lands, it searches for holes created by worms. When it finds one, it inserts its backside in the hole and releases the deadly gases it collected last night.

After a while of inhaling the gas, the worm dies and Volatilis ulterius eats it with its backside.

When Volatilis ulterius is done eating, it reels itself by rolling up its leash. When it's back inside the chimney, it goes to sleep.

For where the city meets nature (Mai)

The creatures in the urban environment are created by trash which we can find everywhere. Basically, the creatures are small robots made of different electric and household appliances which combine and disguise themselves as trash so they can survive on the street. They can choose their own parts to adapt to the environment. For example, their hands can be made of suction cup to climb the wall or scissors to cut the grass on their way.

For the ice environment (Elien)

Living in an environment which is extremely cold asks for innovative ways to move. Several possibilities were explored:

Two irons form the base of this creature, like on a sledge. The tail enables the creature to move by flapping in and out.

This creature is living on the iceberg. It fastens itself to the surface by hammering or drilling his paws into the ice. He more or less crawls up to the iceberg.

On the ice it is hard to move around because of the extreme cold, sometimes bumpy surface. This animal has a heater in the bottom, which results in a smooth surface. The vans on the side of the animal can turn on and off, resulting in the animal moving in the opposite direction than the van.

This animal can live anywhere on the ice. It has paws with little flat surfaces at the end. The animal wets this part of the paw before putting it down. Then it will freeze onto the ice which will give him support to lift his other paws. Releasing the paws is made possible by shortly heating it.

Phantasy week: Environments

These are the environments that were created on monday.

Hot springs (Luuk)

In this moon-like landscape, crater-shaped hot springs spit hot vaporized water in the air. The water condenses on the very tall vertical stone wall.

Ice World (Enitia)

It's icy, it's snowy and it's cold. The environment contains everything of your cold imagination, including penguins and snowmen. It has an iceberg, an ice shelf, cold water and dangerous sharks.

All-round environment (Eddy)

This Environment has a bit of everything. A sea, a mountain with a cave, stone pillars, a grass land and a broken tree.

Factory (Timo)

This environment is a Factory near the sea with enormous chimneys. It's accompanied by a palm tree and a mysterious white box.

Dried up land (Tomas)

This land is what remained after two suns vaporized all the water in the environment. Extreme heat, a lot of sand, a tree and a stranded boat.

Where the city meets nature (Elien)

This environment is found at the border between human cultivation and wild growth. At the cultivated side, there's a sidewalk, a trash can and a skateboard. At the wild side, there's grass, trees and plants.

The rubbish cave (Marieke)

This cave is formed out of rubbish. There is a plastic-eating plant, a meat-eating plant and a poisonous snake. In the sky a glass monster is patrolling. The snake is the protector of the cave. There is a moderate climate.

Jungle (Mai)

Inside this jungle environment, there lives a big plant that lures flies inside and EATS THEM!

Phantasy week: progress so far

A series of posts will follow, going into detail about the progress made in the past two project days. This week is phantasy week. The goal: come up with a story and environment that provide a starting point for designing our critters.

On monday, we individually designed environments and physicalized them. Then, each student was assigned one of those environments and was to design a creature that fitted it. We then evaluated what aspects of an environment can have the best design opportunities.

Thursday was story day. Where do our creatures come from? Why do they exist? What is their relation to us humans? These questions were all to be answered in a story about the history of our creatures. Each of us wrote a story and read it to the group. We then evaluated which stories were best and more importantly: why.

The most Exquisit Cadavres

Just to archive our creativity: some of the cadavres we have been creating

Why do we collect?

Ask a random person if he ever collected something, and his answer is yes. From flippo's to pokemon cards, or shells of every place you've visited. Some people only collect temporary, and are not motivated enough to keep collecting. Whilst others collections seem more an obsession than a simple hobby. But why do we collect?

One fervent collector of historical documents refers to his own collecting propensity as “a genetic defect”. More likely, collecting is a basic human instinct; a survival advantage amplified by eons of natural selection.

The most common reasons people collect things include:

1. Knowledge and learning
2. Relaxation and stress reduction
3. Personal pleasure (including appreciation of beauty, and pride of ownership)
4. Social interaction with fellow collectors and others (i.e. the sharing of pleasure and knowledge)
5. Competitive challenge
6. Recognition by fellow collectors and perhaps even non-collectors
7. Altruism (since many great collections are ultimately donated to museums and learning institutions)
8. The desire to control, possess and bring order to a small (or even a massive) part of the world
9. Nostalgia and/or a connection to history
10. Accumulation and diversification of wealth (which can ultimately provide a measure of security and freedom)

These reasons match with the personal motivations of the group namely:

- memories
- awareness of culture
- status
- competition
- friendship
- beauty

Thus, make our product worth a competition and beautiful. Making it to sell over the whole world includes the culture aspect and indirectly the status, and making you memorize where you've been and all the good things you have done there.

Yes, our product is going to sell! :P

Activites week 1

Day 1 Fr 5-2-2010

On the first encounter of the theme next nature a lecture was given about what the theme is about, and who are responsible inside the theme.
This lecture included aspects which also can be found on the next nature blog .

The team got introduced to each other, and also a coach acquaintance founded place.
After the acquaintance we were put on an assignment for to present the afternoon.

In the afternoon we made our own Cadvre Exquise. This was done in 3 separate groups ( 2 of three and one of two people), each group creating a separate part. Afterwards we combined these on the computer. During the presentations each group presented their part and we revealed the result at the end. The coaches were happy to see that we really thought out these parts and what function they have in the body. Then we watched the other presentations and afterwards had a quick word with the Coach about meetings and about his opinion on our cadavre.

Day 2 Mo 8-2-2010

The first day of the project we started with a small introduction of ourselves. We discussed our goals and skills. We made some agreements about working hours and gave the leading role to Eduard. We created an email-account to store all documents and pictures created during the project. Luuk will be the webmaster of our blog: cadavreex.blogspot.com.

In the afternoon we divided into two groups: one for the purpose/goal of the device and one for the technical part of the device. The technical group brainstormed about functionality of the body parts and how to connect them. They had meeting with Mark de Graaf about centralized and decentralized embodied intelligence.
The purpose group came up with a lot of questions to be answered about the purpose of the product.
After this everyone individually described what they thought at that point what the product should be like.

Day 3 Th 11-2-2010

We started again with a Cadavre Exquis. Doing this every day will keep us sharp and is a good warm-up session. Because an Expert meeting with Rene Ahn was planned later that morning we tried a small brainstorm to make up some questions we could ask him. We concluded that it is still too early in the project to ask specific questions so we decided just to explain the project and see what the Expert had to say about it. As we all know experts like to talk about things they know and so he did.

Some notes:

-Calling the parts “Head”, “Torso” and “Limbs” already creates restrictions. Jellyfish don’t have heads.

-Connection is of course not only physical. Components have to talk to each other on some way. A way to do that if you don’t know what the other is going to do with it is having feedback sensors talking back to another component which will then judge if the component is doing ok or not.

-Why make the robot move/walk? It can also be a static robot interacting with its environment.

-Make small things. Bigger things are harder to make.

-Important: Create the robot its environment. This way you already make some unconscious agreements on requirements and options.

On Thursday afternoon we did the Belbin test to define team roles (Eddie has the results). After that, we searched for videos, images and websites as sources of inspiration. Then we planned "to-do list" for the following weeks. We'll brainstorm about the ideas of the robot in week 8 and go into details about the platform during the next two weeks. We planned have paper prototypes to prove our ideas in the mid-term presentation. To finish, we evaluated the whole week a bit and will continue it on Friday.