connections
elsewhere on this site
Done, wow.
Posted on August 8th, 2006 by dan.
Categories: performing, secondlife, nyc, education, live visuals, Grad school.
Wow, done.
Eight 13 - 15 year old New York City students + five 19 - 21 year old Amsterdam students + 1 co-director + four assistant teachers (later, two and a half) + nine guest teachers + two Amsterdam teachers X (five weeks here | eight days there) + three-ish administrators + a whole lot of help from other people, especially Andres :), == quite a lot of work. Kids Connect workshops concluded on Friday. I’m stunned and delighted at the relatively huge quantity of free time I have now. Back to three squares + eight hours sleep + a social life (! surprise) + a whole lot of thesis writing to do, not to mention the proposals for the next Kids Connect workshop ~= relatively not as busy but quite busy and it’s a good thing I like being busy. 
I gave Carl and IDMI a little posable man as a token of our thanks (I find it amusing that his IKEA name is “Gestalta”). Carl got quite a giggle out of it. I’ve got three minutes left on the remorseless Pester before it’s back to writing thesis stuff…what to say. Hmm. My friend Adam Kendall gave me a DVD of some of his work the other night at the Speigel Tent EyeWash show. I have yet to watch it but it’s a beautifully crafted CD and jewel case so it allures me. Perhaps in 10 minutes or so Pester will give me a break to check it out….au’voir.
superDrawing
Posted on June 17th, 2006 by dan.
Categories: performing, nyc, music, programming, live visuals.
Josh Ott invited me to draw with him last night at Galapagos Art Space in Williamsburg. Josh has written a phenomenal live visual drawing program called superDraw which, surprisingly, I’ve never posted about before. At base it’s a drawing program: the performer draws with a Wacom tablet and the lines are transformed with beautiful effects, the list of which keeps growing and growing as Josh adds to the program. For some time now, it’s been capable of two performers drawing simultaneously, which is what we did last night, playing along with a phenomenal DJ (whose name I didn’t catch) and Mad EP — of Psychasthenia Society — who (dammit) I haven’t posted about before, either. It was thoroughly engaging and fun, like every time I’ve played superDraw with Josh. After much persuasion, it looks like I’ve talked him into considering porting superDraw to Max/MSP/Jitter. Anton discovered a relatively easy way to port Processing code to Jitter and we’re going to do a test port with part (all?) of superDraw — so clean up that code and send it over, Josh. 
The ever-engaging and delightful Chika played with the reggae/dance group after our set, with her increasingly engrossing textural, psychedelic visuals. Bravo, Chika. 
Bang
Posted on June 5th, 2006 by dan.
Categories: bloggage, nyc, music, live visuals.
I saw much of the Bang on a Can festival today. ‘Twas brillig. More on that tomorrow. An idea before I sleep: dance/visuals show; two dancers connected by rope lights, tying and wrapping them around each other like cat’s cradle; shot with a live camera; manipulated by a visualist.
Flexiprims: bendy goodness in Second Life
Posted on June 3rd, 2006 by dan.
Categories: secondlife, share, performing, nyc, art, programming, live visuals.
One of the new features in the latest version of Second Life is flexible prims — basically, now objects can bend — so I searched the Second Life fora to see what people are doing with them. The new version’s only been out for a week and a half and already there are some beautiful new flexible objects — some guy flew by me yesterday with a fantastic cape. nand Nerd had posted about his work so I went to check it out (visit his work, see some videos). nand showed me how it worked and lent me one of his objects for us to display on the Kids Connect island. Thanks to his and other residents’ generosity, we’ll have some great work to show our students the potential for creative building and scripting in SL. Check out the youTube videos linked above: I have a feeling Second Life is going to look a lot more organic pretty soon.
If all goes well, Eric, Anton and I will be doing some live machinima at Share tomorrow night. The plan is very lo-tech: Eric and I will move and look around Second Life at interesting things (nand’s work and others as well as the glitchy goodness you can find by zooming in very closely to things). Our fullscreen outputs will go to a Radio Shack video switcher, the output of which will go into a capture device into Anton’s machine, where he’ll manipulate it with vade, sending his output to Share’s screens and our live stream at share.dj. Check the left-hand side of the Share page around 8 pm EST tomorrow or watch the stream on my land in SL.
Fleet
Posted on May 25th, 2006 by dan.
Categories: shows, bloggage, nyc, music, live visuals, improvisation, Grad school.
It’s Fleet Week, apparently. Partying sailors abound. I was to see two shows tonight but the first one was so enthralling that I missed the second. So it goes. Adam Kendall did visuals for Roger Eno and Plumbline at Tonic: lovely music paired with absolutely brilliant visuals. Adam’s approach is very painterly and moving on a gut level. Since I saw his work for the first time two years ago, his craft has gotten better and better. Misty, melting, mnemonic melanges of powerful, personal films — see? Words don’t do it justice. Watch his Case Studies, which are fairly close to what he did tonight.
