connections
elsewhere on this site
Live buffering with feedback
Posted on August 1st, 2007 by dan.
Categories: video, connections, live visuals.
This video is me at Share playing around with a new piece of my performance patch: a live video buffer (on the graphics card) with feedback, which Eclectic Method has inspired me to add some rhythm controls to. The music is by “Hand Clap” by Girl Talk.
;performing; visuals with Lance Blisters tonight
Posted on April 14th, 2007 by dan.
Categories: politics, connections, performing, nyc, war, music, live visuals.
I forgot to mention that I’m doing visuals with Lance Blisters tonight at the after-party for the 1st annual Anarchist Book Fair. 
LANCE BLISTERS: LIVE Jungle, Breakcore, Punk, and Noise performed with MIDI Guitar and Microphone, using custom software to create cutup political anthems. LIVE synchronized visual transcriptions of the songs’ subjects. LANCE BLISTERS was initiated in 2003 to SMASH THE STATE with a show which will ROCK YOUR FACE OFF! LANCE BLISTERS is a live multimedia band currently comprising Lance Blisters (music) and Ilan Katin (visuals), with special guest visual performer Dan Winckler for this show.
This Saturday, 14 April 07, LANCE BLISTERS will perform at the Anarchist Bookfair Afterparty with bands VIC THRILL and SATURN MISSILE, MOURNING GLORIES, ZEMI 17, and DJ’s CX KIDTRONIK, PETER GUNN, SHAKEY, AMOK, EMMIT BROWN, JASON BK playing a mixed bag of breaks, hip hop, d and b, techno, rare grooves, dubstep, breakcore, and…
Expect LANCE to play at 10:30pm
9pm-4am, Saturday, 14 Apr 2007
The Creek in The Cave, 10-93 Jackson Ave. (Long Island City, QueenS)
7 to Vernon/Jackson -or- G to 21 St/Van Alst.
$3-6 w/ ID
Google subway map from onnyturf.com
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.
piano stream
Posted on June 27th, 2006 by dan.
Categories: performing, nyc, music.
2006-06-27 01:08 am.
this is something i’ve been meaning to do for a while: stream audio from my home while I play piano. Right now, I’m sitting at my piano practicing, playing pieces and improvising. Listen to me play if you like. Requires Quicktime (free download, iTunes install not required — look for a ’standalone’ link)
1:45 am
That’s it for now. Here’s what I played (times approximate):
- 1:08 - 1:19 am: improv
- 1:19 - 1:27: Schumann’s little study
- 1:27 - 1:29: Mendelssohn’s song without words
- 1:29 - 1:31: Chopin’s prelude (Op. 28, No. 4)
- improv
- Enrique Granados’s valses poeticos
- improv
- Schumann, about strange lands and peoples
Let me know if you listened, please, and if you had any technical problems.
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.
Making beautiful toyls
Posted on May 27th, 2006 by dan.
Categories: teaching, share, kidsconnect, secondlife, performing, education, nyc, Grad school.
Some things I’m planning to get or build or get built in Second Life, in no particular order, some of them for Kids Connect and some not:
- very easy-to-use picture and video viewers so the kids can just upload some images — or link to some video files — and chuck them onto an object to be shown immediately.
- an area densely filled with pretty things to be used in a live visual performance, whether by inworld snapshots or just going fullscreen and closing all the onscreen windows
- a (probably blog-based) system that will take emailed snapshots and pull them into a live visual performance. This one’s specifically for use at SHARE. Example of how this would go:
- SL Residents read about SHARE and the SHARE SL project on my land
- on a Sunday night, they login to SL, go to their favorite places and take snapshots, emailing them to secondlife at share dot dj OR a Flickr post-by-email address.
- Visualist(s) at SHARE runs a Max/MSP/Jitter patch that grabs these snapshots (from email or RSS — this might be easiest to demo by using a feedreader like NetNewsWire that can auto-download images to a specific folder that Max can poll) and incorporates them into their visual performance.
- a few buildings that are conducive to group meetings and classes
- a dark building with winding corridors that lead the visitor to various rooms with video art/live visual displays
I would love to get help with these — I’m a novice with Linden Scripting Language and I don’t want to spend time and effort making something that someone’s already made much better. If you know some good builders and coders in SL, please let them know about Kids Connect and Share. They can get some info on my land inworld.
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.
Two wrights
Posted on May 15th, 2006 by dan.
Categories: shows, nyc, music, theater, improvisation.
I bumped into Matt Moses last night, a very funny and genial improviser and playwright. Our groups Gunshow and Stockholm Syndrome used to do a lot of shows together and we had the same coach, the venerable Dan Goldstein, improv teacher, decision studies psychologist and marketing genius. Matt’s moving to Yale for a 3 year stint in their graduate playwright program. Yay, Matt! I hope you’ll find grad school as much of a growing experience as I have.
And speaking of great playwrights, I got an email from the UCB Theater, telling me that Anthony King’s funny, charming, ridiculous musical comedy spoof GUTENBERG! THE MUSICAL! will have a free show tomorrow night. You can hear some songs from the show on its very own myspace and read the show’s very! enthusiastic! website!. Anthony (book) and Scott Brown (music), play the parts of the show’s chipper, clueless creators, Bud Davenport and Doug Simon, who did all their research about Johann Gutenberg using Microsoft Encarta. My favorite part of the show was the hats: Bud and Doug have dozens of cheap mesh hats with the names of the show’s characters painstakingly spelled out in serif Sharpie. At any given moment in the show, each of them will have 6 hats in his hands, doffing and donning them again and again. It’s deadpan, dead-on musical satire from end to end and joyfully silly. UCB’s site says it’s sold out already but there’ll be some tickets at the door.