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Category Archives: 2010 Fall
Rhythm and the everyday life
In response to my design question “What are latent rhythmic aspects of our lives that can be revealed through technology?”, I shot this video on the F/G train platform at Smith and 9th Street. I believe that each moment is the intersection of experiences, and my project investigates the interaction between rhythm and technology. The goal is to reveal and encourage the use of technology to understand the multitude of rhythms that surround us.
The movement of the clouds, the traffic on the BQE, the grass on top of the subway station, the breeze in the microphone, the arriving and departing train, and the chatter of the passengers all form the symphony of rhythms of my everyday life.
Also posted in Thesis Studio
Tagged Design Questions, Rhythm, Rhythm and Everyday Life, Thesis
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Visit to the Freedom Tunnel
Fellow Thesis student, Aaron Druck, and I went to the Upper Way-West side today to pay a visit to the Freedom Tunnel. I always had a desire to go there after seeing Dark Days, and since a close friend had talked about it, a friend of his made a documentary there, and the fact that I’m including graffiti as a form for my thesis, I was basically required to go to this place.
Jumping fences is just fun. It sends adrenaline running through the veins, especially when there are Amtrak trains running past you. We entered the tunnel and were surprised at how much light there was. Even on an overcast day, there was plenty of areas where you could see clearly. It was just amazing. The walls just this dusty, choppy texture. The rocks and the lighting made the whole place feel like it was on another planet.
The goal for me was to get a good look at the legendary graffiti location. The new school artists have their own unique places, and since most of the older pieces that were in the streets of New York have been either weathered away, cleaned-off, or painted over, my hope was to see some classic work in the flesh.
Here is a video of our way out, and there was a lot of action on our exit. A train blows by us and some mole people test out there ladder. A little shakey, but I think you get the point. Make sure you check if the train is coming because it comes really fast.
Next scheduled visit is the writer’s bench in the Bronx.
Conflux Wrap-up
The Conflux Festival was held this past weekend, and I volunteered to help out during Friday night’s events at Conflux Café and during the keynote talk by urban-explorer Steve Duncan. Everyone was friendly, and David Darts and Christina Ray really did a great job of making sure the artists had what they needed. It may not seem like much but everyone doesn’t make the extra effort to make sure the artists involved are taken care of.
I had the opportunity to meet Carlos J. Gomez de Llarena, whose Urban Speaker project was one of my precedences during my Thesis presentation earlier that day. Carlos is a really amazing guy, super modest, and had one of my favorite projects from Conflux. I had been looking at other work done in this area, such as Mark Bain’s Action Unit: Instant Riot for Portable People, so it was great to talk to him about why he did it, what he was interested in, and art in general.
I volunteered for this year’s Conflux because last year’s festival made a major impact on my Urban Drifts project. Elizabeth Streb’s talk as well as a number of the projects from last year embodied a number of things I had been thinking about and gave me context for the kind of work I was doing.
On Saturday, I spent most of the day riding around on my bike checking out the different installations that were up in the city. I was interested in seeing how other artists positioned their “un-commissioned” art and how it was received by the public. In general, I was a little disappointed in the visibility of most of the projects that I checked out. The city is a crazy spectacle, and I had difficulty even finding most of the projects despite the maps I had with me with the specific locations of each project.
For instance, here is a photo of Astor Place. It was a little hard to find the tiny QR coded installations when there was a street faire in full effect right in the same area. Instead of QR codes, I found mozzarella corn bread and strawberry/nutella crêpes.
I was able to find a few of the projects, but I also experienced a few technical difficulties. Whether it was AT&T or a faulty link, I wasn’t able to fully explore each piece for all that it had to offer. To me, there were just too many barriers between me and the pieces.
In reflecting on the event, I need to look at my own projects and identify what barriers are in my work between what I am doing and what message I want the participants and collaborators of my work will receive. This weekend had beautiful weather, so if nothing else, it got me outside and experiencing the many things New York has to offer.
Also posted in Thesis Studio
Tagged Conflux Festival, Psychogeography, QR Codes, Street Faire, Urban Speaker
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Maker Faire = Legendary
Last weekend I volunteered for New Youth Learning for the Maker Faire at the New York Hall of Science in Queens. Jessica Klein, a recent graduate from the Parsons MFA DT program where I am currently a 2nd year, reached out for some assistance with New Youth Learning’s booth at the Faire, and I jumped at the chance. An amazing organization bringing opportunities and design process thinking to the youth of New York. And after speaking with the students, I can tell they are hungry for opportunities like these.
There were definitely some impressive pieces being shown at Maker Faire (Zach’s Eyewriter project included), but the most amazing part of the Maker Faire experience was talking with the kids about their projects. Hearing them talk about their process, their choices, and how they felt about the final result made me feel good about the changes that are happening in the way education is being perceived and “administered”.
Here is a photo of some of the folks involved with the New Youth Learning project, such as Cooper Hewitt, New York Public Library, and American Museum of Natural History. For more photos, you can check out my set here.
Keep up the great work New Youth Center. Looking forward to the next time!
Visual Sequencer
In Code for Art, we were asked to pick an adjective as a constraint for our next project. Since my core thesis topic is rhythm, I chose “rhythmic” as my word of choice.
I had the “a-ha” moment last week after a combination of events, influences, and interests all seemed to intersect (Maker Faire, Trespass book release show, visual music, openFrameworks, QR codes, psychogeography, etc), and I have decided to create a form of visual music graffiti for my thesis project.
In general, I will be creating a custom application that allows musicians and artists to compose music/sound pieces, export them as images, and paste the visual pieces up. Using an app, the public can “read” these images and translate them into the music that is embedded within the image. There is much more to the project but that is a brief overview.
For this prototype, I took my first step toward illustrating my idea:
This program reads the image pixel information from the camera, stores the pixel RGB values in to an array, and based on the actual values, maps the image to the sequencer. Basically it looks for black pixels in specific locations and maps them accordingly.
As I started running out of time before class, I had to hardcode some of my variables, so I’m going to need to go back and redo some of this work. I also would like to add the ability to change the tempo, the number of sequencer buttons, alter what instruments are being played, and include some text for directions.
As a first prototype, it was successful in showing the general idea of the final outcome. Looking forward to doing the next prototype.
Also posted in Code for Art, Thesis Studio
Tagged Camera, openFrameworks, Prototype, Sequencer, Visual Music
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