My take on this flyer (according to www.artcards.com) is that if you produce any work of media, you can show up, plug in, and show your work..
Saturday, August 15th, 8pm-11pm
Do it
MAP:
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=37-24+24th+street+long+island+city+ny&sourceid=navclient-ff&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS176US232&um=1&ie=UTF-8&split=0&gl=us&ei=pp2BSsSLHouMtge4usTHCg&sa=X&oi=geocode_result&ct=image&resnum=1
Take the F to 21st street or the NW to 36th street in Queens
So -
We still exist. Look for the hotness we’ve been working on soon – hint here. ://grove does a lot of their art – like that fly flyer found at the bottom of that post – as well as their live show and their website and their mixtape cover and maybe a t-shirt or two. Anyhow
we’ll be in touch.
So we’re working on a space – somewhere we can work, talk, and play videogames – that isn’t my bedroom, but in the meantime I’ve been living the life of the urban nomad, a laptop strapped to my back and a wifi-sensitive dowsing rod in hand. One of my favorite places to sit and get work done is Velselka – if you roll in after the breakfast rush on a Wednesday they have no problem with you using their free wifi for hours. Highly recommended.
Programming tutorial Pt 2 coming up on Wednseday!
Pics from last Wednesday’s face-melting-good show at the Knitting Factory – ://grove.nyc is providing visual support for BAJAH + DRY EYE CREW.
Photos courtesy of Annie C. Yu, 2009
They’re very, very good at what they do – if you’d like to experience it for yourself email me some time before the 25th of June and I’ll make sure you get to see them when we film the Show at the Knitting Factory. More pics, hopefully, forthcoming.
In other news – I’m finally going through my hard drive and pulling my portfolio together. It’s a long process but here’s a taste:
I originally intended to use this video as a backfrop for performance, but we’ll see what happens with it.
For those following along at home here’s the source code. Copy and paste this sucker into the Processing IDE and you’ll be all set; note that if you hit ‘b’ to turn on the blur it doesn’t turn off…Feel free to use the code in your own non-commercial projects, and please let me know if you do!
//Sin Lines
//by Ted Pallas
//Licensed under Creative Commons, Attribution, Non-commercial
void setup() {
size(700, 450);
background (255, 255, 255);
frameRate(24);
}
int posY = 200;
int posX = 0;
int circCount = 0;
float col1, col2, col3 = 255;
void draw() {
SinLines (posX, 10);
posX = posX + 8;
SinLines (20, 10);
SinLines (40, 10);
if (posX>=700-1) {
posX = 0;
posY = posY + 40;
col1 = random (30, 150);
col2 = random (30, 200);
col3 = random (30, 120);
}
}
void SinLines (int posX, int Y) {
smooth();
strokeWeight(5);
stroke(col1, col2, col3);
line (posX, cos(circCount), posX, (sin(circCount)*1000));
posX = posX + 1;
circCount = circCount + 15;
if (posX>=screen.width-1) {
posX = 0;
posY = posY + 40;
col1 = random (30, 255);
col2 = random (30, 200);
col3 = random (30, 255);
}
keyPressed();
if (key == ‘b’) {
filter(BLUR, .6);
}
}
As a designer I tend to go through periods of obsession, exploring all sorts of topics as thoroughly as possible in the never-ending quest for that Perfect Inspiration. For some people inspiration is visual, but for me it tends, more often then not, to be tonal. Today’s “listen on repeat” is right here:
I love the East-meets-West vibe that I’m getting without having to go to a New-Agey place. It’s also a nice antidote to the bright-lights-flashing-colors-lots-of-drums I’ve been living with since I’ve taken on the Bajah + Dry Eye project.
Also that pumped-bellows-boxy looking thing that we see early in the video is a Shruti Box. I think I may order one – those drones are sexy.
First things first: someone reached this blog yesterday by searching “sexy sherbert” – sorry for letting you down, dude. Hope you found what you were looking for.
