NewsWorksSoftwareTextBioContact
background image

Blog archive for August 2004

Searchable archives of electronic music mailing lists

August 5, 2004

elists.resynthesize.com provides browsable searchable archives of electronic music mailing lists.

presence of absence

August 5, 2004

A runner in Happy Gigster parlance is the character provided by a local promoter to run the band to &amp from hotel and venue. Our runner today was a young man and as is usually the case when touring Italy a young Italian man. I wouldn’t normally mention the runner but this one was so exceptionally stupid that I am mentioning him because he was so exceptionally stupid.

On the first trip from hotel to gig he had the radio on. We asked him to turn it off. This did not provide a difficulty for him. He explained that this was sound that he heard without actually listening to it. No explanation was necessary: that this small part of how he lives his life is how he lives all the small parts of his life was clear. This is how he lives his life.

(…) Remaining within the area of his presence in a small enclosed space was unbearable: his was the presence of absence. That made him dangerous: he lived in a world of accident.


Robert Fripp on 21-22nd. June 2003.

piksel04

August 5, 2004

Gisle has posted the call for participation for Piksel04.

— piksel04 – FLOSS in motion
— call for participation
— deadline 15.000 september 2004


Piksel – www.piksel.no – is a yearly event for artists and developers working
with Free Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) for realtime processing of
video and sound. It will take place at BEK – the Bergen Centre for Electronic
Art in Bergen Norway from october 29.000 to november 7.000 2004.


The first Piksel event was arranged in november 2003 and gathered around 30
artists/developers from all parts of the world. It consisted of
artistic/technical presentations coding workshops and live performances. All
activities were documented in a daily blog:
http://www.piksel.no/log.html


One of the results from the event was the initiation of the Piksel Video
Framework for ‘interoperability between various free software applications
dealing with video manipulation techniques’ –
http://www.piksel.org


CALL for PARTICIPATION


An important part of piksel04 is a series of evening events of live art and
audio-visual performance in cooperation with Landmark/Bergen Kunsthall.
Performing artists using open source software in the creation and presentation
of their work are invited to apply. This call goes out to VJ-crews live
coders typing divas virtual actors noise combos and FLOSS performers of
all kinds.


Please send documentation material – preferably as a URL to on***line***
documentation with images/video to piksel04@bek.no
Deadline – september 15.000 2004


Use this form for submitting (or go to the online form at
http://www.piksel.no/piksel04/form.html):


1. Name of artist(s) email adr.
2.000
3.000
4.000
5.000

Or send by snailmail to:


BEK
att: Gisle Froysland
C. Sundtsgt. 55
5004
Norway


piksel04 is produced in cooperation with Kunsthøgskolen in Bergen dep The
Academy of Fine Arts Bergen Kunsthall/Landmark. Supported by PNEK Bergen
Kommune Norsk Kulturfond.


JEMS and Experimental Music Catalogue

August 5, 2004

The Journal of Experimental Music
Studies (JEMS)
has just been launched. JEMS is a new online peer-reviewed journal launched in association with the Experimental Music Catalogue. Relevant topics include British and American experimental music systems and minimalism free improvisation ‘new’ tonality and other related issues. Among the content so far is an online reprint
of Gavin Bryars’ 1983 article (from Contact 26) on Vexations and its
Performers.

Web maintenance

August 5, 2004

I’ve added links to the documentation of LMW to the the News and Projects sections of my web site.

I’ll have to change the structure of the project section at some point maybe sort projects into different categories (installations stage …). Also I have to add a link for the blog to the menu at the top of the pages. I don’t know how much use there is for the 55 link anymore.

The Australian Sound Design Project

August 5, 2004

The Australian Dound Design Project is a national website and database dedicated to researching and publishing original works and the discourse relating to sound and its design in public space. Over 50 sound designs in public space have been collated and published using multimedia formats of sound video text and image.

