I just got back to NYC from several days’ preparatory meetings at the Patel Conservatory in Tampa, FL, where I met the educators and admin staff we’ll be working with for next month’s program. You can read the blurb at kidzconnect.org for more info about what we’re up to. It was really exciting to meet everyone — we’ve got some bright, sharp people on board, like Demario Henry (hip hop dance) and ranney (music), who’ll be collaborating with our students to develop a music and movement piece, er, song ‘n’ dance, if you will, in the final show, which will be a live, mixed reality performance by the Dutch and American students. This incorporation of music and movement is a new aspect of this, the second Kidz Connect program, which I’m particularly excited about.

Yes, Kidz Connect is now spelled with a Z instead of an S. F*cking domain squatters.

p.s. I have begun to Twitter.

Next month I am teaching a Video Workshop for Artists at 3rd Ward, an artists’ center in Brooklyn. This will be a good class for artists who are just beginning to use video in their work or those who have hit a stumbling block in doing so.

This hands-on, project-based workshop is ideal for those wishing to take their video work to the next level, and is aimed at artists with beginning or intermediate experience with video systems. Problems solved, questions answered, video mastered! Participants will broaden and deepen their practical and theoretical knowledge of video through the development of existing or new projects. Topics will include the ins-and-outs of video installation, hardware- and software-based systems for display, compression/conversion, and dynamic (live) control systems.

Specific technologies and techniques explored include compression and conversion (ffmpegX, Compressor, types of video: DV, HDV, etc) as well as hardware systems for display. We’ll cover general signal routing, sync’d DVD players, cameras, routers, distribution amplifiers, types of cables, the whole thing. We’ll talk about the nuts and bolts of installation – choosing projectors, keystoning, color matching, spanning multiple screens – and how to control them – MIDI, OSC, remote administration, overview of sensor technologies. For the slightly more adventurous, we’ll also probably touch upon video software Jitter and Quartz Composer.

Students are encouraged to come to class with a project in mind, but there will be plenty of material and tricks to try out that we’re sure you’ll be inspired. This class will conclude with a small group show at 3rd Ward.

Please help me spread the word and get the class filled! I’m also taking a class in light sculpture taught by Daniel Rossi, which came highly recommended. We’ll be making light fixtures out of bamboo, LEDs and old power adapters.

Today my students taught me how to dance

In addition to playing with the new old My First Sony Electronic Sketch Pad I brought them

I made them laugh

And they liked the sketch pad

It will serve them well when they do visuals at the 80′s party this Friday

(I will bust the moves they taught me)

And tonight I worked on a patch to share with them: an exquisite corpse maker

It’s coming along

Also I am webcasting a nifty event on Thursday

I’m off to Budapest today to teach workshops and host a Share jam in the Ultrahang Festival. Wish me luck!

Thursday was the end of my five-week project at the Institute for the Future of the Book, helping them get ready for the next big alpha release of Sophie. It was a pleasure working with them and I hope to do so again. If you haven’t heard, check out the call for visualizations of Gamer Theory 2.0, which I’m happy to say I had a hand in formulating. It looks like we’ll be seeing some really nifty visualizations in the next couple weeks.

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

How can you argue with this video? These kids are cool.

Kids Connect is going very well. Our students are learning a lot, they like us, we like them, it’s an avalanche of busy and all good. Tomorrow we’ll open a window (read: video conference) with our counterparts in Amsterdam; we put the above video together in VJ-U today with Benton Bainbridge, who thought it’d make a great welcome when they join us on the Kids Connect island. More later, stories and pictures now:

Things are going very well.

We students and teachers are making lots of stuff for the island.

I made something today that gives me great pleasure. I took a photo of one of the Lawrence Weiner manhole covers and made it a 3D texture in Second Life. Click the pic for full effect.

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.

The video improv workshop Saturday went really well. Me am teachzor! We had about 14 people altogether from widely differing backgrounds: dance, video art, videography, music, network collaboration, graphic design, and only five people from improv comedy. We worked on camera- and scene-work, shooting scenes out on the streets and in Chelsea Market (conveniently right across the street from Atlantic Acting School’s new (and pristine) rehearsal space). I spent much of the lecture and discussion time introducing the class to the different roles of the actors, shooter and runner/timekeeper in crafting scenes on video. What I learned from the workshop:

• I can teach
• The teacher must be the time nazi so things don’t get rushed
• and a possible solution to the 3rd Act Problem of Video Improv, which is when (two-thirds through the show) the different shooting groups meet to mash up their scenes and the shooting slows to an infinite pause on the event horizon of a Black Hole of Brainstorming and Plotting Out the Scenes.

Video improv’s mutability is a great strength and a great weakness. On the one hand you have the power and potential of cinema with all its tricks and delights. On the other, when it comes time to mash up the scenes at the end of the show, there can be a huge trainwreck as everyone verbalizes their ideas, then debates their pros and cons — an instant power struggle in which dominant personalities win– and the the resulting scenes are deflated, scripty and late. This was sometimes a big problem in the Neutrino shows.

Conclusion: plot is just as much of a killer on video improv as stage improv. Early in the workshop, I stressed the importance of Yes Anding behind the camera just as much — more! — as in front of it. Never debate an idea. Always go with the first one offered. This goes without saying on the stage but is easy to let slip in the young art of video improv. More on this after this Saturday’s workshops.

unfortunately, this isn’t an open invitation because space is limited in the IDM lab. there will be more events, however.

A Telepresent Improv Workshop:

What’s it like to share a stage with people who are hundreds of miles away? Let’s find out.

Every hour of every day, network television shows unite far-flung people and places with live video connections. Until recently, the technology necessary for such streams was too costly for small theaters. Now, the software is free, the cameras are cheap and bandwidth is abundant. It’s time to bring telepresence to improvisational theater.

On Saturday, November 19th, the Integrated Digital Media Institute and Dirty South Improv Theater will host a workshop/symposium on telepresence in improvisational theater. This event will bring together improvisers in Chapel Hill, NC, and New York, NY. In essence, we will be joining two performance spaces with live two-way video. On each stage, there will be a projection of the video stream from the other location. We’ll open the connection and and do some improv. We’ll try different longforms, e.g., the Armando, La Ronde, and different ways of relating to the performers on the other stage, then talk about it. What works? What doesn’t? Who’s got the funniest lag joke when the stream stutters?

Come play, come watch. Join the conversation.

Saturday, Nov. 19
2 to 6 pm: improv and discussion
-at-
Integrated Digital Media Lab
Polytechnic University
Brooklyn Campus
6 Metro Tech Center
Rogers Hall room 207
-and-
DSI Comedy Theater @ Carr Mill Mall
(Entrance on dock behind Elmo’s Diner)
200 N. Greensboro St., Suite B-11
Carrboro, NC 27510

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