FUTURE BLINDNESS

Some interesting (to me at least) trends in my dreams recently:

I dream that I am working on a problem involving actual objects I interact with and sometimes, more excitingly, I dream a couple steps ahead and later find myself in a sort of functional deja vu.

I will be working with an object and, when I look back at it, its geometric properties will have changed. For example, last night I was working with a bicycle wheel and when I looked at it again, the spokes were not radially symmetric—some spokes were connected to other places on the circumference, and some were missing altogether. I have been reading about Voronoi diagrams and this might be related.

In a really good dream, there is almost always a dog. Most recently, I was playing with a dog in a museum of wearable furniture. The dog took the form of a dog I know here in Somerville (hi, Drummer!) but its colors were the colors of my new shoes.

I am especially interested in the shapes that result from the aforementioned geometric inconsistencies. A shape revealed in a dream, like the gunner’s sight.

I used to have a recurring dream about floating through the schematics of a mechanism that produced a truly random audio signal. I would float through tree-like hierarchies and as I neared each one, I could listen in on what was playing (much like Max/MSP, although I hadn’t known about that yet). Each night that I dreamed further into the structure, it became clearer and clearer that the machine simply skittered between one hundred symbolic/significant sounds at random times and durations. I know it was one hundred sounds because the structure revealed itself to be ten trees of ten inputs each, with a randomized switch at each ten-in-one-out node. I drove myself crazy trying to figure out how the switching between signals was randomized.

I stopped dreaming about this mechanism when I finally floated near enough to a node to peek inside. It was a crystalline petri-dish, and the insides of each dish were a mess of gold foil electrical contacts and the cloudy honey you see on the sides of trees. There was a flap of gold, free to move, inside each dish whose motions were connecting the various outputs and inputs. Inside each node, a fluorescent bee was pushing the gold leaf around, this way and that, making and breaking the circuits. A real natural type of output.

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!

Hello, here are some unedited recordings of the sounds made when Harlo and I play together—some of them start out pretty raw, but there are parts in each file that certainly merit attention. Let us know what you think!
cookie sandwich
improv 1
improv 2
improv 4
improv 5
improv 6
improv 7

I will be playing laptop and modified electronics tonight on SHARE TV in Cambridge—come on down to Prospect and Mass Ave or watch at home from 7pm to 8pm. There will also be a video by Greg Gagnon and a feature on the recent circuit bending workshop at DORKBOT.

I’m leaving Ambient earlier than I thought, much to my relief; the Hyperinstruments Group has asked me to start early (June 1) to get up to speed on Tod’s opera, which, I gather, has a lot to get done before the first performance in Monaco in September 2009.

Some of the modified electronics I’ve been working with have proven very satisfying, and I will post in more detail soon. Essentially, I am using Max/MSP to change the speed at which tape loops are played; the results are very interesting and, more important, consistent! Next up will be to incorporate a variable-length tape delay using an additional playhead and some servos. (PS, I am very excited about Max 5 but can’t yet afford it)

Thenji’s film will be premiering next week in NYC, and I’m still trying to work out the details so I can make it down. It’s showing with three other short films on Saturday May 10th at the Visual Arts Theater at 333 West 23rd Street. This is very exciting—it is a beautiful film and I am thrilled to see it get the attention it deserves. I may be doing more work with Thenji once she returns from Chad later this summer.

I bought Boxcutter’s first album, “Oneiric,” and I’m really enjoying it. I think it’s exactly what Burial was all hyped up to be, which is good because Burial is a waste of space if you ask me.

But then again, you didn’t—see you later hugs!

Well, I really fucked up the Constraints I laid out for March. My good friend Sasha knows me well enough to profit from these bouts of optimism, so he bet me a reasonable sum that I wouldn’t make four out of the six Constraints. Even if you accept a couple of my excuses (and you know you shouldn’t), I made two. If you follow the letter and not the spirit of the law, I succeeded at zero of these tasks.
Let’s go through them:

I will eat out only three times this month, and not spend over $100 total on this. When at home, I will eat inexpensively and I will try to consume all my leftovers.

NOPE.

I will drink one beer per day, perhaps two on the weekend. This does not count a beer that someone might purchase for me.

SORT OF.

I will visit the gym every other day, with the option to skip a weekend visit if I exercise at home. (This will ensure I get value from my gym membership).

NOPE.

I will sell my two ham radios at a reasonable price.

NOPE.

I will make and sell at least two t-shirts…getting them in a store on consignment is okay for this.

NOPE.

I will find freelance work and execute it at a rate more than $20/hr.

SORT OF.

Sasha, thank you for your support—let me know where to send my finest Liar’s Poker bills.

Here is a recording Harlo and I made during our improvisation on Sunday. It is eight minutes long, so go ahead and do other things while the song is playing. This one is the first in our series of recordings with the following names:
THE BIG STORE
THE HYDROPHOBIA LIE
THE STREET MECHANIC
THE PIGEON DROP
THE FIDDLE GAME
STFO

Below is an image by Alex Hays—I really like it.

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.

This weekend I made a proof-of-concept demo of the SyncWalk digital composition interface I’m working on. You can see photos on my flickr set, and a video is up on YouTube (I think Harlo may have a video of it up soon).

As you can see, it’s a little noisy right now—I’m going to add some filter capacitors and mill a PCB this coming week in an effort to ameliorate this.

At this point, I’m still not sure how I will differentiate between a palm-contact or a thumb contact, let alone contact between the two hands. (The video does not show it, but the glove has a conductive pad on the palm as well) One strategy would be to use the PWM outs to give each finger’s pad a different tone, like a DTMF pad, or to use different reference voltages for the thumb and palm contacts. Interference would be avoided if I could make a DTMF-like solution (whereas it would be the main source of noise if I had to read analog values), but I’m not sure frequency-detection is something AVRs can do well.

It’s always nice to have incremental rewards when you do a project, and this weekend has yielded encouraging results. I’m ordering conductive fabric tonight from here and will be trying to design a glove-to-cat5 PCB in the coming days. Let me know in the comments if you have any ideas or suggestions!

Because of some recent financial blunders and a lack of roommates in my residence, I find myself with far less cash than I usually have available. Coupled with the recent computer troubles necessitating a new laptop, this prompts me to take drastic steps to increase my liquidity.

I will therefore live the month of March with some elective constraints, listed below:

I am interested in the degree to which you think I will be successful here. I have listed more constraints than I intend to follow, and I’d love to hear in the comments which ones you think I will be able to meet.

If I had a lot of time on my hands, in fact, I’d love to take odds on these and make this an ongoing market—I think it would be interesting and motivational if a community helped itself improve by posting resolutions and paying out when they’re broken (and vice versa - if you bet me I won’t make it to the gym and I do, you lose the bet). This encourages people to push their limits and propose something that gets better odds, and discourages them from lowballing and going the comfortable route. Sasha would probably have a better system to implement this, so if you read this, Sasha, chime in!

In other news, I have snuck some fun into my workday by assigning myself the task of designing better visualizations for the tech support staff’s telephone data. Right now, I’m adapting Ben Fry’s excellent zipdecode applet to accept timestamped call data.

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.