behindEars

SoundLines on Sonification Blog

2012-01-29T10:28:00.000-08:00

SoundLines is featured today on a sonification blog here

I met Kovas a week or so ago in Santa Barbara and we had a really great chat about sonification and different ideas of process versus system. The blog is a great resource.

music made by hand

2012-01-25T10:48:00.000-08:00

Some nice manual processes.

A Day With Nick Zammuto from Matt Day on Vimeo.

Pattern Free Music

2012-01-24T09:44:00.000-08:00

well, not really pattern free, there is a lot this guy doesn't consider, but this is a parlour trick not a well thought out piece. If he had thought about it, he would not have choosen sonata for the title.

4D

2012-01-23T11:06:00.000-08:00

The mathematical concept of a 4-dimensional cube is much more simple than getting an imagination of 4 dimensional space. Some might argue, that it is impossible to imagine 4-dimensional space because of it does not exist. Others might say, it's because our brains are not made for this. But what would happen, if we would discover a 4-dimensional space suddenly? Were humans able to learn how to navigate in there? Would they start to develop imaginations of it?
The cybernetic scientist Heinz von Förster describes an experimental setting to investigate such questions. Following his thesis according to the 'radical constructivism', human brains - and so the minds - are able to learn any kind of sensomotoric invariant and create a reality out of it. They do not recognize the world, as a 'naive realist' might claim, but they construct it by interaction.
This viewpoint leads to two assumptions:
There is no fixed 3D capability of the brain, so we might be able to live in a 4D world.
We create a 4D reality much faster if interaction is involved
So it might be possible to get an imagination of 4-dimensional space, but probably not by looking to the rotating blue-green cube on this page, but by interacting with it. Try it out here

from
http://dvde.substitut-fuer-feinmotorik.net/projects/4d-cube

Time Lapse Sausalito

2012-01-20T18:43:00.000-08:00

SOPA and PIPA

2012-01-17T20:20:00.001-08:00

http://sopastrike.com/

Listen to the Ocean

2012-01-17T12:25:00.001-08:00

http://www.listentothedeep.com/acoustics/index.html

mu

2012-01-17T12:13:00.001-08:00

Timeless by KS12 from stichting MU on Vimeo.

www.mu.nl

den haag

2012-01-17T11:37:00.000-08:00

Amsterdam

2012-01-16T19:19:00.000-08:00

A really well put together video. Hope to see it all while in Amsterdam.

number one april 6 1975

2012-01-05T02:49:00.001-08:00

Infrared Weather

2012-01-04T11:47:00.000-08:00

Over 3500 individual infrared images from the GOES East weather satellite, collected between October 28,2011 to January 1, 2012 and made into a movie.

Notice the increase in the number of frames (i.e. the slowdown in the time rate) as the satellite takes more frequent images to carefully monitor Tropical Storm Sean.

Visual Music Links from Elaine Buckholtz

2011-12-30T03:21:00.000-08:00

Janet Cardiff and George B. Miller..... among some of these others...... enjoy your research....
Artist Bios and Web Site links

Visual Music

http://www.hirshhorn.si.edu/visualmusic/organs.html

CENTER FOR VISUAL MUSIC http://www.centerforvisualmusic.org/ArtistsPages.html

Thomas Wilfred

“Light is the artist's sole medium of expression. He must mold it by optical means, almost as a sculptor models clay. He must add colour, and finally motion to his creation. Motion, the time dimension, demands that he must be a choreographer in space”.

Thomas Wilfred The most successful early-20th-century artist of colored light in the United States was undoubtedly Thomas Wilfred (1889-1968). In the 1920s, his "Lumia" compositions were praised by art critics and performed throughout the U.S. After initially embracing a musical analogy to explain Lumia, in the early 1930s he shifted to an analogy based on painting. In pursuit of this new context, Wilfred sought to legitimize Lumia through a relationship with the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His career is emblematic of the difficulties inherent in the creation of art using technology early in the 20th century, years before the postmodern embrace of pluralism.

http://www.gis.net/~scatt/clavilux/clavilux.html

http://www.thomaswilfred-lumia.org/

http://artshost.net/lumia/content/intro.html

dream of color music http://www.awn.com/mag/issue2.1/articles/moritz2.1.html

Oskar Fischinger, 1900-1967

Oskar Fischinger was born on the summer solstice in 1900 in Gelnhausen, Germany. Around 1920 in Frankfurt, he met Dr. Bernhard Diebold at a literary club; seeing Fischinger's abstract scroll sketches, Diebold urged him to take up abstract filmmaking. Oskar was greatly impressed by Walther Ruttmann's Opus I in 1921, at the first public screening of an abstract film. Fischinger soon resigned his engineer's job and moved to Munich to become a full-time filmmaker. By June, 1927 financial difficulties forced Fischinger to leave Munich, so he walked to Berlin where he re-established himself. In 1928, he worked doing rockets and other special effects for Fritz Lang's Frau Im Mond. In 1929 he broke his ankle at the UFA studios and while hospitalized, decided that he must devote himself full-time to abstract filmmaking. He then produced the remarkable series of black-and-white studies tightly synchronized to music. These Studies screened widely in Europe, Japan and America, and came to be in such demand that by 1932 Fischinger had his brother Hans, his wife Elfriede, and three other girls working at Fischinger Studio. Oskar pursued experiments with drawn synthetic sound and collaborated with Bela Gaspar on a three-color film process, GasparColor, which allowed him in 1933 to complete his first color film Kreise. Fischinger's subsequent color films Muratti Marches On and Composition in Blue gained so much critical and popular acclaim that Paramount offered him a contract, and in February 1936 he set sail for Hollywood never to return to Germany.

Fischinger found it extremely difficult to work in studio situations, enduring episodes at Paramount (1936), MGM (1937), and Disney (1938-9). His frustration at not being able to produce independent film led him to take up oil painting, and he came under the patronage of Hilla Rebay, curator of the Solomon Guggenheim Foundation, who extended several grants to him during the difficult war years. Unfortunately, they quarreled over the artistic merits of his film Motion Painting No.1 (1947) and he never again received adequate financial support to complete another film. For the last twenty years of his life, Fischinger had to content himself with unfinished projects, with his paintings and with a home light-show instrument, the Lumigraph. After some years of relative ill health, he died on January 31, 1967.

The Fischinger Archive http://www.oskarfischinger.org/

OSKAR FISCHINGER FILMOGRAPHY http://www.oskarfischinger.org/OF%20Filmo.htm

http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/22/fischinger.html

http://www.tobeycmossgallery.com/fischingerchro.html

László Moholy-Nagy

b. 1895, Bácsborsod, Hungary; d. 1946, Chicago

László Moholy-Nagy was born July 20, 1895, in Bàcs-Borsod, Hungary. In 1913, he began law studies at the University of Budapest, but interrupted them the following year to serve in the Austro-Hungarian army. While recovering from a wound in 1917, he founded the artists’ group MA with Ludwig Kassak and others in Szeged, Hungary, and started a literary magazine called Jelenkor. After receiving his law degree, Moholy-Nagy moved to Vienna in 1919, where he collaborated on the Ma periodical Horizont. He traveled to Berlin in 1920 and began making “photograms” and Dada [more] collages.

During the early 1920s, Moholy-Nagy contributed to several important art periodicals and coedited, with Kassak, Das Buch neuer Künstler, a volume of poetry and essays on art. In 1921, he met El Lissitzky in Germany and traveled to Paris for the first time. His first solo exhibition was organized by Herwarth Walden at the Der Sturm gallery in Berlin in 1922. During this period, Moholy-Nagy was a seminal figure in the development of Constructivism [more]. While teaching at the Bauhaus [more] in Weimar in 1923, he became involved in stage and book design and edited and designed, with Walter Gropius, the Bauhausbücher series published by the school. Moholy-Nagy moved with the Bauhaus to Dessau in 1925 and taught there until 1928, when he returned to Berlin to concentrate on stage design and film.

In 1930, he participated in the Internationale Werkbund Ausstellung in Paris. The artist moved to Amsterdam in 1934, the year a major retrospective of his work was held there, at the Stedelijk Museum. In 1935, Moholy-Nagy fled to London from the growing Nazi threat; there, he worked as a designer for various companies and on films and associated with Naum Gabo, Barbara Hepworth, and Henry Moore. In 1937, he was appointed director of the New Bauhaus in Chicago, which failed after less than a year because of financial problems. Moholy-Nagy established his own School of Design in Chicago in 1938 and in 1940 gave his first summer classes in rural Illinois. He joined the American Abstract Artists group in 1941 and in 1944 became a United States citizen. His book Vision in Motion was published in 1947, after his death on November 24, 1946, in Chicago.

Alwin Nikolais

(dancer/choreographer, born November 25, 1910, Southington, Connecticut; died May 8, 1993)

It was August 1976 at the Beacon Theater in New York. A white-haired man dressed in white stepped gingerly out of the wings to take a bow. The audience, which filled little more than half the vast orchestra section, rose in tribute to Alwin Nikolais, whose Dance Theatre's 25th anniversary season had just completed its final performance and who has been called "perhaps America's least appreciated genius."

The modern choreographer, composer, and designer was also called a "magician," a "wizard," "the P.T. Barnum, the Tome Swift, the Yellow Submarine of dance," the father of multimedia," an acknowledged pioneer in the use of lighting, design and imaginative stage props, who in his dances, created a total theatre of shape, sound, motion, color and light and not only inverted the choreography but the electronic music, costumes, and lighting design as well." He was also known, to those who know him, as "Nik."

He created dozens of visual masterpieces that influenced generations of choreographers. His work was acknowledged with a National Medal of Arts, presented by former president Regan during a White House ceremony in 1987; a Samuel H. Scripps American Dance Festival Award, 1985; a decoration as a Knight of the Legion of Honor, France, 1984; a Capazio Award for Career Excellence, 1982; a Circulo de Criticos Award, Chile, 1973; and in 1968, Emmy and Dance magazine awards.

Of Russian ancestry, Nikolais was the youngest of six and studied piano along with his siblings. He was good enough, in fact, to play piano and organ when he was 16 at the neighboring Westport Movie House during the showing of silent films, an apprenticeship which developed his sensitivity to gesture and mood and refined his ability to improvise as an accompaniment to human action. With the advent of "talking pictures" in 1929, Nikolais lost his job and returned to Southington, where he accompanied dance classes and played at roadside inns. He also gave piano lessons and began studying acting privately.

In 1933, he attended a performance by German dancer Mary Wigman at New Haven's Schubert Theater. "Spellbound," consequently he went to her former student Truda Kaschmann to study percussion, but she persuaded him that he ought to learn dancing as well. While taking dance classes, Nikolais worked as director of the Hartford Parks Marionette Theatre, a post he held from 1935-1937.

He later recalled: "I learned a lot from those puppets. They are all motion and no nerves. I found out that art is motion, not emotion."

In 1937, he founded his own dance company and school in Hartford, where he choreographed, danced, and taught. In 1940, he received his first commission as a choreographer--along with his first modern dance teacher, Truda Kaschmann--to create a ballet. Two years later, Nikolais was inducted into the Army and sent overseas. Following World War II, he relocated in New York City where he studied with Hanya Holm, eventually becoming her assistant. In 1948, he was appointed Director of Henry Street Playhouse and formed the Playhouse Dance Company, later known as the Nikolais Dance Theatre.

Utilizing his war experiences in his dance, he began to develop his own world of abstract dance theatre portraying man as part of a total environment, placing his work in another realm which was previously untouched by choreographers. It was at this time that he defined dance as "the art of motion which left on its own merits becomes the message as well as the medium." His total dance theatre had begun to take shape and form.

Among his best known early works are Tensile Involvement (1953) and Kaleidoscope (1956). The latter was hailed as "evidence of a new force in the modern dance world."

