The Creative Peripherals Project is, as you can likely tell from this rudimentary site, a fledgling idea. But it's a good one.
The impetus for it came from these questions: where is the Universal in USB? Why are there no interesting peripherals which tap the unused power of today's networked desktop systems? Why are there no experimental interfaces, conceptual products or tiny sculptures that capitalize on the promise of USB?
My name is Bruce Cannon. I'm a San Francisco Bay Area artist working with electronics and computer control. I have begun trying to address the above questions by developing a series of prototypes which explore some of the untapped potential of USB on the desktop, and will hopefully help open up this area of exploration for artists and experimenters.
Most of these works are so rudimentary at this point that I can only show you a pic or two and describe what they will ultimately do. And this site too is merely a placeholder for the multi-author public exchange portal that such an idea set needs to flourish.
The long term goal is to design an open platform, including a hardware interface standard, a series of communication protocols, and a software base, which will foster the development of novel interfaces which extend the capabilities of the desktop in as-yet unheard-of ways.
The underlying philosophy of this project is the creation of focused points of reference which stand in conceptual opposition to the comprehensive goals of the desktop. In other words, the paradigm of the desktop computer, and many consumer objects today, is to try and do everything. Yet the tools that we know and love throughout history have been those that we intuitively comprehend and that do only one thing, but do it well.
Brian Eno put it best perhaps: "The trouble begins with a design philosophy that equates 'more options' with 'greater freedom'. Designers struggle endlessly with a problem that is almost nonexistent for users ... With tools, we crave intimacy."
I plan to construct a series of hardware objects and make them available as kits, and also make their designs available for further development or remote production.
I also plan to produce a series of simple protocols and several demo software apps which will exercise and demonstrate the basic idea behind each prototype. Likewise, this software will be open source.
Finally I plan to make all this available on an open collaborative site, and hope for extensive collaborative development with the creative, engineering, hacking and tinkering communities.
Please subscribe to my mailing list if you'd like me to keep you posted about developments here. And please do drop me an email if you'd like to get involved with this project in a constructive way!
If you'd like to see what other kinds of things I do with my time, you're welcome to also visit my gateway site, which links to the many different types of projects I've currently got going.
Thanks for visiting!
Another brucecannon.com special project!
