Here’s a small excerpt of my visuals with Dam-Funk at One Step Beyond last night. Details tomorrow. Thanks, Benton!

Tonight I’m doing visuals at the 8static show in Philadelphia with chip musicians Cheap Dinosaurs and Starscream. If for some reason you’re not in Philly (i hate you), you can watch the live webcast tonight on Ustream or in the player below. I’ll be debuting my first visuals using the Open Emu QC plugins — wish me luck!

Update

The show lat night went really well. Paris and Outpt’s visuals were astounding, especially their set with Nullsleep: the work they’ve put into collaborating with Jeremiah really shows. I’ll put up some video of my sets this week. Technically, the Open Emu debut went really well — no crashes! Did have one hang, though (not sure of the cause), and two kernel panics (Bluetooth, when connecting the Wiimote). :X

8static: Starscream’s first song from plasticpool on Vimeo.

One video up, more to come: this is the first song of the first set of the night: Starscream (Damon on chip, George on drums) and my visuals. You can hear tracks by both bands on MySpace.

I generated the video live using the Open Emu QC plugins, which let me play original NES ROMs in emulation, live. I used two ROMs, one written by No Carrier and another called Polar Pinwheel by Chris Covell. These ROMs are being played totally live — no pre-recorded video — and partway through the song No Carrier picked up the controller and jammed with me.

If you’re interested in using No Carrier’s ROM, watch my blog and/or his site for its upcoming release (free and open source).

My friend Don (a.k.a. No-Carrier) got sick and asked me to sub for him this Friday at Lit Lounge, playing with Nullsleep, Anamanaguchi and Cheap Dinosaurs. Feel better, Don! Here’s the show flyer and info.

The Blue and Red 3D Spectacular
Nullsleep
Anamanaguchi
Cheap Dinosaurs

Friday, 9 pm
Lit Lounge (2nd Ave between 5th and 6th St)
$6 cover (I think)
Ages: 21+

The Tank has lost its venue. If you liked the Blip Festival (chiptunes) and the Bent Festival (circuit bending), please spread this far and wide so more people can help the Tank (and Collective: Unconscious) find a new space.

**info page

The Tank Loses Its Home…Again
Sudden Move Highlights Challenges To NYC’s Independent Arts Scene

The Tank, a non-profit venue that has been providing a creative, collaborative home for emerging artists for the past five years, is about to need a new home of its own. But for this young company that moved 3 times in its first 3 years, this is familiar, if undesirable, territory.

Forced to leave its current home by July 31st, The Tank will continue presenting in this period of transition. But by August, this collective of performing arts and public affairs will move into a temporary space, while it searches for a more stable, long-term venue for 2009. As of now, neither the transitional venue nor the next home are determined.

Damage caused by massive plumbing problems, compounded by irreconcilable issues with the building’s owner, has created a costly, unwelcome and untenable situation at 279 Church Street in Tribeca, where The Tank had made its home with the performing arts presenters Collective: Unconscious (C:U) since January, 2006. At this time, C:U also intends to continue presenting, although is unsure where.

“After we lost our original home on 42nd Street, it wasn’t clear if we’d survive the transition. But we’ve been on Church Street longer than we were on 42nd – we not only survived, we expanded,” explained Founder and Managing Director Mike Rosenthal, who has curated two of The Tank’s most successful offerings: the annual Bent Festival of experimental music and Blip Festival of Game Boy generated music. “It’s a shame to move so suddenly after all the work we’ve put into this space – but we need to feel our artists and audience are coming to a welcoming, healthy setting…and we’re going to make that true.” [...]

Tomorrow the Austin Museum of Digital Art will show some of my visuals in their Digital Showcase, paired with the live music of Proem, an electronic musician whose tracks you can hear on Bleep.com (search for Proem). I really like his sound — it ought to be a good fit. AMODA will also premiere a new installation piece called HOW TO FIX YOUR TV, of which you can see a recorded excerpt below. Also, you can learn how to fix a TV yourself with the instructions I’ve posted on Instructables.com.

if you don’t see a video here, click this link

Last couple thoughts for the night:

• i’ve finally got time to play around with a media-textured avatar (think video skin)
• i want to make an avatar (in SL) that moves like Duchamp’s Nu qui descend un escalier #2 (nude descending a staircase #2)
• I learned a lot about texturing from the SL fora today. Check the end of the GIMPshop texturing tutorial I wrote last week for some illuminating reading on the subject.
• i made a couple ringtones last week — one of the tiny projects I squeezed in to entertain myself after long hours of teaching — in GarageBand and easybeat was very handy in the mastering stage*. Recommended.

* that is, playing it on my phone and transposing it in nudges until it sounded good.

As I said earlier today, I’m writing, writing, writing my thesis paper stuff, which, thank god, is not as painful as my writing process used to be just a few months back. It’s an engaging challenge putting my motivations for Kids Connect as clearly as possible…without using bullet points. Here’s one of my objectives, which will form the template/questionnaire for the thesis paper itself. Your feedback would be much appreciated. Here are some guiding words on clarity if you need them. If you prefer, add your thoughts on my page on the ZoomLab wiki.

