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….

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.

I’m up to my neck (happily) in the last week of the semester. I’ve got a law paper to bang out and my combined final project for Josh Goldberg’s Max class and Media History, which is gelling and shaping up to be quite satisfying. On an unrelated note, I’m much amused by some of the comment spam lately, e.g.,

I haven’t been up to anything today. I don’t care. I’ve just been staying at home not getting anything done. Basically not much happening right now. Maybe tomorrow. I guess it doesn’t bother me.

A depressed spambot! Kaka70670, you might want to take a depression test a few hundred times. Low cost rhinoplasty isn’t the answer. Get help.

And furthermore, yes. More.

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!

A while ago I was looking for a bit of code to randomize text. Thanks to Mary Ann’s away message, I’ve found several bits of code called Fnorder that I can examine, rip apart, and figure out in (slash port to) Max/MSP. Yippee skippee.