Loud Tweets
Another version of the Tweet Bubble Series: Loud Tweets. While I was putting together the concept for the whole project I said in the very beginning: ‘Everything but no LEDs!!!’. LED scroll bars are just too much the cliche of everything. Too much advertising, disco, show off and cheapness (and too much Jenny Holzer ;-). And there are already a couple of T-shirts with LED scroll tags on the market.
But then we ended up starting on this never the less. Simon did the hack with this LED name badge I got at eARTS festival Shanghai. An Arduino board does a simulated 3 button thumb press input. So each tweet is programmed letter by letter which takes a while pull a tweet from the web. And I liked that emulating human cheap device interaction. The next step would have been to connect the badge to a GSM/GPRS Arduino to make it standalone without PC but I stopped it here. The simplicity would have been lost and in the and the price to make it a standalone device was not in relation to the cheapness factor any more.
I preferred to keep it like this and to walk it in the city. I like a lot the big ad bars or train info displays next to the personal twitter feed ad. Blink blink city signage in relation to personal show off ad bar in small scale.
Tweet Bubble Series 'Loud Tweets' from Aram Bartholl on Vimeo.