The last few days have been spent hanging out with Bajah + Dry Eye Crew, 3 MC’s from Sierra Leone who are just about to unleash themselves on an unsuspecting American music scene. These cats are good – I heartily recommend going to their MySpace and turning your laptop up to 11 (also, their Space features what would appear to be the filter section from a Moog product along the right side, which I can get behind like crazy.) ://grove.nyc is providing visual support for their live act as it develops, with a gig at the Knitting Factory on Tuesday and a larger show at the Roots picnic on Saturday. As a result I am burning midnight oil like it’s chanukkah, trying to come with content that doesn’t look like wall paper but actually, you know, has narrative and whatnot. It’s gonna be sick – drop me a line if you come by the Factory and we can hang out after the set.
In other news: I am knee deep in VDMX and all of it’s Quartz Composer bullshit/glory and while it’s nice to be working on a hotrod it’s making me yearn to do something with my hands and my eyes that doesn’t involve a mouse at all – ideally it won’t even involve a screen, though that may or may bot be wishful thinking. I’m leaning towards pulling off some oil projections – glycerin + oil + water + dish + overhead projector + practice = this – and maybe some ghetto OptiKinetics stuff as well. Point is I want to be careful about getting too digital.
So – look for video of the show on Wednesday.
Who’s doing something neat this weekend? Or has read any good books?
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This morning, when my girlfriend gave me her customary “wake the hell up you lazy bastard” phone call (which I missed and had to return) she mentioned that she had a “long article for me to read” that she “wasn’t sure how you (read: I) would feel about.” A few hours later this 8-page gem from New York Magazine appeared in my inbox.
After slogging through the first 4 pages – which don’t really tie themselves down to one thesis, making me wonder if the author is making a point or falling victim to his own distractions – I started thinking that maybe we need someone to write about this point from the perspective of someone who’s grown up not being able to remember a time before the Internet. By the end I was convinced that anyone who doesn’t treat the Internet as a neccesity, either by choice or by job description, is incapable of getting the point – communication allows for more than “where you at,” and if you’re good at communicating you’re good at finding the solution you need for the problem of the moment.
Two quotes from the article, both attributed to Horace Mann, and one excerpt from the author sum up the piece quite nicely:
Despite his robust web presence, Mann is skeptical about technology’s impact on our lives. “Is it clear to you that the last fifteen years represent an enormous improvement in how everything operates?” he asks. “Picasso was somehow able to finish the Desmoiselles of Avignon even though he didn’t have an application that let him tag his to-dos. If John Lennon had a BlackBerry, do you think he would have done everything he did with the Beatles in less than ten years?”
“There’s no shell script, there’s no fancy pen, there’s no notebook or nap or Firefox extension or hack that’s gonna help you figure out why the fuck you’re here,” he tells me. “That’s on you. This makes me sound like one of those people who swindled the Beatles, but if you are having attention problems, the best way to deal with it is by admitting it and then saying, ‘From now on, I’m gonna be in the moment and more cognizant.’ I said not long ago, I think on Twitter—God, I quote myself a lot, what an asshole—that really all self-help is Buddhism with a service mark.”I keep returning to the parable of Einstein and Lennon—the great historical geniuses hypothetically ruined by modern distraction. What made both men’s achievements so groundbreaking, though, was that they did something modern technology is getting increasingly better at allowing us to do: They very powerfully linked and synthesized things that had previously been unlinked—Newtonian gravity and particle physics, rock and blues and folk and doo-wop and bubblegum pop and psychedelia. If Einstein and Lennon were growing up today, their natural genius might be so pumped up on the possibilities of the new technology they’d be doing even more dazzling things. Surely Lennon would find a way to manipulate his BlackBerry to his own ends, just like he did with all the new technology of the sixties—he’d harvest spam and text messages and web snippets and build them into a new kind of absurd poetry. The Beatles would make the best viral videos of all time, simultaneously addictive and artful, disposable and forever. All of those canonical songs, let’s remember, were created entirely within a newfangled mass genre that was widely considered to be an assault on civilization and the sanctity of deep human thought. Standards change. They change because of great creations in formerly suspect media.