Setting up PC

August 6, 2004

This post is written on a shuttleX PC that I&acute m setting up in order to be able to run Max from a PC as well. Next month I&acute m doing a new installation in collaboration with Jeremy and Jon Arne. This time it will be at Trondhjems kunstforening. The gallery space will be smaller than in Kristiansand but it&acute s divided into three different rooms so I have to find new ways of working on the material and on a practical level find new ways to distribute the sound in the various rooms. Proberbly I&acute ll have to use several computers to run the installation and that&acute s the reason why I&acute m setting up the shuttle now. I&acute m also planning on using 18 loudspeakers and a sub this time as compared to 12 loudspeakers in Kristiansand.

Update: Afterwards I also got time to install the driver for the built in audio card an Avance ac97 that has been very hard to get specs on. The shuttle has built in audio in/out using mini-jack and optical so I hoped that it would be possible to do at least 6 channels in and out with an ADAT converter. Unfortunately it seems to be 2 channels only 16 bits and with incredible latencies. That is: basicly useless.

:-(

Attempting to fix the sound card

August 6, 2004

Last thing I did in the evening was to pull my MOTU 828 sound card apart. The flight case I bought for it turned out not to be solid enough and the card got some bad beating during a flight last spring. The front got bulky and the card started buzzing. Apart from the noise the card still worked as supposed to. I opened it up today and everything seems fine apart from the front cover. I’ll try to bend it back into shape and see if that works. I’ll have to get a new and stronger flight case as well.

There’s almost no-one at the Art Academy these days. Everyone’s off for vacation apart from me working overtime on a late Friday night as usuall. I guess I enjoy what I’m doing.

Further development of “Kunsten å gå på vannet”

August 7, 2004

Coming Monday and Tuesday I’ll work with Jana on further development of the “Kunsten å gå på vannet” installation. I guess we’ll be doing a brand new version.

Though the kids in general has enjoyed the installation a lot we want to strengten the concept. In my view one of the weeknesses has been that there’s no good reason why we’ve chosen the sounds we are using instead of others apart from the fact that we’ve searched for sounds and combinations of sounds that work musically.

I’m going to suggest to Jana that we work on two different classes of sounds: musical (pitched) sounds and ambient (noisy or non-pitched) sounds suggesting soundscapes. The ambient sounds should all be associated with water moving in one way or another (thus relating to the title of the work: “The art of Walking on Water”): raindrops waves at the shoreline or the sound of a brook. I’d like these sounds to be somewhat abstracted suggesting well-known soundscapes but at the same time offering a twisted and abstracted view of it. Possible ways of doing this could be to use FFT to split various frequency bands to different loudspeakers or using rather short samples looping and with a regular delay from one loudspeaker to the next thus creating a slight rhythmic and repetitious pattern into the sounds. The pitched sounds would form a clear contrast to this and establish the background layer (the ever-present ambience) and the foreground (sounds triggered by the sensors) as two distinct layers. Possible pithed sounds could be: pitched raindrops (e.g. by feeding the sound of raindrops into resonant models) fog horns etc. This way the interactive sounds could relate more clearly to the actual movements in the room by the kids: The kids could become raindrops boats lost at the sea etc.

If Jana agrees on these ideas this will be an opportunity to work at some issues that I have been thinking about for a while now. In addition the pitched part of the total sound composition would be a responce to my instinct reaction when listening to a number of mp3s at Ubuweb yesterday. After a while I suddenly thought “Now it would be nice with some pitched music.”.

 

Jana has not succeeded to raise money for further development so this will be something we do out of our own interest. I suppose that when an organization commision a work like this they are thinking in terms of a finished permanent product. For us the artists the process is an integral part of the work and the work will in some ways cease to exist when it’s not being activly developed anymore.

Repairing sound card

August 9, 2004

I managed to fix the MOTU card (relief) and installed Win drivers for it as well so that I can now use it on both plattforms. The PC is more or less up and running now.

Next step: The Shuttle (2.4 GHz) vs. TiBook (1 GHz) performance test.

Working with Jana

August 11, 2004

Me and Jana had a good work session yesterday and the day before. Most of the time was spent discussing making various scetches for possible sounds to use and focusing on the concept of the project. I believe we came a lot closer to possible solutions for some of the major problems we’ve wanted to adress but one still remains in the blue: the relationship between the sounds the sensor matts and the movements of the kids. Both of us would like to have to kids listening attentative to the sounds but you don’t exactly encourage that by asking them to jump around in a frantic way.

