Workshops, Lectures and Food, Oh-My!

1910: belated update: the past two weeks have been a gusty whirlwind of workshops, meetings and lectures. as a tutor of mine said recently, "blogging might be [is] a form of writing that reflects the moment" but in his case and in mine, ideas take awhile to gestate.

my first workshop was in MAX/MSP/Jitters..i guess you'd call it a program, but it's more like a tool-box, than anything else. it's a graphical environment for developing applications to interpret/manipulate raw data (numbers). it's all the rage right now (with good reason) for new media artists, mainly due to the flexibility and almost limitless possibilities it offers. i liked it a lot. the image above is of a "patch" (small program) that i wrote on the last day of the workshop. we were told to write a patch that would manipulate video based on sound/video analysis. mine takes a realtime 3d image of my desktop, and moves it around an x,y axis based on the input through a microphone. everyone was coughing a lot during the week of the workshop, getting over colds and such; the room had this ambient soundtrack, that at first was annoying and intrusive, and seemed to shake my computer. i wanted to visualize it, make it obvious. i was pretty happy with the result. though i have to admit, certain elements of the patch come ready-made. i also linked the microphone to the speakers to set up a bit of feedback. when someone would cough, the mic would pick that up, the two-channels would feed numbers to x,y coordinates for the desktop, but would also go straight into the speakers, generating weird sounds, which would feed back into the mic, and a loop was created. it wasn't a snowball effect, but it did exaggerate the movement initiatized by the coughing.

my second workshop was in a program called processing, which as far as i can tell is pretty much java, though a bit easier to understand. it wasn't my cup of... java (sorry, couldn't resist), so i didn't get too excited about it. during this workshop-week i also had three meetings, one each with my three theory tutors, and a great lecture on play/gaming in music as practiced by john(s) cage and zorn, given by my theory tutor, arie altena.

which brings me more or less to this week, the autumn break. i haven't done a lot this week besides catch up on sleep, watch movies and eat. i eat so much here, probably due to biking everywhere. i did go on a short 40km bike ride to winsum and back on tuesday with plans for a much longer ride this weekend if the weather cooperates. it's been pretty rainy & cold the past couple of days, and the leaves are falling; autumn is here.
and i'm going to go eat. <3