In 1956, the Company was invited to its first of many appearances at the American Dance Festival, where it established itself in the forefront of contemporary dance in the United States. Nikolais' impact on dance grew internationally with the Company's 1968 Paris season, which was followed by performances throughout the world. In 1978, the French National Ministry of Culture invited Nikolais to form the Centre Nationals de Dance Contemporaire in Angers, France, and in December 1980, he created his 99th choreographic work, Scheme, for the Paris Opera. At the same time, his choreography for an opera by Gian Carlo Menotti was being staged at the Vienna Staatsoper. The French critics' appraisal of Nikolais as "the most original exponent of American contemporary dance," was echoed throughout Europe and on subsequent tours to South America and the Far East.

Included in his long list of celebrated repertory is Allegory (1959), Totem (1960), Imago (1963), Sanctum (1964), Tent (1968), Crossfade (1974), Gallery (1978), Mechanical Organ (1982), Graph (1984), Illusive Visions (1985) and Velocities (1986). In 1987, Nik and Murray, a documentary film by Christain Blackwood, aired on American Master.

Over the course of his career, Alwin Nikolais blended his many talents into a single aesthetic force and continued to challenge himself while creating dances, proving the verity of one critic's statement: "No one interested in the arts of the theater can afford to ignore Mr. Nikolais, who combines the roles of poet and showman in a strangely meaningful way."

World Magazine, Issue 2.5, August 1997

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Nam-Jun Paik (1932 - )

Nam-Jun Paik was born in Seoul, Korea in 1932 and is now an American citizen. Paik has been a central figure in avant-garde art throughout his career, and his innovative work in the fields of video art, performance art, installation art, satellite transmission, painting and music composition has had a profound influence on contemporary art. After his family fled Korea in 1950, he studied philosophy, history and music in Tokyo, moving to Germany to study music theory at the University in Munich and the Freiburg conservatory, where he

discovered electronic music and met the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, who became one of his major teachers. Paik's first solo exhibition, in Wuppertal, Germany in 1963, introduced his "adapted" television sets and launched a new era in 20th century art. His work incorporating art and technology soon made him a major international artist. Paik's recent work is a series of monumental video installations. For the 1988 Seoul Olympics, he created the tower “The More the Better,” an installation comprising 1003 video monitors. “Fin de Siécle II” (1989) shown at New York’s Whitney Museum as part of an exhibition on art and media culture, used a wall of monitors to present

popular culture. At the 1993 Venice Biennial, where he represented Germany, Paik’s installation “Electronic Super Highway” received the prize for best pavillion. Another recent monumental work, “Megatron,” a video wall of more than 200 monitors, was shown in 1997 at the Guggenheim Museum-Soho in New York.

http://www.rogallery.com/paik_nam_jun/nam-biography.htm

Design is for living. That maxim shaped a widespread shift in design during the 1940s and 1950s. It was a revolution of form, an exciting visual language that signaled a new age and a fresh start -- and two of its prime movers were Charles and Ray Eames. The Eamses were a husband and wife team whose unique synergy led to a whole new look in furniture. Lean and modern. Sleek, sophisticated and simple. Beautifully functional.

Yet Charles and Ray Eames created more than a "look" with their bent plywood chairs or molded fiberglass seating. They had ideas about making a better world, one in which things were designed to fulfill the practical needs of ordinary people and bring greater simplicity and pleasure to our lives.

The Eameses adventurously pursued new ideas and forms with a sense of "serious fun." Yet, it was rigorous discipline that allowed them to achieve perfection of form and mastery over materials. As Charles noted about the molded plywood chair, "Yes, it was a flash of inspiration," he said, "a kind of 30-year flash." Combining imagination and thought, art and science, Charles and Ray Eames created some of the most influential expressions of 20th century design--furniture that remains stylish, fresh and functional today.

And they didn't stop with furniture. The Eameses also created a highly innovative "case study" house in response to a magazine contest. They made films, including a seven-screen installation at the 1959 Moscow World's Fair, presented in a dome designed by Buckminster Fuller. They designed showrooms, invented toys and generally made the world a more interesting place to be.

As the most important exponents of organic design, Charles and Ray Eames demonstrated how good design can improve quality of life and human understanding and knowledge.

http://www.dwr.com/designers.cfm?designer_ID=105

Digital Harmony: The Life of John Whitney,

Computer Animation Pioneer

by William Moritz

Pioneer computer animator John Whitney Sr. in 1959, operating one of the first computer-graphics engines, a mechanical analog computer built largely from surplus World War II anti-aircraft guidance hardware. The camera is in the upper left, aiming down through the apparatus that "paints" the film with light. Photo by Charles Eames.

Computers were originally developed as part of the British and American World War II defense efforts. They were first known as "Turing Machines" after Alan Turing who invented them to break Nazi codes -- the film of Andrew Hodges' biography was recently broadcast as Breaking the Code with Derek Jacobi portraying the inventor. The young John Whitney worked in the Lockheed Aircraft Factory during the war and while he was working with high-speed missile photography, he was technically adept enough to realize that the targeting elements in such weapons as bomb sites and anti-aircraft guns calculated trajectories and produced finely-controlled linear numerical equivalents, which could potentially be used for plotting graphics or guiding movements in peacetime artistic endeavors. A decade would pass before he was able to buy some of these analog computer mechanisms as "war-surplus" and construct with them his own "cam machine," which pioneered the concept of "motion control."

In the meantime, Whitney had made about two dozen films in more or less traditional animation. Among these were: in 8mm, a time-lapse of an eclipse and several drawn Variations, in 16mm two Film Exercises accompanied by electronic music composed by Whitney with a system of pendulums he had invented, and about 10 abstract musical visualizations using an oil-wipe instrument he had also invented as well as three 35mm cartoons for the UPA studios. He also did various commercial assignments including the title design for Hitchcock's feature Vertigo (in association with Saul Bass), and the preparation (in association with Charles Eames) of a seven-screen presentation for the Buckminster Fuller Dome in Moscow.

http://www.awn.com/mag/issue2.5/2.5pages/2.5moritzwhitney.html

James Turrell

"First, I am dealing with no object. Perception is the object. Secondly, I am dealing with no image, because I want to avoid associative, symbolic thought. Thirdly, I am dealing with no focus or particular place to look. With no object, no image and no focus, what are you looking at? You are looking at you looking." James Turrell

James Turrell studied optics and perceptual psychology in college, but he gravitated towards art as his curiosity led him to investigate light itself. His thinking and work are compelling to scientists, artists, and laypeople because his understanding of light comes from a personal process of investigation, resulting in works of astounding beauty.

James Turrell was born in Los Angeles in 1943. His undergraduate studies at Pomona College focused on psychology and mathematics; only later, in graduate school, did he pursue art. He received an MFA in art from the Claremont Graduate School in Claremont, California. Turrell’s work involves explorations in light and space that speak to viewers without words, impacting the eye, body, and mind with the force of a spiritual awakening. “I want to create an atmosphere that can be consciously plumbed with seeing,” says the artist, “like the wordless thought that comes from looking in a fire.” Informed by his studies in perceptual psychology and optical illusions, Turrell’s work allows us to see ourselves “seeing.” Whether harnessing the light at sunset or transforming the glow of a television set into a fluctuating portal, Turrell’s art places viewers in a realm of pure experience. Situated near the Grand Canyon and Arizona’s Painted Desert is Roden Crater, an extinct volcano the artist has been transforming into a celestial observatory for the past thirty years. Working with cosmological phenomena that have interested man since the dawn of civilization and have prompted responses such as Stonehenge and the Mayan calendar, Turrell’s crater brings the heavens down to earth, linking the actions of people with the movements of planets and distant galaxies. His fascination with the phenomena of light is ultimately connected to a very personal, inward search for mankind’s place in the universe. Influenced by his Quaker faith, which he characterizes as having a “straightforward, strict presentation of the sublime,” Turrell’s art prompts greater self-awareness through a similar discipline of silent contemplation, patience, and meditation. His ethereal installations enlist the common properties of light to communicate feelings of transcendence and the Divine. The recipient of several prestigious awards such as Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships, Turrell lives in Arizona.

VIDEO: Outside "Roden Crater"

VIDEO: Inside "Roden Crater"

VIDEO: "Friends Meeting House"

VIDEO: "The Light Inside"

http://www.pomona.edu/Magazine/PCMWin02/CRturrell.shtml

http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/turrell/

http://www.rodencrater.org/

http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/turrell_james.html

http://members.aol.com/mindwebart4/page43.htm

Krzysztof Wodiczko

Krzysztof Wodiczko was born in 1943 in Warsaw, Poland, and lives and works in New York and Cambridge, Massachusetts. Since 1980, he has created more than seventy large-scale slide and video projections of politically-charged images on architectural façades and monuments worldwide. By appropriating public buildings and monuments as backdrops for projections, Wodiczko focuses attention on ways in which architecture and monuments reflect collective memory and history. In 1996 he added sound and motion to the projections and began to collaborate with communities around chosen projection sites, giving voice to the concerns of heretofore marginalized and silent citizens who live in the monuments’ shadows. Projecting images of community members’ hands, faces, or entire bodies onto architectural façades, and combining those images with voiced testimonies, Wodiczko disrupts our traditional understanding of the functions of public space and architecture. He challenges the silent, stark monumentality of buildings, activating them in an examination of notions of human rights, democracy, and truths about the violence, alienation, and inhumanity that underlie countless aspects of social interaction in present-day society. Wodiczko has also developed ‘instruments’ to facilitate survival, communication, and healing, for homeless people and immigrants. These therapeutic devices, which Wodiczko envisions as technological prosthetics or tools for empowering and extending human abilities, address physical disability as well as economic hardship, emotional trauma, and psychological distress. Wodiczko heads the Interrogative Design Group and is Director of the Center for Art, Culture, and Technology, formerly known as the Center for Advanced Visual Studies, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His work has appeared in many international exhibitions, including the São Paulo Bienale (1965, 1967, 1985); Documenta (1977, 1987); the Venice Biennale (1986, 2000); and the Whitney Biennial (2000). Wodiczko received the 1999 Hiroshima Art Prize for his contribution as an artist to world peace, and the 2004 College Art Association Award for Distinguished Body of Work.

Robert Irwin

Robert Irwin has been one of the pivotal artists in American Art for more than 30 years both as a practitioner and a theoretician. Irwin began his career as an abstract expressionist; however, by the late 1960's he had moved away from painting to become one of the creators of the art of light and space, using ephemeral materials such as scrim, lighting and orientation to alter and heighten the viewers perception of the space in which they encountered his work. Since the early 80's Irwin has won an international reputation for his "site-generated" work in public spaces which often make intimate use of natural elements, plantings and topographic features.

Robert Irwin was born in 1928 and grew up in Los Angeles, where he attended Dorsey High School. He received his art education at Otis Art Institute, Jepsons Art Institute and Chouinards Art Institute (1948-1954). Later, Mr. Irwin taught at Chouinards (1957-58), University of California, Los Angeles (1962), and in 1968-69, he developed the graduate program at the University of California, Irvine.

Beginning in 1970 (with the end of his practice as a studio artist), Irwin's method of teaching became exclusively in response, developing a peripatetic form of accepting invitations to lecture or participate in seminars and symposia in the art, architecture, philosophy and perceptual psychology departments of over 150 universities in 46 states. Along the way Robert Irwin has been the John J. Hill professor at the University of Minnesota (1981); the J. Paul Getty lecturer at the University of Southern California (1986); the Cullinan professor at Rice University (1987-88); the Andrew Ritchie lecturer at Yale University (1988); and the Yaseen lecturer at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1990).

