you should be able to listen to to it here:
http://makeart.goto10.org/2008/?page=streaming&lang=en

I’ve taken a job as an interactive installation programmer, four days a week. I’m wanting to keep the extra day for my own projects. At the same time I don’t want to fill every second of my life up. I want to leave time for contemplation in the middle of everything.

I stumbled upon this today: Is Google Making Us Stupid? (via OneGoodMove). I’m finding this idea of contemplation to be extremely important in the artworks that I’m making and planning. Over the last few days I’ve planned and executed a project that takes a video image of a moving scene and turns it into sound. I made it with moving grass in mind, but it should work with any kind of movement. In any case the point of it is to provide a space for contemplation of visual stimuli by augmenting them with sound. In other words, it takes what you are seeing and sonifies it, in a way that makes you more aware of the movement and thus better able to slip into a state of contemplation, where time seems to stop.

Also I’m especially impressed by the Concert for mr. Cheglakov and his shadow – combining video of Mr Cheglakov performing with the person himself on stage. It plays around with ideas of time and here-and-now-ness – very nice work!

Watch the video in ogg theora format, 320×240 or look at the icky closed source YouTube flash version below:

The YouTube version is a little broken at the end. I don’t know why, but since I seem to have broken my ffmpeg encoder’s mp3 support it will be a week or two before it’s fixed. Fixed!

What’s more, the power and data distribution thing I built to handle all of the wiring for this thing is connected to the controller board (orginally Wiring) by 2x 8-core ribbon cables (you can see them in the picture below, each snaking off the distribution board on the left to go to the two separate Arduino boards in the middle/right). So think about it for a second: 15 doesn’t divide into 8 very nicely, nor does 3 divide into 8 very nicely.

So one of the lighting boards is shared across two ribbon cables, which was fine when it was all on the one I/O board, but now that I’ve got two of them it’s meant a doubling up of data transmission for the third light module. To save bandwidth in the original design (making serial communication speedier) I transmit light control information in packets of 3 bytes (red, green, blue). Because the third light module is split over two Arduino boards (red and green pins on board 0, blue pin on board 1) I have to transmit the third light module’s data to both board 0 (as module 2) and to board 1 (as module 0).

Look, it makes sense to me, OK? :-)

But I’ve got it to work again, for the first time since I left New Zealand! Hooray.

8 am Caught a train from Birmingham to Sheffield.

10 am Arrived in Sheffield. Sought out the Millenium Gallery to see Rose Butler’s 3-screen video installation Tent. The work is based on Muslim ideas of pottery design, apparently, which seemed to my mind to play out as a kind of mirroring and inverted mirroring effect. Sometimes the central screen had a mirror line down the middle, and the video stretched over the left one and a half screens was repeated on the right. Sometimes the left screen and the right screen showed the same thing but the middle was mirrored, sometimes the three screens showed video staggered in time; and variations on the above. In all shots though a tent appears, adorned with brightly-coloured paintings, posters, and bits of colour.. the idea seems to be that the tent formed some kind of base of operations for the filming process, connecting the bits of otherwise fairly random landscape photography together.

The footage was taken from what seemed to be a camera on some kind of rotating mount that took footage stop-motion style, and there was quite often some kind of interaction with people in the image. In one particular shot, which seemed to be taken from a countryside scene somewhere, there was a small girl who ran with glee around the camera while it was filming, and this coupled with the splitting/mirroring that was going on lent a very nice feel to the whole thing, as though it was just a machine for play… I like playfulness in art, it’s something I’m trying to work towards myself. Another shot that sticks in my mind involved the tent on a beach, with interested cyclists moving around and sometimes stopping in front.

11 am Walked around trying to find the location for Single Shot. When I finally found where it was supposed to be I realised I’d got the dates wrong by three days, and the place I was looking for was closed. Oh well – had a good walk around Sheffield nonetheless.

