My allergies started two nights ago. The allergen index is high and the predominant pollens are oak, birch and maple. I always forget this stuff so for future reference and so on and so forth. That is all.

In other news, I’m performing a work in progress at Share this Sunday. Writing the Max patches for it has been quite satisfying. The big challenge is writing the video step sequencer*. I’m finding the logical stuff just as fun as the video manipulation.

We’re hosting DrupalCamp at Poly this weekend. Anton and I are hosting/representing IDMI, but I’ll probably be spending a lot of time hiding and working on my patches. :-/

And furthermore, there’s great stuff going on at Issue Project Room this Friday but I can’t go. Perhaps you can go. Think about it.

* Mom and Dad, this means something that plays through a bunch of videos in sequence automatically. It’s trickier than it sounds, especially if you want it to be dynamic, e.g., play them in random order or with crossfades.

Written yesterday. I’m at the New School, doing an all-day webcast for the India China Institute’s big conference, which brings to mind Ross’s recent post about educational webcasts and archiving. The New School Online is a great initiative and it gets the job done, though I wish they’d chosen open source technologies instead of Real and the need for a CMS grows as each event gets added to the hand-coded archives. I’ve yet to learn how much traffic they actually get, but I figure it’s small yet growing. As each month (not year) goes by, more and more activities — economic and cultural — make use of telecollaborative tech like streaming video meetings, wikis and such. One of our selling points to parents for Kids Connect is that their children will have a leg up in the small, loosely organized, distributed businesses of tomorrow* by playing and experimenting with video performance and virtual (Second Life) collaboration. I’m going to get a prototype working environment set up in Second Life as soon as possible. I’m looking forward to Ross and other educators asking hard questions and shredding my assumptions so our workshops in SL can be truly valuable, not just buzzword inclusion.

Speaking of truly valuable places in Second Life, check out _blacklibrary, a cultural center slash micro-publisher. They host fiction, non-fiction, games, graphic novels, and art including sculpture. They’re going to distribute my comic.

* And no, that’s not THE LAND OF THE FUTURE with food pills and shiny jumpsuits — it’s…well, 10 minutes from now.

Alright, you asked for it. And by ‘you’ I mean ‘me’, because, honest to jeebus, I’m really writing all of this for myself+20years. I’ve decided to braindump every night into this meager webvessel. Let Dan+20 cringe at my horrocious puns (see above x 3).

Tonight I prepped for my presentation in Media History tomorrow. Over-prepared, I should say, because I’ll probably only have twenty minutes to talk, seeing as there are three presentations and it’s the last class of the semester. It’s been good. Our professor Deborah Levitt I esteem most highly. She chose very illuminating readings.

This really is every thought that comes to me, a free writing thing. Except if I censor it afterwards to protect my interests (in case someone in particular reads this, e.g., the franchised citizenry + 20 years).

I’m preparing my final project for my Max class with Josh Goldberg. We’re in total agreement that I should do something entirely different from brush. I’m going to make a visual step sequencer that’ll take in streaming media, live camera or QT movies, buffer them and allow dynamic timelining/sequencing. I’m going to force myself to use GPU processing (jit.gl.slab) for effects, except in those situations where the CPU’s faster. Anton — who taught a fantastic Max/MSP workshop today, by the way, just totally on point — and I will be performing at the Bunker at SubTonic* in a couple weeks, i.e., as our final project. As long as it’s cool with Anton and doesn’t make a lot of extra work for him, I’d like to make my patches be modules in vade//, his (excellent) performance app. I will, of course, share my patches, yup yup, always on the Share mission, me.

Now to bed, to the hypnodrome, may the hypnagogues grant me entry, to cuddle with thrice great Hermes…

* run by the wonderful Chris Jordan and Giles Hendrix.

O, to be asleep instead of writing at 2:11 AM. O, alack this brain of mine.

The long and short, quickly: got back from Texas on Sunday. Four of us Share people went down to setup a Share jam at the Media Archaeology Festival at Aurora Picture Show. Went great, saw and met many wonderfully sweet people. Pics to come on the Share site.