In the early years following art school (1958-68) Irwin practiced as a painter, a period marked by a series of radical reductions in the "highly stylized learned logic of pictorial reality." Today these paintings are in the permanent collections of The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Art Institute of Chicago; and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. In 1970 Irwin broke with painting and embarked on an extended inquiry of an art outside the traditional frame and object; working by invitation in existing spaces, Irwin created a series of ephemeral interventions now referred to as the distinctly west coast art of light and space. These works were created in such places as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and The Pace Gallery, New York. A facet of this work continues to be present with more recent installations (1994-95) at the Musée d' Art Moderne de la Ville, Paris; Kölinscher Kunstverein, Cologne; and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid. Since the 1980's Irwin's continued questioning for the "pure subject of art" has carried him to an inquiry of the actual role of art in the light of a radical "modern" art history. This exploration has resulted in "real" world "site-generated-conditional art" proposals and projects in public places such as the Old Post Office Atrium, Washington, D.C.; Stuart Collection, University of California, San Diego; a case study Arts Enrichment Master Plan; Miami International Airport; and his most recent project, the Central Gardens of the new J. Paul Getty Center, Los Angeles.

Among the writings and books Mr. Irwin has published are: Rober Irwin Notes towards A model (Whitney Museum of American Art, 1977); Being and Circumstance: Notes Toward a Conditional Art (Lapis Press, San Francisco, 1985); The Hidden Structures of Art (The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Rozzoli International Publications, New York, 1993). A biography Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees By Lawrence Weschler was published by the University of California Press in 1982.

Robert Irwin has received the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship Award along the way.

Jean Rosenthal

Jean Rosenthal is considered one of the pioneers of theatrical lighting design. She emerged as a specialist at a time when a show's lighting was usually handled by either the scene designer or the master electrician. It was during her thirty three year career that the Lighting Designer joined the Scene and Costume Designer as a member of the production team.

Eugenia (Jean) Rosenthal was born in New York City on March 16, 1912. She was the daughter of Drs. Pauline (a psychiatrist) and Maurice (an ear, nose and throat specialist) Rosenthal and attended Manumit School in Pawling, NY and the Friends Seminary in Manhattan. After briefly studying acting and dance at the Neighborhood Playhouse during the 1929-1930 academic year, she became a technical assistant to Martha Graham, a member of the school's dance faculty. This was the beginning of a life long association with Martha Graham and her dance company. Between 1936 and her death in 1969, she designed the lighting for fifty three dances in the company's repertory. She returned to the Neighborhood Playhouse as a lecturer and production advisor during the 1937-38 and 1940-41 seasons. In the late 1950s, Miss Rosenthal began developing plans for a book on lighting design. She would dictate the material when she had time. It would be edited and shaped by writer: Lael Wertenbaker, and illustrated by her assistant, Marion Kinsella. During the early 60's Jean was constantly in demand, so little work was done on the book. In 1968 she was diagonosed with cancer. During her long stays in the hospital she was finally able to dictate the essential material that would become the basis for her final legacy. The Magic of Light, which has long been out-of-print, was published in 1972.

Barrie Cook

Nationality: British

Born: 1929 - Birmingham, West Midlands, England

Cook studied at the College of Arts and Crafts, Birmingham from 1949-54. He taught in secondary schools and then at Coventry College of Art from 1961-9. He was Head of the Fine Art Department at Stourbridge College of Art from 1969-74; senior fellow in fine art, painting, at Cardiff College of Art from 1974-9; Gregynog Fellow, University of Wales 1977-8 and then Head of Fine Art at Birmingham Polytechnic from 1979-83. He was Artist-in-Residence at Fishgard Arts Festival in 1984 and at the National Museum and Art Gallery, Cardiff where he had his studio base. In 1992 he moved to Cornwall.

Peter Sedgley

Nationality: British

Born: 1930 - London, England

Born in London 19 March 1930, Sedgeley studied building and architecture at Brixton Technical School, London 1944-46. He had no formal art education but was influenced professionally by Bridget Riley, Harry Thubron and Bruce Lacey. After completing his National Service in the R.A.O.C. in Egypt 1948-50 he married Marguerite Wiltshire, 1951 and they had two children. He was an Architectural Assistant at R Ward & Partners, London 1946-48, Gollins Melvin, London 1953-54, Clifford Culpin, London 1955-56 and Architects Co-Partners London 1956-59. Sedgley was an Aircraftsman in the the 2nd Class Royal Air Force in Wiltshire, Somerset and Oxfordshire in 1960. Initiated buildings technicians co-operative 1957-58 and Arts information Registry (A.I.R.) and Space Provision Artists Cultural and Educational (S.P.A.C.E.) 1968.

Sedgley was a professional architect before turning to painting in the early 1960s. He began to explore Op art effects in large paintings of soft-edged concentric circles which appear to pulsate with light and colour. He favoured the circle for its 'anonymity' which allows the sensation of colour rather than the form to command attention.

He made use of contemporary materials, making his own black paint from commercial pigments and resins which were applied with a Devilbliss spray gun. He used masking out to apply the successive layers of colour corresponding to the chromatic scale of the spectrum with white as a neutral spacer. The effect is hypnotic and changes with the movement of the viewer.

Bruce Nauman

VIDEO: Model for "Stairway"

VIDEO: "Setting a Good Corner"

VIDEO: "Read/Reap" & "Hanging Carousel (George Skins a Fox)"

VIDEO: "Mapping the Studio (Fat Chance John Cage)"

Biography

Born in 1941 in Fort Wayne, Indiana, Bruce Nauman has been recognized since the early 1970s as one of the most innovative and provocative of America’s contemporary artists. Nauman finds inspiration in the activities, speech, and materials of everyday life. Confronted with “What to do?” in his studio soon after graduating from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1964 with a BFA, and then the University of California, Davis in 1966 with an MFA, Nauman had the simple but profound realization that “If I was an artist and I was in the studio, then whatever I was doing in the studio must be art. At this point art became more of an activity and less of a product.” Working in the diverse mediums of sculpture, video, film, printmaking, performance, and installation, Nauman concentrates less on the development of a characteristic style and more on the way in which a process or activity can transform or become a work of art. A survey of his diverse output demonstrates the alternately political, prosaic, spiritual, and crass methods by which Nauman examines life in all its gory details, mapping the human arc between life and death. The text from an early neon work proclaims: “The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths.” Whether or not we—or even Nauman—agree with this statement, the underlying subtext of the piece emphasizes the way in which the audience, artist, and culture at large are involved in the resonance a work of art will ultimately have. Nauman lives in New Mexico.

http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/nauman/

http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/nauman_bruce.html

http://home.sprynet.com/~mindweb/page42.htm

Kenny Greenberg

SCENIC NEON

Behind the company name `Krypton Neon,

Scenic and Environmental Art' is the name of a person .

That name is Kenny Greenberg, or as he is also called mister Krypton.

"What is scenic neon and how does it differ from typical neon work?"

Kenny Greenberg: "I apply this term to neon scenery work that I do for theatre, film, TV and clubs. A set may require anything from an abstract mood to a historic recreation. In certain ways, all neon is scenic because advertising and interior design attempt the

same. A major difference in scenic work is that the usual is often the norm. Another difference is that

getting the set accomplished quickly and failure free is essential. There are a wide

range of steps that must be taken to assure that the work performs safely and reliable . Often both the installation or 'load-in' of the neon, and the neon's actual operation throughout the course of a show, will be occurring under more than normally stressful conditions ."

"What are some examples of your work?"

Greenberg: "Currently on Broadway, my most

prominent work is in the revival of 'Grease!' where the entire stage is a montage of pop art-like images from the fifties . Other well known shows include `Miss Saigon', `Five Guys Named Moe', the Who's 'Tommy', and 'Victor/ Victoria' .

www.neonshop.com/Press/ESM/esm1.html

Alfons Schilling

Was born 1934 in Basel (CH); 1956-59 studies at the Akademie für angewandte Kunst in Vienna (A). With Günter Brus participant of the Viennes Actionist group and elaboration of the American «action painting.» Moves to New York (1962–1986). Since 1970 teaching and 1985 Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. 1986–1990 visiting professor at the Hochschule für Angewandte Kunst in Vienna. Lives in Vienna.

http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/artist/schilling/biography/

Charlotte Davies

Fusing art and technology, Char Davies has achieved international recognition for her work in virtual reality. Integrating real-time stereoscopic 3-D computer graphics, 3-D localized sound and user interaction based on breath & balance,

Davies has dealt with the themes of nature, psyche, and perception in her work for more than 25 years. She studied liberal arts (visual art, philosophy, religion, anthropology and biology) at Bennington College, Vermont from 1973 to 1975, and obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Victoria, British Columbia, in 1978. Over the following decade, she worked with many different media, including painting, documentary filmmaking and animation, developing a distinctive symbolic language and aesthetic. In the mid 1980s, Davies began to explore the virtual space of 3-D computer technology as a means of furthering her artistic intentions: in late 1987, she became a founding director of Softimage, building it into the world's leading developer of 3-D animation software, used for special effects in many Hollywood films including «Jurassic Park» and «The Matrix.» Davies was on the Softimage Board of Directors and head of its Visual Research group for a ten-year period, during which the company went public on Nasdaq in 1992 and was acquired by Microsoft in 1994. She left Softimage at the end of 1997 to found her own art & technology research company, Immersence Inc.; lives and works in Montréal and San Francisco.

(Source: www.immersence.com)

Bridget Riley

Bridget Riley was born in 1931 at Norwood, London, the daughter of a businessman. Her childhood was spent in Cornwall and Lincolnshire. She studied at Goldsmiths College from 1949 to 1952, and at the Royal College of Art from 1952 to 1955. Riley has exhibited widely since her first solo show in 1962. Among numerous exhibitions, she was included in the 1968 Venice Biennial where she won the International Prize for painting.

Riley began painting figure subjects in a semi-impressionist manner, then changed to the Neo-Impressionist technique of Pointillism around 1958, mainly producing landscapes. The same year she was deeply impressed by the large Jackson Pollock exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London.

In 1960, working initially in black and white, she evolved a style in which she explored the dynamic effects of optical phenomena. These so-called 'Op-art' pieces, such as "Fall", 1963, produce a disorienting physical effect on the eye. Riley taught children for two years before joining the Loughborough School of Art, where she initiated a basic design course in 1959. She then taught at Hornsey School of Art, and from 1962 at Croydon School of Art. She worked for the J. Walter Thompson Group advertising agency from 1960, but gave up teaching and advertising agency work in 1963-4.

"In my earlier paintings, I wanted the space between the picture plane and the spectator to be active. It was in that space, paradoxically, the painting 'took place,'" Bridget Riley summarized with characteristic incisive clarity. "Then, little by little, and, to some extent deliberately, I made it go the other way, opening up an interior space, as it were, so that there was a layered, shallow depth. It is important that the painting can be inhabited, so that the mind's eye, or the eye's mind, can move about it credibly."

Links:

Bridget Riley: BBC Audio Interviews - Julian Spalding of the BBC

Bridget Riley: Film produced by Arts Council of Great Britain - The Roland Collection

Bridget Riley at the Tate Britain

Bridget Riley: Encyclopedic Reference - Wikipedia encyclopedia

Bridget Riley's optical art (Op Art)

Bridget Riley: Reconnaissance - Dia Art Foundation

Bridget Riley at Work in East & West London - Tate Magazine

Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey ( The Grass People)

Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey have collaborated since 1990. "After observing the pale outline created by a ladder left on a lawn for a few days, the duo decided to make sod into a photographic medium."

Heather Ackroyd's has worked in sculpture, visual and performance art. Multidisciplinary work with focus on processes of growth and transformation, striving to articulate a relationship between performance and visual art. Dan Harvey has worked primarily in sculpture since 1980 and often uses found objects where the effects of nature can be seen. He places these within "intimate tableaux of implied narratives to do with transience, alchemy and decay. " Slate is a principle material in much of his work. The scale moves from very small intimate pieces to large landscape designs.

Their collaborative work includes installation, sculpture, landscape design, photography, performance, film and frequently reflects both architectural and scientific concerns. Another conceptual focus is time and visibility.

