Final Artist Creation for Digital Media: Sound and Image

For our final project in Digital Media, we were given the freedom to choose what we wanted to do as long as it went along with the course theme: sound and image. One of the workshops we had in class involved this thing called "Circuit Bending." Circuit bending is when you take the circuitry out of a anything that makes noise (most commonly kids toys) and find points on the circuit board that distort or warp the sounds. When the points are found you add a switch to those points and then you play around with that. I had never heard of this before and I really enjoyed it. So I wanted to include that in my final. I also enjoy 3D modeling and was disappointed when there wasn't a project for that this semester. So I decided to 3D model a hollow dome, circuit bend some kids toys, then combine them all into the thing shown above. I added a button and switch for each toy and wired them all to play from an audio jack plugged into an amp. The circuit bending portions of the project went well, it was only when I started trying to fit them inside the model when wires start ripping out and I had to solder them in very awkward positions. As far as the modeling portion went, though the model was only a dome, it had a great deal of issues printing and took an entire weekend to construct, which luckily I wasn't pressed for time. When it came down to making holes for the switches to come out of, a very large drill bit and some manual adjustments finally lead to the sizing that I could work with. I did run into an issue when I had to figure out how to close the model.In order to get my circuits to work outside of their original toys I needed to craft battery packs. One of the battery packs wouldn't fit within a ball shape, so I had to distort the two halves. Which I actually like the new shape because it makes the device sit better in my hands. I chose the colors of the domes to represent those of a poke ball because not only did one of the circuit bent toys sound exactly like a selection tone from the very first pokemon games but since I was taking apart current kids toys it only felt right to put them into something that resembled my childhood.