Begegnung

“It is raining. Let this book therefore be, before all else, a book about ordinary rain. Malebranche wondered ‘why it rains upon sands, upon highways and seas’, since this water from the sky which, elsewhere, waters crops (and that is very good), adds nothing to the water of the sea, or goes to waste on the roads and beaches.”

— Althusser, Louis. Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978-87.

Althusser says. Every encounter in nature has no intention or purpose. Nature is never created by material alone, nature is formed by a lot of encounter and the the sounds produced by the various encounters create natural harmonies. How then can we explain the human intentional encounter? Is it human intervention in nature or a phenomenon as being a part of nature? With these questions, the project deals with the accidental encounters of nature and the intentional encounters of humans.

On a rainy day we see raindrops on the glass in the car and also hear the sounds of rain and glass when they meet. The encounter between raindrops and glass is a coincidence. And we turn on the wiper to wipe the raindrops. The encounter between the raindrops and the wipers is intentional. Through this accidental and intentional encounter, the machine produces a harmonious sound.

The machine is driven by an wiper and a wiper motor. The motor is equipped with a raspberry pie 3 board and measures the position of the raindrop through the camera. The measured position values of the raindrops is converted to a specific note through the Harmonic Table Note Layout. When the wiper meets the raindrops on the glass, it emits the specified sound from the pure data. The measurement of positions of the raindrops was used with ofxCvPiCam OpenCV Library. Harmonic Table Note Layout has been implemented with Openframeworks.