"In the greater body of our artwork we play with many materials exploring processes of growth, transformation and decay, and we embrace the transience and ephemeral nature of our materials. Yet somehow the fragility of these chlorophyll apparitions urged us to make moves to preserve them longer."

"We can't recall the precise moment when we first articulated this desire to hold the image - conceptually, we can rationalize the move to preserve the photographic grass image for longer by saying it follows through the established process of photography of exposing, developing and then fixing the image."

"To talk about 'fixing' an image refers directly to the photographic process of stabilising the emergent picture. It is a word used as much now, as nearly 200 years ago, by the early pioneers of photography such as, Thomas Wedgewood, Humphrey Davy, Fox Talbot, the Niepce brothers, Daguerre, and Bayard, to name but a few. "

http://www.artsadmin.co.uk/artists/ah/photosynthesistext.html#Living%20Skins

Susan Chorpenning

NY based sculptor and light installation artist

www.neonshop.com/Press/ArtNews/ArtNews.html

Anne Militello

Vortex Lighting was founded in 1996 by Anne Militello, the principal lighting designer of this group, located in Hollywood, CA. Lighting designs produced in our studios encompass architectural projects, theater and concert lighting, major theme park attractions and lighting art installations.

www.vortexlighting.com

Dan Flavin

b. 1933, Jamaica, N.Y.; d. 1996, Riverhead, N.Y.

Daniel Flavin was born in Jamaica, New York, on April 1, 1933. He studied for the priesthood for a time. During military service in 1954–55, Flavin studied art through the University of Maryland Extension Program in Korea. Upon his return to New York in 1956, he briefly attended the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts and studied art history at the New School for Social Research. In 1959, he took drawing and painting classes at Columbia University; this year, he began to make assemblages and collages in addition to painting. Flavin’s early paintings reflect the influence of Abstract Expressionism. His first solo show of constructions and watercolors was held at the Judson Gallery, New York, in 1961.

In the summer of 1961, while working as a guard at the American Museum of Natural History, New York, Flavin started to make sketches for sculptures in which electric lights were incorporated. Late in that year, he made his first light sculptures; he called these “icons.” In 1963, he began to work with colored fluorescent tubes. His sculpture was shown in a solo exhibition, some light, at the Kaymar Gallery, New York, in 1964. In 1967, Flavin was a guest instructor of design at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro. By 1968, he had developed his sculpture into room-size environments of light; this year, he outlined an entire gallery in ultraviolet light at Documenta in Kassel. A retrospective of Flavin’s work was organized by the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, in 1969; the exhibition traveled to the Jewish Museum in New York in 1970. Among Flavin’s numerous exhibitions in Europe were solo shows in Cologne in 1974 and Basel in 1975. He has executed many commissions, including the lighting of several tracks at Grand Central Station in New York in 1976.

www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/flavin_dan.html

Golan Levin (http://www.flong.com) is an artist, engineer and composer interested in developing artifacts and events which explore supple new modes of interactive expression. His work focuses on the design of systems for the creation, manipulation and performance of simultaneous image and sound, as part of a more general inquiry into non-verbal communications protocols in cybernetic systems. He is known for the conception and creation of Dialtones (2001), a concert whose sounds are wholly performed through the carefully choreographed dialing and ringing of the audience's own mobile phones, and for The Secret Lives of Numbers (2002), an interactive online data visualization featured in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. Levin is Assistant Professor of Electronic Art at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh.

Zachary Lieberman (http://www.thesystemis.com) is an artist, engineer and educator whose work explores the creative and human uses of technology. He produces installations, on-line works and concerts concerned with the themes of kinetic and gestural performance, interactive imaging and sound synthesis. Lieberman lives and works in New York City, where he teaches courses in audiovisual synthesis and creative image processing at Parsons School of Design. Most recently, Lieberman and Levin have premiered several works exploring visual treatments of real-time speech analysis, including RE:MARK (2002), an interactive installation, and Messa di Voce (2003), an interactive-media performance.

http://gregorybarsamian.com/LoadFlash.html

Bob Miller’s Light Walk

Bob Miller first started taking friends outside the Exploratorium to show them his discoveries about images and sunlight in the summer of 1975. At the time, he was building the exhibit Holes In A Wall and was fascinated with the way single images of the sun that shone through pinholes could combine in so many unexpected ways. It wasn't long before Bob became convinced that all light is in the form of images. He set out to show this in a whole series of exhibit sculptures that include Image Mosaic, Christmas Tree Balls, Sophisticated Shadows and many others.

Over the years, Bob's Image Walk has evolved into an Exploratorium institution. It has been nourished continually by the comments and questions of visitors, interns, Explainers and Exploratorium staff. An Image Walk can last an hour, or a day. It always begins outside the museum with a single image of the sun, and it ends inside with exhibits on images and shadows. It can lead almost anywhere. Bob Miller has created many of the best-loved exhibits on light and color, including the Sun Painting.

http://www.exploratorium.edu/light_walk/lw_todo.html

Werner Nekes

filmmaker and media artist

* 1944, Erfurt [D]

lives in Mülheim an der Ruhr [D]

Since 1965, filmmaker and media artist Werner Nekes has produced over 100 films and his work has been presented internationally at major museums and festivals.

Furthermore, Nekes has compiled one of the most important private collections of artifacts documenting 500 years of pre-cinematographic experiments as well as developments in the early history of film, focusing on spatial and temporal principles of representation.

Werner Nekes is a member of the working group of German feature film producers, of the German Society for Photography, of the European Academy of Arts, Science and Humanities. Currently, he is teaching as a Professor for Film and Media Art in Hamburg, Offenbach, Wuppertal, and Cologne [D].

N55

N55, a four-person artist collective based in Copenhagen, has been engaged for nearly a decade in research on the design and production of an ecologically self-sufficient environment. At the New Museum, they will exhibit Public Things, a module constructed from durable and weather proof polyethylene tanks that includes a kitchen, wash basin, shower, toilet, bed, table, and chair. Visitors will be able to manipulate Public Things to their liking.

http://www.n55.dk/MANUALS/N55_BOOK/BOOK.html

http://www.copy-art.net/modules/articles/article.php?id=15

n55 transformed solar energy into social energy, and invited the public for socializing or contemplation.

http://www.balticartcenter.com/docs/eng/exhibition/1999/1999.html

Jim Campbell http://www.jimcampbell.tv/

Jim Campbell was born in Chicago in 1956 and lives in San Francisco.

He received degrees in Mathematics and Engineering from MIT in 1978.

He transitioned from filmmaking to interactive video installations in the

mid 1980s. His custom electronic sculptures and installations have made

him a leading figure in the use of computer technology as an art form.

Excerpt from the essay "Jim Campbell: Working in the Open Sphere"

by Marilyn A. Zeitlin from the catalog Jim Campbell: Transforming Time,

Electronic Works 1990-99, published by Arizona State University Art

Museum:

By joining physics and metaphysics in a mutual safari into epistemology

from assorted scientific, artistic, and spiritual positions, while remaining

acutely aware of the limitations to our ability to know, Campbell's work

reinforces the skepticism characteristic of the body of theoretical writing

loosely collected under the rubric "postmodern." The perennial human

desire to know is paired with a need to know how we know. Campbell's

genius, if I may use such a word, is in his skill at bringing us back to that

state of relative innocence in which we again ask not only what reality

might be but how we can know it when we sense it...

Campbell combines more traditional media, such a s video, with his own

inventions. He is expanding video in particular as a medium, using it to

posit questions about time, memory, and perceived reality in the vocabu-

lary of the electronic age or perhaps, more accurately, the post-electronic

age. He welcomes viewers for whom the silent, static work of art is often

no longer engaging, employing media of communication familiar to people

who grew up not only on television, but on Nintendo and the Internet.

He is on the forefront of interactive work. Yet Campbell does not limit his

viewership to the children of cyberspace. His work has a timeless quality

in its ideas, its conceptual concision, and its apparent simplicity.

Perry Hoberman http://www.perryhoberman.com/

(born 1954), [1] is an installation artist who has worked extensively with machines and media. His career has included stints with Laurie Anderson and the USC Interactive Media Division. He has taught at the Cooper Union School of Art, the San Francisco Art Institute, and the graduate Computer Art Department in the school of Visual Arts in New York. He is currently an Associate Research Professor in the Interactive Media Division at the University of Southern California School of Cinema-Television, as well as a visiting artist at the California Institute of the Arts. His work is included in the exhibition "Open House: Working In Brooklyn", currently on view at the Brooklyn Museum.

Hoberman work focuses on the interactive nature of people and technology. 'Bar Code Hotel' and 'Systems Maintenance' are two exhibitions that demonstrate this aspect.

Ann Hamilton http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/hamilton/index.html

was born in 1956 in Lima, Ohio. She trained in textile design at the University of Kansas, and later received an MFA from Yale University. While her degree is in sculpture, textiles and fabric have continued to be an important part of her work, which includes installations, photographs, videos, performances, and objects. For example, following graduation she made “Toothpick Suit,” for which she layered thousands of toothpicks in porcupine fashion along a suit of clothes that she then wore and photographed. Hamilton’s sensual installations often combine evocative soundtracks with cloth, filmed footage, organic material, and objects such as tables. She is as interested in verbal and written language as she is in the visual, and sees the two as related and interchangeable. In recent work, she has experimented with exchanging one sense organ for another—the mouth and fingers, for example, become like an eye with the addition of miniature pinhole cameras. In 1993, she won a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship. As the 1999 American representative at the Venice Biennale, she addressed topics of slavery and oppression in American society with an installation that used walls embossed with Braille. The embossed Braille caught a dazzling red powder as it slid down from above, literally making language visible. After teaching at the University of California at Santa Barbara from 1985 to 1991, she returned to Ohio, where she lives and works.

Cai Guo-Qiang http://www.caiguoqiang.com/

Cai Guo-Qiang was born in 1957 in Quanzhou City, Fujian Province, China. He was trained in stage design at the Shanghai Drama Institute from 1981 to 1985. Cai's work is scholarly and often politically charged. Cai initially began working with gunpowder to foster spontaneity and confront the suppressive, controlled artistic tradition and social climate in China. While living in Japan from 1986 to 1995, Cai explored the properties of gunpowder in his drawings, an inquiry that eventually led to his experimentation with explosives on a massive scale and the development of his signature "explosion events," artistically choreographed shows incorporating fireworks and other pyrotechnics.

Cai Guo-Qiang's practice draws on a wide variety of symbols, narratives, traditions and materials such as fengshui, Chinese medicine, dragons, roller coasters, computers, vending machines, wildlife, portraiture, non-Han Chinese citizens and their cultures, fireworks and gunpowder. Much of his work draws on Maoist/Socialist concepts for content, especially his gunpowder drawings which strongly reflect Mao Zedong's tenet "destroy nothing, create nothing."

Bill Viola http://billviola.com/

Bill Viola (b.1951) is considered a pioneer in the medium of video art and is internationally recognized as one of today’s leading artists. He has been instrumental in the establishment of video as a vital form of contemporary art, and in so doing has helped to greatly expand its scope in terms of technology, content, and historical reach. For over 35 years he has created videotapes, architectural video installations, sound environments, electronic music performances, flat panel video pieces, and works for television broadcast. Viola’s video installations—total environments that envelop the viewer in image and sound—employ state-of-the-art technologies and are distinguished by their precision and direct simplicity. They are shown in museums and galleries worldwide and are found in many distinguished collections. His single channel videotapes have been widely broadcast and presented cinematically, while his writings have been extensively published, and translated for international readers. Viola uses video to explore the phenomena of sense perception as an avenue to self-knowledge. His works focus on universal human experiences—birth, death, the unfolding of consciousness—and have roots in both Eastern and Western art as well as spiritual traditions, including Zen Buddhism, Islamic Sufism, and Christian mysticism. Using the inner language of subjective thoughts and collective memories, his videos communicate to a wide audience, allowing viewers to experience the work directly, and in their own personal way.