The big news: my thesis has changed. A great opportunity fell in my lap; things folded together. I sat in on a net conference call two weeks ago and whiff-boom-bang! I’m suddenly co-organizing and teaching Kids Connect, a series of summer workshops for kids in theatrical and technological collaboration, sponsored by ZoomLab, the Waag Society and Polytechnic University. It brings together a lot of my interests and goals — it gelled quickly, a total no-brainer. One thing I brought to the table is the still relatively untapped potential for education and performance in Second Life and it’s that which is keeping me up brainstorming right now. What would make a compelling indigenous performance in Second Life? That is, one that is not virtual set dressing for a real life performance but a truly virtual performance that couldn’t be done in meatspace.

Wandering through SL, I’m struck again and again by how meatoid it is. Virtual human bodies walking on two legs and seeing with one eye. Houses with four walls as if there were a need for load-bearing members. It seems to me that an indigenous, exciting Second Life performance ought to be code-intensive (possibly generative), interactive, and transformative — literally body-changing — warping your avatar, multiplying and distributing its eyes and ears. Kaleidescopic eyes as big as houses. Think a live machinima of The Matrix: The Musical! with Vishnu as Neo, dance numbers choreographed by the mutant child of Busby Berkeley and Chris Cunningham). Hopefully this silly hyperbole sounds more exciting to you than listening to streaming audio while watching a jerky animation of a guy playing a guitar.

Not that I’m no longer into Real Life/Second Life performances, of course.

Maybe I can get to sleep now.

p.s.

Inworld I’m Dan Magpie and here’s a link to my land.

I added record functionality*, drag ‘n’ drop movie loading, and made the camera start process a bit simpler. Not too much really, but it’s a better patch. Let me know if you use it — I’d love to see screenshots or movies of your work.

Get brush 0.1.2

* from a patch called Simple Mix by Peter Nyboer in the Jitter examples folder. Thanks for the great patch, Peter!

Since Daniel Smith called it excellent, I thought I’d post this explanation of SHARE that I sent to a Houston Press journalist last night, just in case any y’all are confused. (Notice the “y’all”? I never used to say that when I lived in Texas — I made a point of it. I’m a bit less uptight than I was in high school. A bit.)

SHARE hosts open jams for audio and visual artists. Anyone can come and participate. We provide the infrastructure: multichannel audio mixing and amplification, video projectors and screens, and the expertise to help first-timers learn the basics of audio and visual performance. Share is completely content-agnostic: you can play anything you want on any instrument you can carry in. No structure is imposed on the jam by the Share team. Rather, we encourage structure to emerge from the participants in the jam. Although our audio infrastructure is designed to allow electronic musicians play together, people bring many different kinds of instruments, from traditional/acoustic to electronic to homemade to far-out. No one conducts or actively mixes the sound so the performers communicate the old-fashioned way: by listening to each other and following the flow of the improvisation. Some people prepare extensively, laying down tracks at home to try them out in the mix at Share. Others do almost no pre-recording or pre-structuring apart from practice — like jazz musicians.

I’ve seen Share participants make sound with violins, cellos, laptops, guitars, double basses, lutes, Gameboys, hand drums, kit drums, contact microphones affixed to plastic waterfalls, homemade noiseboxes, analog synthesizers, microphones, circuit-bent toys, keyboards, beatbox, voice, and something in a bright green custom fiberglass body called the Green Bean*. Likewise, the video participants use laptops, cameras, movie clips, film, slide projectors, flashlights, lightboxes, custom screens, DVD players, paper dioramas and more. Then there’s the really far out stuff: motion and light sensors worn by dancers, communicating their movements to audio and visual performers who use the sensor data to affect the sound and light. The distinction between media gets blurred. The separation between performer and audience breaks down and changes.

That’s not the half of it, of course.

* Made by Randy Jones. Really nice guy. Very helpful on the Max/MSP/Jitter mailing lists.

