Just a general update, I am in the process of getting this moved over to a new location. I have also found a solution for giving it a bit more life.

This is where the new site will be located. Yes, I am using iWeb.

Culural Webs...a start

Something that I have found fascinating in general, is the basic concepts behind a functional capitalistic society, more specifically the idea of 'spontaneous order'. A recent blog post on mises.org(an austrian economics organization) discusses how the founder of wikipedia has tried to apply this concept to the worlds knowledge, that the wants and needs of many individuals will provide a broad overarching order.

Another thread that has recently pulled at my imagination, is the artist Brian Eno. I have begun listening to some of his Ambient work, but what I find most interesting is his work on the windows 95 startup music. His description of it is pretty amazing:
(from wikipedia)

The idea came up at the time when I was completely bereft of ideas. I'd been working on my own music for a while and was quite lost, actually. And I really appreciated someone coming along and saying, "Here's a specific problem – solve it." The thing from the agency said, "We want a piece of music that is inspiring, universal, blah-blah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional," this whole list of adjectives, and then at the bottom it said "and it must be 3¼ seconds long." I thought this was so funny and an amazing thought to actually try to make a little piece of music. It's like making a tiny little jewel. In fact, I made 84 pieces. I got completely into this world of tiny, tiny little pieces of music. I was so sensitive to microseconds at the end of this that it really broke a logjam in my own work. Then when I'd finished that and I went back to working with pieces that were like three minutes long, it seemed like oceans of time.

What I would like to accomplish

With this idea of a sketchspace, I am hoping to setup a page that serves as both a reference, and a point of inspiration. For now though I am going to do basic blogging.

Projects I am working on:

Finishing an interactive piece in blender. I must get a basic understanding of how to implement python scripts, and have not yet found a useful beginners guide. I am also revising much of the texturing.

Finishing an old interactive piece that combined a wacom tablet, video, and sound. I was very excited about this project, and I am potentially very close to completion, or very far away if I am unable to properly implement sound in max/msp and have to port those features to supercollider.

My final project is purely technical, I am writing an ear training game in supercollider in hopes of gaining a better knowledge of the language, as well as learning how to setup an intuitive GUI.

I am hoping to port this into a more dynamic page in the near future, rather then a standard blog.

Project Wrapup: The Sequel

Well, I am now getting consistent control values, and the audio, though still a bit fast zipping around the area (something I need to tweak), is coming in nice and stereo. So, the audio is now pretty much in place, and the video is pretty much in place...but when you put them together the computer is running like beefcake, averaging about 0.5 fps. I have a few more things I might try to keep things running nicely, but I am running out of ideas. I am quite sure that I have streamlined the control values for the audio as best I could, delay lines are now in place to keep all the timers running nicely. The video has been severely reduced in quality, and I have scaled back the refresh rate on the pad. 5 videos, and 7 audio tracks being mixed live might just be a bit too much.

I will make another attempt putting everything together later (after the video class final that started at 4:30).

Project Wrapup

As I described in class, though I had a bit of a hangup with the audio, I'm so close to getting things close. Even in its partial state, I was surprised that it was still able to kind of work.

I'm going to continue to work, and if it is possible I would like to show at the wednesday showing. I took a small parts aproach, working on each section on there own. I would love to see all the parts working together, because I know the effect of the project will be much better.

Though I played partial parts of the four settings I made, I thought I'd include them here as well.



I think I remember saying during the prototype discussion that I described it as ambivalent... I realized that about a week later, what I really meant was ambiguous. There is a quality shared by each track, though I tried to give each a different type of coloration.

Things I would change if I were to do this again:

I would have started earlier with the media. I was way to cautious, I just had to go for it, and when I did I wasn't too disappointed, in fact I was quite happy with the audio

I would have got an actor. I'm not an actor, and I have essentially no dynamic range. I think it would have been more interesting for me as well, I can't help shake the narcissistic vibes.

I knew I could potentially have problems with the programming, and was happy to get the video pretty much exactly as I wanted. However, the audio...I didn't anticipate where I would have the difficulty with the getting the control values. I thought that the prototype had given me a good clue about what sort of difficulties I would have processor wise, but when I finally put everything together, problems popped up that I was sort of at a loss for.

Either way, I had fun putting this together, setting the sound environments, and brushing up on my max/msp jitter understanding. I am really close to setting up what I envisioned. Even with this early setup today, I still think the thing has some potential.

question...(sorry about how late these are)

Alright, so my concerns are in several areas,

The central video (the starting point will be the basically inactive, the neutral point. It'll just show me eating, drinking, plain lighting.

Then four different corners with different extremes( very tenative):
1. sunny day, looking out the window, watching cars go by or whatever, slowly walking around
2. twilight, laughing discussing with friend
3. night, angry, box throwing, kitchen is a mess
4. night, probably flickering light, might experiment with a projector for shadow stuff, figure sitting in chair, zombie-ish

sound- snippets of conversation will be roving about the tablet, so parts of the story will move from place to place, phone conversations, dialogue, etc.

ok, thoughts on these basic things, any reccomendations for what to watch out for. I'm behind schedule on the filming because I have not been able to nail down thoughts on the how to describe a partial story...

Where I'm at (week 6)

-integrated wacom with MAX/MSP
-got mixing to work between the two test videos


I assumed I could potentiall have cpu problems...and already even without sound, and three less videos, the computer is stalling.

Going to have to play around with encoding. Currently using the H.264 video encoder, got a 17 meg and 70 meg file (of equal length and resolution, but one has much more color info). Resolution is 1280 by 720, maybe a bit high?

Going to prepare basic sound for the prototype, and also worked on getting the appropriate mixer setup for the video arrangment I diagramed. Filming for real this weekend. seriously