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.

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.

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.

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.

Had a very good meeting today where Josephine and I presented the Kids Connect plan and budget to the Promise Fund. They are very enthusiastic about our workshops. All proceeds in accordance with prophecy.

Yesterday in Second Life I met a bunch of people from the Real Life Education in SL group. Claude Desmoulins and co have started a school in Neualtenberg for RL education with paid educators. He’s looking for teachers and Kids Connect needs SL skills teachers: could be a good collab for both of us.

Also, I’ve been invited to start a groupblog on creativity, education, non-linear thinking “and maybe some geekery and design” and suchlike. Is there a void to be filled? I don’t know. They’re looking for a couple more writers if you’re interested.

Addendum

Final advice from our Law professor Suzan Dionne: read a book on negotiation. So you know the tactics and you won’t get screwed. If you need legal advice, get more than one opinion. Pick one whose temperament suits your needs, e.g., courtroom bulldog or milquetoast mediator. You’re in control: you’re paying them. And finally, never ever ever believe what the other guy says.

Sorry for the silence here — I’m spectacularly busy, as you might have guessed. I’ll try to post a few times a week: it’ll be brief, messy and the mundane will creep in but hey, doesn’t that describe everything? As I said 10 hours ago, my new thesis is Kids Connect, which brings together a lot of my interests: improv theatre, networked performance and collaboration, Second Life performance, teaching and has the added benefit of institutional support so more of the being-the-producer work is taken care of and I can devote myself to artistic direction and teaching. In other news, the semester is drawing rapidly to a close and I have a paper for Law, a presentation and a project for Media History, a project for Max/MSP/Jitter as well. Exciting stuff. I’m reading Deep Time of the Media by Siegfried Zielinski, key ideas of which can be found in this brief Rhizome interview — and I’m presenting on it and Spectres of the Spectrum (a messy, funny film collage — see this review) on Friday. Key thought from Deep Time for you before I get back to it: the present concentration of power is in control of time, not space. E.g., TV, pace Tivo. (Man, I hope someone gets that besides me.)

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.

Iraq is in civil war. The possibility of this war spreading to neighboring countries is almost certain. Already, hundreds of mujahedeen have gone into Iraq from Iran and Syria. What are you going to do about it? Who are you going to vote for this November?

Last week, the New School’s World Policy Institute held a panel discussion on the war in Iraq. The standout for me was the vivid, sobering portrait of Iraq from the ground by Nir Rosen, whom the moderator introduced as the journalist who’s spent more time in Iraq since the war began than anyone else.

direct links to the Real streams:
part I
part II

I work for the New School Online webcasting some of these events. Some of them are extraordinarily educational and illuminating, painting a picture of America and American politics that helps me to fight against apathy and get moving politically. Right now I’m sitting in the Tishman auditorium, webcasting a panel called Politics of Resistance, featuring Cornel West. These are great events, but they’re preaching to the choir! We need to get these to people outside of New York City.

Why learn media studies? To give words to that mix of feelings when you look at something like a Virgin Mary nightlight.

Heidegger has blown my mind. You see, the big question that has always most fascinated me is how do/did people — especially those who lived hundreds or thousands of years ago — see the world? What is/was their worldview? The nugget of Heidegger’s argument in this essay is that before the modern era, there was no awareness that there was a worldview or that there could be multiple worldviews. This is particularly relevant when many violent people want to roll the world back to medieval times.

I need to pull a better quote than the below.

The gigantic is rather that through which the quantitative becomes a special quality and thus a remarkable kind of greatness. Each historical age is not only great in a distinctive way in contrast to others; it also has, in each instance, its own concept of greatness. But as soon as the gigantic in planning and calculating and adjusting and making secure shifts over out of the quantitative and becomes a special quality, then what is gigantic, and what can seemingly always be calculated completely, becomes, precisely through this, incalculable. This becoming incalculable remains the invisible shadow that is cast around all things everywhere when man has been transformed into subiectum and the world into picture.

By means of this shadow the modern world extends itself out into a space withdrawn from representation and so lends to the incalculable the determinateness peculiar to it, as well as a historical uniqueness. This shadow, however, points to something else, which is denied to us of today to know. But man will never be able to experience and ponder this that is denied so long as he dawdles about in the mere negating of the age. The flight into tradition, out of a combination of humility and presumption, can bring about nothing in itself other than self-deception and blindness in relation to the historical moment. [emphasis mine]

Man will know, i.e., carefully safeguard into its truth, that which is incalculable, only in creative questioning and shaping out of the power of genuine reflection. Reflection transports the man of the future into that “between” in which he belongs to Being and yet remains a stranger amid that which is. Holderlin knew of this. His poem, which bears the superscription “To the Germans,” closes:

How narrowly bounded is our lifetime,
We see and count the number of our years.
But have the years of nations
Been seen by mortal eye?

If your soul throbs in longing
Over its own time, mourning, then
You linger on the cold shore
Among your own and never know them. *

From a reading for my history of media class. There were several more striking sections — and I’m sorry if this fragment is incomprehensible for most of you — but it’s time for bed.

* Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture” (from The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays [New York: Harper & Row, 1977], rpt. in Timothy Druckery, ed., Electronic Culture: Technology and Visual Representation [New York: Aperture, 1996])