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Blog archive for May 2009

Artist residencies in Western Norway

May 6, 2009

Air West Norway provides an overview of all available artist residencies in Western Norway.

The town councils of Bergen and Stavanger presents this survey of Artist in Residency (AiR) programmes aiming to strengthen, promote and develop collaborations between foreign artists, Norwegian artists and west Norwegian institutions, organizations and local communities.

Stepping down as director of BEK

May 26, 2009

Dilbert

I am resigning as director of BEK.

Over the last year, my work situation have felt increasingly schizophrenic, attention scattered between numerous tasks including accounting, budgets, general administration, writing applications, doing server maintenance, develop new web site for BEK, doing research and development, contributing to Jamoma and SpatDIF, participating in the SID European research project, assisting artists, producing events, you name it. The workload has gotten out of hand, and I have barely had time of since last summer.

Recently we had a meeting of the board at BEK, and spent time getting a thorough overview of all major and minor tasks required to keep BEK running. Next we started brainstorming what would be a sensible way of distributing responsibilities among the staff. Gradually a picture emerged where it seemed beneficial to make a clearer separation between administration/management and artistic research and development. The vacant position as director was advertised in the local paper last Saturday. Application deadline is June 14th.

I am not leaving BEK, but over the coming months my position will hopefully get a stronger emphasis on artistic research and development (“faglig virksomhet” would be the proper word in Norwegian) and I will get a new boss.

I am looking forward to that!

GIT and SVN

May 26, 2009

We use SVN for all of the development projects related to Jamoma and SpatDIF. SVN works well, and the Versions client for Mac OSX is excellent.

Still, for me there’s one caveat: SVN requires you to be online to update and commit changes, and I don’t have internet access at my studio.

For a while I have been curious about GIT. It seems to gain a lot of momentum among Rails developers, and one advantage seems to be that you don’t depend on network access to track changes done locally.

A post to the Pd list a week ago pointed to git+svn, enabling one to use GIT locally, but synced to a central SVN repository. It would be nice to install GIT and check out git-svn over the next few months. There seems to be at least two books available: Pragmatic Version Control Using Git and the free online Git Community Book.

Gitx-screenshot     Gitx-screenshot2

Recently GitX was announced, a git GUI specifically for Mac OS X.

The onset of sound

May 29, 2009

Why would we single out the properties of the onset of a sound, its attack, as being any different to those that follows?

(…) In most naturally occurring sounds the onset gives us some clue as to the causality of the sound – what source is producing it, how much energy was expended in producing it, where it’s coming from. Of course, we can pick up some of this information from later moments in the sound, but such information has a primitive and potentially life-threatening importance in the species development of hearing. After all, hearing did not develop to allow us to compose music, but to better help us to survive. We are therefore particularly sensitive to the qualities of sound onset – at some stage in the past our ancestors lives may have depended on the correct interpretation of that data.

 

Trevor Wishart (1994): Audible design. A plain
and easy introduction to practical sound composition.
Orpheus the Pantomime Ltd. Page 44.