I suppose that when you’re dealing with a good interface it will become more or less transparent to you so that you can focus on the actual task at hand. Either we’ll have to strive in that direction with the installation or we’ll have to make it incredibly awkward. At the moment it’s kind of inbetween. Our situation is that we’ve created the interface first but still being open to what it is supposed to be used for.

Favourite MaxMSP externals of the day: The RMI – Realtime Modal Instrument – ß 1 MaxMSP implementation of Modalys by the estimable Xoax.

Real-time display of audio waveform

August 11, 2004

Just made a simple Max utility for displaying audio waveforms in realtime. It could proberbly be implemented in a more clever and flexible way using JavaScript and the jsgui object but this bpatcher solution using two mutlisliders will do for the time being.

The source code is below.

Save as tl.rtwave~:

max v2
#N vpatcher 14 59 666 484
#P window setfont “Sans Serif” 9.000
#P comment 311 83 179 196617 use as bpatcher
#P inlet 275 12 15 0
#P inlet 223 12 15 0
#P newex 223 69 33 196617 * -1.000
#P newex 223 42 62 196617 peakamp~ 5
#P user multiSlider 0 24 200 25 -1.000 0.000 1 3449 16 0 0 2 0
#M frgb 0 0 0
#M brgb 165 139 224
#M rgb2 127 127 127
#M rgb3 0 0 0
#M rgb4 37 52 91
#M rgb5 74 105 182
#M rgb6 112 158 18
#M rgb7 149 211 110
#M rgb8 187 9 201
#M rgb9 224 62 37
#M rgb10 7 114 128
#P user multiSlider 0 0 200 25 0.000 1.000 1 3449 16 0 0 2 0
#M frgb 0 0 0
#M brgb 165 139 224
#M rgb2 127 127 127
#M rgb3 0 0 0
#M rgb4 37 52 91
#M rgb5 74 105 182
#M rgb6 112 158 18
#M rgb7 149 211 110
#M rgb8 187 9 201
#M rgb9 224 62 37
#M rgb10 7 114 128
#P window setfont “Sans Serif” 12.000
#P comment 311 25 100 196620 tl.rtwave~
#P window setfont “Sans Serif” 9.000
#P comment 311 49 178 196617 simple real-time sound wave display using two multisliders
#P comment 311 105 128 196617 ©Trond Lossius , 2004
#P comment 34 88 100 196617 Dim: 200 × 50
#P hidden connect 6 0 4 0
#P hidden connect 7 0 5 0
#P connect 8 0 6 0
#P connect 6 0 7 0
#P connect 9 0 6 1
#P pop

Save as tl.rtwave~ .help:

max v2
#N vpatcher 14 59 406 445
#P window setfont “Sans Serif” 9.000
#P hidden newex 266 120 59 196617 loadmess 5
#P number 266 148 35 9 1 0 1 3 0 0 0 221 221 221 222 222 222 0 0 0
#P comment 33 92 226 196617 Right inlet: update rate (ms) (default: 5 ms)
#P comment 33 113 179 196617 Use as bpatcher (dim: 200 × 50)
#P window setfont “Sans Serif” 12.000
#P comment 33 31 100 196620 tl.rtwave~
#P window setfont “Sans Serif” 9.000
#P comment 33 55 314 196617 Simple real-time sound wave display using two multisliders
#P comment 33 338 128 196617 ©Trond Lossius , 2004
#P message 173 271 27 196617 stop
#P message 105 271 65 196617 startwindow
#P newex 58 296 30 196617 dac~
#P message 93 148 49 196617 1 , loop 1
#P message 58 148 29 196617 open
#N sfplay~ 1 120960 0
#P newobj 58 172 43 196617 sfplay~
#P bpatcher 76 203 200 50 0 0 tl.rtwave~ 0
#P comment 33 77 109 196617 Left inlet: audio signal
#P connect 3 0 2 0
#P fasten 4 0 2 0 98 167 63 167
#P connect 2 0 5 0
#P fasten 7 0 5 0 178 291 63 291
#P fasten 6 0 5 0 110 291 63 291
#P connect 2 0 1 0
#P fasten 2 0 5 1 63 283 83 283
#P hidden connect 14 0 13 0
#P connect 13 0 1 1
#P pop

MaxLink

August 11, 2004

Jesse Kriss has made a Java library for enabling communication between Max and Processing.

