About
What the heck is this?
This allows you to send a message to a physical e-ink display sitting on my desk.
WHY the heck is this?
I guess you could call it an art project. If I had to write an artist's statement about it, I'd say it's about the way we communicate with others in the age of computers. Or an exploration of anonymous communication in a digital age. Or the frustration of the seemingly one-sided communication of prayer to a higher power in a largely cold and uncaring world. Not that I'm comparing myself to any sort of god; I'm just a dude who hated writing artist statements when he was in art school.
How does it work?
You type a message and it gets sent through the magic of the
internet, where a little Raspberry Pi picks it up and renders
it to an e-ink display. You get to pick some font sizes and colors.
So that's cool.
It takes about 15 seconds from the time you submit your message to
the time it finishes rendering on my screen. It's pretty slow because
the seven-color e-ink display I have takes a very long time to work its
magic. That's why you might get a "device busy" page; somebody else
may have just sent a message that is still rendering.
When a new message comes in, it erases the old one entirely. Your
message is ephemeral, like picking up an Etch-a-Sketch and shaking
it, the image is wiped away forever. The server does not save old
messages; once it is gone, it is gone.
Why am I only limited to the colors provided?
The seven colors you can pick are the seven colors that the e-ink screen can display. You can pretty convincingly recreate many other colors on it by using dithering, but for the purposes of this project, I stuck to the ones that work out of the box.
Do all messages get read?
Nope. If you send a message while I'm not at my desk, and then somebody
else sends a message before I get back, I'll have missed your message.
There's no guarantee I see anything. In a sense you are shouting into a
void, and if the receptionist for the void happens to be at their desk at
that exact moment, they will make a note of it. But it's also a one-way
communication device by design, so the abyss won't be able to respond.
Whether or not you think that all of that is a good thing is up
to you.