Archive for May, 2009
it’ll be all right on the night
You may have noticed a lack of references recently in this blog to my coding. That’s because I haven’t done any. I’ve temporarily abandoned the circleLine idea, as I found I couldn’t concentrate while trying to debug the final stages, though I produced lots of unintentional effects. (Perhaps there ought to be a ‘Processing Sketches Do the Funniest Things’ programme on TV. My, how we laughed when that function kept calling itself with no escape condition…)
Until I resume work on that sketch, I’ve decided to develop some new ideas, exploring the possibilities of achieving interesting results from relatively simple behaviour. That seems to be where my reading and interests currently lie.
In the meantime, I leave you with a couple of hilarious out-takes. The first one is closer to what I was trying to achieve, though far too fast, and when I slow it down, it doesn’t work at all. The other is more sedate, giving the effect of rotating cones.
here comes the sun
It’s spread across the internet, and was on the front page of yesterday’s Times. What is it? It’s a photograph of the space shuttle in front of the sun. It’s a powerful and exciting image, but I find it unsettling.
The shuttle is tiny against a quadrant of the huge yellow star behind it. A filter has removed all solar flare, so the sun looks more like a planet. The optical trick played by relative sizes and distances makes the image look like countless establishing shots in science fiction films and programmes of a space craft in orbit around a planet where crew members have landed, though normally the spacecraft would appear larger.
Our familiarity with such shots means that it’s easy to misinterpret the image. The shuttle is not near the sun at all. We are not close to travelling to other planets. The headline in the Times, “Set your controls for the heart of the sun” is not meant to be a suggestion that the shuttle will travel to the sun. It refers to a track by Pink Floyd on the 1968 album, ‘A Saucerful of Secrets’, written at the time of the Apollo rockets and shortly before the first moon landing.
Perhaps all the recent discussion of space tourism, including Richard Branson’s talk of space flights for £10,000 within ten years, together with NASA’s desire to resume manned flights, contributes to an excited feeling that we are on the verge of a new era. Yet if air travel is a major cause of environmental damage, why are we even contemplating extending it with completely unnecessary leisure flights to the edge of the atmosphere?
But that feels like a curmudgeonly attitude. When I was growing up, like many others, I wanted to be an astronaut, and believed that space travel would soon be commonplace. Why should we voluntarily give up that dream, just because it might cause harm to our planet?
There is no claim that the photograph of the shuttle in front of the sun is art, but my troubled response to it makes me willing to consider it so.
fun and games
Three of us went to Futuresonic in Manchester yesterday, to research digital art. Well, I say Futuresonic, but really we just went to Cube since that’s where almost all of the art events in Futuresonic are located. A couple of events I wanted to look at were listed as city-wide, but we saw no evidence of them, and since we’d finished at Cube by lunchtime, we decided not to wait for the highlights of the Japan Media Arts Festival at the Contact Theatre in the evening.
If I had to chose a single piece as my favourite, Flight Patterns by Aaron Kolbin would be a strong contender, but I also liked Nuage Vert. I confess that part of their appeal for me is that the latter was created using Processing and I suspect the former was too, though the interpretation notes mention only an “open source programming language”.
On that basis, I ought also to like the knitting scanner in Making Fun Serious, which appears to use Arduino and therefore probably Processing as well, but somehow it merely left me bemused – an electronic version of a pianola, albeit one that plays knitted patterns, with the consequent distortions to the output. It’s quite possible that several other items in the RCA/Yahama section, such as the wearable instrument, used Arduino and Processing too, but the precise method of control was less obvious.
The whole Yamaha section was interesting and it contributed hugely to the relaxed atmosphere that I hope we can emulate in our digital art exhibition in 2011, but I felt the title was the wrong way round. It couldn’t really be taken seriously at all, and should only be seen as a bit of fun.
