Virtual Boxes

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I just completed editing a video this morning. It's me playing with cyberspacial fields through dance and video. Check it out:

Here are some of the screenshots of the things of the workspace:

This display is kinda neato - it's the animation tweens of the blue boxes that float around. I had three boxes in total, one for the big solid, and two extra for when they split up. Sometimes I made them invisible (opacity at zero) but they still were floating around... it's like a window running in the background or something.

And here are my keyframes. Mostly scale and position, but some instances of rotation and opacity.

Circuit bending, and cyberspace...

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So NYU ITP did a live performance last night. It kicked off w/ a girl who played a sonarized version of the Melissa virus, and the I Love You virus - which was alright, but not so much of a 'performance.' It was too conceptual to actually sound like anything cool. There was some other dude who played drums with a three pre-programmed robots: a woodblock, a tin plate, and a washboard (I think). It all played up against a MIDI, or something.

One of the highlights of the evening was two guys playing Mortal Combat with guitars - they'd pluck a note and Sub-Zero would punch or duck or whatever. Their whole performance was pretty damn well orchestrated. The guitars managed to be music while controlling the characters. They managed to get lightning to strike by strumming a particular chord. It was the dueling banjos superimposed on the dueling imaginations of hand-eye coordination...

Some guy made music with a device that picked up electromagnetic(?) signals. He would brush it up against a computer and it would buzz all weird. He put it next to his cell, made a call, and the interference was beeping out.

And what totally geeked me out was the circuit bending. From what I understand, circuit bending is when they pass a current through circuits of old electronics and play it on an amp - then they rewire and reroute all that electricity and make funny sounds. I was listening to the sound landscape, and realized that this is what the world sounds like to a circuit board.

Wok this way?

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When I was walking home today, I passed a news stand and saw this on the front page of the New York Post:

I'm more baffled than anything. It's not that this is offensive, as much as it's just plain stupid. The nameless "China Chief" in question is Chinese President Hu, and although he looks exactly like that dude who makes your beef broccoli, he isn't.

I remember when Shaq made Chinese jokes at Yao Ming. He was quoted saying, "Tell Yao Ming, 'ching-chong-yang-wah-ah-soh.'" I remember hearing this and wondering what would have happened if Yao were quoted saying, "Tell Shaq that I ain't gon' stand fer his po-dank shit." The fallout would have been outrageous, and rightfully so. Everybody would have been on Yao's ass for being way outa line.

This isn't an issue of how black folk and asian folk get along, it's an issue of how the media responds to being racist. The presidents of two economic superpowers meet and because one of them happens to be Chinese, all you have to report is "Wok This Way"?

So I took the liberty to photoshop my own front page. Just try and imagine - you're walking home late one night, and you pass a news stand, and on the front page of the New York Post, you see:

To be fair, the pun "watermelon you talkin bout?" (what're you talking about) isn't as clean as "Wok this way," but, on the plus side, it does it's job at being just as irrelevant and racist. But I think this is offset by the fact that I named Sharpton by name (mainly because "Sharpton" happened to be shorter than "Afro-American Chief").

Rhizome, P5

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So... I'm interning at where Fran used to be the director of technology - a not-for-profit new media arts organization called rhizome.org. Doing really basic HTML and CSS stuff. And I figure, where else to pick up good coding habits than a geeky artsy computery place like this?

Also, my interest is growing in the P5 glove. Google search to find more about it, but it's a controller that fits on your hand - I think it holds the same pattents as the Powerglove for the NES, but it's for the computer. At any rate, I figure w/ my movement experience (and, moreover, my hand movement experience w/ digitz), I can fenagel somethin pretty cool out of it. Just ordered one yesterday, can't wait for it. They used to retail at a hundred bucks a unit, but they flopped in the market, and are down to twenty + shipping.

I created a portfolio for most of my movement/media work for a scholarship application a class in Colorado called "Responding to Gesture and Bodies: Design for Physically Based Interactive Art." I have no idea what my chances are - whether they're looking for folk more experienced w/ actually getting a curator and whatnot, or if they're looking for a younger folk.

Oh yeah, I joined the Yahoo! Group for the P5 Glove. Check out the geek in that.