catfingers

911

2012-01-31T02:43:00.000-08:00

from http://www.telephonetribute.com

new

2011-06-09T05:49:00.001-07:00

http://underbellyarts.com.au/2011/julie-vulcan-and-ashley-scott-with-friends-with-deficits-spotlight-bunny/

Difficult Music Festival at Sedition 12th January

2010-01-13T10:00:00.000-08:00

in an impro with Alex Spence (clarinets)

catfingers at Final Failure

2009-12-22T18:06:00.001-08:00

(pic by Shannon O'Neill I think)
Don't Look gallery is closing. Thus the 'final failure' festival was run over the first weekend in December. I was very nearly the last act on Sunday night but everyone was surprised by an impromtu set by Wun Thong.

gig at Don't Look Sunday 23 August

2009-08-29T21:04:00.000-07:00

that's gear belonging to Panoptique Electrical in the background. I opened for them.

2009-06-25T07:04:00.000-07:00

2009-06-22T18:02:00.000-07:00

Since I am working up Max patches to control MIDI gear right now. I figured it was time to get a sideline in simple standalone devices working. Based upon http://ruinwesen.com/mididuino, a Hong Kong assembled duemilanove & LCD/encoders from eBay - plus the hard work of many other people...

The point being - last gig I reduced my need to look at the computer screen & I worked on the rotary controller & kaosspad. The next gig will cut back on this even more. Heading towards a box that translates input data from one thing to another and/or outputs data I've stored in there beforehand.

2009-05-12T04:40:00.000-07:00

hmm, I may have gone a bit overboard with the MIDI controllers. Some of these are up on ebay right now!!

SoundLAB 6

2009-03-22T13:56:00.000-07:00

a work from 2006-7 mfv appears in the soundpool http://soundlab.newmediafest.org/blog/

RPM again

2009-01-29T19:17:00.000-08:00

Nearly time for RPM again. The album title for this year is: sketchrock. I even found a couple of (somewhat dated) terms for what I want to do: microhouse & clickhop. But really - the kinds of techniques I remember using in the mid-80's (tape loops & mixing). I don't even want to really use a computer much for this one.

2008-12-29T02:19:00.000-08:00

annoyed

2008-12-15T14:31:00.000-08:00

* a stand-alone version of my video 'wait' just got rejected from http://www.guarnerius.co.yu/eng/programi/pojedinacno.php?ID=422. Fair enough - their call.

* I can overhear co-workers talking golf clubs (Chinese counterfeits), dining room furniture &, of course, property (that's what everyone talks about in Sydney).

Every feel like you're inhabiting a couple of incompatible worlds?

an early draft

2008-11-03T00:35:00.000-08:00

as the lecture unfolded, the speaker's slides became less and less relevant to his argument - even so, he continued to refer to obscure details in the images. While the audience was frustrated & confused by the presentation, they could not precisely describe what had happened.

nocturn

2008-11-02T03:59:00.000-08:00

about 10pm, Saturday, 18 October 2008. West Albury, NSW - on a dirt road in between a swamp & a pasture. If you listen closely you can hear horses breathing while they stare at me in the darkness.

dawn time lapse

2008-10-31T05:37:00.001-07:00

from 2am to 8:30. What a shame we can't see in the dark. I guess then it wouldn't be 'dark' huh?

month in the country

2008-10-02T21:16:00.000-07:00

http://www.hothousetheatre.com.au/amitc/index.htm
well, 3 weeks really. To just make audio and/or music. I have:
* OSX86 laptop with Max 5
* MPC 1000
* a minidisc recorder & couple of mics
* a multiband radio & a great deal of wire to make an aerial

new prototype

2008-05-22T05:57:00.000-07:00

this project has split its seams & spilled out onto it's own blog!

300 images composited until the specified image size is filled. Notice that the repetition of the image series is apparent. hmmm

OMG it's done

2008-02-28T15:38:00.001-08:00

So now there is a one-off copy of this CD in the world - winging it's way to the RPM HQ - my submission in the 2008 challenge.

RPMChallenge

2008-01-22T21:15:00.001-08:00

I have signed up to record an entire album during February. I adopted the 'Red Marshall' that I drew for Cathy as a kind of product logo. I suppose a 'yellow drum machine' might have been more appropriate.

no audio

2007-11-07T05:30:00.000-08:00

2007-10-24T05:40:00.000-07:00

more of the same but I kept the time-sequence intact, the sequence is 'readable' from the top-left down.

