OSArc Manifesto

Exploring the intersection of digital collaboration and physical space anchored this interactive installation developed in collaboration between Carlo Ratti Associati and Fablab Torino. The project centered on building a large-scale vertical plotter that acted as a physical intermediary for an evolving online document. The work focused on embedded hardware, custom motor control, and translating live crowdsourced text from a Wikipedia page into dynamic vector paths drawn directly onto a gallery wall.

The hardware architecture relied on a custom polargraph system driven by an Arduino microcontroller and stepper motors. A minimal acrylic chassis housed the electronics, suspending a whiteboard marker across the wall via cords. To manage the data pipeline, a custom Processing application analyzed the live Wikipedia page, parsed the text, and generated vector coordinates. The embedded firmware then calculated the necessary motor movements to draw the text during the day, while a servo-driven rotating brush automatically erased the canvas each night.

Scaling the prototype for a massive exhibition wall introduced severe mechanical and software constraints. During the initial on-site deployment, the plotter produced chaotic, distorted trajectories instead of legible text. To debug the system without access to the physical machine, I built a custom software simulator to compare intended coordinates against the microcontroller's output. This revealed that the 16-bit integers used for trigonometric calculations were overflowing due to the expanded wall dimensions. Recompiling the firmware with 32-bit signed integers resolved the overflow and stabilized the motor control.

The finalized system operated continuously for two months without major mechanical failures. By physically rendering the additions and deletions of a collective online document, the machine successfully visualized the concept of open-source architecture. The installation was exhibited at the Istanbul Design Biennial as part of the Adhocracy exhibition curated by Joseph Grima, and its underlying architecture later served as the foundation for subsequent commercial hardware iterations.