Wolfgang Laib http://www.guggenheim.org/exhibitions/singular_forms/highlights_12a.html

http://images.google.com/images?client=safari&rls=en&q=Wolfgang+Laib&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&um=1&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&resnum=1&ct=title

Wolfgang Laib finds spirituality in the simplicity of everyday, organic substances—milk, pollen, beeswax, rice—that provide sustenance or engender life. In 1975 he created his first Milkstone in what has become an ongoing series of elemental sculptures. A rectangular block of polished white marble containing a slight depression on its upper surface, the piece is filled with a thin layer of milk to foster the illusion of a solid form. Though an inert object, this sculpture requires ritualistic participation. Laib performs the first act of pouring the milk when the piece is displayed, but after this initial gesture, the collector or museum staff must clean and refill the stone each day it is on view.

Ritual plays a central role in all of Laib's highly reductive art. He lives in a remote region of Germany's Black Forest, communing with the natural world outside his house as a painter would work in his or her studio. During the spring and summer months he collects pollen, including dandelion, hazelnut, pine, buttercup, and moss varieties, from the fields surrounding his home. He displays this laboriously gathered material in simple glass jars or sifts it through sheets of muslin directly onto the floor to create large, square fields of spectacular color. He also molds the brilliantly pigmented dust into cones, as in The Five Mountains Not to Climb On. Though intimate in scale and intensely fragile, this hazelnut pollen sculpture alludes to the monumentality suggested by its title. The notion that there is infinitude in the infinitesimal is beautifully manifest in Laib's spare but highly aesthetic practice.

Won Ju Lim

http://images.google.com/images?client=safari&rls=en&q=Won+Ju+Lim&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&um=1&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&resnum=4&ct=title

An MFA graduate of Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Won Ju Lim currently lives and works in Los Angeles as a sculptor and installation artist. Taschen’s Art Now: 137 Artists at the Rise of the New Millennium finds that Lim’s work “focuses on the tensions between perception, space, and subjectivity in the post-modern age. In order to reflect on and represent the shifting relationship between these three elements, she usually takes architectural reconstructions whose ‘realism’ she questions, critically and poetically, through the judicious use of light, slide projection and video installation.” Lim is represented by Patrick Painter, Inc. in Los Angeles and has had solo exhibitions in Madrid, Salamanca, London, Berlin, Siegen, Basel and Vancouver.

Shirin Neshat http://www.gladstonegallery.com/neshat.asp

http://images.google.com/images?client=safari&rls=en&q=Shirin+Neshat&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&um=1&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&resnum=1&ct=title

Shirin Neshat seeks to, according an article in Time, "untangle the ideology of Islam through her art." Her current cinematic work continues to express the poetic, philosophical, and metaphorical as well as complex levels of intellectual abstraction.

Her work refers to the social, cultural and religious codes of Muslim societies and the complexity of certain oppositions, such as man and woman. Neshat often emphasizes this theme with the technique of showing two or more coordinated films concurrently, creating stark visual contrasts through such motifs as light and dark, black and white, male and female. Neshat has also made more traditional narrative short films, such as her recent work, Zarin.

Diana Thater http://www.davidzwirner.com/artists/2/

Thater received her undergraduate degree from NYU in Art History and her MFA from Art Center College of Design.

Since her first solo show in 1991, she has exhibited widely throughout North America and Europe, with one-person exhibitions at Dia Center for the Arts (2001), the Vienna Secession (2000), The Museum of Modern Art (1998),[1] the MAK Center for Art and Architecture Los Angeles (1998), the Walker Art Center (1997), the Kunsthalle Basel (1996), Salzburger Kunstverein (1996), The Renaissance Society (1995), and the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art (1994), among many others. In March 2004 the Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen and the Kunsthalle Bremen in Germany opened a simultaneous two-museum survey exhibition of her work from 1993 to 2003.

Her numerous group exhibitions include the Whitney Biennial (2006, 1997, 1995) and the Carnegie International (1999). She was the recipient of the Phelan Award in Film and Video in 2006 and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship (2005), [2] an Etant-donnes Foundation Grant (1996), and an NEA Fellowship (1993). Since 2000, Thater has been the artist-in-residence for The Dolphin Project, a non-profit organization that protects cetaceans from slaughter, captivity, and abuse.

Her work is held in many public collections including the The Guggenheim, [3] the Tate,[4] the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Art Institute of Chicago,[5] the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles,[6]and the Walker Art Center.[7]

Thater’s work explores the temporal qualities of video, while literally expanding it into space. She is best known for her site-specific installations in which she manipulates architectural space through forced interaction with projected images and tinted light, such as knots + surfaces (2001). [8] Thater’s primary interest lies in exploring the relationship between humans and the natural world and the distinctions between untouched and manipulated nature. She has focused her lens on a wide variety of animals including zebras, tigers, bees, dolphins, wolves, horses, and most recently birds of prey for her exhibition at David Zwirner, New York. [9] Though she is a devoted activist for the environment and wildlife, Thater’s work is not meant to arouse sympathy or empathy, but instead to propose observation as a mode of understanding. The installations follow ideas in 20th Century art whose great innovation was the intense exploration of abstraction in painting and sculpture. Despite nods to structural film, Thater's underlying reference points are closer to panoramic landscape painting. [10] Thater’s stated belief is that film and video are not by definition narrative media, and that abstraction can, and does exist in representational moving images.[11]

Michael Kenna http://www.michaelkenna.net/html/archive/index.html

(born 1953) is an English photographer known for his landscapes.

Kenna attended Upholland College in Lancashire, the Banbury School of Art in Oxfordshire, and the London College of Printing. In the 1980s, Kenna moved to San Francisco and worked as Ruth Bernhard's printer.[1]

Kenna's photography focuses on unusual landscapes with ethereal light achieved by photographing at dawn or at night with exposures of up to 10 hours. His work has been shown in galleries and museum exhibitions in Asia, Australia, Europe and the United States. He also has photographs included in the collections of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Patrimoine photographique in Paris, the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. In 2000, the Ministry of Culture in France made Kenna a Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters. In 2006, Kenna wrote the preface to Humans, a photo-series by Iranian photographer Mohammadreza Mirzaei[2] .

Olafur Eliasson http://www.olafureliasson.net/

Eliasson prefers not to share too much about his own background, believing that biography is often overemphasized in writings about an artist’s work. Eliasson's mother was a dressmaker; his father was a cook and amateur painter. A little-known fact about his youth is that as a teenager, Eliasson was the break-dancing champion of Scandinavia. [1]

From 1989 until 1995 Eliasson studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Art. Later, he spent an extended period in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, working as a studio assistant for Christian Eckhart. [2]His work is represented in many private and public collections, including the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. He currently lives and works in the German capital, Berlin.

In 1996, he started working with Einar Thorsteinn, an architect and geometry expert who is 25 years older than him. 8900054, their first piece created together, involved building a stainless-steel dome 30 feet (9.1 m) wide and seven feet high, designed to be seen as if it were growing from the ground. The visual result is unparalleled. Despite the fact that it is an illusion, the mind has a hard time believing that the structure is not just part of a much grander one developing from deep underground. Thorsteinn's study in geometry and space have been integrated into Eliasson's artistic production, often seen in his geometric lamp works as well as his pavilions, tunnels and camera obscura projects. [3]

It was recently announced that he will be involved in a project with luxury goods company Louis Vuitton. According to LV website: "A new project by the internationally renowned artist Olafur Eliasson, Eye See You, will be presented at Louis Vuitton Fifth Avenue, the company's New York flagship, on Thursday 9th November 2006.

Commissioned by Louis Vuitton, Eye See You will form the centerpiece of the Christmas windows in all Louis Vuitton stores, of which there are more than 350 worldwide. In addition, a new work by the artist, entitled You See Me, will go on permanent display at Louis Vuitton Fifth Avenue. [4]

All fees from the project will be donated to 121Ethiopia.org, a charitable foundation recently established by Olafur Eliasson and his wife.

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) is organized Eliasson's first full-scale survey in the United States Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson, which was on view from September 8, 2007 to February 24, 2008. It was Eliasson’s first major U.S. survey exhibition. It spanned the artist’s diverse range of artistic production between 1993 and the present, the exhibition included site-specific installation, large-scale immersive environments, freestanding sculpture, photography, and special commissions seen through a succession of interconnected rooms and corridors, including the the museum’s skylight bridge which is turned into an installation titled One-way Colour Tunnel. [5]Curated by Madeleine Grynsztejn, Elise S. Haas Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture at SFMOMA and incoming director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, in close collaboration with the artist, the major survey unified nearly 15 years of Eliasson’s career and will embark on a national tour following its San Francisco debut, accompanied by an extensive catalogue, the first American publication to fully assess the critical context of Eliasson’s practice.

Janet Cardiff and George Burres Miller http://www.cardiffmiller.com/

Cardiff's installations and walking pieces are often audio-based. She has been included in exhibitions such as: Present Tense, Nine Artists in the Nineties, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, NowHere, Louisiana Museum, Denmark, The Museum as Muse, Museum of Modern Art, the Carnegie International '99/00, the Tate Modern Opening Exhibition as well as a project commissioned by Artangel in London. This project ("The Missing Voice (Case Study B)") was commissioned in 1999 and continues to run. It is an audio tour that leaves from the Whitechapel Library, next to the Whitechapel tube stop and snakes its way through London's East End, weaving fictional narrative with descriptions about the actual landscape. Cardiff represented Canada at the São Paulo Art Biennial in 1998, and at the 6th Istanbul Biennial in 1999 with her partner George Bures Miller.

In her Forty Part Motet she placed 40 speakers in 8 groups, each speaker playing a recording of one voice singing Thomas Tallis' Spem in alium, enabling the audience to walk through the space and "sample" individual voices of the polyphonic vocal music. This work now part of the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. [1]

A recent mid-career retrospective, Janet Cardiff: A Survey of Works, Including Collaborations with George Bures Miller, opened at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, Queens, in 2001 and has travelled to Montréal, Oslo, and Turin. Exhibitions in 2006 include Good Vibrations–Le arti visive e il Rock, Palazzo delle Papesse, Centro Arte Contemporanea, Siena, Anticipation, The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago and Sonic Presence, Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen, Norway.

In 2005, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden of the Smithsonian Institution commissioned and exhibited Cardiff's work "Words Drawn in Water".

Jennifer Steinkamp http://jsteinkamp.com/html/art_documentation.htm

An installation artist who works with video and new media

in order to explore ideas about architectural space, motion, and perception.

Etienne-Jules Marey http://www.expo-marey.com/ANGLAIS/mediasup.html

(March 5, 1830 – May 21, 1904) was a French scientist and chronophotographer, born in Beaune,

France.

His work was significant in the development of cardiology, physical instrumentation, aviation, cinematography and the science of labor photography. He is widely considered to be a pioneer of photography and an influential pioneer of the history of cinema.

http://www.expo-marey.com/ANGLAIS/mediasup.html

http://www.expo-marey.com/ANGLAIS/mediasup.html

The History Of Animation PDF http://plab.ramk.fi/~innomedia/data/animaation_historia2.pdf

http://www.camargofoundation-apply.org//index_registered.php

Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum http://www.cooperhewitt.org/NDA/

Light In Early Education http://zerosei.comune.re.it/inter/aperto/index.htm

Solar Spectrum Art http://erskinesolarart.net/

New Media Artists

http://www.the artists.org/MovementView.cfm?id=8A01EE99%2DBBCF%2D11D4%2DA93500D0B7069B40

Transmaterials

We live in a time in which all material frontiers are being explored, and the interest in new materials now extends beyond the fields of design and architecture into popular culture. With the recent explosion in the quantity of new materials and products, it is important to highlight the candidates which will most likely influence our physical world.

