FUTURE BLINDNESS

It has been difficult to find a moment to write about the last two weeks. I will try, briefly, to relate the events so far.

Last week I took Wednesday and Thursday off from Ambient to go to the all-hands production retreat for “Death and the Powers,” the opera I’m working on as part of my research at the Hyperinstrument Group. I admit it—I only got a chance to read the libretto all the way through on the night before the production meeting began.

When I had finished reading the libretto, I laughed out loud for almost a full minute. They did not know how it ended! Despite this, the meeting went well and was quite productive. I was very impressed with the creative team, and Pinsky coined a part of the (erotic) choreography “The Chandelier Position;” we got along quite well after that. I had the sense, though, that he was having his own fun with us (the technical staff) by writing into the libretto a series of known-impossible tricks (for example, the stage direction “NICHOLAS calmly removes his head from his body, and smiles at the Delegation”).

After the first day of brainstorming, we had made good steps towards a complete vision for the show’s aesthetic and production values. It was clear that after a long and exciting day of new ideas, us engineers had gone home and thought for a moment more about phrases like “those batteries will cost nine hundred thousand dollars” and “Nicholas’ arm should detach from his shoulder and crawl around” with understandable trepidation. On the second day the scales fell from our eyes, and we went through the libretto again with a pragmatic run-down of the requirements for each minute of the show. I learned quite a bit about engineers and their working process, which is different from other styles I’ve encountered but not without its merits.

Unsurprisingly, the meeting ran a little long on the second day and a couple participants almost missed their flights. (No, I don’t believe we quite finished deciding how the opera will end I was thrilled that I left the meeting much more excited about the opera than I had been coming into it. The story is wonderfully written, with a couple completely beautiful moments, the set is going to look rad, and the story itself is more compelling than the synopsis I had read months ago.

Come Friday morning I sure wasn’t looking forward to going back to Ambient to answer the phone. I hit the ground running on Monday as we began to set up the Hyperinstruments space for all the UROPs we’ll be working with all summer. This took most of the first week, during which I am also supposed to be learning Eagle, Mathcad, Solidworks, Visio, OMAX, and a few more things I have written down somewhere. I am drinking a lot of Diet Coke, and I haven’t exercised or cooked myself a meal in over a week. Today is my last day at Ambient (hooray!), so my fond hope is that this weekend I will be able to organize myself, take stock of my time the coming summer, and be able to start on Monday with a new, more productive and flexible routine. If you have any suggestions, let me know—I got the email address I was hoping for, so you can guess how to reach me!

Well, they let me into the Media Lab—hooray! I am very excited to join the talented and interesting people there, and you can expect me to be a lot more smug than usual for awhile.

After three txt-msg blogposts, I need to break the streak and provide a proper update. Please do not think I will be txt-blogging less, though, as it makes an excellent threat when Company is around.

My second run of T-shirts went very well - I will be posting photos soon to flickr. The design was an AKA logo called Twin Eurofighters, and most of the shirts from the first run of 9 have been given away. Let me know if you’d like one, and I’m sure we can work something out. Screenprinting is great fun but a bit costly—so far I’m about $300 in the hole from supplies, the sink I had to buy and install, and shirts to print on. Clearly, this is a pursuit that must eventually be monetized.

I’m preparing a very small (but possibly noteworthy) presentation for the Dorkbot “Presidents Day” showing; it is called PissPoll and I’ll have more details soon. You may or may not like this idea. I am concerned that you might not like it.

I was in Harlem from this past Thursday to Monday working on Thenji’s film, which is coming along well. We were supposed to have finished by Monday but the deadline was extended and we’re finishing up next weekend. I hope. My most pressing concern is that I will finish the score and not have a chance to mix it on proper monitors, which neither of us own. Also, the diagetic mix is not yet final, which may affect some scoring stuff. It certainly will be exciting to see it screened, though! (no idea when that may occur).

Harlo was down in New York over the weekend as well; she was filming an interview with DJ/rupture for the premiere episode of share.tv, which airs on Feb 17th on CCTV. I haven’t seen the footage yet, but I’m sure it will come out very well. We went to Raggs of Harlem, a fine old bar, and had a nice evening talking with drunken locals who won money on the Superbowl.

In the last month I’ve gotten quite a bit done, and I have more on the horizon. It is a relief to have my time spoken for these days, and a delight that such exciting projects are on the roster. I will attempt to be brief.

The application
The application is in, and all necessary evaluators have responded. Hopefully, my application is as good as anyone else’s at this point. I am satisfied with my submission, and glad that it is out of my hands.

The Cameroon project
Delightfully, I met Andrew Sempere again recently and he has offered some insight on the chip problem I am having—the one I’m working with is proving difficult to debug. I’ve been working with Harlo on using this power source and looking at other chips that more easily facilitate pitchshifting. I’m considering just gutting this helmet and using it for a cheap pitchshift effect (I assume it can be hacked to change pitches).

The Syncwalk Digital Composition Interface
I’m chomping at the bit to get to the hardware/software part of this but I have committed to do the Cameroon project first. It’s nice, though, to continue to try to refine the operational flow as a background task while walking. I have a pretty complete model in mind now, and it can be implemented in several stages, which will help focus development work along the way.

