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.
I made some good progress on my Hybrid Music project. In Hybrid everyone in the class is working on a live performance of electro-acoustic music to be performed at a public concert during week 9. I learned how to program the drumKAT midi drum triggering device. I have created a rather decent Kontakt percussion instrument from Buchla 200 samples, and am thinking about how to actually create the rhythmic elements of my project in a live setting. Most likely it will end up being a primary bed of pre-sequenced polyrhythmic drum programming, with an additional flare of articulative live-triggered fills.
I did some great reading of theory for my New Media class, accidentally typing a 1000 word comment about the nature of language and the representation of ideas, and its relationship to the ill-defined concept of artificial intelligence. Through this discussion I was turned on to the fascinating theory of the Linguistic Relativity (Sapir-Whorf) Hypothesis, and was inspired to search for some better definitions of just what the definition of artificial intelligence really is.
On Friday, in the morning I did the aforementioned drumKAT experimentation, and in the afternoon I taught a section of about 10-15 Mediaworks students Adobe After Effects. Yes, I did stay up about 4.5 hours into the morning, that time directly cutting into my healthy 8 hours of sleep that I seldom get, revisiting previous After Effects handouts, and creating a new outline, and even attempting to bypass the necessity of live improvisation of verbiage by recording video tutorials of everything I was intending to say. Unfortunately, 4 hours wasn’t quite enough time to both figure out how to do this, and successfully pull it off, so I ended up being all with the talking. This actually went surprisingly well. I am wondering just how much the formation of concepts are tied to verbal language. I get this huge increase in my ability to think cogently and express myself successfully after every time I do one of these verbal-heavy presentations. And also, to a lesser extent, after I write an intensive paper. Needless to say, the workshop went the best of any that I have done so far, and I am really glad I had such an opportunity to share my knowledge with a group of people who might very well benefit from using it.
At 6:45am the next day (Saturday), I woke up and drove with Brad Hutchinson and Katie Gregg to Portland, OR. Here I was headed to help Brad set up for the most recent performance of his 3-projector 16mm direct animation film epic about the fracturing of family, “My Primary Colors”, accepted to be a part of the PDX Invitational, a competitive competition of the best experimental work of those accepted. After setting up in the morning, we had all afternoon to Jock around the land of Ports, so we drove to downtown and ate Greek food, and then went to the underside of the Burnside bridge, where we documented the glorious examples of dystopian ruin found right here in our very own country. These documentation included a 3-channel multi-perspectional recording from the edge of a freeway, and footage of a moving freight train from nearly under its wheels, as well as a multitude of photographs.
That night, Brad and me and Morgan Dusatko projected “My Primary Colors”. It went alright, except that the main film loop broke a little more than halfway through. This was somewhat disastrous, as you might imagine, but we managed to get it rethreaded and projecting again. Unfortunately the film decided it didn’t like the improvised takeup reel either, and so it spewed the film all over the floor… but it went across to the audience well enough to tie with 13 other people for 2nd place. The winner was a 70+ year-old man who made a psychedelic film visualizing microscopically the shifting and warping multi-colored patterns on the surface of soap-bubbles. He deserved it.
On the way home on I-5, I shot a great deal (about 40 minutes) of slow-shutter mode motion blurred video of lights with my Panasonic GS-150. I actually have a specific purpose for this footage. I am going to be doing a live performance of visual material to complement a live performance of audio material with my friend and classmate from Hybrid Music, Nic Zwart, this Saturday at 5:30pm at the Eagle’s Hall in Olympia. This is a concert series in benefit of the excellent Free Radio Olympia. I am working on compiling a “sample library” of good clips from this in After Effects, not just cutting things out, but adding effects and layering to make things more visually interesting. I have been wanting to do live musical performance for a long time. This is my chance, and I’m not going to pass it up.
Next week is my first work in progress presentation. Like I said at the beginning of this post, I have a lot of work to do. But there are 6 days between now and then. That is 144 hours. if I spend 30 of those hours sleeping, that is 114 hours of time to do things. If 12 hours of those are spent eating, showering, procrastinating, and transporting myself around, that is still 102 hours to accomplish things. That is 17 hours per day. A lot can happen between now and next tuesday. I will update on the journey if there is time, and let you all know how the impossible task of WRITING my AI project goes. And, subsequently, the ANIMATING of the first couple of scenes.