Objective [1]: teach read/write media literacy and cultivate a critical stance to mass media

Why: One of the primary goals of Kids Connect (KC) is read/write media literacy. What does this mean? To be literate is to be able to read and write. A full understanding of media (new, mass and otherwise) necessitates practical know-how of audio and video recording/editing, creation and synthesis. [Quote Mark Twain about reading the river]. In order to be critical of media, you must be able to distance yourself from it. A practical understanding of the craft of media creation and manipulation cultivates that distance. Moreover, a one-sided conversation is a lecture. Few young people are learning how to master the written word, to produce a compelling argument in nouns and verbs. It is vital that young people learn to write media, to raise their voices over and around the constant shouting match and join the discussion.

How: In the first two weeks of workshops, students learn to shoot video with cameras of various quality, record audio with a variety of microphones, go on sound walks and video walks (experiential exercises in listening and seeing), composition and framing, editing and compression. Each technology is approached through exercises with storytelling, improvisational and/or experiential frames. For example, convey a given emotion through a sequence of still images. In the subsequent weeks, these skills are built upon in exercises exploring expression of identity, neighborhood and community experience. Example: take photos, audio and video of your home in your neighborhood, edit together a gestalt, share it through Second Life. Furthermore, we introduce our students to the world of live visual performance. They learn the techniques of live visuals and VJ-ing: how to mix and synthesize live, streaming, and pre-recorded media, how to express emotion and narative through abstracted light and sound, and to do this collaboratively over networks. They’ve [Some have] already given up on the written word [for formal purposes, e.g., an argument --thank you, Anton]: we teach them the new multimedia communication skills they passionately desire.

Evaluation: How can you tell if someone has developed read/write media literacy? By seeing what they’ve expressed through various media. At the end of the workshops, we will have a large collection of work by our students to examine, as well as many hours of teaching experience to consider. We’ll sift this for patterns and I will write it up in my thesis paper.

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.

Last week, Josephine and I attended the Games 4 Change conference, put on by the Serious Games Initiative (among many) and hosted at Parsons. It was an energizing experience that gave a definite boost to Kids Connect. We met other educators (many from Second Life), program directors, game developers, and one futurist; saw several really good panels on serious games, funding of, grassroots organization with, benefits of, big media interest in, building alternative spaces in, and reaching new audiences through; and — a subject I’m keenly interested in — the realization/evolution of the 3D Web through virtual worlds like Second Life. We met Barry Joseph et al from Global Kids (the first educational initiative in Teen Second Life) who not only gave two excellent presentations on panels but also gave generously of their time to share their learning experiences in Second Life with Josephine and me. A lot of this is covered in one their Holy Meatballs’ stories, which I’ll call What (Not) To Do When Starting an Educational Island in Teen Second Life (pdf) and it’s an essential read for anyone starting to teach in SL. We’re going to ask the Lindens to put our island next to theirs so our students can skip right over without a teleport. We may collaborate on some projects in the future, too.

Tomorrow is the first day of Kids Connect workshops in New York. It will be a somewhat messy start because of some typos in the mailing but no matter — most things start messy.

Today’s Second Life recommendation: check out Svarga (teleport link), an artificial ecosystem where all the plants, animals, rain, clouds, sun and terrain communicate with each other, grow and evolve procedurally a la The Game of Life. See Pathfinder Linden’s photoset of Svarga and the New World Notes post about it.

Things are trucking right along. Thanks to Stu Steele and Keni Yip from Polytechnic’s Computer Science Department, we’ve now got an excellent PC lab for our Second Life workshops. Josephine and I had a wonderful meeting with Pauline Oliveros, Will Swofford and Vonn New from the Deep Listening Institute and we all got very excited about having a Deep Listening workshop for our students next month. They’re all very keen to explore Second Life and its (mostly untapped) potential for aural environments. Yesterday Jos and I met with two teachers from Scotland, Sean and Katie Farrell, and it looks like they’ll be joining us in New York next month to teach SL skills to our students in person and (I hope) help us build the Kids Connect island.

Talking with Pauline, Will and Vonn about deep listening, aural environments and perceptual shifts, the shape of the Kids Connect island continued to coalesce and I thought of more exercises we could do there. Example: we ask the kids to make an audio recording of their home and/or neighborhood and take pictures of it. Using Photoshop or Gimp, they stitch the photos into a panorama; using Audacity, they edit and enhance their audio recording. In Second Life, they turn the audio and panorama into an audio/video installation, a slice of their lives for their counterparts in Amsterdam or New York to experience. This is not a new idea, of course. See:

• a panoramic photo with sound of the Sydney Opera House, as seen from a ferry (requires Quicktime)
• the one-minute vacations: field recordings from around the world

On a related note, if you want to understand why some people stray from the mainstream and end up in the so-called “avant garde” read the profile of Morton Feldman in the latest New Yorker.

Extreme length allowed Feldman to approach his ultimate goal of making music into an experience of life-changing force, a transcendent art form that wipes everything else away. To sit through performances of the two biggest works‚ÄîI heard Petr Kotik’s S.E.M. Ensemble play the five-hour-long “For Philip Guston” in 1995, with phenomenal purity of tone, and the Flux Quartet play the six-hour-long “String Quartet (II)” in 1999, with tireless focus‚Äîis to enter into a new way of listening, even a new consciousness. There are passages in each where Feldman seems to be testing the listener’s patience, seeing how long we can endure a repeated note or a dissonant minor second. Then, out of nowhere, some very pure, almost childlike idea materializes. Most of the closing section of “For Philip Guston” is in modal A minor, and it is music of surpassing gentleness and tenderness. But it inhabits a far-off, secret place that few travellers will stumble upon.