Dear Mastodon, here is a small recap of my 2024 year.

Last year I have been working in a web agency that employed me to do research on interactive systems.

In the end, it was a mistake, because, I was asked to do more website than research (and god knows I don't like doing that, CSS kills my brain from boredom) (and by god I mean the god of nature, the only one I trust).

Anyway, now I am unemployed but that's ok. I visited Venice and Rome and filled my heart with beauty.

HOWEVER and this is the point of my first entry here, during the few hours I could work on a more experimental direction, I started looking into how we can create new interactive interfaces from reused material. And I decided to look into old smartphones.

This is how Zombitron was born :)

Zombitron is a tool that connects together different smartphones (all OS, all versions, because all web based) so they can communicate together and become a new musical instrument.

You can read more here :
https://www.clararigaud.fr/en/projects/2024-zombitron/

And ask me questions ofc.

My intern, Marion Jolas and I were able to build two prototypes of musical instruments, only made from reused material !

We were invited by Villette Makerz in paris to be part of the "Experimenter et transmettre" residency.

The first prototype called Zombitronica, is designed it with a basic flightcase and a lasercut piece of plastic (not ideal I know but it is a prototype and it was interesting to be able to see what's underneath).

4 phones connected together on a local network fed by one of the smartphones.
One of them generates music while the others send their sensor data through websocket.

Live demo: https://vimeo.com/970251904

The latency is no existent because on this one, the server is on y computer.

The research directions also includes the way to make it a single object, such as we should not necessarily know that it has been made with phones !

Here is a preview of how we built the first proto : https://vimeo.com/995425565

More info and pictures here: (in french) https://www.zombitron.org/journaldebord/2024-07-21-premier-prototype-zombitronica/

The second prototype was drew by Marion Jolas and Romain Segaud , who also made the sound design and brought the great idea of making a replica of the Omnichord.

Zombichord is made with a tablet running android 5.0 and an Iphone 6 :)

(Credit goes to noesya)