After leaving Cube we went to Urbis, to see the videogame nation exhibition, which was even more fun than the Yamaha pieces. There were a lot of games I’d never heard of, and most of the games I used to play, such as Myst, Spindizzy, Dark Seed and Wipeout, were missing, and there was little or no mention of the Amiga, my computer of choice for many years. It turns out (though perhaps I should have noted the title of the exhibition) that the emphasis was very much on games created in Britain. I enjoyed trying many of the games on offer, but I struggled, as I always did, with the driving simulators, and some of the controls were too complicated to pick up without a manual or much more time to experiment. My only regret is that I forgot to try Little Big Planet, the one reason I might consider buying a Playstation. The £3 entry fee to the exhibition was a bargain.
slugfest
For the first time in far too long, I dug out my SLR and video cameras today. It’s so long since I last used them that I had to think while setting them up, but I enjoyed today’s session – some close-up stills and timelapse filming of a slug, in preparation for more prolonged filming at work next week.
don’t push me ‘cos i’m close to the edge – g flash
I keep returning to the Tonematrix Flash application. It’s simple, but the choices made by its creator are very clever – the spread of notes, the reverb and the speed of the echo make it impossible to select dissonant patterns. Even the visual ripple adds to the effect.
for those in the know…
I went to see Coraline yesterday. It looked great, the story was intelligent, the models were wonderful, the detail in the animation was amazing, the 3D was effective, there was progression and development, the film was genuinely involving at times, I liked the lack of neat explanation at the end and yet… I don’t know why, but it failed to satisfy. Perhaps it was the weight of unfair expectation or perhaps I was distracted by thinking about how it was made, but I found myself resisting.
Maybe it was because the neighbours in the “real” world were too extreme. Maybe the cat was too unappealing (or, if it was meant to be unappealing or ambivalent, then there was no reason or point at which it chose to join with the girl). Maybe it was because there was something missing at the core – something to do with the price of staying with Coraline’s other mother and father.
I suspect that there was something significant that I missed about the grandmother introduced at the end. Perhaps understanding that would have helped. Was there any significance in the cat disappearing at the end? I googled the “For those in the know” phrase at the end of the closing credits, but the results were irrelevant.
Or perhaps I’m just over-analysing it.
coping strategies
I went to see ‘Trying to Cope with Things that Aren’t Human: Part One’ at the airspace gallery the other day. It was the first time I’d been to the gallery, partly because I’ve not been able or wanted to go to a gallery for a long time but also partly, I’m ashamed to say, because the outside looks so forbidding, but I really enjoyed the exhibition. It was funny and clever and, yes, thought-provoking.
It’s good to have a gallery like airspace in Stoke.
going underground – p weller
My curiosity was piqued by an article in yesterday’s Guardian. So, presumably, was everyone else’s, because Tunnel 228 is now fully booked, but I followed up a brief reference at the end of the Guardian’s editorial, and bought one of the few remaining tickets for Punchdrunk‘s forthoming production of It Felt Like a Kiss in an empty building as part of Manchester’s International Festival. On 12 July I shall therefore be wearing sensible shoes and claiming that I am not of a nervous disposition…
out of my brain on a train, 5:15 – r daltrey
For several weeks now, I’ve been waking up ridiculously early in the morning. At first, the times fluctuated a lot, but recently it seems to have settled down to around 5 or 5.15am.
I’ve learned, not surprisingly, that I ought to go to sleep early as a result. I haven’t yet managed, though, to overcome the mental resistance of going to bed before 10pm. It just doesn’t feel right. But there’s nothing much on television to keep me up, and if there is anything then On Demand internet provision is useful, so it’s purely ingrained thought patterns that I need to master.
At first, I was annoyed at waking so early, and would try to go back to sleep, usually unsuccessfully, but it’s actually useful. These days, I need to eat very slowly, so breakfast takes a long time. Waking early means that I can take my time and still walk to work at an early hour. It also means that I can resume my daily writing task, as advised by Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way. I haven’t actively missed writing over the last few weeks, but now that I’ve started again, I remember the benefits: calmer, clearer thoughts and freedom for ideas to filter through.
There is still much about the Artist’s Way that I find irritating or unacceptable, but the Morning Pages task has certainly helped me.
it’s not just on or off
I linked to a post on (the teeming void) the other day, and I can’t get a particular phrase out of my head:
“…the digital is just the analog operating within certain tolerances or threshholds.”
It seems to resonate and hint at momentous meaning that I can’t quite grasp. I don’t understand his first link to Kirschenbaum, but I get his second reference to Kirschenbaum and the point about data’s illusion of immateriality. I’m sure this could have a deep impact on my current research on contemporary digital art.
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