South Africa Documentary
I’m heading down to New York to finalize the scored parts of Thenji Nkosi’s documentary at the end of the month—there’s also a new song called “Primary Loyalty” that you can hear here:
Primary Loyalty

Screen printing
Harlo and started screen printing this past weekend and had some modest successes.

A Bell
I received a very lovely bell for Christmas and it makes a wonderful sound. I will link to it soon.

I finally, finally found the VHS of an old performance I did with Teresa Marrin Nakra last week, and have now safely converted it to a .mov.

The music itself isn’t the most awesome thing in the world, but I certainly am glad that proof of this exists…I really need something from this to put in my portfolio! As I try to write more thoughtfully about this project, it becomes clearer how much this served as an introduction to the world of physical computing and, in a sense, the process involved in working with emerging technology.

The carpet itself was very cool but a bit buggy. Factors like heat and prior use would seriously impact the consistency of the output, and it led to some frustrating but now-familiar debugging issues. Other things, like Teresa’s imminent pregnancy and my own unfamiliarity with the medium made this a frustrating project at the time. Thankfully, Tim Ledlie was around to handle the software side of the debugging and help me retain a sense of perspective.

We only had a week from start to finish to make our performances, and the title of mine (DON’T WORRY ABOUT ME, I’LL BE FINE) comes from the sampleset I was using at the time. Snips from Disney’s version of “Peter and the Wolf” and R+H’s “South Pacific” combined with pretty abstract (and, upon later reflection, boring) drum and toneloops to make an endless, atmospheric performance that did not go very many places.

I think the best thing about this project was finally getting to just play the damn carpet. I spent many, many hypercaffeinated hours before that night pressing on the thing and listening for trouble, and even watching it reminds me of what fun it was to make sounds with something so malleable and strange.

I’m supposed to be somewhere right now but I’m posting this first—let me know what you think. It is, like most things these days, a rough unmastered/edited quickie recording done while working on “the woods”, a composition environment I’m working on in Max.
I’LL BE LATE

Friend, I have been absent due to a disgusting illness.

Nowdays I’m working on the following:

DORKBOT HALLOWEEN07

Originally uploaded by AKA MEDIA SYSTEM

The opening tonight went well—many thanks to all who attended!

Pictured here is the final product. I think the form turned out well, and I certainly learned many lessons in different media. The flower initially deployed flawlessly and worked for over an hour with no intervention from me. I’ll detail in a later update the means by which I ensured that the auto-destruct feature of previous flower incarnations was successfully deprecated.

After I had been away from the flower for awhile, I came back and noticed it was stuck in the “on” position—not good for anyone! After twenty minutes of frustrating, in-public debugging I discovered that the 9v battery had more or less drained completely; tomorrow I’ll need to deliver a 9v AC power supply, and perhaps once I post the schematic and/or breadboard photos someone can point out the error in my circuit that causes the excessive drain.

Watching strangers interact with the flower was pretty enlightening. I certainly regret that I had to compromise on the original interaction design in order to complete the schematic on time. In the final hours of Googling for an answer (peep my del.icio.us to see the link density/time relationship change as we approach opening night) I realized I should have had the circuit ready way sooner than the physical proto…so now I know.

One significant upside to this project is that it’s eliminated the inertia that I felt was keeping me from making acceptable progress on the Cameroon project. The flower circuit is my first foray from hardware hacking into the realm of microcontroller/logic projects, and I feel much more comfortable delving into a non-555 project with this under my belt.

Well, the flower project hit a snag when the dragon skin I molded turned out to be too thick for the muscle wire to move—in the course of figuring this out, I think I may have damaged/overheated some of the wire segments.

Most of the wire is undamaged, though, and it was easy to retrieve the other wires from the silicone.

Now I’m using a much thinner and lighter strategy involving a plastic flower I got at a craft shop. The downside here is that now I’ve got a shot at making a flower that magically sets itself on fire.

My new form factor also means there’s no inbuilt means to force the wire back into a bent position when it’s unactuated - I’ll have to work out something there once the silicone has cured. It won’t be pretty.

The other bad part: so far, I have not got a circuit working - I initially ordered too few/the wrong parts. Now I’m using a relay from an old robotics project of my brother’s, but I’m concerned about the current drawn by each wire—to get them to react quickly you have to really juice them up, and I doubt my relay can handle the current drawn by 6 of these, not to mention where I’ll find a power source for all this.

The circuit I’ll worry about tomorrow. Tonight I’m not sleeping until I’m confident at least the form factor is correct and workable.

Well, it’s really coming down to the wire here with the flower project. For the next few days I may not be updating as frequently, but I’ll post a final write-up with lots of photos etc when the dust settles.

I have spent too much time working out the mechanics and not enough time planning for the circuitry side of this; I don’t even have a final behavior model yet, so tonight I’ll be hastily curing v2 of my prototype petals and trying to decide what the best operational flow will be, and whether or not that’s feasible. Last-choice scenario is using an Arduino or my flaky CUI board to detect events and actuate the flower.

Meanwhile, my good friend Thenji (a CuriousAV affiliate) has called me in on a film she’s making about South Africa - I’ll be making a small amount of prepared sound from samples she’s recorded. I listened to the first batch of folk instrument samples and they’re quite exciting—mbiras, little flutes, and hand drums are some of my favorite toys!