Edited by Blaine Brownell, Transmaterial is a compilation of nearly 200 of the most innovative recent products and materials for design and construction, organized according to major industry trends. http://www.transstudio.com/tm1/index.htm

Light Art From Artificial Works http://hosting.zkm.de/lightart/stories/storyReader$9

http://www.west.asu.edu/rlerman/NewWebPagesHTML/FRAMETGpage4.new.html

Multi_Media From Wagner To Virtual Reality http://www.artmuseum.net/w2vr/timeline/Heilig.html

Eye and Gaze http://chicagoschoolmediatheory.net/glossary2004/eyegaze.htm

The Phenakistiscope http://www.centres.ex.ac.uk/bill.douglas/Schools/animation/animation3.htm

Early Visual Media http://users.telenet.be/thomasweynants/opticaltoys.html

Color Theory http://art.sdsu.edu/geninfo/homepages/art240/lessons/color/theory.htm

Cinematic Imagery after Film

Future cinema http://www.zkm.de/futurecinema/nekes_cv_e.html

Optical Art http://eluzions.com/Illusions/Art/Optical/

American Museum of The Moving Image http://www.ammi.org/site/online/

Moving Image Archives http://www.archive.org/details/movies

The Magic of Light

light art exhibition

We cannot touch or hold it, but we can see it, and with it, see our world. Light defines our physical, visual and mental experiences. It determines how we move and stirs our emotions.

At the Hudson River Museum (New York), the exhibition The Magic of Light examine light art as physical sensation. Magic presents work by 14 artists who changed the nature of art by using light rather than paint or stone to create. Their artworks move away from the traditional art object and focus, instead, on the viewer©ˆs perceptions.

The Magic of Light displays the work of both established and emerging American artists. James Turrell, part of the Light-and-Space movement of the 1960s and 1970s along with Robert Irwin, works with pure light, while his main goal is the viewer©ˆs highest visual and physiological perception. Magic also shows how the vocabulary of these seminal artists is reexamined by the recent work of artists like Susan Chorpenning.

The entire museum is the framework for this exhibition. Five new installations by Stephen Antonakos, Pietro Costa, Kenny Greenberg, Erwin Redl and Robert Thurmer were created especially for The Magic of Light.

Exhibiting artists are Stephen Antonakos, Dan Flavin, Susan Chorpenning, Pietro Costa, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Kenny Greenberg, Robert Irwin, Bill Jones and Ben Neill, Sheila Moss, Liz Phillips, James Turrell, Erwin Redl, Keith Sonnier and Robert Thurmer. >from *The Magic of Light, Focusing on Non-Traditional Media, Slated for Exhibition February 1 to May 19 at the Hudson River Museum*, january 11, 2002

Cole, KC. for The Exploratorium. Looking at the Light. Washington, D.C.: Association of Science-Technology Centers, 1981.

In a light-hearted style, this publication describes the seventeen exhibits in the Exploratorium's Looking at the Light show. The descripdons and supplementary text discuss light and shadows, pinhole images, refraction, and reflecdon.

* Falk, David; Dieter Brill; and David Stork. Seeing the light: Optics in Nature, Photography, Color Vision, and Holography. New York, NY: Harperand Row Publishers, 1986

An indespensible book covering many area with very good illustrations. One of our favorites!

* Minnaert, M. The Nature of Light and Color in the Open Air. New York, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 1954

* Pirenne, M.H. Optics, Painting, and Photography. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1970.

Pirenne provides an exhaustive discussion of images and optics, recommended for the dedicated reader.

* Shull, Jim. The Hole Thing. New York: Morgan & Morgan, Inc., 1974.

You can capture the image that is revealed by a small hole on film by using a pinhole camera. Shull describes in detail how to construct and use a pinhole camera.

* Time-Life Books. The Camera; Life Library of Photography. New York: Time-Life Books, 1976.

This book about cameras and photography includes a section which contrasts the pinhole with the lens as a way of controlling light and explains the camera obscura in its historical context. Profusely illustrated with photos and sketches.

* Time-Life Books. Light and Film; Life Library of Photography. New York: TimeLife Books, 1976.

This richly illustrated treatise on the role of light and film in photography in cludes a section discussing the nature of light, with graphic representations of the electromagnetic spectrum, the effects of the Earth's atmosphere on sunlight, scattering of sunlight, reflection and refraction.

* Williamson, SJ. and Cummins, H. Light and Color in Nature and Art. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1983.

An encyclopedic treatment of the role and behavior of light.

Lichtkunst http://www.lichtkunst-unna.de/v2/index2.htm

http://www.artmuseums.harvard.edu/sites/eoed/lightplay/film/formats.html

http://personal.inet.fi/taide/esa.laurema/valo.html

Bauhaus Museum Of Design

http://www.bauhaus.de/english/index.htm http://www.bauhaus.de/english/bauhaus1919/nachfolge1919.htm

Santa Claus

2011-12-29T14:49:00.000-08:00

This is a great thought on the myth and the man that are Santa Claus.
From Jeff Bolander

Santa is a Legend Not a Lie
Filed under: Blah Blah Blog — Jeff @ 11:26 am
My friend Al told me he was struggling with telling his four-year-old daughter about Santa Claus. “It’s the only lie I’ve ever told her,” he said. I too have a four-year-old daughter and am currently in the thick of Santa Fever at my house, where we’ve been lauding Père Noël for the last three Christmases. He’s a legend I’m honored to propagate.

I study legends for a living. Monsters, ghosts, extraterrestrials, and ancient mysteries swirl around me like smoke from a smoldering campfire. If there’s one thing that’s certain: it’s that all legends have a solid foundation in someone’s reality. From there the story grows and evolves; it becomes part of a collective human experience. Legends are real. The point can’t be argued.

When I say “Bigfoot,” an image is instantly conjured in your mind. You no doubt picture a tall, hairy, upright-walking creature who lurks in the forest. There are Halloween costumes that feature this biped, he even shills beef jerky in TV commercials. Can there be any doubt as to the veracity of this legend? Whether there is an actual ape-like creature wandering the forests of the world can be debated forever. But the legend itself cannot.

Belief makes reality.

The only reason that $20 bill in your pocket is worth more than the $1 bill is belief. Faith. We believe our government will back up these bank notes so they’re worth something. If we collectively lose that belief, our monetary system will collapse.

Of all the legends in America, there can be none as prominent, or as real, as that of St. Nick. If I were to walk into a crowded restaurant anywhere in the United States holding an image of a big man with white hair and a white beard wearing a red suit and asked each diner, “Who is this?” I would have trouble finding a single person who wouldn’t answer, “Santa Claus.”

Before there was the hoopla, the guy in the red suit at the mall, the shopping frenzy, the Christmas trees, and the holiday lights, there was a man—a regular man who was the foundation of something extraordinary.

Nicholas lived in the land of Myra (which is modern-day Turkey) around 300 A.D. He was the only child of a wealthy family and was orphaned at a young age. The boy grew up in a monastery and entered priesthood by age 17. A true philanthropist, and inspired by a person named Jesus who lived long ago, Nicholas gave away his wealth throughout his life. He left gifts for children in their shoes, he was known to toss small sacks of gold through open windows, and to lavish affection upon the poor.

The Catholic Church canonized him shortly after his death, making him St. Nicholas. A real person inspired Catholics to make him into a saint. When the Church established Christmas on December 25th to coincide near the Pagan holiday of Yule, incorporating Nicholas and his spirit of generosity into the Christmas season was a natural fit for the Church. The legend of that saint grew, evolved, and spread through a natural folklore process.

Over the centuries, Nicholas’s story was passed around, he was copy-catted by others who took joy in giving away money and toys to poor children. As the centuries passed, his legend grew to mythic proportions and took on supernatural attributes.

The Dutch people called this figure “Sinter Klaas,” and brought him over to New York when they arrived in the seventeenth century. They celebrated this saint on December 5th or 6th (depending on what country you lived in). Washington Irving wrote about this figure in his History of New York where he described the arrival of the Saint on horseback, but it was a poem penned by Clement Clarke Moore in 1823 that defined Santa Claus, his sled, the reindeer, what he looks like, and his chimney-arrival behavior. That poem is called “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” better known as “The Night Before Christmas.”

In 1860 a Harper’s magazine illustrator named Thomas Nast depicted Santa as a big round man who had a workshop at the North Pole and a list of all the good and bad children. In 1931 the Coca Cola Company made the figure of Santa in a red suit with white fur trim a cultural icon as part of their advertising campaign.

The first time a child meets Santa Claus, it’s like meeting the world’s biggest celebrity. Most of us never forget the racing heartbeats, the giddy excitement, or maybe even the fear of meeting this omniscient, supernatural being who can either make your dreams come true by laying your most desired toy under the Christmas tree, or crush you with lumps of coal and sticks in your stocking.

As we get older, our ideas of Santa morph and evolve until many of us actually become Father Christmas—either at the office holiday party or when we have children of our own. The Santa experience offers genuine miracles on both sides of the fluffy white beard in a world where most mysteries are dying off at an alarming rate.

Since Santa went mainstream in the nineteenth century, he’s has been deified, lampooned, imitated, commercialized, scorned, and overexposed. But through all the murk and mess, Santa’s magic still shines through like Rudolph’s nose through the fiercest blizzard. We created Santa. All of us. Each Christmas he’s born again. We teach our own children about Santa because, even if only for the first few years, it’s right to believe in magic.

From the children’s perspective, it’s so wonderfully simple: On December 24th, before they go to bed they leave milk and cookies out for Santa. They glance at the empty space under the Christmas tree, and run off to try and sleep; giddy with anticipation. The next morning there is tangible evidence of the supernatural visitation: The cookies are mostly eaten, the milk is mostly drunk, and behold the wrapped presents under the tree!

I don’t care if you’re Christian or not. I’m a paranormal guy. I believe in possession. In Judaism there’s the concept of the “Dybbuk,” which is a type of spirit possession. This possession can be a bad thing: like if you’re inclined to drink too much or do drugs, a spirit that did that in life may cling to you and push you over the edge; or it can be a good thing: you’re trying to get healthy and exercise and a spirit who did that in life may be drawn to you to help. We get possessed by good ideas, gut instincts, and inspiration all of the time. We also get inspired by great legends… like Santa Claus.

Santa’s legend and story has spread throughout the world. Each Christmas we get inspired… nay, possessed by this good spirit. I’m thrilled my daughter is eagerly awaiting St. Nick visiting our house. I want her to know the magic this figure holds.

By carrying on these traditions which were based on a real man, I become a part of the legend. I write myself into the story. I write my daughter into the story in the hopes that one day she too will become possessed by the spirit of Christmas. That she will be reminded to behave because someone is out there watching, that she will feel the urge to give to charities a little more, that she will know there’s still magic in the world.

Believe in Santa, Al. His legend is real. He’s real. He’s you. He’s me. He’s a bit of all of us. And next year he’ll be back, because we’ll never stop needing him.

found @
http://www.dailygrail.com/node

Online Manual for Analogue Sound Restoration

2011-12-29T14:29:00.000-08:00

This is a manual for analogue Sound Restoration.

