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

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.

Programming tutorial Pt 2 coming up on Wednseday!

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);
}
}

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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.