I’ll check it out later this year as I attend the Processing worksop at KHIB with Marius Watz.

Cue handling in Max

August 12, 2004

I’m helping out writing application for grants 2005-2006 for Verdensteatret at the moment. Right now I’m concerned about ways of scripting and event handling in Max/MSP/Jitter/SoftVNS. Over the last year we’ve spent quite some time on these issues checking out Jade Mirage the qlist object that’s now a part of the Max 4.500 distro and the new patcher attributes features of Max 4.5. In my view Jade (that is the v.2 betas) are the one that is the closest to a convinsing solution but it would be preferable to be able to use the system inside Max instead of having to patch modules in Max and then import into Jade.

Straight out of the box the Max patcher attribute regime (made up of the objects pattr autopattr pattrhub and pattrstorage) are missing some important features of Jade:

  • The ability to edit presets/events as text inside the application used (Max or Jade) while working on and developing presets and the patch/patches themselves.
  • Naming of presets. As the number of presets grow large it might be difficult to keep track of the presets.
  • The ability to change parameter values over time (e.g. creating fade-ins or fade out).
  • A simple way of creating presets for subsets of the parameters available (activating and deactivating parameters as nexsessary
  • Simple tracking of current parameter values and what parameter values has been changed since the last preset was recalled.

At current patcher attributes seems to work the best if you are developing the art work in a very structured and linear way: First making the patches required and then setting the cues required one by one from the beginning to the end of the piece. That’s not exactly the way Verdensteatret work sessions go. Patches are changed and modified on an ongoing bases all the way through the process and they are not based on connecting simple and standard modules for sound or video FX processing in a sequence. The sequence of events might change drastically from one day to the next. Even though a progression of events will have been settled for each public performance the sequence of events might change up til the last minute and from one day to the next.

qlist is out of the question. It’s depending on a similar syntax to coll requiring semicolons at the end of each line. If you forget kabong: everything from there on in the text file is lost. I guess the reason why qlist was included in Max 4.500 is that it has been used by a lot of composers for a long time and already was maintained by Dudas but it would have made more sence to create a fifth object for the pattr regime offering text edit abilities in similar ways to Jade.

I haven’t spent to much time checkin out Mirage so far but it seems to be limited to SoftVNS only (no Jitter or MSP) and thus can not provide a sufficient solutions for all parts of what we’re doing. The documentation coming with the download isn’t very thorough but there’s more available online although most of it is in French at the moment.

spam language

August 13, 2004

An interesting example of artists imitating the language of spam. The Oergaden Sound Art Festival sounds interesting.

dear trond lossius
Now backUT to serious mAttre LA pavu.com Team bucklePixes the
cont0rsion once again to glitter the wildest PineXiang eastern t0uch
into Its nextroUte <strong>Ukase dr0p atchoK</strong> S-gUrd sUNset drill !
Today friday august 13
pavu.com&#8217;s outersPace Ukases will be premiered and derniered at
Overgaden Sound Art Festival ( http://www.soundartfestival.dk/ ) in
Denmark (Greece).
More wants ?
Stay tuned for tonite&#8217;s pavu.com crYstalOrbiT revelations about
<strong>outersPace Ukases</strong> onesh0t special.
Warnies pluSs ?
get ready to coverL the duckL !
wishing you the best always
LA pavu.com Team
http://pavu.com/
<del>/ atum <span class="caps">BOM</span> ! /</del>

Copying data between buffers and matrixes

August 16, 2004

Some further progress on the Cloud Generator port: I’ve made Java classes for copying buffer~ data to jit.matrix and vica versa. This was required in order to be able to import and export sound files.