This is the table of contents

1 Introduction/Einführung (ist bei uns Teil 1)
1.1 The organisation of this manual............3
1.2 The target audience for this manual......4
1.3 The original sound.................................6
1.4 Operational principles...........................8
1.5 A quadruple conservation strategy......10
1.6 How to achieve objectivity...................11
1.7 The necessity for documentation.........12
2 The overall copying strategy (ist bei uns Teil 2)
2.1 The problem to be solved..........................13
2.2 General issues.......................................13
2.3 The principle of the “Power-Bandwidth Product”.......14
2.4 Restricting the bandwidth.........................16
2.5 Deciding priorities......................................17
2.6 Getting the best original power-bandwidth product.....17
2.7 Archive, objective, and service copies......19
2.8 “Partially objective” copies.........................20
2.9 Documentation strategy..........................20
2.10 Absolute phase........................................22
2.11 Relative phase...........................................23
2.12 Scale distortion..........................................23
2.13 Conclusion.................................................24
3 Digital conversion of analogue sound (ist bei uns Teil 3)
3.1 The advantages of digital audio.............................................25
3.2 Technical restrictions of digital audio - the “power” element....26
3.3 Technical limitations of digital audio: the “bandwidth” element.28
3.4 Operational techniques for digital encoding...............................30
3.5 Difficulties of “cloning” digital recordings.................................30
3.6 Digital data compression.......................................................33
3.7 A severe warning...................................................................35
3.8 Digital watermarking and copy protection..............................37
3.9 The use of general-purpose computers..................................38
3.10 Processes better handled in the analogue domain...............39
3.11 Digital recording media...........................................................40
4 Grooves and styli (ist bei uns Teil 4)
4.1 Introduction............................................42
4.2 Basic turntable principles.........................43
4.3 Pickups and other devices........................44
4.4 Conventional electrical pickup considerations...45
4.5 Operational procedure for selecting a stylus....47
4.6 U-shaped and V-shaped grooves.............48
4.7 The principle of minimising groove hiss.....52
4.8 “Soft” replay styli..................................53
4.9 “Hard” replay styli.............................55
4.10 Stereo techniques.......................57
4.11 “Elliptical” and other styli........59
4.12 Other considerations..............61
4.13 Playing records backwards......63
4.14 Half-speed copying.................65
4.15 Distortion correction...............65
4.16 Radius compensation.............67
4.17 Electronic click reduction.........70
4.18 Electronic hiss reduction..........74
4.19 Eliminating rumble....................76
4.20 De-thumping............................76
4.21 Future developments.................77
4.22 Recommendations and conclusion....78
5 Speed setting (ist bei uns Teil 5)
5.1 Introduction...........................................................81
5.2 History of speed control.........................................82
5.3 History of speed-control in visual media..................84
5.4 Setting the speed of old commercial sound records...86
5.5 Musical considerations............................................90
5.6 Strengths and weaknesses of “standard pitch”......91
5.7 Non-“standard” pitches..........................................91
5.8 The use of vocal quality..........................................92
5.9 Variable-speed recordings.....................................93
5.10 Engineering evidence..........................................95
5.11 Timings................................................................97
6 Frequency responses of grooved media
6.1 The problem stated
6.2 A broad history of equalisation
6.3 Why previous writers have gone wrong
6.4 Two ways to define “a flat frequency response”
6.5 Equalisation ethics and philosophy
6.6 Old frequency records as evidence of characteristics
6.7 Two common characteristics
6.8 Practical limits to equalisation
6.9 Practical test discs
6.10 International standard microgroove test discs
6.11 Coarsegroove (78rpm) test discs
6.12 Generalised study of electromagnetic cutters
6.13 Characteristics of “simple” cutterheads
6.14 High-resistance cutterheads
6.15 Western Electric, and similar line-damped recording systems
6.16 Western Electric revolutionises sound recording
6.17 The Western Electric microphone
6.18 The Western Electric amplifier
6.19 Documentation of HMV amplifier settings, 1925-1931
6.20 The Western Electric cutterhead
6.21 How to recognise recordings made with Western Electric 1A and 1B systems
6.22 Summary of equalisation techniques for the above
6.23 Western Electric developments after 1931
6.24 Recognising recordings made on RCA-modified and Western Electric 1C and 1D systems
6.25 Summary of equalisation techniques for the above
6.26 Other systems using line-damped cutterheads: British Brunswick, Decca, DGG 1925-1939
6.27 Other systems using line-damped cutterheads: The Lindström system
6.28 Conclusion to line-damped systems
6.29 The Blumlein system
6.30 The Blumlein microphone
6.31 The Blumlein moving-coil cutterhead
6.32 Test discs made by Blumlein’s system
6.33 How to recognise Blumlein cutters on commercial records, 1931-1944
6.34 Summary of how to equalise the above
6.35 The Gramophone Company system
6.36 How to recognise the Gramophone Company system on commercial records..131
6.37 Summary of how to equalise “Gramophone system” recordings.................131
6.38 Extended-Range Blumlein recordings (1943-5) and later systems...............131
6.39 Summary of how to equalise “Extended-Range” and subsequent systems....132
6.40 Early EMI long-playing and 45 r.p.m. records
6.41 Other systems giving a “Blumlein-shaped” curve - amateur and semi-pro machines
6.42 British Decca-group recordings 1935-1944
6.43 Summary of how to equalise Decca-group recordings 1935-1944
6.44 Synchrophone
6.45 Summary of how to equalise Synchrophone recordings....................135
6.46 Conclusion to “Blumlein-shaped” equalisation..................135
6.47 The Marconi system..............................................136
6.48 BBC Disc Record equalisation - Introduction..137
6.49 The subject matter of these sections..............138
6.50 Pre-history of BBC disc recording..................139
6.51 BBC matrix numbers......................................139
6.52 BBC “current library” numbers......................140
6.53 BBC M.S.S. recordings...................................141
6.54 BBC American equipment..............................142
6.55 BBC transportable equipment........................142
6.56 BBC coarsegroove 33rpm discs......................142
6.57 Later BBC coarsegroove systems...................143
6.58 Early BBC microgroove discs..........................145
6.59 BBC “CCIR characteristics”...........................145
6.60 RIAA and subsequently.................................146
6.61 Brief summary of BBC characteristics.............146
6.62 “Standard” equalisation curves.....................147
6.63 General history of “standards”......................147
6.64 Defining standard curves...............................149
6.65 Discographical problems................................150
6.66 General history of changeover procedures....151
6.67 NAB (later “NARTB”) characteristics.............152
6.68 Decca Group (UK) “ffrr” characteristics........152
6.69 American Columbia LPs.................................155
6.70 “AES” characteristics....................................156
6.71 Various RCA characteristics...........................157
6.72 “CCIR” characteristics..................................158
6.73 “DIN” characteristics....................................158
6.74 Concluding remarks......................................159
7 Analogue tape reproduction
7.1 Preliminary remarks...........................................163
7.2 Historical development of magnetic sound recording...164
7.3 Bias...................................................................166
7.4 Magnetised tape heads......................................168
7.5 Print-through....................................................169
7.6 Azimuth............................................................170
7.7 Frequency responses of tape recordings.............172
7.8 “Standard” characteristics on open-reel tapes....173
7.9 Standards on tape cassettes................................176
7.10 Operational principles...................................177
7.11 “Mono” and “half-track” tapes....................180
7.12 “Twin-track” tapes.......................................181
7.13 “Quarter-track” tapes...................................182
7.14 Practical reproduction issues..........................183
7.15 “Hi-fi” Tracks on domestic video..................184
8 Optical film reproduction
8.1 Introduction......................................................187
8.2 Optical sound with moving pictures...................187
8.3 Considerations of strategy..................................188
8.4 Basic types of optical soundtracks.......................189
8.5 Soundtracks combined with optical picture media....190
8.6 Recovering the power-bandwidth product.........191
8.7 Frequency responses.........................................193
8.8 Reducing background noise...............................194
9 Reciprocal noise reduction
9.1 Principles of noise reduction...............................196
9.2 Non-reciprocal and reciprocal noise-reduction....196
9.3 Recognising reciprocal noise reduction systems..197
9.4 Principles of reciprocal noise reduction systems..198
9.5 Dolby “A”.........................................................199
9.6 Dolby “B”.........................................................201
9.7 DBX systems......................................................202
9.8 JVC ANRS (Audio Noise Reduction System).......205
9.9 Telcom C4.........................................................205
9.10 Telefunken “High-Com”...............................206
9.11 The “CX” systems.........................................206
9.12 Dolby “C”....................................................207
9.13 Dolby SR and Dolby S...................................208
9.14 Other noise reduction systems......................209
9.15 Noise reduction systems not needing treatment....211
9.16 Conclusion...................................................211
10 Spatial recordings
10.1 Introduction.................................................213
10.2 “Two-channel” recordings............................213
10.3 Archaeological stereo....................................216
10.4 Matrixing into two channels..........................218
10.5 Three-channel recordings..............................218
10.6 Four-channel recordings - in the cinema.......219
10.7 Four-channel audio-only principles................220
10.8 Matrix “quadraphonic” systems....................221
10.9 The QS system.................................................221
10.10 The SQ system..................................................222
10.11 Matrix H................................................................223
10.12 “Dolby Stereo”..........................................................224
10.13 Developments of “Dolby Stereo” - (a) Dolby AC-3..........226
10.14 Developments of “Dolby Stereo” - (b) Dolby headphone...227
10.15 Developments of “Dolby Stereo” - (c) Pro Logic 2..........227
10.16 Discrete 4-channel systems - The JVC CD-4 system....227
10.17 The “UD-4” system..................................................228
10.18 “Ambisonics”.........................................................229
10.19 Other discrete four-channel media.....................230
10.20 More than five-channel systems.......................230
10.21 Multitrack master-tapes................................231
11 Dynamics
11.1 Introduction.................................................233
11.2 The reasons for dynamic compression...........234
11.3 Acoustic recording........................................235
11.4 Manually-controlled electrical recording........235
11.5 Procedures for reversing manual control.......237
11.6 Automatic volume controlling.......................238
11.7 Principles of limiters and compressors............241
11.8 Identifying limited recordings........................243
11.9 Attack times.................................................244
11.10 Decay-times.................................................245
11.11 The compression-ratio and how to kludge It.246
12 Acoustic recordings
12.1 Introduction.................................................249
12.2 Ethical matters..............................................249
12.3 Overall view of acoustic recording hardware.251
12.4 Performance modifications............................252
12.5 Procedures for reverse-engineering the effects........254
12.6 Documentation of HMV acoustic recording equipment...255
12.7 The Recording horn - why horns were used...........256
12.8 The lack of bass with horn recording....................257
12.9 Resonances of air within the horn.................257
12.10 Experimental methodology............................257
12.11 Design of an Acoustic Horn Equaliser............259
12.12 Resonances of the horn itself.........................259
12.13 Positions of artists in relation to a conical horn....261
12.14 Acoustic impedances.....................................262
12.15 Joining two horns..........................................263
12.16 Joining three or more horns..........................264
12.17 Another way of connecting several horns......264
12.18 Electrical equalisation of recordings made with parallel-sided tubes....265
12.19 Electrical equalisation of recordings made with multiple recording horns....266
12.20 The recording soundbox................................267
12.21 “Lumped” and “distributed” components....267
12.22 How pre-1925 soundboxes worked..............268
12.23 Practicalities of acoustic recording diaphragms.......270
12.24 The rest of the soundbox..............................271
12.25 Notes on variations.......................................271
12.26 When we should apply these lessons............274
12.27 Summary of present-day equalisation possibilities......274
12.28 Conclusion...................................................275
13 The engineer and the artist
13.1 Introduction.................................................279
13.2 The effect of playing-time upon recorded performances.....279
13.3 The introduction of the microphone..............283
13.4 The performing environment........................284
13.5 “Multitrack” issues........................................287
13.6 Signal strengths............................................289
13.7 Frequency ranges..........................................290
13.8 Monitoring sound recordings........................291
13.9 The effects of playback.................................292
13.10 The Costs of recording, making copies, and playback....295
13.10.1 The dawn of sound recording.............295
13.10.2 Mass produced cylinders.....................297
13.10.3 Coarsegroove disc mastering costs......297
13.10.4 Retail prices of coarsegroove pressings298
13.10.5 One-off disc recording........................300
13.10.6 Magnetic tape costs............................301
13.10.7 Pre-recorded tapes and cassettes........302
13.10.8 Popular music
13.10.9 Digital formats
13.10.10 Conclusion for pure sound recordings
13.11 The cinema and the performer
13.12 Film sound on disc
13.13 The art of film sound
13.14 Film sound editing and dubbing
13.15 The automatic volume limiter
13.16 Films, video, and the acoustic environment
13.17 Making continuous performances
13.18 Audio monitoring for visual media
13.19 Listening conditions and the target audience and its equipment
13.20 The influence of naturalism

Appendix 1. Preparing media for playback
Appendix 2: Aligning analogue tape reproducers...............328

The war on General Computing

2011-12-29T13:59:00.000-08:00

Education Resources

2011-12-28T18:12:00.000-08:00

Note that some of the sources overlap between various subjects of education. Therefore, each has been placed under a specific subject based on the majority focus of the source’s content.