I think it’s time that we stopped looking at the Internet as a thing and started approaching the Internet as an expansion of our own mind, much the same way college students might treat their university’s library. Since I’ve put an iPhone in my pocket last July, for example, my approach to the problems of my day-to-day existence – from “where is that bar I’m meeting Adam at?” to “how do I sync audio driven in Ableton Live to video playing in qLab without worrying about load-time latency?” – have been answered by the Internet, on the spot, without having to go through the ritual of opening the computer, finding a network, looking up the data, writing it down, etc etc etc. I no longer wonder about things, intead I know them, and there’s an incredible power in that. As a freelance show control programmer I’ve found myself in situations where I didn’t know why my system wasn’t working and having the Internet in my pocket, available for a quick Google, has saved several producers quite a bit of money, and made me more valuable at the same time – I don’t have to leave the theater and tackle the problem after I’ve gone and done a bunch of research and made a bunch of phone calls, which is quite a departure from the way these situations would’ve worked in the past. Those of us who are good at our jobs aren’t going to be the ones “twittering” away our bosses’ money – we’re going to be the ones leveraging our way into new techniques that allow us to do more work in less time, earning us more income and allowing those who hire us to see more return from their investment.
In short people over 30 – and even that may be generous – need to stop analyzing the Internet in a fashion that separates anything from anything else. Facebook and Twitter, for example, are the same goddam thing, at the end of the day – you interface with a keyboard in order to allow an audience of your peers access to you and your ideas, be they musings on sandwiches or party planning or whatever, it’s all the same thing. Going a step further the better you are at using these tools, which will involve a lot of bouncing around, the better you will be at meshing the entire Internet, blogosphere and all, into a giant cohesive whole.
A note on lifehacking, as well – there is not, contrary to popular belief, a scene that revolves around new ways to use the Internet for the sake of using the Interent differently. Lifehacking, when done right, instead focuses on acknowledging that there is a problem with the way something you have to use works – example, you don’t like having to email large files – so instead you find DropBox, which allows you to solve that problem. Etcetera. That’s it – I believe that calling LifeHacing is ridiculous – was the dude who invented the watermill “agrihacking” because he harvested energy from a stream to grind flour? Food for thought.
Commentary here is particularly welcome.
Do this tonight at 3rd Ward– its a handmade music sound scaping event with
free beer!
from 730-1030 at 3rd Ward (195 Morgan Ave, BK)
Sandwich?
Date: Thursday, May 21st
Time: 7:30pm – 10:30pm
Location: 3rd Ward (195 Morgan Ave, W’burg)
Cost: Free with RSVP
“3rd Ward, Etsy.com, Make Magazine, and
createdigitalmusic.com present Handmade Music Night. Open to all, this part-party, part-mixer, part-Science Fair, and part-performance is an informal chance for geeksters and the geek-curious to come together, relax, and discover new sounds. Featuring circuit-bent toys, custom software and patches, interactive digital & visual instruments, custom electronics, electricity-powered noisemakers, DIY robots and new acoustic instruments. Tonight’s line-up below
* ROBOTIC GAMELAN: The GamelaTron by League of Urban Robots makes an appearance, with a fully robotic composition for a high-tech take on the traditional Indonesian instruments
* RESCUED iPODS: Hans-Christoph Steiner is saving old mobile devices and PDAs from being junked, by harnassing open-source software to make them powerful, useful, expressive, fun tools, toys, and instruments instead
* POCKET ANDROIDS: Peter Kirn shows off a new, in-progress app for turning Google’s open-source Linux platform into a gestural controller – and for connecting any computer running any operating system for music, visuals, and interaction via Java and OpenSoundControl
So before this gets started in earnest I’m going to point out that this post will contain very little, if any, actual computer code. Today is all about getting in the mindset required to make something from scratch, and sitting in front of a computer screen can hurt that process more than you’d think.