Major obstacle right now: I don’t know of a simple way to use lookup tables in Jitter for anything but char matrixes.

More on cue handling in Max

August 16, 2004

Tim Place has responded to my discussion concerning cue handling in Max at the Electrotap blog:

One recommendation he makes is that he would like to use the Jade scripting structure directly inside of Max. I’ve been resistant to this idea in the past (in part because you can just run Jade and Max at the same time in OS X anyway) but I’m starting to become more open to it now. Using Max 4.5’s Java support may make this a lot more feasible than it would have been previously. It’s a good idea anyway regardless of whether it makes it into version 2.0.

There are indications that in the future it might be possible to merge the pattr system and timeline. A complete rewrite and rethink of timeline has been herald to happen at some stage but this most proberbly won’t happen before MaxMSP 5 is released sometime in the future. Still I don’t think that a merge of pattr and timeline would be able to fully solve all issues discissed a few days ago.

Planning the installation in Trondheim

August 16, 2004

Me Jeremy and Jon Arne met today to make practical plans for the upcoming installation in Trondheim. I’ve been spending a lot of time arranging technical details the last week. Still there’s a lot to be done.

I’m going to make sound recordings of Jon Arne spray painting.

Testing WinMax

August 16, 2004

Fired up the Shuttle WinXP Saturday opened four or five MSP example patches started audio and let it run thru the weekend. It was still running when I arrived at the office today. That’s a good sign.

I seem to be in a very techy mode these days…

Blog comments

August 16, 2004

On a different note I’ve been wondering for if there’re some difficulties about writing comments to the blog. Testing out today I got it confirmed. It seems that it’s not possible at the moment to write comments unless you’re loged in. As I’m the only one with a password there’s no wonder why I don’t get any comments to it. It won’t make any senso to do anything about this before Gisle has updated CoreBlog on the BEK server. I’m not running the most recent update of it.

JavaScript

August 17, 2004

Javascript is a language designed to control the software in which it is embedded. Put another way it is a language designed to script an application. Javascript code always executes within a script context that can add new properties and functions – this is for example how Netscape added browser-specific features familiar to Web developers. (…) One of the primary reasons for the js object was to provide a more powerful interface for the patcher scripting features where you can create connect and move new objects.

From the JavaScriptInMax documentation

strange jobs

August 18, 2004

For the last decade I’ve been collecting candidates for a top ten list of strange jobs you could have. So far only three candidates are approved:

  • Funeral singer
  • Inventing toys for Kinderegg
  • Author of spam mails specializing on “med`ications such as Va”_"lium"

Java coding

August 18, 2004

I’m starting to get a grip at Java coding. So far I’ve made four Java classes for the MaxMSP mxj object all relating to the CloudGenerator Jitter port:

  • tl_buffer2matrix: copy data from buffer~ to jit.matrix.
  • tl_matrix2buffer: copy data from jit.matrix to buffer~.
  • tl_paramsplit: slice lists or messages into a series of messages according to the types of atoms. Symbols indicate a new message. I’m not sure how useful this one will be. I’m currently thinking about protocols for control information and it might be that I abandon the solution I first thought of and developed this for.
  • tl_windows is a port of the Csound gen20 windows. I’ve also added a triangular window so that it’s now offering Hamming Hanning Bartlett Blackman Blackman-Harris Gaussian Kaiser Square Sinc and Triangle. It might be that I should have added a Trapezoid as well but that can wait.

While doing this I discovered that Orfanidis has a thorough discussion of the Kaiser window with a lot of information that is new to me (chapter 10.2)

The last major obstacle to solve is using lookup tables in jit.matrix float32 matrixes. Several posts on the MaxMSP list suggest I try to use jit.repos. I’ll check it out but I’m not sure if it will work. It might be that I’ll have to come up with a new object myself.

