Eddo Stern just posted the video we shot of his installation Darkgame. This is phase two of what looks to be a very intense game. I’m impressed with the game’s development roadmap, but I’ll let Eddo talk more about it when he’s ready. It should be very cool.
I’ll be giving two public talks next week. On Tuesday, I’ll be speaking at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago where I’ll be focusing more on the Atelier Hypermédia and our work with coding as plastic medium. I’ll also try to find some time to talk about Plot and our postulate on slow real-time systems.
And on Friday, I’ll be speaking at Gosia Koscielak Studio and Gallery where I’ll probably do more of the abstractmachine dog and poney show.
I have just uploaded onto YouTube three videos documenting the three concurrent exhibitions (Feedback, Gameworld, Labcyberspaces) opening the new Laboral Centre de Arte in Gijón, Spain (March 30 - June 30, 2007).
I have also included a short video documenting in more detail my installation Invaders! which is part of the Gameworld exhibition. This is a site-specific installation that I coded from scratch in just a few days using the Processing programming environment. In this video I’ve added some extra footage of the tracking software at work:
I’m obviously privileging my own work in the Gameworld video (hey, get your own camera). But I was bummed that I couldn’t include more footage of one of my favourite pieces, Eddo Stern’s Dark Game, especially since Eddo and I filmed about 30 minutes worth of footage. I didn’t have enough space on my disk to make a copy before handing over his cassette, so I’ll just wait for Eddo’s edit and link to it here later.
The curators for the three exhibitions were: Gameworld (Carl Goodman, Daphne Dragona); Feedback (Christiane Paul, Jemima Rellie, Charlie Gere); Labcyberspaces (Alex Adriaansens, Rosina Gómez-Baeza, Christiane Paul, Gerfried Stocker).
There are too many artists to list here. I should also mention that I missed a lot of works in my documentation. If you want to see it all, you’ll just have to go there yourself. Also I need to get some sleep. I have a plane to catch at 06:00 tomorrow morning.
Oh, and sorry for the quality of my crappy 300€ camera. My big-fancy-camera’s tape deck just died again. It’s the second time I’ve had it repaired only to have it die just after the repair warranty expires. Thanks Canon!
Invaders! [2:39m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (554) Gameworld [8:17m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (515) Feedback [08:25m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (552) Labcyberspaces [8:01m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (511)On Friday I’ll be flying to Chicago where I’ll be teaching at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago as part of our Transatlab between Chicago, Nice and Aix-en-Provence. I’ll be rebuilding my hypertable there, and if I have time I’ll show the students how to do FTIR tracking, as well as object tracking with ReacTIVision (using Processing, PureData, etc).
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After Chicago, I’ll fly to Montréal for two days where I have been invited by Jean-François Renaud to visit the University of Montréal à Québec and more specifically the École des médias. I’ll be in Montréal from the afternoon of the April 24th to noon April 26th. If you want to meet, show me work, or know of anything interesting going on, let me know.
Ooops. I forgot about Processing Blogs being so popular. My video bandwidth just maxed out.
If you’re reading this from my blog, you won’t be concerned. But if you reading this from Processing Blogs well that last post got a little garbled and wasn’t supposed to look like that. It was actually the fault of WordPress’s RSS feed not wanting to play nice with Markdown. While I was trying to fix it (apparently it’s unfixable) I screwed up the post and the Processing Blogs robot grabbed that last icky mess. As a result, no one could see the YouTube video and apparently downloaded instead the too-huge-and-not-even-really-worth-it video from my last post. Don’t get me wrong, it was an interresting workshop, but not worth a 50Mb download! (update: it turned out to be PodPress’s fault; I had to move back down to version 7.2 in order to fix it.)
The reason for all the troubles: I’m experimenting with various rss-feed systems right now, in line with the new direction I’m taking my work. I have some interresting ideas on how to evolve the abstractmachine project over the next year, one of them being a video feed (more on what that will be like later). So while I was experimenting with different formats, tie-ins with YouTube and such-like, I sent out the last post mangled. Sorry. Please be patient. One of the original ideologies of the project was “always in beta”, but I didn’t mean for it to be taken so literally :-(
I’ve just re-read Lance Arthur’s post on amazon’s filehosting service that Robert Hodgin mentioned a few days back (it’s kinda complicated). If anyone knows any other good hosts for video podcasts let me know because this bandwidth problem becomes an issue almost immediately when you start a podcast. I like Daily Motion and YouTube and whatever, and so far they’ve solved most of my previous problems, but I also like watching new video and listening to new audio loaded automatically onto that-little-white-thing as I ride the bus from my country home into town. I hate cars, and actually like public transportation, so podcasts were made for me. I also think it’s an interesting medium that I would like to explore as such.
Here are pictures + video from the workshop I ran at Le Quai, a school of art and design in Mulhouse, France. The workshop was organized by Jeff Guess. I am still waiting for some more documentation from the participants themselves, but its already been several weeks and I wanted to at least get this documentation online.
Most of the images were taken during our 4-hour livecoding performance for Tranche de Quai on the evening of March 1st.
Although it isn’t clear from the images, we pasted together a strange livecode system which was more like live parametering using osc for the declaration and attribution of variables and code in a program as it ran. The graphical coding environment was designed by Ben and myself, based on some very cool experiments Ben did with typography (working with design students is always fun for a typography-nerd like me). Into this networked system, we fed the film PI, which was used for raw sound and image data and then spit out as a re-worked video feed. Around this system Julia and I installed three video projectors into a small gallery space which we occupied throughout the evening with various code permutations. The projectors displayed the film, the re-processed film, and a livecoding window.
The original plan was to do real livecoding, but unfortunately this was just too tight on the schedule we had to work with. Also, I wanted to leave the students with a good knowledge of what is possible with Processing, as they will need it in the rest of their studies. That said, Processing really isn’t all that great for coding during runtime. There are scripting hacks out there for Processing, but they weren’t really fast enough and are incredibly wonky when you want to work in 3d. Basically you have to force the Applet to go into 3d and then constantly force all the variables into float-type as the interpreter declares everything as doubles (if my memory serves me well). As a result, I was the only one to truly livecode during our performance, even using the slowness of the interpreter to my advantage. You can see the results in still images (below) and clips of that section of the performance are also in the video (above). Basically I tried to create a movieplayer that would constantly fall astray of the framerate of the incoming video. But aside from my 45 minute performance, all the student code was osc based manipulation of variables and loops.
The workshop was actually very short: 3 days to learn everything, 1 day to prepare and perform, and 1 day for wrap-up/critique. Thankfully, Jeff and Julien are already very accomplished coders and were able to fill in the gaps. I am actually very encouraged by Jeff’s teaching effort. He’s a real pro and it’s nice to know that in France I finally have someone from another school I can collaborate closely with. But that’s also quite a telling statement because Jeff is originally from the other side of the pond. Like me.
This is just a brief post to announce that I will be presenting the Processing platform in late May in Paris. I have yet to announce my program, as I am hoping for input from the Processing community on what people would like to see there. If you want to make any suggestions, please go to this link (Processing @ Flash Festival) and comment away.