Select this paragraph, copy it into a text editor and print it out. Did you do that? Good. Now go to your kitchen and make a sandwich. Write down every single step you take on the path to a delicious lunch (or breakfast, or dinner, or midnight snack.)
Take a look at that list. How thorough were you? Did you start with ‘acquire bread’ or go straight to spreading the mayo? How about the middle? Did you specify how much ham and precisely how it gets placed? Did you list optional items, like mustard? The trick to beautiful code is painting a complete picture of everything that happens before you even sit down at the computer.
If this is your first foray into the world of code it’s time to get excited. Coding is actually a very relaxing activity (assuming you aren’t under deadline – then it’s exactly the opposite). While my lady does her yoga thing to de-stress I’ll fire up Processing and try and make pretty shapes or something – it’s definitely a therapeutic past-time.
Here, then, are some important things to keep in mind over the coming weeks as this tutorial takes shape:
1. Syntax and Grammar Matter A LOT - The way you type your code in a given language is called syntax. Much like a spoken language every computer language has it’s own rules as to how ideas have to be stated in order to be executed, as well as an order to how things have to happen. You can’t, for example, declare a variable as an integer (a number without any decimal points, essentially) and then later expect that variable to be able to handle a value like ‘1.5.’ Get used to thinking in the code you’re working in – it’s a struggle to get there, to be sure, but with dilligence it’ll happen. Here might be a good point to mention that when you see example code you don’t want to just copy and paste it into whatever editor you’re working in; a better call would be to type it out by hand, run it to see the result, delete it, and type it out by hand again (and again, and again, and again) tweaking things a little bit each time but keeping the core of the code the same. This will achieve two ends – 1, it will drill grammar and 2 it will show you exactly what each line of the code is doing as you make you’re own adjustments.
2. Everything takes patience - Bugs happen. All the time. A lot. There’s no getting around it. These are beautiful – they allow you to learn, and maybe will compel you try something different next time. Don’t rage, embrace.
3. No, really, you need to be patient - Learning this stuff takes a not insignificant amount of time, but it’s worth it!
4. Computers do what you tell them to, as long as you phrase it right – Rather self-explanatory but it bears mention. I’ll use a personal example here – Ray at Vidvox, makers of the super-rad VDMX VJ software (who are the kings of responding to crash logs, by the way – if you work with live visuals at all you should check this software out if only for the super-awesome tech support) clued me in to the wonderful world of differences in what people can make using Quartz Composer. My ignorance of these differences led VDMX to occasionally get grumpy, which is different from VDMX being buggy. In short, when things don’t work, find out everything you can about what you’re trying to do before you throw your hands in the air and start screaming at your machine.
5. The end result is what drives a project, not how you get there – This is something I struggle with every day. There are so many tools out there that it can get hard to choose how you want to go about doing something. I’m going to go ahead and say it straight – if you can solve the problem without having to code your own solution that is generally better in most situations involving either time management or collaboration with others who might be waiting on you to deliver before they can move on. If you’re reading this you are probably not a professional developer – using Ableton Live to get a peice of audio to playback at the speed you need, for example, instead of messing around in PureData playing with buffers and things you don’t understand yet will get you working towards the end result faster (and make clients happier because you’ve done it quicker, which is something to keep in mind) which will allow you to get moving on to the next bit of the project that much faster. If, on the other hand, you’re looking to achieve something super-specific or you’re doing your own work or time isn’t an issue or you just really want to then rolling-your-own can be a great solution.
Alright, now for the fun stuff. Over then next few months I’ll be showing you some nifty tricks in Processing, and you’ll be working along side me as I dig in to Max/MSP/Jitter and OpenFrameworks. If there is significant interest I have no problem writing a short series on Isadora as well, but that’s a bit of a niche topic. Because we all have different needs – I’m a live media designer, so a lot of what I’ll be doing is going to be oriented towards streamlining my performance process – we won’t all want to reach the same ends but we should definitely do our best to help each other get there.
