greetings, search engines of the future!
this is a journal of my activities during my stay as the access-space artist in residence (April 12 - May 7 2005).
... wow, i know it's been a long time between entries. unfortunately the access-space residency landed right in the middle of a seemingly never-ending stretch of work related travel.
recently, Ed has been understandably hassling me to get some more content up on this page. since the bulk of the value of my residency was to learn supercollider, the most useful content generated during my stay was the workshop i gave at the end. i've been working on turning my (kinda) transcript of this into a tutorial of sorts. the process of banging four hours of rampant explanation into a cohesive document is proving pretty challenging, and at the very least, time consuming.
so, since that is still under construction, in the meantime i have made a page documenting the supercollider packages i made in preparation for the workshop.
if this is going to look like a real diary, then i need more than one entry. this is that entry. to see if it has some value beyond numeric filler, join me on this literary journey ;)
on wednesday i was in brussels to perform both as myself and as a member of farmersmanual. normally my contribution to the farmersmanual experience is mediated via pure data, but this time i braved a live performance with SuperCollider3. this wouldn't have really been possible without the many hours of staring at its help pages while on this residency. even though the role of clown in a multiply ringed noise circus is an especially fault tolerant (if not fault encouraging) performance context, it does mark a vaguely defined milestone in my understanding.
at this point i think i have finally regained comfort with working with audio in a textual environment. prior to my long relationship with pd, i had been working with text-based dsp languages such as mp4-sa (using sfront) and csound, but i am still surprised how quickly i had been spoiled by pd's ever-present graphical interface.
... i had planned to ramble on a bit more about this issue but i have once again found myself a victim of the access space opening hours (yes i've been editing this on and off for 3 hours... pretty poor time management really).
first entry, a little late in the game. hopefully this means you will be spared the tedious details of my settling in, but here is a little summary:
last week i performed my first official duties as an artist in residence by giving a little presentation about the stuff i do as an mad scientist geek artist. this involved a tour of some of the silly java things on my website, a hastily constructed piece based on q3apd and a quick teaser of fijuu. the following day i did a short live performance as part of the access-space birthday which was based around a solo performance of fijuu.
back in the lab, a lot of time has been going into seting up a nice working environment. most of the machines here use mandrake, with the exception of two audio machines which are running the planet CCRMA distribution. being a long-time debian user (and slackware before that) i find it interesting that you can be rendered relatively incompetent by a simple repackaging of a system you are normally quite familar with. having now discovered some replacements for debian staples apt-cache and apt-get (urpmq and urpmi respectively), things are running much smoother.
as a diversion from compiling SuperCollider3 and SCUM, i spent some time investigating an old trackball mouse which i found lying around the space. after looking at the bytes it output when being moved (thanks to od), i managed to work out the protocol it was using. it is probably just a standard (albeit old) microsoft mouse protocol, but now i should be able to mock up a simple program to read data from the mouse and send it into SuperCollider over OSC. this is my plan for a more access-space friendly replacement for the game-pad in fijuu (at least while i'm here).