I want to get far enough on this development to be able to use it for generating and treating sound material in upcoming projects. For the installation in Trondheim I’d like to record Jon Arne spray painting and use those sounds as a source for further treatments. I’m also planning on using this kind of granulation for the collaboration with Asbjørn in October. Finally I hoped that I should have finished some sound examples several days ago for Kurt Ralske. He mailed me several videos a week ago and I hoped to be able to provide some examples for him by now. In other words: I’m very impatient about getting as far as possible now. I know that in a few days time I’ll have to shift from this kind of development to working on actual sounds and patches to use for Trondheim.

BTW: While porting the window functions I’ve discovered a bug in gen20 with the sinc window. If max amplitude differs from 1.000 it produce an artificial spike at the center. This can be seen clearly in Kevin Conder’s illustration of the various window functions. I’ve reported the problem to the Csound-dev list.

New toys

August 19, 2004

Thanks Santa!
Thanks Santa! (x 3)
Thanks Santa!

KHIB has sponsored the acquisition of 6 B&amp W602 S3 loudspeakers a B&amp W ASW650 sub and a Denon AVR-2805 loudspeaker as toys for me to play with for the rest of the fellowship period.

Alongside the equipment I have beforehand I’ll be able to use 18 loudspeakers (all B&amp W 602 S2 or S3) and a sub for the upcomming installation in Trondheim. The loudspeakers will be driven by three Denon receivers (AVR-2801 AVR-2803 and AVR-2805).

That might be necsessary as the installation is going to use a total of four rooms.

Avid has acquired M-Audio.

August 19, 2004

M-Audio will become a business unit of Avid’s Digidesign audio division. More info here.

Start of semester

August 20, 2004

There are several new collegues at the Art Academy this autumn among them Jon Arne Sunnvia Inger-Lise and Roald. Yesterday at day time we had a long staff meeting planning activities for the coming two semesters. In the evening we were all dining at Jeremy’s place. It was a nice evening. I’ve missed the possibility of informal discussions on an ongoing basis in the staff. I guesss everyone was overworked last semester and never had the time. Hopefully this will improve. Next week we’re all going for a four day “get together” excursion to Iceland. I’m looking forward to that.

Most of today has been spent participating in a one-day pedagogic seminar. I studied pedagogy at the Grieg Academy some years ago. I hoped that the subject of the day would deal with what is particular about education at an Art and design school. Instead we got a quick and dirty scan of general theory on didacticism. Nothing new to me and the day felt more or less wasted.

There’s another party tonight this time for all of the staff at KHIB. I’m already tired….

Munch paintings stolen

August 22, 2004

The famous Munch paintings “Skrik” and “Madonna” was stolen in an armed robbery at the Munch museum in Oslo two hours ago.

OSX ports of RTC-lib ++

August 23, 2004

Karlheinz Essl has recently made available OSX compatible versions of the Real Time Composition Library as well as several of his algorithmic compositions. They can be downloaded here.

Migrating Jitter patches from OS9 to XP

August 23, 2004

Adam Kendall has reported to the Max-MSP list his findings when porting Jitter patches from Mac OS9 to Windows XP. I’m reposting here as I might have to refer to this at a later stage.

Subject: [max-msp] Migrating Jitter patches from OS9 to XP

In case this helps other people —

I recently migrated all my Jitter work from OS9 4.100 to XP 4.3.2 Following
are issues I ran into. Some might be obvious some not.

If anyone sees incorrect or incomplete information please correct me.

If other people email their experiences I’ll compile a “White Paper” on the
subject.

ORIGINAL PLATFORM:

  • OS9
  • 1Ghz TiBook
  • 768mb RAM
  • Radeon ATI w/64mb video RAM
  • 4200rpm drive

NEW PLATFORM:

  • XP
  • Dell Inspiron 9100
  • 3.2Ghz P4ht
  • 1Gb RAM
  • Radeon ATI 9600 w/128mb video RAM
  • 7200rpm drive.

NET RESULT:

  • FPS on the new platform are easily 2x-4x higher. It’s not a linear
    difference — Different patches slow down the FPS differently on the two
    machines. On the TiBook I constantly fell below 15fps often as low as 6 or
    7.000
    than I ever did in OS9. So far 12fps is my worst performance on the XP
    setup.

