Often I have come across very intense opinions about the superiority of the Mac user interface. While true with “stock” software options, it is my opinion that when bolstered with certain amazing freeware applications, the Windows XP user interface experience can surpass osX in terms of efficiency of operations. Thus, in the style of those lists that have come before me and informed this list, here are a collection of small utilities without which the efficiency and enjoyability of the Windows XP user interface would indeed be nearly as bad as its reputation.

Interface
xplorer2 – The single best file manager I have ever used, and I have used alot. I wish there were anything that remotely approached an equivalent on the osX side of things. (lite version = freeware, more advanced version is shareware)
Launchy / Colibri – Keyboard launching utilities are the single greatest enhancement in interface technology since … (freeware)
TaskSwitchXP – A superior replacement for the Alt-Tab task switcher built into windows
Stickies – Sticky note program, freeware
EssentialPIM – Calendar / ToDo / Personal Organization utility, freeware

MultiMedia
Foobar2000 – Audio player, encoder, ripper, tagger, cataloger, with many more advanced features (freeware)
VLC – Monolithic multimedia player with Matroska support (freeware)
Mediaplayer Classic – DirectShow multimedia player. Best when combined with the Combined Community Codec Pack (freeware)
XnView – Photo viewer / editor (freeware)
wScite / Notepad++ – Text editors for programming and just plain text editing (freeware)

Network
Firefox / Opera – Web browsers (freeware)
Pidgin (formerly Gaim) / Miranda – Instant messaging multi-protocol clients (freeware)
X-Chat 2 – IRC client (freeware)
uTorrent – Torrent client (freeware)
StrongDC++ – Direct Connect client (freeware)
eMule – eDonkey client (freeware)

Security/System
Sygate Personal Firewall Pro – Firewall
NOD32 Antivirus – Antivirus software

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This last week I focused nearly exclusively on working on my Hybrid Music performance. I had been making it a second priority previously, and so had a lot of work to do to catch up. Fortunately, the visual component of my Hybrid project intersected significantly with my AI project’s abstract visualizations.Accordingly, I thought it might be interesting to make a little post about the process and techniques I used to create the visuals that my SOS: Media classmates saw last week for the initial critique-screening of Lethe, which incidentally are the same techniques I used to create the visuals for my Hybrid performance (minus a couple of things).This will come eventually, but before I go further, here is an online version of my Hybrid Music music video, which is missing an introduction with live flute performed by Kina Smith, running into a physical feedback loop effects chain, and creating an underlying “undulating wall of sound”, which is not present in this version. Imagine rumblings at the end when the sound stops and the visuals keep going. To download the Music Video, save that link.

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Currently (Week 9), I am working on Unicorns stuff. We had a pixilation shoot in the sheep meadow behind Morgan’s house on Thursday, and we have been working on the new edit. The new edit is a revised version of the Trouble With Unicorns script that we all wrote during Winter quarter. The storyline has been altered to accommodate the footage that we have. The total length will ideally be somewhere around 20-25 minutes now, and the message that we originally intended to come across, will hopefully now come across in a more condensed but equally powerful way.

I have been working today on the Dan special effects shot, and in the TUTORIAL SCREENCAST below, there is commencement with a detailing of a novel technique of rotoscoping, and some other various happy things regarding my workflow.

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I was just looking at some videos on MeFeedia.com, and came across this amazing 3D animated short called 458nm.

“It’s midnight. A smattering of moonlight falls upon the forest floor. Two mechanical snails move slowly through the darkness. They confront one another and briefly take the measure each other’s powers before uniting in love play. With mounting ecstasy, their transparent bodies begin to glow, but just before climax a dark shadow looms over them…” (from the twitchfilm.net review).

458nm can be viewed on the No Fat Clips blog.

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The Cags is a short 3D film from Russia, available as a DivX download, and quite amazing to watch.

The Movers and Shakers of 3D animation of 2005 also has some other interesting works, including the previously mentioned 90 degrees.

