creative spaces

I don’t have any official connection with The SOLD Project, except that a former student of mine, Aaron Knight, scored a trailer (PSA, something along those lines) for them. Here is their website, and here is the page with that video—his is the video on the bottom (also embedded below). I think he did a nice job. Keep up the good work, Captain!

(via Create Digital Motion)

Home-grown industrial tech art. That’s how I might describe the work of Karsten Schmidt, aka Toxi (blogs here and here). He uses Java and Processing, developing his own libraries as needed: physics, audio, video, 3d–you name it.  Just another hobbyist messing with processing?  I don’t think so–check out his portfolio (audi, bmw, nokia, channel4, etc.).

He has released some videos demonstrating some of his work and the processes he developed for the projects.  Here is one that details his recent development of the bouncy, squishy little generative creatures that are the Nokia Friends. These generative characters bounce around in Nokia flagship stores and in Heathrow Terminal 5.


The making of: Nokia Friends, generative characters from postspectacular on Vimeo.

Proprietary software? Nope. Java. Processing. Custom open-source libraries available for download at Toxi’s GoogleCode page.

Well, maybe I’m a bit out of the loop, but before the NY Times article this weekend, I hadn’t heard about Paul Lansky’s new career direction. So many composers (myself included) had written music for acoustic instruments for years before becoming attracted to the world of electronic and computer music, and are, of course, beneficiaries of the difficult time-consuming work of pioneers in the field such as Lansky, who is now going in the other direction. He says that he is (gasp) “done.” Really? Well, here is the precise quote from the Times article:

“I hate to say this, but I think I’m done,” Mr. Lansky said. “Basically I’ve said what I’ve had to say. Here I am, 64, and I find myself at what feels like the beginning of a career. I’m interested in writing for real people at this point.”

That sounds pretty emphatic to me. But I can certainly understand it. Lansky has spent his career doing it all from punching cards to writing programs, and having control over the minute details of the resulting music. When any composer is around the greatest performers exquisitly performing great music, there is always a beckoning to be able to speak through that medium. Apparently, Paul Lansky wants to devote his career from now on to that, and who can fault him? Not even his greatest fans.

We’re not talking about the sculpture in your local park or the paintings in your library.  The exhibit at Glastonbury in the previous post is really cool, but I really like the unexpected things.  You know, the one where the people who are the audience don’t know what is going on.  Like public experiments without informed consent forms being signed. These examples are courtesy of Chris O’Shea’s Pixelsumo blog. 

The artist Peter Coffin teamed up with Cinimod Studio to create the UFO Project. Can you imagine your lovely evening at the cafe in Gdansk, when this thing goes flying about the city? 3000 programmable LED nodes, and fully controllable via SMS? The team at Cinimod went all out to build this puppy.  Wish I had been there at the opening night performance in Gdansk!

See the post at PIxelsumo and the project page at Cinimod Studio.

And while we’re at Pixelsumo, the July Digest post includes a couple of projects that are terribly amusing. I love the Double-Taker (Snout) project by Golan Levin et al.

But my favorite is the Image Fulgurator by Berlin photographer Julius von Bismark.

This ingenious device projects an image onto something that is being flash photographed.  The projection only lasts for a few milliseconds and is triggered by the flash, so the unsuspecting photographer doesn’t see the projection until they look at the snapshot. Just watch the YouTube video.

And for some serious laughs, watch the video of his Topshot Helmet project (toward the bottom of the page).

Let’s not forget who our audience is!

This is where it’s at–interactive audio and video installation that allows for groups of people to play cooperatively.  Read about it from Memo.tv, and watch the video–note the reactions of the installation’s visitors. Also checkout the Flickr stream.

Glastonbury 2008 – Pi Interactive Installation from evan on Vimeo.

So what have I been up to lately? Quite a bit! A bit of composing, a bit of research, some pretty fierce committee work at PBA, and a big project involving using virtual worlds for enhanced student projects in undergraduate music course (see the blog). I’ve spent so much time reading other fantastic blogs (I especially like Peter Kirn’s incredibly good CDM sites here and here).

So this will be my little journal, and hopefully I’ll try to pass along some cool things as I find them.

Lets see if I can Jott to two different WordPress blogs. So, I’ve setup two WordPress links, one going to one of my blogs and the other going to this one, creative spaces. listen

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With this post I’m trying out using “Mirror Blog” to post here from fb, and to have this blog mirrored there. Maybe I’ll crank this blog back up, or maybe put another one here–we’ll see. Support for multiple blogs?

I will do a demonstration/lecture at the Georgia Music Educators Association conference in Savannah on January 26. This is part of the Southern Regional TI:ME proceedings that is coordinated with the GMEA this year. Thanks to Richard Repp for putting this together.

The course Performance of Interactive Works Using Computers at PBAU begins this week. The students in this course will experiment with all kinds of new media ideas for performance, and will assist in the construction of the upcoming “Gethsemane” piece for live music, dance, and interactive multimedia. This blog is one place to stay informed about the Gethsemane project.