SOS: Media Spring – Week 4 Update
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.
I made some good progress on my Hybrid Music project. In Hybrid everyone in the class is working on a live performance of electro-acoustic music to be performed at a public concert during week 9. I learned how to program the drumKAT midi drum triggering device. I have created a rather decent Kontakt percussion instrument from Buchla 200 samples, and am thinking about how to actually create the rhythmic elements of my project in a live setting. Most likely it will end up being a primary bed of pre-sequenced polyrhythmic drum programming, with an additional flare of articulative live-triggered fills.
I did some great reading of theory for my New Media class, accidentally typing a 1000 word comment about the nature of language and the representation of ideas, and its relationship to the ill-defined concept of artificial intelligence. Through this discussion I was turned on to the fascinating theory of the Linguistic Relativity (Sapir-Whorf) Hypothesis, and was inspired to search for some better definitions of just what the definition of artificial intelligence really is.
On Friday, in the morning I did the aforementioned drumKAT experimentation, and in the afternoon I taught a section of about 10-15 Mediaworks students Adobe After Effects. Yes, I did stay up about 4.5 hours into the morning, that time directly cutting into my healthy 8 hours of sleep that I seldom get, revisiting previous After Effects handouts, and creating a new outline, and even attempting to bypass the necessity of live improvisation of verbiage by recording video tutorials of everything I was intending to say. Unfortunately, 4 hours wasn’t quite enough time to both figure out how to do this, and successfully pull it off, so I ended up being all with the talking. This actually went surprisingly well. I am wondering just how much the formation of concepts are tied to verbal language. I get this huge increase in my ability to think cogently and express myself successfully after every time I do one of these verbal-heavy presentations. And also, to a lesser extent, after I write an intensive paper. Needless to say, the workshop went the best of any that I have done so far, and I am really glad I had such an opportunity to share my knowledge with a group of people who might very well benefit from using it.
At 6:45am the next day (Saturday), I woke up and drove with Brad Hutchinson and Katie Gregg to Portland, OR. Here I was headed to help Brad set up for the most recent performance of his 3-projector 16mm direct animation film epic about the fracturing of family, “My Primary Colors”, accepted to be a part of the PDX Invitational, a competitive competition of the best experimental work of those accepted. After setting up in the morning, we had all afternoon to Jock around the land of Ports, so we drove to downtown and ate Greek food, and then went to the underside of the Burnside bridge, where we documented the glorious examples of dystopian ruin found right here in our very own country. These documentation included a 3-channel multi-perspectional recording from the edge of a freeway, and footage of a moving freight train from nearly under its wheels, as well as a multitude of photographs.
That night, Brad and me and Morgan Dusatko projected “My Primary Colors”. It went alright, except that the main film loop broke a little more than halfway through. This was somewhat disastrous, as you might imagine, but we managed to get it rethreaded and projecting again. Unfortunately the film decided it didn’t like the improvised takeup reel either, and so it spewed the film all over the floor… but it went across to the audience well enough to tie with 13 other people for 2nd place. The winner was a 70+ year-old man who made a psychedelic film visualizing microscopically the shifting and warping multi-colored patterns on the surface of soap-bubbles. He deserved it.
On the way home on I-5, I shot a great deal (about 40 minutes) of slow-shutter mode motion blurred video of lights with my Panasonic GS-150. I actually have a specific purpose for this footage. I am going to be doing a live performance of visual material to complement a live performance of audio material with my friend and classmate from Hybrid Music, Nic Zwart, this Saturday at 5:30pm at the Eagle’s Hall in Olympia. This is a concert series in benefit of the excellent Free Radio Olympia. I am working on compiling a “sample library” of good clips from this in After Effects, not just cutting things out, but adding effects and layering to make things more visually interesting. I have been wanting to do live musical performance for a long time. This is my chance, and I’m not going to pass it up.
Next week is my first work in progress presentation. Like I said at the beginning of this post, I have a lot of work to do. But there are 6 days between now and then. That is 144 hours. if I spend 30 of those hours sleeping, that is 114 hours of time to do things. If 12 hours of those are spent eating, showering, procrastinating, and transporting myself around, that is still 102 hours to accomplish things. That is 17 hours per day. A lot can happen between now and next tuesday. I will update on the journey if there is time, and let you all know how the impossible task of WRITING my AI project goes. And, subsequently, the ANIMATING of the first couple of scenes.