myth's livejournal!

This past week I participated in 5-in-5, along with a number of current ITP students and recent alumni. The challenge:

Do a creative project every day for five straight days, starting Monday, July 28th 2008

Projects must be completed in a day, so they need to be as compact as they are creative

Each project needs a name and documentation posted by the end of the day. It should be a stand-alone accomplishment

And so I did! It was fun and productive, but surprisingly exhausting. Here are my projects. The links for each day go to more detailed documentation on the 5-in-5.com blog.

Day One: Mega Man Linocut Prints

Also featured in Bre Pettis' overview video.

Day Two: twbasic: BASIC for Twitter

Send your BASIC listing to @twbasic. (It may take a while to respond... for some reason the replies API doesn't like to update very frequently.)

Day Three: Subwoofer Tactics (w/C. Anderson Miller)

A board game powered by a 30-watt subwoofer.
Subwoofer Tactics from Anderson Miller on Vimeo.

Day Four: Strokeweight (a New Interface for Textual Expression)

Translates between "drawing" gestures and "writing" gestures.
Strokeweight: Writing with fruit and Dunsany from Adam Parrish on Vimeo.

Day Five: Binary Telepathy (also with C. Anderson Miller)

I attempted to transmit binary data to eight experimental subjects using only my mind. Of the attempted 64 bits, 36 were correctly divined.

A few of my favorite projects by my fellow 5-in-5ers: Throwing Light, Japanese Family Crests, ZenTV, Flexible Cardboard Surface, and Vikram's honey, lavender and habanero ice cream.

I've been working hard this semester on a little project I call the Frotzophone. It's a musical instrument that you "play" by playing Infocom-style interactive fiction. I'll be performing with it as part of the New Instruments for Musical Expression class show at Exit Art on Thursday, December 13th.

There are a bunch of very cool projects that will be displayed and performed at this show: a musical cow's udder, a musical abacus, a weirdo mutating analog synth, a loom(!), and more. So even if seeing yours truly perform the Z-Machine's object tree doesn't seem like too much fun, something there is bound to appeal to you. It would be great to see some of my NYC area friends there!

If you can't make the NIME show, don't fret: a kiosk version of the Frotzophone will be available for the public to play around with at the ITP Winter Show on December 16th and 17th. Actually, you should come to the Winter Show anyway, as it's bound to be awesome (like it is every semester).

Our game, The Invention of Murder, will also be a part of the Winter Show. We'll be running the game again on either Sunday or Monday of that week. Details and web page forthcoming.

Leonard puts me on the cover of Wired. Thanks for coming to the show, guys!

We really need to get a web page up for the Byte Organ, but in the mean time here's a prototype version from earlier in the semester (before Andy added his sound design and Jack added the network connectivity). Two other projects from the show, Rui Pereira's Looop-R and Rory Nugent's Solar Xylophone, do have web pages, so check them out.

I'm a week into Spring semester now, but I thought this would be as good a time as any to post about what I did last semester. A Fall Retrospective, if you will. Anyway, here's the stuff that I did last semester that I'm especially eager to show off.

MicroPoet 200

The MicroPoet 200, a creative tool for transforming texts. (Make sure to try out the applet.) I really wanted to get this into the Winter Show, but I didn't actually finish the physical interface portion of the project until a few days after the deadline. Previously featured on crummy.com!

Two-Note Synthesizer Orchestra

The Two-Note Synthesizer Orchestra was my final project for Introduction to Physical Computing. It's a collaborative performance not unlike Dialtones (the cell phone symphony thing), except we built the instruments ourselves. I worked on the project with my colleague Armin, whose blog is linked above. (He has the raw WAV recording of the performance available for download there, but I have a slightly cleaned up but still mostly inaudible MP3 here. Turn up the volume and skip maybe halfway through the track to get an idea of what it sounded like.)

Alan Alda Attacks

You saw the storyboard, you saw the pretty good photograph of Alan Alda, but did you see the FEATURE PRESENTATION? I'm pretty satisfied with how it turned out, though now I realize my mouth shape for "ee" doesn't quite cut it. A sequel would be forthcoming, but my 30 day trial of Flash expired. :(

STFU, a film

Here's co-producer Adam Simon's take on our short film for Communications Lab, STFU. My role was mainly in the storyboarding and planning phases, as the internal workings of your "digi-cams" and Final Slice Pro or whatever are deep mysteries to me. I did carry the light kit around all day when we did the shooting, though, and I have to say I think I'm pretty convincing in my (acting debut) as "Pencil Tapper #1."