Another in a series of argh posts, dear reader…

Marisa Olson, whom I had the pleasure to meet at a Rhizome event a couple months ago for which I did tech stuff, curated a show at the Scope Art Fair two weeks ago called All Systems Go!, which I missed. ARgh. And now that I’ve read all about the cool art in her show on her blog, double argh. For example,

Brody Condon’s 650 Polygon John Carmack (Version 2.0) is a low polygon likeness of the famous game engine programmer John Carmack, of ID Software. The sculpture is an appropriated portrait of Carmack from the game Quake III, CNC milled in polyurethane, and textured with hundreds of hand placed inket decals.

and

The photos in [dNASAb]‘s series, Obscure Sexual Habits of Wireless Data are unique hybrids inspired by his pursuit to visualize and create the possible aesthetics of wireless data, and the invisible, complex systems of overlapping networks.

ARgh, dear reader, arGH. I blame my roommate. Wanna go see an art show, I said to my roommate (let’s call him “Erick” because that’s his name). Eh maybe, said Erick, I’m tired. It was all I could do to get him to leave the house, and then we ended up doing something else. Foul, wicked roommate! There’s so much good work out there; I should really leave the house more often.

Also

from Marisa’s blog, good net art.

We knew (I knew!) we had never been modern, but now we are even less so: fragile, frail, threatened; that is, back to normal, back to the anxious and careful stage in which the “others” used to live before being “liberated” from their “absurd beliefs” by our courageous and ambitious modernization. Suddenly, we seem to cling with a new intensity to our idols, to our fetishes, to our “factishes,” to the extraordinarily fragile ways in which our hand can produce objects over which we have no command. We look at our institutions, our public spheres, our scientific objectivity, even our religious ways, everything we loved to hate before, with a somewhat renewed sympathy. Less cynicism, suddenly, less irony. A worshipping of images, a craving for carefully crafted mediators, what the Byzantine called “economy,” what used to simply be called civilization.

||

from ICONOCLASH (html + pdf)

Been interested in the downtown music and visual scene but just don’t have a lot of time to investigate? Take a crash course for just $30 this Monday night as a phenomenal array of more than sixty downtown artists come together to benefit David Linton of UnityGain at Tonic. What, you’ve gotta work ’til nine? Then see the latter part of the show for just $10.

As the guy behind Unity Gain, David Linton has been making video art and supporting video artists since before I was born. Come out and see a phenomenal array of downtown audio and visual artists blow the roof off Tonic. Come see Eric Bogosian and Kate Valk, Diamanda Galas and Shelley Hirsch, Koosil-ja and Lance Blisters and many, many more. If you saw these artists individually you’d probably end up paying a thousand bucks. See them all Monday for $30 (or $10 for just the Subtonic events).

David Linton’s New York 5.0

A 50-year celebration and benefit at Tonic (107 Norfolk St. between Rivington & Delancey, NYC)
Monday, March 20, 2005 8 pm till late
Full info at http://www.unitygain.org/benefit

part I : ‘PARTNERS IN TIME’ featuring live performances by

Diamanda Galas, Christian Marclay/Ikue Mori/Anthony Coleman, Lee Ranaldo, Eric Bogosian, Matthew Ostrowski, Shelley Hirsch/David Weinstein, Kate Valk (of The Wooster Group), Koosil-ja, Charles Atlas, Hahn Rowe with Raz Mesinai, and the Alien Comic. With Master of Ceremonies John Gernand and closing remarks by “Sally Rand”(Toni Dove).

part II : UnityGain

The legendary electronic soiree ‘UnityGain’ follows immediately in the Tonic main space @ 11:15 pm featuring live collaborative audio visual performances by:

Audio artists – Charles Cohen, Antfactor, qpe, Lloop, Warbulator (Jodi Shapiro), Doily, Bubblyfish, Glomag, David Last, Brian Moran, Gen Ken Montgomery, Zach Layton and Bruce Tovsky. Visual artists – Benton-C, Angie Eng, Bill Etra, c.h.i.a.k.i., feedBUCK GaLORE, Naval Cassidy, Andy Graydon, Giles Hendrix, Adam Kendall, Katherine Liberovskaya, Lu(x)z, Peter Shapiro, Caspar Stracke, CHiKA.

