#Death

#Death was a collaboration project between myself, Shaune Oosthuizen and a group of first years on my course (Digital Art and Technology) at Plymouth University.

Using a combination of Arduino and Twitter, the project symbolises the worldwide concern of death.

Using a small Python script on a Raspberry Pi, we polled Twitter each minute for the newest tweets with the hashtag 'death'.

We stored the last ID of the tweets returned to offset the result, so we could not miscount how many tweets were new.
Based on the count of the new tweets, we send to an Arduino Uno, over serial, the number of tweets. The Arduino then looped with a delay over the number and sent a signal to a relay attached to a washing machine valve attached to a large barrel of water.

All of this was mounted into the ceiling of our studio. We had a piece of wood cut to the same dimensions of a ceiling tile with a hole for the valve to sit in.

This would then drop 'blood'/dyed water into a vase positioned underneath.