2007-10-15T16:28:00.000-07:00

busy. I think I've covered the basics of putting together basic compositions: automated cropping, layout etc. with imagemagick. I've also made some odd little flipbook animated films using these techniques (& the same source images). Focus on variations on the actual image content: saturation, brightness.

exploded view

2007-09-22T19:37:00.001-07:00

towards a less explicit grid (still a long way to go)

2007-09-20T06:56:00.000-07:00

14.4 minutes of tv

2007-09-18T05:04:00.001-07:00

grid pix

2007-09-10T06:55:00.000-07:00

I'm thinking about making images in a format like:

-only very, very large - thousands of elements perhaps.

the internet never forgets

2007-09-10T06:16:00.001-07:00

If I were to Google my name - I'd end up with many many sites devoted to a certain U.S. actress. However, adding the title of my thesis turned up the following:

http://www.savoyhill.co.uk/technique/listening.html From a Contemporary Sound Arts essay I must have contributed in 1992(!)

http://gsd.ime.usp.br/sbcm/2000/papers/aldrovandi.pdf Which must have been discovered after I posted an HTML-formatted version on geocities back in 1995/96.

I didn't even know I'd been cited in an academic context (a paper from the 2000 Brazilian Symposium on Computer Music). Best of all - I rather like the essay.

Well - I'm glad that people read my stuff & liked some things. I can tell you, it's not something I'd do again. It's really all Pierre Schaeffer's ideas anyway, I was just a messenger.

Processing 0124/1025

2007-08-28T04:33:00.000-07:00

...if, say, you had the idea of taking each frame of a movie & directly manipulating it as an array of pixels...which is the approach described in the perfect sense - below - posting requires...then you'd have eventually found some of the web sprawl around Processing. Turns out to be a method that has several examples within that thought-cloud.

Although we are talking QuickTime for Java here (which is what Processing - very sensibly - uses for it's video library) & that really is something of a dog performance-wise. The applet I'm working on will run precisely once & never again until I restart or login/out between runs...

Serious problems (in QTJ) - I'm guessing here.

that mysterious 11th post

2007-08-28T03:53:00.000-07:00

...the one that disappeared when firefox crashed. anyway. It's open source! how could that happen... well, I'm a user of pd I know about that (& Max/MSP - which does a good job of dying badly on occasion). Well, my old G4 powerbook is heading for retirement I think & the AMD linux box which was largely a generous gift of parts from stegasaurus is just...fast enough to render movies using the pdp video extensions (hmmm, time to build a custom kernel maybe). Great! I've discovered a rich seam of video/audio stuff that is continually inspiring but pretty quickly exceeds the capabilities of both hardware & software I have to work with. Not that I'm grudgeful.

This is one limitation (sheer CPU speed) I've never bumped into before so that's interesting in itself - old-school ProTools users may remember things like virtual tracks - ways of putting components of your work on hold, so you can keep working & render your stuff on faster equipment.

I rendered my initial cut of extruded snow from a pd/pdp video patch on linux, sending values to Max/MSP on the Mac to create the synchronised audio. Then doing the final thing on iMovie under OSX

I have learned so much about dealing with buggy output files (pdp creates .mov files that QuickTime 7.x cannot read - VLC to the rescue!) & I know that I'm using software for things it was never intended to do.

Reminds in a way of creating electroacoustic music in analogue studios that were built & wired for stereo radio production. Just remember that everything must be re-plugged so that it works for the next user...(because I'm nice that way - not like some people).

The law of the workaround: things may look hopeless but there's always a solution. However, it may involve borrowing cables from the next room & your sanity may not survive the process.

mattstetten

2007-08-22T02:31:00.000-07:00

which trail would you choose?

showing in Sound of Failure

2007-08-16T02:42:00.000-07:00

Thanks be to Don't Look Gallery. The first cut of 'extruded snow' - 7 minute video will play on a loop in the nice backroom of the gallery (not in the performance night as on the invite).

it makes perfect sense to me but exactly no-one else

2007-08-05T21:01:00.000-07:00

A shopping centre carpark after hours. Twilight in a forest. An example: a cold sunny afternoon in the bush, strong wind making the gumtrees roar, whisper, thrash & knock their branches together. This - not so much a distillation of this but a stepping back from it. I wanted to place the lense of the equipment & the computer in between the experience of this & shooting the video & the finished projection.

