Flask was achieved through participation in the Everyware module on the Digital Art & Technology undergraduate course at Plymouth University.
Brief
The task for this negotiated assignment is to create an interactive experience […] and manifest it into a working project. You may start by rethinking an entity of “reality” as an immaterial networked mediated process.
Concept
Flask is a bottle that collects data. It condenses streams of 1s and 0s and represents the quantity stored using light. It plays on the inherent affordances of its form to map real world actions to digital functions – its cork can be removed and replaced to start and stop the collection of data and its contents can be poured, at varying rates, onto a surface. If it had to be categorised as an artefact of everyware, it would fall under the umbrella of ambient information. For the purpose of demonstrating Flask we made it aware of its geo-location and instructed it to store localised social networking data from the cloud. In this form, Flask can be placed into an environment to become a passive window into realtime social networking activity.
Prototype
Technology
Flask is powered by the usual concoction of Arduino, Node.js and HTML5; glued together using the MQTT and WebSocket protocols.