DIRECTORY STRUCTURE REFERENCES

  • WinMax uses “/” instead of the OS9 convention “:”
  • Also note “/” is the opposite of the standard Windows "

SINGLE-QUOTES

  • Sometimes WinMax doesn’t recognzie Single-quotes
  • This was an issue when porting bpatchers referencing files with spaces
  • Max put single-quotes around the names in my OS9 patches. WinMax didn’t
    recognize the single-quotes and I lost bpatcher file references.

FILE-EXTENSIONS

  • Files in OS9 that are seen as Max text files must be labeled .pat in XP
  • .mxb is the extension for Max binary files and Max will choke if a Max
    text file is labeled as binary
  • XP files with the .mxb extension won’t work in OS9. Whether or not
    they’re text or binary they must be labeled .pat.

EXTERNALS

  • All third-party externals must have XP versions installed

OUTPUT WINDOWS

  • In WinMax output windows must be floating or will be hidden to the OS
    and monitors by Max’s parent MDI window.
  • Alternately manually extend Max’s parent MDI window across the second
    monitor

QUICKTIME

  • Quicktime is not standard in XP. It must be downloaded and installed
    (it’s free)

GRABBING VIDEO

  • Grabbing video is not standard in XP which is relevant for
    jit.qt.grab.
  • Note the jit.qt.grab help-files recommend using WinVDIG.

FULLSCREEN

  • FullScreen behaves differently in WinMax than OS9.
  • Behavior in OS9 — Master patch in full screen Double click on a
    patcher or subpatcher — subpatch floats above full screen.
  • Behavior on PC — Patcher or subpatcher opens behind the master patch.
  • Net result — I find FullScreen kind of useless in WinMax
  • Personal Note: I use FullScreen in OS9 because it’s more efficient for
    video. I haven’t noticed any efficiency loss in WinMax using
    non-FullScreen. My guess is since XP has the MDI system even if the patch
    is not FullScreen WinMax still controls the entire screen.

UBUMENU

  • Ubumenu doesn’t work in FullScreen.
  • My guess is it’s related to the FullScreen issue since Ubumenu actually
    produces a second floating window.

MAXIMIZING WINDOWS

  • Annoying behavior consistent with XP behavior in general — When a
    parent patcher is maximized subpatchers open up maximized also.

OVERDRIVE

  • This is purely anecdotal I haven’t thoroughly tested or quantified
    this
  • I have three “Vertical Hold / Horizontal Hold” patches. They use
    jit.mxform2fd jit.rota or jit.convolve to create traditional vertical hold
    / horizontal hold functionality. I apply a simple non-audio oscillator to
    make the images roll
  • OS9 Overdrive on or off — “rolling” works fine in all circumstances
  • PC Overdrive off — “rolling” chokes if too many pwindows are active
  • PC Overdrive on — No problems.
  • I tested lots of other parameters and Overdrive seemed to be the cause

Time schedule for C_H

August 24, 2004

The project Crashing Happy was initialized by me and Jørgen Larsson a couple of years ago. We’re now setting schedule for finalizing the projects. All remixes has to be done by the end of October. mastering cover design and pressing will happen in November-December and we’’ve just decided that the release party will be hosted by Pilota.fm at Landmark no later than February 2005.

New web solution

August 24, 2004

Yesterday KHIB switched to the the new web solution. This will be much more dynamic than the old one and all of the staff can now provide content as required.

The new web pages was presented during a staff meeting today as was the new strategic plan for the period 2004-2009 (not yet online).

Oh and the baby finally has gotten an English name. KHIB is now officially “Bergen National Academy of the Arts” in English."

Preparing for Trondheim

August 25, 2004

I’m preparing the equipment for Trondheim: Making sure the computers are set up and running as supposed to packing loudspeakers amplifiers cables you name it. Staff passing by are making jokes about the current state of mess at the office.

I’m always surprised at how long it takes to gather all the equipment setting up computers test etc. The Win XP Shuttle has been running with some Max patches for two days without any problems now and that’s a good sign. Maybe I should keep it running until Monday just to see if it is still playing smoothly.

I’ve never used Max on Windows before so this is the one technical issue I’m the least sure about for the installations.

