hobbies and endeavors

After a humiliating evening last night of getting my butt whooped many times by my friend Jon and some other chess jockeys at Fat Cat, I found an article that puts things into perspective. It suggests that the sort of highly challenging experiences of sweating through the really difficult stuff when learning are what actually produce real breakthroughs.

So take that chess masters! I feel WAY better now knowing that I am the one who was truly learning something last night while you guys were just pitifully going through the motions. That makes me feel really, really a lot better. Totally a lot better. Seriously.

Finally, I'm posting again, and I actually have something interesting. Suzanne, Mandi and I (along with a bazillion other people) took part in Unsilent Night this year, on December 15th. I took some footage with my camera, and strung it together in this pretty much unedited movie. I didn't edit it much because I wanted to include as much of the music as possible; so forgive the crap quality—much of the time I just had the camera on hung around my neck so as to record the sound if nothing else.

cycling74 is on their way to the next version of Max/MSP, Max 5. This is a complete overhaul in terms of the user interface; they are scrapping the old 1980s-style boxes & lines for new, slick, Web 2.0ish looking...um...boxes & lines.

Max 4.x

Max 5

Okay, so, maybe it's hard to see what the big deal is from these screenshots. But, if you read the article and watch the quicktime movie examples, you'll see how there are some really great new features that are a long time coming (if I do say so myself). I'm really digging the ability to zoom in and out, and the presentation mode is fantastic.

Now all I want is a really intelligent timing system that doesn't have so many gotchas that it makes your head spin. Oh, and I want a poly~ object that is completely audio rate. Or, if the timing system is better, maybe I won't need a poly~ that is completely audio rate...how about a global timing system with metrics in milliseconds or b.p.m.? Something that can tightly perform audio rate and event rate calculations without dropping time?

I don't know if this will be enough for me to consider dropping Super Collider and taking Max/MSP back into my obsessive little world, but who knows. I don't think that, now that I've invested some time in audio programming (rather than graphical object "programming"), I'll be willing to go back to something that is fundamentally slower both to program and to run—although I wonder if the interface will be so much better engineered that I'll be able to increase the load on Max so my 2.33 GHz/2 GB MacBook Pro will run more than, say 100 cycle~ objects at once (as opposed to around 4K SinOsc UGens in SC3 before it kicks it). That'd be really, really nice.

Did I mention that I'd like an improved timing system?

Whitman Turning at Pace Wildenstein, originally uploaded by dubitable.

I've uploaded a photo set of pieces I worked on for Robert Whitman's "Turning" show at the Pace Wildenstein gallery on 25th St. in Chelsea.

My contribution to the piece was a piece of software that allows for automated shutdown & startup of the Christie projector inside, based on temperature & humidity sensing, using a network connection. I also built a web interface for the system so that the monitor could be controlled remotely, including shutdown & startup, freezing the projector image, and monitoring the status. I also did some configuration of the router used in the internal network.

Each globe had it's own setup identical to the other two. I used Perl on Mac OS X for both the daemon and the web application, along with the built-in Apache web server—Mac OS X is handy because all of this is ready to go by default.

I really enjoyed this project...I want to do more like this!

What I want to know is, how the @!&# did you sequence all of that? Are those devices all controlled by MIDI or something? Uh-may-zing.

My good friend Beau is a very talented individual who makes custom-built bass guitars. They are, how you say, fucking sick.

I think I like this one the best:

Those are handmade knobs, sucker. By Beau's hand, that is.

If you play bass and you don't buy one I will be greatly disappointed. I mean, YOU will be greatly disappointed...let's get that straight. I will just be mildly disappointed, and cease to associate with you.

Oh, here's Beau's MySpace page, if you do that sort of thing. I suppose I should make mine respectable now so people don't think Beau associates with complete idiots.

Etsy Labs Handmade Music Night, 08/23/2007, originally uploaded by dubitable.

I dropped by the Handmade Music 02 event at last night with my friend Clayton. It was a blast. The event was co-sponsored by Make Magazine and Create Digital Music along with Etsy Labs. Ranjit was there with Samson and his fabulous cacophonic door-stop gear-box (which is, I think, probably not its proper name). There were Nintendo DS performances, a video-mixing guitar thingy, a bunch of handmade synths and sequencers, and a general good vibe. I want there to be more of these.

Monome performance by Brian Crabtree. I was totally sold on this device after watching him perform. Check it out: monome.org.

Oh my! Here's what I'm obsessed with right now:

• SuperCollider is the latest toy I've been playing with. Max/MSP/Jitter is a bit on the back burner right now. Here is my very basic first SuperCollider GUI code, a simple sequencer based on example code from the help files. And I haven't even gotten to the interesting sounds yet!
• Processing is up on the list. I'm excited by code-based artist tools lately, I guess--while the graphical programming environment provided by Max/MSP/Jitter is great for fast-prototyping, I feel that it imposes limitations on architecture over time, and can also impose speed hits on the application itself--the fact is, added a user-interface overhead to every object becomes expensive after a while!
• The wonders of science. I just finished the book Art & Physics by Dr. Leonard Shlain. No, he's a medical doctor, not a Ph.D., and unfortunately it shows; there are some real limitations to this book. However, I can say that it was worth reading for me because it really made me consider the connections between art and science, how science and math can provide (and has provided) a vocabulary for artists. I feel a new excitement for stuff like Dan Shiffman's The Nature of Code course at ITP. I wish we had something like that at Parsons. As soon as I finished Dr. Shlain's book I picked up QED by Richard Feynman--now THAT is a mind-blowing book. I'm getting towards the end of chapter two (there are four chapters, one for each lecture that he gave in the series, each one builds on the last). Even though he used language in the lectures aimed at the layman rather than a theoretical physicist, some sections still require that I go back over them a few times to really absorb concepts. But, nevertheless, a fascinating read, highly recommended, so far.
• My trip to Argentina. I don't know what to expect, or rather, I have no expectations. I've barely planned for it--I just wrote up a TODO list for the trip just now, and only purchased a guidebook and simple Spanish text a few hours ago. I'll be there from July 2nd to July 12th, and I'll be joining my parents who got there a few days ago in Buenos Aires, and then the three of us will head to Mendoza (or thereabouts) to meet up with my sister, who has been there since last fall. While I can't say I'm very excited yet--this is just how I am--I will be once I get into the airport, I'm sure. I expect it to be a blast, full of good food and drink, sightseeing, exploration, relaxation, all that good stuff.

More to come...

Well, I have no excuse for taking so long to post. Actually, I have plenty of excuses, just no solid reasons:

• The CDT 10 Year show & EA Sims ("Parsons Does the Sims") show went up, the latter this past week, the former two weeks before that. I was somewhat involved.
• More importantly (to me at least) I've been spending a lot of time working on my Max/MSP performance patch, learning a bunch about computer music, playing with other sound software like ChucK and SuperCollider, and lastly, performing at Monkeytown with my Parsons Max/MSP class. That was the highlight of the last few weeks.
• Oh yeah, I've also been enjoying the weather.

Now, my life is complete.