Maria Mendez

Brick Screen is a site-specific video installation consisting in a projection structure made of 120 brick-shaped mini-screens dispersed between 5 planes of depth. The software developed in Max/Jitter control the projection display in each one of the bricks. This project was developed for the Jose Gilbert Ramirez community park in Bushwick, Brooklyn.

BrickScreen is meant to discuss the ever-changing cultural landscape of Bushwick. Like the social complexities of a transitional neighborhood, is multi-faceted, with five separate viewing planes, none of which are the same. When surrounding noise increases, the screen reacts, as its content breaks into fragmented, pixelated images, reflecting the affectation of influx and deflux of the gentrification process.

In collaboration with Ana Gutierrez and Rucyl Mills

Rama is a processing application that uses stochastic L-systems to generate a plant growth simulation that resemble hand made botanically precise illustrations.

Inspired by observations from botanical illustrations the projects aims to create a visualization of a natural process that is focus on the aesthetic of the representation with certain level of abstraction and not in a hyperrealist render.

Lindenmayer systems (L-systems) are mathematical descriptions of plant development that are used for generating realistic images of plants.

Built with Processing

The Paint Bucket Tool is a physical computing project in which I use an Arduino microcontroller and a 3-axis accelerometer to build a drawing tool.

The idea is to control an application build in processing changing the rate of the sound and the position, scale, and color of forms with the manipulation of a physical bucket. The programming map a spiral to the changes of velocity in the Y axis of the Paint Bucket Object and place circles which position, color and scale are determined by the change of the velocity in the 3 axis. The change in the speed of movement in the Y-axis also controls the rate of the sound.

At first I was using the MMA 7260Q accelerometer but I couldn’t get consistent numbers. One of the problems trying to use the circuit as a “shake” sensor was to be able to have “stable” connections and data. The MMA 7260 works only in very controlled situations. (Loose wires can create false signals )

Finally I end up working with a ADXL3xx acceloremeter.