Big news: Emily and I are engaged. Two weeks ago while we were upstate apple-picking with some friends, I proposed and Emily said yes. And before you ask, no, we haven’t set a date or a place yet.

Flickr set: apple pickin’

This trumps all other news but it doesn’t get me out of doing a proper post. What else? I’ve been very (good) busy with work for the past couple months, beginning with a major project for us: the audio, video and lighting design for an art installation by William Pope.L at Hauser & Wirth gallery. We spent large chunks of August and September collaborating with Pope.L on the design and the producer Adi Nachman on making it all happen (both of whom were great to work with), and installing everything at the gallery. The installation closed on Saturday, October 24th, after a successful five week run, and I’m told that attendance was usually about 100 visitors/day and much higher on peak days.

Happy New Year! It’s been almost two months since I last posted so I thought I would wrap up 2008 with a quick update of what I’ve been doing lately.

Work. The autumn was tough. Plenty of gigs dropped off my calendar as the economic freakout affected my clients. As a result, I found myself having to hustle for more work and new clients. That sort of business development doesn’t come naturally for me so it was, at times, a painful learning process. Thankfully I had Emily by my side, goading me on when I needed a prod and giving me good advice.

Programming. I invested a lot of my copious free time in professional development by digging into learning Objective-C (and Cocoa), which, for the 98% of the planet that knows nothing about programming, is a programming language that is, basically, the preferred language for writing applications for Mac OS X. I had tons of help from several generous friends — you know who you are and I can’t thank you enough. I got involved in one big open source project that we’ll be announcing fairly soon. For me, 2008 was The Year I Became a Real Programmer. It feels good.

Super++ Family Times FTW. Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays with my family and Emily’s, respectively, were delightful.

This felt like it was shaping up to to be a full Year in Review post but now I can’t think of what else to say and I have stuff to do. Maybe I’ll add to this later.

dan & em before the wedding, originally uploaded by ekornblut (for more of our trip photos, click on this link or the picture above).

Just got back from a lovely vacation in Fort Worth, TX, Eugene and Portland, OR. Emily’s cousin Sarah got married in Fort Worth, hence the new suit! Beautiful wedding, wonderful people. Eugene: wonderful family, beautiful country, good times. Portland: good hotel, beautiful city, wonderful company. Inching myself back into work mode now like a hot tub. Or maybe a cold shower. :X

Beautiful new site design by Mary Ann! It’s been in seekrit development for some time now. Thanks for putting it up, MA.

The video below is a brief excerpt of my 35 minute set with DJ Olive at {R}ake last week. Olive played a beautiful ambient set. I did live visuals on all four screens, mixing together new HD footage (@800×450) shot with my new HV20, mixed in a custom application built in Jitter with the v001 system. vade graciously recorded my set and I’ve posted the whole thing to the Internet Archive.

Alternate versions and downloads

• Download this excerpt as a Quicktime for iPhone and iPod Touch
• Watch a streaming version of the whole show
• And the whole 35 minute video will be available in 1080p HDV soon — VJ historians, take note.

Spam is the I Ching of our millenium.

I had a fan moment today. A friend of mine is working with a hiphop artist I really, really dig. I ran into them today and told the artist I liked his music. So fumbly, these moments. I tend to think back on the lack of eye contact. Why? To be seen; to speak; to see; to be heard. Which of them is the operator in these encounters with recording artists? To be present; to be in the presence of.

I saw Flipped Chips at Galapagos tonight, a show of video art by contemporary artists and pioneers like Nam June Paik, Bill Etra and Matthew Schlanger. Works that stood out to me: Matthew Schlanger (beautiful synthesis, all built from oscillators); Karl Klomp, with music by toktek (simple distortion of a vid of a dog, triggered by audio, the results seemed so violent); Jon Satrom (nice sprite rip stuff with a sense of humor); Defanti/Sandin (really pretty and mesmerizing math psychedelia with a charming how-we-do-it video at the beginning); noteNdo / Johnny Beverley 1989! / Jeff, who I played with at the big chiptunes show back in October (excellent textures from hacking the NES). And there was a great Bit Shifter track with Jeff’s video. Speaking of which, Bit Shifter has a new album out and so does David Sugar!

Man I’m tired.

Anyway, to finish up — great stuff. It drove this home:

• it’s all simple things added together. no magic.
• minds are pattern recognition engines.
• the best stuff is elusive and evocative.

Also, I had a fun idea for projections @ Galapagos that I’m going to bounce off of CJ. Now I can crash. Thank Jeebus. I’m still not recovered from the end of the semester pushzzzzzz….

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.

My show with Chris Jordan at Monkeytown last night went really well. We had a good turnout despite the blizzard. The band we played with, This Invitation, was really good: languid, somewhat brooding, slowcore guitar music, kind of like Low. I was doing brushwork that Chris mixed into his visuals, overlaying or underlaying my brush strokes on cityscapes, panoramas, and what looked like microorganisms. There were some really good moments; I really like collaborating with a passthrough like that. Unfortunately, our shipment of battery-powered slide projectors did not arrive in time so we will be doing the audience participation show next time.