(added later) Clearer or maybe not: I'm thinking about a distruption of the connection of sound & image. Diagesis - one of those very useful definitions from film/narrative theory (well, a common usage of the term anyway - I must admit I can't remember the originator & should hit the books...).

If the image is disrupted & not 'recognisable' as standing for itself - ie. video of the trees moving in the strong wind (which is what we irrefutably hear) - the situation becomes one of sound versus image. The normally seamless support these provide for each other doesn't work anymore.

What I mean by disruption is to take the video stream & apply some mechanical change to it - say by sorting the pixels in each frame by colour. I am working at a fundamental level of the encoding (the capture & replay technology)...& exploiting this capability to open up a breach in the visual/audio perception of the audience.

This situation is limited to the presentation of this work but it falls into the Dada/Surreal tradition of dissociation. I'd argue that it also works in the tradition of exposing the means of recording & playback.

& this is what we all want: art that exposes a breach in perception & a breach in the media - not the necessity of these but the possibility.

distinction between eyecandy & informative

2007-08-05T19:57:00.001-07:00

Googling video installation aesthetics gets you to places like: http://infosthetics.com/. I'm interested, sure - just like with the hard core at generator x. But I wonder about all that input. I have a vast amount of unformed notions about where I, personally, would draw the line about creating visualisations - no matter how pretty (& yes I really do like, value & defend 'pretty'), how clever etc.

Fining down this problem, I think it ends up being that I still have some kind of belief in there being a material/energy that is what animates the artwork. Of course the current model of this is information: a dataset. That's the focus of those websites - informatics. I am not a believer in informatics in such isolation.

Of course, all this would make more sense if I got more than 2 uninterrupted minutes at a time to write. Beware of instant content.

A

I have so much to tell you & do not know where to begin

2007-08-05T19:50:00.000-07:00

I'm trying to create video for looped playback. Something I haven't done (any video production at all) for about 15 years:

This was my blurb:

extruded snow
refers to tuning for broadcasts (sound and vision). There are worlds of richness in between the narrow bands where something supposedly intelligible is broadcast. That is well-known & well-explored fact in art & musical works created since the advent of radio receivers.

Many modern TV receivers attempt to hide what happens between bands, which is the preserve of every kind of noise - up to & including the cosmic. I'd like to create someting that does the opposite...

This particular extrusion (used in the sense of passing a starting material through a series of operations which change it into something else) is an early stage of working with this audio & visual plasma & artefacts.

tourism of a sort

2007-08-02T20:02:00.001-07:00

I just discovered: http://hisz.rsoe.hu/alertmap/. Now I know what a 'GLIDE number' is too. It's a very comprehensive system - including a code for 'animal attacks'...

There's also: http://www.gdacs.org/

One of those slightly weird moments when you're reminded that anything (in terms of published information) is available at anytime. I rather envy the programmers who worked on all this. Web Services (tapping news & information feeds) are nice to work with.

iMovie HD PAL as your default project format

2007-07-29T21:47:00.001-07:00

Problem iMovie HD (iMovie 6) creates new projects in NTSC format.

Solution You need to change the default project format - which is buried in a text file inside the Application Bundle:

Easiest: right-click or command-click the iMovie icon inside the Applications folder & choose to show package contents. In the new Finder window that opens, navigate into Contents/ Resources/English.lproj and you will find a file called Localizable.strings. Edit this file in TextEdit & change the line defaultVideoFormat = "DV-NTSC"; to defaultVideoFormat = "DV-PAL";

Quicker: startup terminal.app & open /Applications/iMovie/Contents/ Resources/ English.lproj/Localizable.strings in vi. find the same line, change it as above & save...Well, not really all that geeky really.

Discussion This is documented in only a couple of places on the net so it could do with a few more locations to improve search results spread. Apparently, if you have your DV camera plugged in before starting iMovie, a new project will default to the format supported by the camera.

trucks - two film stills

2007-07-22T16:39:00.000-07:00

between two cities: Budapest & Prague. Night