Remember when I said there wouldn’t be any code? I lied. Go hit that Processing link and download the IDE for your system. Once you’ve installed it type the following code into your editor window (it’s the only window, if you’ve just launched the progam and haven’t touched anything yet):
// Circles!
//by Ted Pallas
//Dec 20, 2009
//Shared Under a Creative Commons Non-Commercial Attribution License
void setup(){
size(screen.width, screen.height);
smooth();
background(#A5D1FF);
frameRate(30);
}
float count = 0.00;
float angle1 = 0.00;
float angle2 = 1.00;
float rectsize = 0.00;
float size1 = 0.00;
void draw(){
strokeWeight(5);
stroke(random(120, 220), random(120, 220), random(120, 220), random(30, 120));
angle1 = angle1 + 5;
count = count + 1;
}
void mouseMoved() {
strokeWeight(1);
stroke(0, 0, 0, 255);
fill(random(120, 220), random(120, 220), random(120, 220), random(30, 225));
size1 = random(8, 20);
ellipse (mouseX, mouseY, size1, size1);
}
//end code
Hit run (the little play button or, if you’re feeling fancy, apple-r on the Mac or cntrl-r on Windows (and maybe linux?) will do the same thing.) If it doesn’t run make sure you typed it out correctly.
Does it run? Do you see what happens when you click and move the mouse? Pretty neat, right? Now start messing with it – I might save a copy to fall back to if I break it. Change variables, move things around, just have at it. Please post what you’ve come up with here in the comments.
Your other bit of homework is to make three more lists of steps you need to take in order to achieve a task. We already did a sandwich but I bet you’ll be hungry again soon so why don’t you try another food that involves cooking, sorting/washing laundry and hooking up a ster-erry-erry-oh system? Again, please post these in the comments – we’ll learn more from each other (myself included) then we would without.
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The affordable art fair starts Wednesday with a cocktail reception from 6-9
its not free… unfortunately, but its a great way to see and buy upcoming artists at a very reasonable price.
Julien Gilbert, untitled
“AAF NYC is the place for new and established collectors to discover and buy paintings, drawings, sculptures, video, photography and limited edition prints from distinguished galleries, all priced from $100 – $10,000. This year the Fair will host more than 60 galleries from the US, Europe, Asia, Canada and South America. AAF 2009 will debut at its new home at ‘7 West 34th Street’ this May.
Hours:
Here’s the website: http://www.aafnyc.com/
Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/New-York-NY/Affordable-Art-Fair-New-York-City/8150753909?v=info&viewas=5206735
cool.
And what a way to celebrate!!!!
There is a new Bike lane on grand street in Williamsburg, starting on the brooklyn side of the bridge and continuing past bushwick ave. This makes a huge difference in my life, and anyone else who rides to work from off the lorimer, graham, grand and montrose stop. Grand st. is horrible during rush hour and this makes it 10x less terrifying.
Bike lane
What a way to get into that summer feeling. I wonder what other bike lanes will spring up in the coming months, with a 38% increase in bikers this year, two-wheelers have some serious pull in city planning.
I’m so happy… now if only it wouldn’t rain for the next two weeks.
Also if you go to http://bikemonthnyc.org/ it has a huge calendar of bike- events!!!
–Katie
I’m sitting in my bedroom warping some breakbeats for share.dj tonight and I can’t help but feel like a modern-day Pierre Schafer – it blows my mind how loop-based electronic music still is, even in 2009.
Hello spring! You are here in earnest – all is warm, bloom’d and growing. Who has ideas for street performance pieces?
The image is of my lady sitting outside studying menstruation on a lovely spring afternoon. Apparently the pural is ‘menses.’
Swine Flu actual disease or fashion experiment…
“They wouldn’t wear the masks would they…I bet they would.. I dare you to start an epidemic rumor…You’re on…Lets mix the two most terrifying things we can think of… Mayonaise and Egg Salad?… No–Pigs and Mexico…Egads, that just pedestrian enough to be believable…I win, brunch is on you…Damn.”
I couldn’t help myself
Epidemic = Advertising space?