part III : Nought for Naught

From 9 pm on ‘Nought for Naught’ in the Subtonic Lounge offers a packed roster of DJ, VJ & live audio-visual performers into the wee hours, featuring:

Aerostatic, Darryl Hell, Danny Hamilton, DJ $mall Change, DJ Spinoza, Firehorse, Jason BK (Blackkat), Toshio Kajiwara, Lance Blisters (AV), LoVid (AV), Socks and Sandals;Chris Jordan, Eric Dunlap, Eric Redlinger, Dan Vatsky and Dan Winckler, and Jeremy Slater.

Background

In celebration of the fiftieth birthday of David Linton, downtown music pioneer, Tonic has donated its space for an entire evening of performances by musicians and artists who have worked with Linton over the past twenty-five years.

Unfortunately, David’s birthday has been darkened by a most distressing event: he was recently robbed in his home at knifepoint, emerging fortunately unscathed, but losing all of his equipment, which sadly contained much of his recent work. In order to recoup the loss of what can be replaced, and salute his talents and contributions to music in New York, his friends and collaborators through the years are joining together for a night of multimedia performances on March 20th. We hope you can join us, to both celebrate his work and help make it possible for him to continue it.

Tickets

Tickets are $30.00 for the full evening including: ‘PARTNERS IN TIME’, ‘UNITYGAIN’ and ‘NOUGHT for NAUGHT’. $10.00 for ‘UNITYGAIN’ and ‘NOUGHT for NAUGHT’ only.

Advance tickets recommended; available now at Tonic (107 Norfolk Street) and Other Music (15 East 4th Street). Cash only tickets will be sold at the door on March 20, 2006 subject to availability.

For updates check http://www.unitygain.org/benefit.

BENEFIT ONLINE ART AUCTION

Monday March 6th – Monday March 27th, 2006

In consideration of David Linton’s commitment to multimedia and video art, the Outpost, a resource for artists in new media and video, is sponsoring an art auction as part of the benefit activities for David Linton’s NY 5.0. Works will be auctioned online at http://www.unitygain.org/auction, and all money raised will be contributed to the David Linton Recovery Fund.

Participating artists include Laura Parnes, Michael Smith, Ralph Lemon, Javier Tellez, John Brattin, Robert Boyd, Oliver Herring, Barbara Ess, Johanna Malinowska, Andrew Sutherland and Caspar Stracke.

Private donations will be accepted at Tonic on March 20th by Stephanie Palmer. Questions regarding donations may be addressed to lintonbenefit@gmail.com.

http://unitygain.org/benefit/
http://unitygain.org/auction/
http://tonicnyc.com

Fuck me. Fuck me busy me.

I got home from seeing V for Vendetta tonight (excellent, chilling, apropos) to find my computer still playing WFMU. Some beautiful piano pieces in a peculiar tuning. Comes the station break and I find out who it was: some of Michael Harrison’s Music for Harmonically Tuned Piano. It rang a bell and I swore, fuck fuck fuck. Because I’d read about it in one of Keiko’s weekly recommendation emails. Because Harrison’s REVELATION: for Harmonically Tuned Piano was performed in its entirety at Experimental Intermedia on Thursday, while I was busy working for the New School and then coding Jitter patches. What is a harmonically tuned piano?

>In 1986, Harrison created the “harmonic piano,” an extensively modified seven-foot grand piano with the ability to alternate between two different tunings, thus creating the possibility to play 24 notes per octave on a conventional keyboard.

Here is a sample of Harrison’s work as I am sneaky sneaky.

Argh, again, argh. I could have seen the man himself performing for 90 minutes for $15! Anywho, speaking of being things you shouldn’t miss if you value your ability to not say fuck a lot, I’m performing Monday night with 60+ other artists to benefit David Linton, a friend and pillar of the NY art world. See above.