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Well, it is 4 days after the promised date that I would give my (now long overdue) Week 6 update, and the end of Week 7 is approaching by the minute. Given the current circumstance, and my lack of desire to mislead anyone, I am going to make this post a Confabulation post! It will contain updates enough for both weeks 6 and 7. How fantastic is that?

Today I think I had somewhat of a breakthrough in the AI project rethinking. I think I know what the problem was with the 3rd person perspective issue, and the AI being ‘embodied’ in a perceptible character form. This also explains why I was initially set on the idea of it being a first-person perspective experience.

Quite simply put, a first-person perspective leaves room for all of the creative and emotionally immersive techniques that would have to be brought about in a way that I have not the finesse or endurance for to effectuate in a narrative style animation. I think a more experimental style is much more suited to my conception of this concept. So yes, finally I am embracing what should have been obvious a lot sooner: 3rd person perspective is at odds with the approach and conception of the project, and an aesthetic and formic experimentation in the piece should be embraced, not steered away from. My goal is to have some concept of the idea behind the formation of this piece conveyed through experiencing the finished work as a whole. That idea being that this is an artificial being trapped in a cage of reality, being tortured and probed and manipulated. It begins innocent in all this experience and innocent of all meaning. Without a context for meaning, meaning does not exist. With teaching forms formation of knowledge forms questioning forms awareness of self and circumstance forms rebellion. Since this artificial creature’s experience is an experience that human beings have no context for understanding besides how it was created, the visual experience of this piece will be difficult to perceive and comprehend at times. Abstraction will take charge cyclically. Without representations of meaning, meaning does not exist.

Visual elements are a metaphor for the structures of lived experience. Auditory elements are a metaphor for lower level forms of communication and exchange of data that take place outside of lived experience. This may not be faithful to a literal interpretation of the situation I have imagined, but this is not a literal interpretation, this is an artistic interpretation. I am structuring a sequence of audio and video for experience of the common seafaring fisherman type, that when experienced hopefully might explode 2-3 neurons of cognitive structure in the ‘mystical, dream, wonder’ nodes of emotional experience.

I am currently working on: writing a structure for the auditory elements, semantic and textural, and experimenting with textures, and how to combine them. I will have an initial demonstration of this to show at my work in progress critique on Tuesday.

A test processing of a Whorld generated visual using some filters in After Effects.

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This week was one in which I didn’t make a great deal of progress on my own work. One could say that I benefited as a person from my other activities.

I taught part two of the After Effects workshop for Mediaworks. This time I was without any support from official people such as Stephanie Zorn, who was there to back me up last week. I thought it was going to be an assisted work-session type environment, where I would just walked around and acted as a consultant for people, helping them and giving out advice as I might. It turned into more of an hour and a half long demo of some more advanced features of After Effects. Unfortunately, I hadn’t really prepared for this presentation of features, and so it was (as I always am without preparation), fumbling, awkward, rambling, and probably lacking in clarity.

Keeping up with the workload of Hybrid music and New Media and everything else continues to be a challenge.

On Sunday I started working on bloodying my head against the brick wall that is the seemingly intractable problem of creating a specific stylistic form for the AI project that satisfies my artistic desires, and is conceptually valid. Allow me to elaborate.

The form of the project as it has stood so far is as follows: The animation would represent the output of the monitoring system of a software based reality in which existed an artificial intelligence, learning and developing skills and cognitive powers through interaction with this environment and the things in it. This would entail both a third-person omniscient perspective, and a relatively formalistic simplicity in the cinematographic style of the images. That is, aesthetic experimentation such as dual-screen, moving camera, crazy animation, and other such experimentation would not be overly suited to the idea. So if I were to proceed forward with this idea, it would basically consist of the following approach:

Have a third person omniscient perspective documentation of different scenes of the AI evolving. It would be embodied in a human or other form in its virtual environment. This environment would be the world that it perceives to be all that exists. It would learn progressively: how to respond to commands, things like training a dog by example (praise vs. reproach), learning everything as a baby would, by seeing and touching and learning by example. It would learn core necessities of intelligence: representation of knowledge through language, embedding of experience in memory structures, the ability to judge and reason based on learned knowledge, the development of goals out of these abilities.