Companies are Swin(e)dling their way into public health phobias…
I’m imagining a Black mesh mask brought to you by Dolce and Gabana… and a mask with a food flap from Mcdonalds free with every happy meal…
image courtesy of Gawker.com
Happy Unicorn Wednesday!
We will return to our regularly scheduled appearance tomorrow.
Picture taken on 1st and Ave A
Hey everyone who’s coming here via “Max/MSP” tag searches on WordPress! Keep an eye on this space in the next couple weeks – I’m going to start putting up some beginner-level tutorials to help people wrap their minds around the entry level stuff. At the end of the day all Max/MSP really does is shuffle around numbers – it’s where those numbers end up that starts to make things interesting.
At any rate, the tutorial is in development – please stick around!
These Krink moptops are way, way more fun then they have any right to be.
Also, how adorable is this little dude?
First, before this goes any further, I’d like to welcome Katie Higgins to the ://grove.nyc blog. She’s growing a ://grove in her backyard, as you can see – I’m totally pumped to go play in the dirt.
So this VJ thing is very, very fun – I spent a few hours this morning mixing to an old RJD2 mix Luke sent my way. I’m starting to wrap my head around how compositing works – for those who don’t know compositing literally involves combining two videos together into a single visual – you know, like a composite. It’s the “how” that I’m trying to figure out now – do I take out and replace certain colors with the second video? Do I fade and blend that way? Do I use masks? All of these questions inform the ultimate question, “how do I build these in Isadora?” That process has been ongoing for the past few days – I’ll have a sample patch up later in the week for y’alls perusal. The one I’m looking at right now works mostly, except it crashes a lot, and I’m not sure why – I think I have too many “projectors” on one page – time to go and build a super-awesome routing system!
So how good is Neil Young’s Harvest? I can honestly say that before my girlfriend goaded me into buying it on vinyl over the weekend I’d really never given it a pay-attention listen but MAN that disc is fire. The strings, in particular, sound extra-beautiful, poking their noses into the action periodically across the record. “I see you give more than I can take, but I only harvest song” – this is definitely going to be my summer-nights alone and thinkin’ jam. It’ll be like I’m on a porch somewhere in the heartland even though I’ll actually be rocking out in my no-AC bedroom in northern Astoria.
On the same trip I picked up a copy of the Grateful Dead’s fan-titled “Skull and Roses,” a collection of live recordings from 1971, a two-LP set including an entire side devoted to a wonderfully-awesome rendition of “The Other One.” Most of the album is rather tame by Dead standards, especially for someone like myself who is more into Anthem of the Sun and aoxomoxoa and their 1968-9 output (which focused more on LOUD/FAST/UNBRIDLED MUSICIANSHIP over intricacy), but it’s still a nice background listen.
What have you all been rocking?
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Maybe I’m just hungry, or maybe the weather is just screaming “Plant me!” but this summer’s project will be edible.
There is no time like the present to strike a wayward hoe to the ground and celebrate the ‘Recessional’ like starting your very own Victory Garden.
And if the Age old proverb holds true… you are what you eat–That makes you, a champion.
Things I’ve discovered that aid in gardening:
Plant seeds at the $.99 store.
Plant seeds at Walmart
Plant seeds inside the vegetables I’ve just eaten…
Soil not drenched in beer
The hardest part for me will be clearing a section of the jungle that has claimed my backyard. We planted grass seeds last summer, and the grass did grow, only now its a foot-high tick circus and I’m without a lawn mower.
I have to admit my garden initiative is in part due to the silent competition that exists between my neighbors and I (they may or may not be aware of this.) Their manicured lawn, complete with hammock, must be put in its place, and made to suffer the smell of victory tomatoes all summer long.
Once I have reaped the first fruits of my harvest, I imagine that I will feel the same manly pride one gets after shooting a bear. So expect a myriad of hunting stories and 3 months of giving Key Foods the cold shoulder.
Grow green,
–Katie
Draft one of many for the ://grove.nyc logo. Gold ink on cardboard.