My classes for this semester include GL Art (intro to programming with OpenGL), Audio Art (Max/MSP and synthesis and field recordings), The Nature of Code, and an art theory class that seems like it's going to kick my ass. I'll let you know how they go. No, really, I will. "Post More to LiveJournal" is like number one on my list of resolutions for 2007.

I was originally using this image in an animation storyboard (oh yes, we're learning how to make flash animations in my Communication Lab class), but once I loaded it up in Processing I couldn't help but have a little fun.

The Alan Alda Clock (Java applet, but don't let that scare you off)

Other noteworthy grad school-related tidbits: My final project idea for my Introduction to Computational Media class, tentatively entitled "Subtractive Text Synthesizer"; Point of Disgust (Dr. Wily Mix), made in response to the audio editing assignment in Comm Lab; and The Mystery Clock, which was sort of a joint assignment for ICM and my Physical Computing class.

Have I mentioned that I love my graduate program?

1. From an old MeFi post, I present to you the Tromba Marina, a massive and obsolete one-stringed instrument played with harmonics rather than entirely depressing the string against the fretboard. The instrument's signature "brassy buzz" results from a loosely fitting bridge (helpful visualization). In combination with the 7th grade orchestra at Chippewa Middle School (mp3 link) the tromba marina makes a noise that can only be described as "a great way to get the neighbors to call the police if you play it pretty loud."

2. Speaking of cacophony, here's my Reverse Organ, a little Processing sketch I worked up last night in response to a recent e-mail discussion with Josh. (This is, incidentally, Blog Post for Josh 2 of N.) The discussion concerns methods of notating music that specify which notes not to play, rather than the other way around. I already sent this to him but I thought you folks might enjoy it too.

It works like this: each of the vertical bars represents a note in the C major scale. By default, all seven notes are playing. To make a note stop playing, depress (and/or hold down) the key on your keyboard corresponding to the note, as follows (if, like me, you've used Impulse Tracker, this is already muscle memory):

• z: C
• x: D
• c: E
• v: F
• b: G
• n: A
• m: B

So to play a C major chord, hold down X, V, N, and M; to play a D minor chord, hold down Z, C, B, and M.

3. Tonight was my first night of class. Specifically: Vito Acconci spoke in my "Applications of Interactive Technology" class. Up until this point, I didn't know Mr. Acconci by name—I had only read about his performance art from the '60s (e.g., Seedbed). He spoke about that for a while, but for the most part he focused on what his design firm has been up to lately. Like this.

Oh man was this talk awesome! I'm not even all that into architecture but the concepts and techniques he presented are universal and really got me thinking about applications in my areas of interest. If ITP wanted to convince me that it's worth taking out loans for this stuff, they couldn't have started out with a better speaker. They sure as hell would never have had a performance artist speak in a linguistics Ph.D. program!

The real value of ITP, I'm coming to understand, lies in its engagement with art. I've always been a technical person, really, a nerd. For a little while, though, I get to think of myself as an artist. This is a new thing for me, and I'm enjoying it so far.

ITP. I attended the group interview today for admission to ITP. My gut was twisted with anxiety: I was sure I'd be the squarest kid in the room. Turns out everyone else there had at least as many right angles as I do, and some even had sides whose lengths were equaler than mine. I think I distinguished myself with my witty banter - most everyone else was stuck on their dour stories about how being a programmer in the finance industry affords them no opportunity to be "creative." All I want, I said, is to study at a place that will reward me for my relentless dilettantery. Like Douglas Rushkoff, I want to write comic books, have an article in Arthur about the occult, learn to fly, teach an online class about neat yo-yo tricks, etc.

Animal Crossing Wild World. This game is like pure bliss crack cocaine. I never realized before how much I needed to have a sheep send me a cactus in the mail; how I could have even existed before such joy is a mystery unfathomable. S & I spent the whole weekend fishing, transplanting flowers, collecting shells, re-arranging the house, paying off the mortgage and otherwise exploiting this convenient outlet for one's domestic proclivities. (Other games recently enjoyed: Super Mario 64 DS, Final Fantasy I & II on the GBA. Now that I beat FF I finally understand what everyone else was going on about back in the MegaZeux days ...)

Recently discovered songs. Ducktails (Moon Stage) - the Advantage. Soon it will be fire - Richard Youngs (this is the most beautiful song ever written and/or sung). Heartbeats - Jose Gonzales. Anadromous - Mirza (the whole album).

Sumana and Leonard move to town. Last week we all had pierogi and kielbasa in the Village and Leonard took me on a brief yet insightful tour of the sci-fi section at St. Mark's Books. It was fun. I hope we get to do it again soon.