12:30 am Went right back to where I started to find another place where Single Shot was showing. Some of the films were great, thought not always the ones I’d expected. They’re all viewable online:

• George Barber’s Automotive Action involved upturning buckets of coloured paint onto a motorway and then watching as cars drove through them: the whole thing appeared candid and possibly of dubious legality – awesome.
• Vanished Point by Christian Krupa was quite nice.
• Ben Dodd’s Surprise was technically very interesting, if not so narratively..
• Mike Marshall’s Birdcatcher was pleasantly serene.
• Dust was far too long and made little sense.

1:30pm Lunch. Fruit on a patch of grass. Noice.

2:30pm We Grew Our Own Medialab (and this is what happened), which was a talk (documentary video available on the link) by various open-source-based medialabs on what they’re doing, and how they’re doing it… the Grow Your Own Medialab project was initiated by Sheffield’s Access Space, a medialab that uses FLOSS software on donated and recycled hardware. They’ve formalised some of the work involved in setting up such a facility, and this talk was a chance for people who’ve gone down this path to tell other people about it. Present and presenting were James from Access Space, some folks from Folly, Mongrel/MediaShed who do neat things for free, eg sniffing WiFi CCTV systems to get free video content to then make movies (their logo is someone reaching in to a rubbish bin so there’s certainly a freegan element going on there..), and lastly Newcastle’s Polytechnic.

4:30pm Group discussion on free vs open (documentary video available on the link): looking at free and open source ideas of software and how they might be and can be applied to art and life. We passed through some very interesting territory, including differences between the currently prevailing world view of art as the creation of private and personal cultural objects (cf intellectual property laws), vs art as shared cultural heritage (cf the GNU foundation and FLOSS). The interesting thing about the discussion is that it brought people of vastly different social classes together, from an ex-features editor of the Face magazine right through to someone who has been on the unemployment benefit his whole life and was able to relate stories of single mothers trying to survive on the dole back into the sometimes utopian and rich-middle-class-priveliged perspective that sometimes comes along with the open source rhetoric… great stuff anyway. I had some fascinating if brief chats with Adnan Hadzi afterwards, who is part of the Deptford.tv project to document the redevelopment of the Deptford area of London in an open-source/creative commons way.

6pm-10pm Biosphere does Does Music Affect Plants? Beautiful Biosphere ambience in a large indoor greenhouse. Really lovely. I could’ve stayed there all night.

8pm Haswell & Hecker diffuse a composition they made with the Xenakis‘ image-based UPIC Music Composing System. With Lasers! and Strobe Lighting! This was not really so interesting, all things considered. The music suffered from something that electroacoustic/acousmatic music often does suffer from – namely, to my ears at least, a lack of direction, too much length with not enough music. Often you’ll find it conceptually fits together and makes sense, but musically this conceptual coherence cannot be felt, and the result is what starts to feel like monotony and unnecessary repetition. There were certainly some moments within it but overall I don’t think it worked quite as well as it could. And the lasers ended up being a little bit of a gimmick – save for a few moments there wasn’t really much relationship between what you were hearing and what you were seeing, except (again) from a conceptual point of view, which sadly didn’t play out in the actual experience.

9pm Yasunao Tone does 495.63. Chinese calligraphy drawn on a graphics tablet, projected on a wall and converted into loud, crunchy, glitchy noise, in a darkened library, at 9pm at night. Awesome!

10:30pm Train back to Birmingham, to arrive at midnight.

Wow, that was novel…

Along with the actual events I managed to get details of a whole bunch of people including the Polytechnic people from Sheffield (Dominic and .. Jake I think? very friendly lads), Adnan Hadzi who worked on the Deptford.tv project (studying for PhD in media communications and with a strong interest in free and open as they apply to the creation of shared cultural heritage), and the Access Space folks, who I will hopefully be visiting to do a residency with… excellent.

[edit, to clear up some confusion] no, I didn’t make this, but isn’t it cool?