I’m on my way home from Cry Havoc’s Monday night writer’s/actor’s new work development workshop. Cry Havoc is a wonderful group of folks whom I’ve had the pleasure of working with several times over the years; tonight was my first appearance at the workshop in a dog’s age and it was a refreshing experience – I’m hoping to be a regular presence at these things from here on out.
Since I work in the theater primarily the concept of text as source is not an entirely unfamiliar one, but it wasn’t until recently – within the last week or so – that I’ve thought about text as an important part of a process that isn’t, by nature, generated from words in a page, a la theatre or film. I’ve been staring at my computer screen for a week trying to nudge a piece of code into doing what I want it to do, and I wonder what would happen if I wrote out the result I want to see/feel before I started working in the IDE. Would it do anything beyond helping me organize my thoughts? Would it prevent happy accidents? Will I be able to come up with more than 60 words, and would more than that be necessary? I plan on trying it out this week, as soon as I can come up with a compelling project.
At any rate I can’t say enough wonderful things about the amazing folks over at Cry Havoc. You should go check them out for sure, and if you’re an actor or writer in NYC you should check out the workshop for sure.
EDIT: Apparently the WordPress for iPhone app doesn’t do HTML.
Since my time with my old show has ended I’ve moved to Astoria, where I have had no Internet and thus no ideas of what to do with my time
SO
I’ve started learning Max/MSP. For those who don’t know Max/MSP is a programming language who’s IDE is node-based – like, you drag “parts” on to your “table” and “patch” them with “cables” – rather than text based, though I assume it can be that too. The people who use it tend to be artists who need something very specific from a piece of software, just a task accomplished and nothing more (though fellow ://grovester Luke Schantz will use Max/MSP to do anything and everything, including talk to open-source 3D modeling tool Blender(though it’s so much more than that – more info forthcoming)…) I’ve been meaning to do this for ages but now that I have the free time to do it right the learning process has really started in earnest.
Since my love affair with Processing started last year I’ve really been taken by the change in design process that occurs when you design in code as opposed to a WYSIWYG editor – everything becomes a variable to be changed rather than existing as a result in and of itself. I’m still chewing on this but it’s been a revelation. Since I have to think about how the shapes are made – how many edges? where are the vertices? what’s the relationship between angles? – in a very deliberate fashion, since I’m typing all of it, every choice, no matter how small, becomes bigger. Below are some pieces from a series I’ve done exploring simple geometric relationships. Source forthcoming, along with a more detailed examination of math for not-math types.
Click these to launch a gallery:
EDIT: OH HEY GUYS the tutorial you probably want starts right here.
So I’ve spent the last few days trying to get an actual not-free-wordpress blog website together, but it turns out I have to wait another 30-summodd days to transfer the registrar. So while this kind of sucks – having my email be ted@grovenyc.net will kick ass – it’s also a good thing, since it gives me some time to think about this organization’s visual identity.
This is the first of several posts exploring the different ideas I have as I come up with them. Expect a few others to chime in as well. I spent some time yesterday playing around with Photoshop and this happened:
://grove.nyc visual identity volume 1
I like that it isn’t terribly hard-edged – it almost looks painterly. I also really love this color palette – it looks like sherbert, and sherbert is delicious. In fact, I just Google Image-searched “sherbert” and this image popped up. Maybe the universe is trying to tell me something about the color choices?
I remember the first time I ate this stuff – it blew my mind that fruit could be so creamy, so delicious.
Expect more from this series later on this evening.
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Today’s prop shopping list for a show currently in workshop:
- grape juice in a bottle that looks like wine
- fake wine glass
- half a donut
- 2 empty cups of coffee taped on top of one another
- reese’s peanut butter cups
- cheeze wiz
-mustard
- water, for mouth-rinsing
Apart from the coffee cups these are all used in one sequence, with one actor. Sometimes theater is awesome.
-.tj
As promised here’s the video of Marley Marl struttin’ her bad self down 45th street. Dan did some real neat stuff with the final edit – I especially like the cut around the two minute mark where it looks like Marley is caught in a Chinese finger trap.