Tomorrow I’m of to Reykjarvik along with the rest of the staff at the Art Academy coming back late Sunday. Early Monday me and Jon Arne will get hold of a car get the equipment and paintings in and set of for Trondheim.

pshshshshshshshshshshshshshshshsh!

August 25, 2004

Last thing I got to do before leaving the Academy today was sampling the sound of Jon Arne spray painting. Jeremy spray painted as well and seemed to have fun. The sound can be described as sudden bursts of noise somewhere inbetween white and pink. Jeremy asked me to make screensaves of what the sound file looks like. After a few more installations we might end up with loudspeakers covered by overpainted silk prints of video processed images of the sound files of Jeremys stripes being played back as raw audio. Or something like that.

At Iceland

August 26, 2004

The art scene in Reykjarvik seems vibrant. We got to see a few galleries before closing time. My strategy: staying close to some of the others in order to get some interesting discussions and exchanges on what we see. A very interesting exhibition of Goya at Rekjarvik Art Museum. I would like to get back to it later.

I also got some time to play around with the samples of Jon Arne spray painting. Most of the attempts did not produce interesting results.

Presentations

August 27, 2004

This day has been spent at the Art Academy in Reykjarvik. All of the artistic staff at the Art Academy has been presenting their work to each other. I found this very interesting and valuable. We also intended to spend time discussing future strategies and collaborations (if possible) on artistic research and development projects but never got that far. As Karen said: Maybe just as good. The impressions from the presentations will have to be digested somewhat before we can move further. I’m enjoying myself. I’ve missed this kind of discussions the previous semester.

In the evening: Partying with the staff at the Art Department in Reykjarvik. Nice to meet Halli again haven’t seen him in four years.

Arrived in Trondheim

August 31, 2004

After a somewhat slow morning yesterday spent with the kids I got to the Academy met Jon Arne and together we set off to pick up a rental car. Back at the Academy equipment and paintings were packed into the car and off we went for Trondheim. The drive is about 550 km but on Norwegian roads passing the mountains that took us 11 hours. Lovely drive though and interesting conversations on art music life the Universe and all the rest.

Most of today has been spent getting everything into the gallery unpacking and start mounting. The paintings and the equipment seems to have managed the trip without any damages.

The rooms are different from what I thought beforehand. The two main rooms for the installation at 1st floor are larger than I thought. One of them will be kept semi-dark the other will have more light coming in. The best room is at ground floor but is not sufficiently separated from a café in the next room. For security reasons this means that we most likely can’t take the risk of using projectors DVD-players amplifiers or loudspeakers in the room. That’s a pity as I know exactly what I’d like to do.

At the end of the day I tried different ways of positioning loudspeakers. It seems like they will be subdivided into smaller groups and I’ll use separate sound elements for each group as if each group was one piece of sound art with several pieces exhibited at the same space. They’ll all be able to blend together though.

Two different ways of distributing sound in a multi-speaker setup:

  • All loudspeakers are set up to create an illusion of a continuos sound space. Sounds can be positioned at any loudspeaker travel from one to the next or be present in many or all of them at the same time.
  • Eno seems to have used an approach of using a number of CD-players in shuffle mode for several of his sound installations. This approach implies that each loudspeaker (or pair of loudspeakers) is dedicated to a certain layer of the total fabric.

There are of course other ways of thinking but the two mentioned represent two different approaches of relevance to what I’ll be attempting at. For this installation I’ll try something in-between using sub-groups consisting of more than 2 loudspeakers and positioned so that they relate to the room paintings video material or other physical and visual elements of the installation.

I’d like to get a digital camera so that I could take soem images during the process. Don’t know if I can afford it though.

Electronic Art in Public Spaces

August 31, 2004

PNEK and NoTAM has released a publication and web site on electronic arts in public spaces. The publication edited by Janne Stang Dahl and Jøran Rudi is based on the conference hosted by NoTAM and PNEK as part of Ultima two years ago on the subject.

[meta-issue]

August 31, 2004

- an issue that can be dealt with indirectly only by addressing other issues.