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It’s half past three in the AM, my Wiring board has blown up so I’ve been mcguyvering together a replacement using two Arduinos (need 15 output pins, you see) and my brain is full of tech. If you get the D2XX drivers from FTDI’s website and write some code to call FT_GetDeviceInfoList() it’s possible to grab the serial number from each Arduino so they can be consistently individually addressed. Next step is to find some white sticky labels and label each Arduino with its serial number, with a big black felt tip pen. Then commence feeling like a Real Professional Techie. I wonder if there’s a Real Professional Techie Dance.

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All I’ve had for dinner is some spoonfuls of raw Instant Chai powder mix which doubtless contains copious quantities of MSG and/or L-Cystiene. Closed my eyes for a moment back there and the world pulsed like I was tripping. My eyes were doing this crazymad waking-REM thing. Time for bed – except I’m bloody miles away from home and it’s pissing with rain! Gah.

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Whoooooooooo… Does anyone else trip out a little when they eat too much MSG?

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I’m using a service called ChangeNotes to let me know when artist residencies become available, by pointing it at pages like this. This message is a test run…

I have just published a fairly lengthy piece about arts funding over on window.org.nz, a groupblog on arts and new media in New Zealand. In it I discuss differences in the funding situation between New Zealand and the UK, drawing on my experiences in Birmingham.

Also, I didn’t catch the talk show last night… Oh. It seems to be in Dutch.

I’ve just discovered Cool Media Hot Talk Show, via the Rhizome Raw mailing list. It’s a ‘DIY talk show’ about art and media, which is an interesting concept.

It’s screening live this Wednesday the 27th at 20:30 CET (19:30 GMT). I might try and catch it..

Over the last little while I have been rearranging things, and updating some other things:

• Added Projects page, with nice sub-pages.
• Made a more proper page for Sounds Like Light, Lights Like Sound.
• Added an embedded version Into the Wandering Wandering, a film by Alouis Woodhouse that I made a soundtrack for.
• Cleaned up the Downloads section – now you can actually see what’s going on.
• Made proper biography and about pages. I might merge these in future.
• Added some contact details.

Hooray for updateage.

I appear to be rediscovering composing music. Again. Funny. This seems to happen every now and again.. I feel like I’ve run out of musical things to say, for a very long time, then someone says something, or something happens, and it all comes back.

Tonight myself and Bobby were in his studio, mulling over a track that I’d started a while back but had never quite finished. And I was asking him, if this was his track, what would he do next? He said something that made an enormous amount of sense, but was something I’d never quite been able to pin down for myself. Which was this: try and find a core for the track, its identity, the one or two elements that define it and make it what it is. They may be there already, or they may need to be added; either way, once they have been found then you can strip everything else away if you want to, and as long as you’ve still got that then you’re doing fine.

Bloody good advice. Thanks Bob. That’s what you get from a man who’s been doing it for 15 years, collaborating with Biosphere and being invited to DEMF/Movement… aah, one day.

I updated my Mac to OS X 10.4.9 just now, and it blew up and hosed something, so when I boot I get a loveley grey flashing folder with a question mark on it, instead of my operating system.

Stink!

I think it had something to do with the fact that I had run out of space..

Fortunately I’m not the only one having problems. “Macs don’t crash!” Ha!

So the seminars have all finished, and now we’re on to the projects part.

Needless to say it’s enormous quantities of fun. I’m working on two or three different projects at the same time: one, which I am focussing most of my programming efforts on, is a project by Chris Sugrue called Delicate Boundaries (read about it here).

The idea is that there’s some creatures living on a screen, and when you move up to the screen you can reach out and touch it and the creatures crawl off the screen and on to your body. I’m working on the hand tracking part, as we need some mechanisms to figure out both when a hand is touching the screen and, once there are creatures living on your body, how much you are moving, so that we can project the creatures in the right place relative on your arm. It’s a bit tricky but lots of fun.

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