I kind of imagine this is what Phil Lesh saw everytime he walked his chihuahua back in ‘72.
So I saw this today at the Pashmina Center at 265 Canal Street and was confused:
What the hell is this about? Red plaid? No statues? No amphora? For non-New Yorkers they usually look like this(and yes, more often then not you see them lying on the sidewalk):
I’m conflicted between being really upset and a bit pumped – while I appreciate plaid anything, there’s something about the charm of the original that helps (me at least) remember that there are some things about New York that will never change, though inevitably I guess they always do.
That said, where do I get one of these cups in the wild?
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I just got to play with our new Canon Vixia HG-21 during our mascot Marley’s morning walk. At first I was a little put off by how small it was – I have shaky hands and small cameras don’t seem to help with that too much – but this little box has a) some serious heft and b) really responsive auto-focus. Now, if there’s one thing I’m not it’s a camera expert but this guy felt like what I always wanted video cameras to feel like, if that makes any sense. The biggest challenge was probably keeping this chihuahua in the frame. My buddy Dan is going to edit the footage together tonight and tomorrow; if puppy-dog pooping cake shots are you thing come check back here Tuesday.
://grove.nyc's official 4-legged mascot
So over the past few weeks I’ve been designing this little show out in the ‘Burg, squeezing everything I have to say through Mark Coniglio’s super-beautiful Isadora software. Isadora, for those not in the know, is a “graphical patching language” with a number of modules optimized for video. (A patch-based language is a programming tool designed to be more similar in execution to using, say, a modular synth as opposed to C++. A lot of us artsy types find them easier to work with than other languages because we can see, concretely, what is connected to what. Other patch-based languages include Max/MSP, puredata, and Plogue Bidule. More on puredata tomorrow or the next day.) Isadora is interesting because in addition to hosting it’s own “effect, and being able to create your own with a bunch of bits and pieces, it can also host Quartz Compositions (or any other Core Image file.) This is where things get both awesome and confusing – while I see the potential here being huge (and I made what I think was a very nice newspaper printed image effect for a live video input) there are two workflow-busters involved. The first is that I don’t know Quartz Composer all that great yet, and the second is that I’m unsure of what to do with a published “Image” output – this may be why I couldn’t get it to work, I’m thinking. That said I’m excited for the potential here, and if anybody knows what’s up please send me an email or comment on this post.
I’m trying a new page layout – what do you all think?
Also, big shoutout to the few dozen Missisippi ladies Dan and I saw on 45th street this morning – they were all wearing shirts that said “Southern Belles” and when I said “good morning Southern Belles!” while holding a camcorder and chasing a dog down the street covered in chihuahua hair and looking like I just rolled out of bed and I swear I heard one of the mothers say “that’s why we don’t let y’all go anywhere without chaperones – they’re crazy up here.”
Lady, you don’t even know.
Following our show the other evening Jason Fleitz started telling me about Paula Scher and her TED Talk on serious vs. solemn design. To sum it up solemn design is done with a purpose in mind that goes beyond the scope of the work itself (i.e. paying rent or getting one’s name out there) while serious work focuses on the work itself. At ://grove.nyc I like to think that we’ll be able to find the intersection, eventually, where we can do serious work that WILL pay our rent, but in the meantime I believe that the only way to get there is to only do serious work until we get to that point.
Here’s the talk: Paula Scher on TED
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we’re very excited that you’ve decided to stop by and see what was going on here.
if you found us via times:365:24:7 let us offer a hearty “thank you!” for trekking out to lorimer street to see the show – we hope you enjoyed it. you’ll notice, in the url bar, that we are now located at a much more convenient http://grovenyc.net.
we’d also like to encourage you to come back very, very soon – there will be something very interesting to look at in this very spot, but until then please enjoy this video of a robot gaining cognizance of itself:
and also please feel free to drop us an email and yell at us to get our acts together and entertain you goddammit.
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