It was really cool to see a great pianist like Roger Eno play. He had a delicate touch and phrasing, well-placing his lines in Plumbline’s laptop work. He showed how you could improvise just outside the tonal structure of a (seemingly) fixed set of tracks, which is something that had stumped my imagination a bit when thinking about how to play piano in a Share jam with similar laptop musicians. And he watched Adam’s visuals closely. Thumbs up.
Aside to Adam: are you putting out 320 x 240? I’d love to see your stuff in higher res. Good reason to start incorporating those GPU shaders…
The show I missed was my friend Eli’s, which I wrote about earlier. Ah, well — next time (which is just what Eli said). He’s going on a solo tour this summer, hitting LA, Vancouver, Buffalo, and other places I can’t recall. If you like the tracks on his myspace and you know someone with a venue in the lower 48, drop Eli a line — he’ll probably be interested.
Challenges
Adam and Anton’s approaches seem similar and complementary to me. I hastily scribbled an idea that came to me during the show: challenges. I’d like to give collaborative challenges to my fellow/favorite visualists, e.g., swap: Adam and Anton doing a duo show with their current setups (god’s eye and vade, respectively). Both of them predominantly use a library of video clips that are both personally meaningful and formally interesting, which they know and have practiced well. Now swap their libraries and let each other decide which clip the other will use next. Connect them with an Ethernet cable and a very simple Max patch to streamline the process. The patch notifies them when a video’s been selected and previews it so they can prepare to slip it in.
Regardless of whether A and A would dig this idea, it’s the kind of collaborative ‘game’ (or structure or form) I’d like to explore more. Rather than focus on the technical aspects of current and future video mixers, which seems to snag us all up when we talk about visual jams, I’d like to see my fellow visualists play games with each other like this. And I’d like to build simple Max patches — and potentially KeyWorx plugins, in the new version of KeyWorx that’s on the table for the 2nd phase of Kids Connect — to aid these games. Thoughts?
Kids Connect dev
Speaking of Kids Connect, we had a really good meeting today that cleared up a lot of the questions Josephine and I had, e.g., the level of supervision needed, if/how many student teachers we’d have to help teach, when we’d get funds released to start work in Second Life, and more. Plus we were joined by Dr. Garey Ellis, who heads the Promise Fund’s Inner Force program. Not only did he have valuable insights and suggestions for KC, he reminded us how new this kind of work (online collaboration, visual performance, creative uses of consumer technology) is, and how exciting it will be for the workshop students and parents. It feels really good to be sharing my knowledge outside of the relatively narrow improv comedy world.
Idle in the Saved Night (silent)
Posted on May 11th, 2006 by dan.
Categories: music, nyc, performing, programming, art, live visuals, improvisation, theater, philosophy.
Tonight, I’ll be performing at Bunker at SubTonic, the 2nd show of a developing performance called Idle in the Saved Night, inspired by the writings of Deborah Levitt. It’s a mixed piece for live visuals and acting. In a nutshell, I’ll be playing video (of mental patients from the 40s) from my laptop to the projector, standing in front of the projection screen …acting funny… and capturing my strange behavior and gestures with a live camera, which’ll then get chopped up and spit back out to the screen on top of me. It will be divine. And since the music at SubTonic is curated separately from the visuals, I’ll be doing it mute. Instead of speaking the texts I’ve gathered for the videos, I’ll run them on the screen as text. ‘Twill be an interesting challenge.
By the way, I highly recommend EyeWash tonight. Most of the visual acts will be getting physical: from performance art to burlesque to unique interfaces. This is good. For did John not say, let’s get into physical/ Let me hear your body talk? Should be swell. I’ll be there if I get my patch ready in time.
This just in, a great show to see Saturday night featuring my Gunshow-mate Ryan Sturt:
Have you ever seen Showgirls? Pretty crappy right? What would make it better you ask? If it were done with sockpuppets! Yup. I’m in a sockpuppet version of Showgirls. It’s been running for a few years in Chicago and played in New York in 2002, and now it’s back in our city with fresh jokes and extra filth. It’s every Saturday night at 8pm until the end of June.
It’s super raunchy. The puppets will dance your face off! I’m playing a couple different characters in it, and the character voice stuff has been a lot of fun.
Come if you can!
For more info, directions, and tickets, here’s the flyer and the ticket link:
vade// will play at the Bunker as well — he has been absolutely tearing it up lately with his visuals — just brilliant work. He played at {R} A K E at Monkeytown with Larry 7 on Wednesday, an unusual pairing that kept them both on their toes. It was gorgeous. The entire evening was, to be precise, ecstatic. Now you know I am often accused of hyperbole and over-enthusiasm and to this I would retort: wake up! The world is full of beauty and interest and commonality if you’re paying attention. I pay attention. Hence, I enjoy things more fully, perhaps, than the next human.