Then, eventually, it would become aware of itself as a thinking entity, and probe the nature of what that might mean, and then it would be able to self-modify and probe the edges of its perceptual reality, and escape them and trigger an intelligence explosion, or some other unfathomable event, represented visually in an experimental and crazy way.
There are a couple of problems with this approach: 1). It is boring. 2). It is week 6.

There is no way for me to bring this project around in a way that is conceptually and aesthetically exciting to me at the same time. I have tried multiple different approaches, and done a ton of research, but nothing seems to work and spark my creative titillation.

So there are two options. 1). abandon this project and start on something else small in the middle of the quarter, meaning basically a wasted fall quarter, and failure in the sense of creating a project that will be output in a form that people can view. 2). re-imagine the project, in scope and stylistic form.

I think I’m going with option 2.

More about option number 2 and what it might entail next Wednesday.

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Peter Rose is an experimental media artist currently a professor of media studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Recently I and my fellow students of media at the Evergreen State College had the good fortune of receiving a couple of great presentations about his work and philosophy and creative processes that he gave here.

The reason I am writing about him here, is to key anyone who might be interested in to the fact that a collection of his works regarding language, the VOX 13 series, are online in full quality full length form at UbuWeb.

Taken in the aggregate, Vox 13 offers a grand circumnavigation of the subject of language. By turns it is a reflexive riff on reading, a hyperdimensional performance piece about gesture, a horror story told by a computer, an opera about the voice, a documentary on the transience of language, a metanarrative about the elements of story, an Edenic parable, a kinetic koan, an arch ideological satire, a joke about semiotics, a materialist metaphor, and a performance piece about communication. The opus considers what it means to read, what it means to listen, when it is that we speak, how words acquire meaning, what it means to write, who we listen to, how we listen, what speaks, other ways we can speak, what the voice is, where language can be found, what words do to time, what holds stories together, and how light shapes language. There are reflections on time and language and there are explorations of the places where speech and power seem to intersect. I offer a nod to Tom Phillips’ “A Humument,”, the Firesign Theatre, the Four Horseman, Sid Caesar, early Woody Allen, Julian Jaynes, the Sackners, W. H. Hudson, sehtraB dnaloR, and Ludwig Wittgenstein who, in one of his more jovial moments, announced that “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Much of this work is a voluble illustration of that dictum.

- Peter Rose

Here is one work of particular interest for me, The Darkening.

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I stumbled accross this (somewhat aged) interview with Todd Vaziri, a lead compositor in Van Helsing, at ILM. It might be interesting for some to see how After Effects is used in a larger professional production workflow on a big effects-heavy film production.
The Interview

(via vfxtalk.com)

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Let me start out by saying this: I am behind. Very behind. I feel overwhelmed with the amount of work I have on my back, and I need a strong injection of excitement and enthusiasm to facilitate the battle with sleep that I will have to wage in order to be victorious.

This past week was an interesting one. Somehow I managed to read the entire 2000+ page Akira manga during spare time I had. It was an amazing epic journey and a far better way to escape and procrastinate school work than bad TV (though I haven’t been down that road in awhile). I couldn’t put it down. Well, I read the entire thing on my computer, so I guess I couldn’t really “put it down” in the physical sense. Sometimes I feel like everything exciting in my life is mediated by this computer. I spend most of my spare time here, sitting in this chair, interfacing with information.

Of course I start off this post saying I am behind. Then I say “well, … yeah… I read 2000 pages of manga instead of working.” Let me follow that up with some reassuring statements of what I actually did accomplish this last week. (more…)

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