Joyful details of which I speak, of {R} A K E, the evening of electro-acoustic music and visuals run by Satoshi Takeishi, Shoko Nagai and Adam Kendall:
- the first act was Kato Hideki (solo bass guitar) and Giles Hendrix* (video). Kato was exceptionally sensitive to his instrument and the sound in the room. He drew unusual sounds out of the bass, from the lightest of touches with a bow to heavy slams of his fist against the body, punctuated with long, deliberate silences. Giles’ visuals were equally slow and exploratory. I must admit I went into a trance/fell asleep at some points, which sounds bad but felt great: I drifted lightly in and out of the sound and light. As I suspected, Kato uses a custom tuning system based on prime numbers. I suspected it was different — not that it was prime.
How can I describe Vortex’s music? Words fail me. It was an ecstatic experience. Satoshi is a percussionist but not limited to struck instruments — he also played the waterphone with a bow that night. Shoko plays keyboards and (what I can only describe as) Pan pipes. They both do some Max/MSP manipulation and layering of the sound, which seems to run on auto-pilot mostly. Each time I’ve heard them play it’s been a unique performance, an environment of sound created entirely of the moment. Unlike many musicians, they respond to your visuals when you play with them; I feel honored that my first visual gig was with them at {R} A K E. Wednesday they played with visuals by Shimpei Takeda, who used only a video camera, a flashlight and a jar of water to make a truly beautiful light show. Chika whispered to me that it reminded her of my work with live camera, which is quite a flattering comparison. Seeing it gave me a shove to do a similar work with water and bubbles I’ve had in mind for a while.
It was an evening of synaesthesia, the visuals and the music combined - to use the oft-abused word — in synergy. The last act was no exception. Anton (vade//) and Larry 7 played the room like a drum. Monkeytown’s back room, if you haven’t seen it, is a hard-walled cube with projections on each wall. A visualist can easily blind the audience and break the mood with the combined light from the four projectors and I’ve been thankful for my earplugs on several occasions when the audio artists have found the resonant frequency of the room and made it ring how I imagine the inside of the fuel chamber of the Space Shuttle must sound. (Alright, that last was definitely hyperbole.) However, Larry 7 and vade// did no such thing. Larry, who I’m told used to work for Andy Warhol, played with a bunch of analogue electronics, tube amps, a multi-stringed instrument with mics on it, and four mics arranged in a cross on a rotating turntable. Also quite difficult to describe. Let’s just say he succeeded in his aim, “to set up situations where he has almost no control over what happens, so he can be entertained along with the audience.” Anton’s setup is as digital as Larry’s is analogue — just a laptop — and he usually doesn’t take his MIDI keyboard along so it’s all controlled with the mouse and keyboard.
Again, beautiful stuff. I almost stayed home to program but I’m so glad I went. Time to program now: the patch for tonight is almost ready. I rebuilt it from scratch to make sure I got the order of operations right.
* note: I am very envious of Giles’ domain name.
Addendum
If you don’t bother to read my del.icio.us links in the spliced feed, you’ll have missed a great listening opportunity: an album of Radiohead covers called Exit Music - Songs with Radio Heads. I particularly recommend the cover of Just by Mark Ronson and Alex Greenwald, which reveals the hidden funk of RH with handclaps, djembe and sexy horn blasts. My Flickr photos are also in the spliced feed and I’m just about to upload a shitload of cameraphone pics featuring the flowers of which I spoke yesterday. Name the purple pom-pom, s’il vous plait.
Let it be known
Posted on May 4th, 2006 by dan.
Categories: nyc, performing, politics, education, programming, live visuals, theater, art, Grad school.
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.
brush 0.1.2
Posted on April 7th, 2006 by dan.
Categories: programming, code, live visuals.
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.
* from a patch called Simple Mix by Peter Nyboer in the Jitter examples folder. Thanks for the great patch, Peter!
David Linton 5.0
Posted on March 19th, 2006 by dan.
Categories: performing, shows, nyc, art, theater, live visuals.
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
Video Feedback
Posted on March 11th, 2006 by dan.
Categories: performing, video art, live visuals.
Today at 2:30 pm Central I’ll be participating in Video Feedback at Aurora Picture Show, a non-profit microcinema and media arts center in Houston, TX.
Do you want your video art critiqued but can’t afford the high price of graduate school? Join Aurora for our FREE inaugural video review series “Video Feedback” with visiting film and video curators and artists. First up is Astria Suparak, a roving one woman powerhouse of independent film and video curation. The first six media makers to sign-up each get a 30 minute critique with Astria. Observers are welcome!
I’m going to be participating via live video stream. You — yes, you! — can watch Video Feedback and the stream of me from my apartment. You may need the latest version of Quicktime Player (free) to watch. Note: you don’t have to give Apple your email address to download it.
- watch the stream from Aurora — other artist are presenting their work right now!
- watch the stream from my apartment - featuring a lovely view out my window right now while I nip out for lunch
*
Well, that was fun. Thank you to Barna, Astria and everyone else at Aurora for having me. I’m looking forward to meeting you all next month. I’ll chop the two stream recordings into a movie and stick them online for you if you like.