Science and Health

MIT OpenCourseWare – MIT OpenCourseWare is a free web-based publication of MIT course materials that reflects almost all the undergraduate and graduate subjects taught at MIT.

Tufts OpenCourseWare – Tufts OpenCourseWare is part of a new educational movement initiated by MIT that provides free access to course content for everyone online. Tufts’ course offerings demonstrate the University’s strength in the life sciences in addition to its multidisciplinary approach, international perspective and underlying ethic of service to its local, national and international communities.

HowStuffWorks Science – More scientific lessons and explanations than you could sort through in an entire year.

Harvard Medical School Open Courseware – The mission of the Harvard Medical School Open Courseware Initiative is to exchange knowledge from the Harvard community of scholars to other academic institutions, prospective students, and the general public.

Khan Academy – Over 1200 videos lessons covering everything from basic arithmetic and algebra to differential equations, physics, chemistry, and biology.

Open Yale Courses – Open Yale Courses provides lectures and other materials from selected Yale College courses to the public free of charge via the internet. The courses span the full range of liberal arts disciplines, including humanities, social sciences, and physical and biological sciences.

webcast.berkeley – Every semester, UC Berkeley webcasts select courses and events for on-demand viewing via the Internet. webcast.berkeley course lectures are provided as a study resource for both students and the public.

UC San Deigo Podcast Lectures – UCSD’s podcasting service was established for instructional use to benefit our students. Podcasts are taken down at the end of every quarter (10 weeks Fall-Spring and 5 weeks in the summer). If you’re enjoying a podcast, be sure to subscribe and download the lectures. Once the podcast has been taken offline, faculty rarely approve their reposting.

Johns Hopkins OpenCourseWare – The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s OpenCourseWare project provides access to content of the School’s most popular courses. As challenges to the world’s health escalate daily, the School feels a moral imperative to provide equal and open access to information and knowledge about the obstacles to the public’s health and their potential solutions.

Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative – No instructors, no credits, no charge. Use these self-guiding Carnegie Mellon materials and activities to learn at your own pace.

Utah State OpenCourseWare – Utah State OpenCourseWare is a collection of educational material used in our formal campus courses, and seeks to provide people around the world with an opportunity to access high quality learning opportunities.

AMSER – AMSER (the Applied Math and Science Education Repository) is a portal of educational resources and services built specifically for use by those in Community and Technical Colleges but free for anyone to use.

Wolfram Demonstrations Project – Wolfram brings computational exploration to the widest possible audience, open-code resource that uses dynamic computation to illuminate concepts. Free player runs all demos and videos.

The Science Forum – A very active scientific discussion and debate forum.

Free Science and Video Lectures Online! – A nice collection of video lectures and lessons on science and philosophy.

Science.gov – Science.gov searches over 42 databases and over 2000 selected websites from 14 federal agencies, offering 200 million pages of authoritative U.S. government science information including research and development results.

The National Science Digital Library – NSDL is the Nation’s online library for education and research in Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics.

EnviroLink Network– A non-profit organization, grassroots online community uniting organizations and volunteers around the world. Up-to-date environmental information and news.

Geology.com – Information about geology and earth science to visitors without charge: Articles, News, Maps, Satellite Images, Dictionary, etc.

Scitable – A free science library and personal learning tool that currently concentrates on genetics, the study of evolution, variation, and the rich complexity of living organisms. The site also expects to expand into other topics of learning and education.

LearningScience.org – A free open learning community for sharing newer and emerging tools to teach science.

Business and Money

MIT Sloan School of Management – MIT Sloan is a world-class business school long renowned for thought leadership and the ability to successfully partner theory and practice. This is a subsection of the larger MIT OpenCourseWare site.

Investopedia Financial Investing Tutorials – A plethora of detailed lessons on money management and investing.

U.S. Small Business Administration Training Network – The Small Business Administration has one of the best selections of business courses on the web. Topics include everything from starting a business and business management to government contracting and international trade. Most courses take only 30 minutes to complete.

VideoLectures.NET (Business) – A free and open access educational video lectures repository. The lectures are given by distinguished scholars and scientists at the most important and prominent events like conferences, summer schools, workshops and science promotional events from many fields of Science.

My Own Business, Inc. – Offers a free online business administration course that would be beneficial to new managers and to anyone who is interested in starting a business. This comprehensive course is split up into 16 sessions covering topics like business plans, accounting, marketing, insurance, e-commerce and international trade.

UC Irvine OpenCourseWare (Business) – Rapidly with the addition of nearly 10 new courses every month. Many of our OCW offerings are directed at working adults seeking continuing education, with the option to enroll in instructor-led, for-credit courses, related to the OCW content.

Kutztown University of Pennsylvania – The Kutztown University of Pennsylvania’s Small Business Development Center offers more than 80 free business courses online. Kutztown’s courses are individualized and self-paced. Many of the courses feature high-end graphics, interactive case studies and audio streams.

Boston College Front Row (Business) – Boston College Front Row is a Web site that offers free access through streaming media to tapes of cultural and scholarly events at Boston College.

Financial Management Training Center – The Financial Management Training Center provides several free downloadable business courses for people who need to learn the finer points of financial management. All courses offered can be taken online; courses include full exams as well as evaluation forms for people seeking Continuing Professional Education (CPE) credits.

The Free Nonprofit Micro-eMBA – Free Management Library’s Free Nonprofit Micro-eMBA Program is an especially great resource for students wishing to learn more about nonprofit management, but most of the lessons also apply to general business management. Completion of this program will not result in an MBA degree, but enrollment is free and the material is well structured.

Bookboon Free Business e-books – Hundreds of free business books online in PDF format.

TheStreet University – If you’re just starting out as a stock and bond investor or need a refresher’s course, this is the place to learn what you need to know.

History and World Culture

University of Washington’s OpenUW – Explore a variety of learning in several free history-centric online courses from the University of Washington.

Notre Dame OpenCourseWare – Notre Dame OCW is a free and open educational resource for faculty, students, and self-learners throughout the world.

Bio’s Best – Biography.com’s most popular biographies on notable historical figures.

UC Irvine OpenCourseWare (Social Science) – Rapidly with the addition of nearly 10 new courses every month. Many of our OCW offerings are directed at working adults seeking continuing education, with the option to enroll in instructor-led, for-credit courses, related to the OCW content.

Boston College Front Row (History) – Boston College Front Row is a Web site that offers free access through streaming media to tapes of cultural and scholarly events at Boston College.

MIT OpenCourseWare (History) – The MIT History Faculty offers about 70 subjects in the areas of Ancient, North American, European, East Asian, and Middle Eastern history.

Wikiversity School of Social Sciences – Wikiversity is a Wikimedia Foundation project devoted to learning resources, learning projects, and research for use in all levels, types, and styles of education from pre-school to university, including professional training and informal learning.

OpenLearn (Arts and Humanities) – The OpenLearn website gives free access to Open University course materials.

A Biography of America – A Biography of America presents history not simply as a series of irrefutable facts to be memorized, but as a living narrative of America’s story.

Have Fun with History – A resource for students, educators and all lovers of American History.

The USGenWeb Project – Free genealogy and family history resources online.

MacroHistory and World Report – Tell without illusions or ideological restraints the story of our ancestors, our parents and us.

World History HyperHistory – Navigates through 3000 years of World History with links to important persons and events of world historical importance.

American Digital History – Online American history textbook. An interactive, multimedia history of the United States from the Revolution to the present.

Law

Duke Law Center for the Public Domain – Duke University is counted amongst the best schools in the South. If you’re interested in law, Duke’s open courseware in that subject area can go a long way towards helping you learn more about the justice system.

Intute Law – Provides free access to high quality resources on the Internet. Each resource has been evaluated and categorised by subject specialists based at UK universities.

Boston College Front Row (Law) – Boston College Front Row is a Web site that offers free access through streaming media to tapes of cultural and scholarly events at Boston College.

American University – Offers a selection of podcasts on a number of different law-related subjects. There is even a very interesting podcast on debt relief and the law.

Lewis & Clark Law School – Provides a number of podcast from the law school. Subjects include tax law, business law, environmental law and other areas of law. Interesting and insightful lectures on the law.

Case Western Reserve University School of Law – Offers a number of interesting lectures on different law subjects. These lectures are both podcasts and Web casts. You can look ahead to the coming school year, which already has a number of interesting subjects lined up.

Harvard Law School – Provides a number of Web casts of law lectures, symposia, panels and conferences. A great collection of relevant information and insights on how the law interacts with current events.

Stanford Law – Provides open courseware via iTunes on a variety of law subjects, including the theory of justice, mobile content distribution, gay marriage, judicial review and privacy protection. The tracks are available for free, but you’ll need iTunes. Put the lectures on your iPod or iPhone and listen them anywhere.

MoneyInstructor Business Law – From MoneyInstructor.com provides a look at a number of basics in business law. Learn how to define crimes under business law. Worksheets and curriculums are available for teachers. Ordinary folks will find them useful as well.

Wesleyan College Constitutional Law – From North Carolina Wesleyan College offers an overview of the U.S. Constitution and the laws springing from it. Online lectures and class notes are included, which can help you develop a strong understanding of the Constitution and how it forms the basis of our laws.

Computer Science and Engineering

VideoLectures.NET (Computer Science) – A free and open access educational video lectures repository. The lectures are given by distinguished scholars and scientists at the most important and prominent events like conferences, summer schools, workshops and science promotional events from many fields of Science.

Wikiversity School of Computer Science and Technology – Wikiversity is a Wikimedia Foundation project devoted to learning resources, learning projects, and research for use in all levels, types, and styles of education from pre-school to university, including professional training and informal learning.

New York State University (US), Computer Science – Hundreds of lectures, tutorials and links to educational material.

Dream.In.Code Tutorials – Lots of computer programming tutorials.

MIT OpenCourseWare (Engineering and Computer Science) – MIT OpenCourseWare is a free web-based publication of MIT course materials that reflects almost all the undergraduate and graduate subjects taught at MIT.

Maine University (US), Fogler Guide to Computer Science – An insanely detailed list of computer science resources.

FreeComputerBooks.com – Free computer, mathematics, technical books and lecture notes.

Collection of Computer Science Bibliographies – A massive collection of bibliographies of scientific literature in computer science, updated weekly from original locations, more than 3 millions of references (mostly to journal articles, conference papers and technical reports), clustered in about 2000 bibliographies.

W3Schools – Web-building tutorials, from basic HTML and XHTML to advanced XML, SQL, Database, Multimedia and WAP.

FreeTechBooks.com – This site lists free online computer science, engineering and programming books, textbooks and lecture notes, all of which are legally and freely available over the Internet.

Free computer Tutorials – Free computer courses and tutorials site. All the courses are aimed at complete beginners, so you don’t need experience to get started.

Programmer 101: Teach Yourself How to Code – Several helpful resources for computer programming beginners.

Google Code University – Provides sample course content and tutorials for Computer Science (CS) students and educators on current computing technologies and paradigms.

Mathematics

Oxford University Mathematics OpenCourseWare – Various online mathematics classes provided free by Oxford University.

UMass Boston Mathematics – Various online mathematics classes provided free by UMass Boston.

Whatcom Online Math Center – Various math lessons provided free by Whatcom Community College.

VideoLectures.NET (Mathematics) – A free and open access educational video lectures repository. The lectures are given by distinguished scholars and scientists at the most important and prominent events like conferences, summer schools, workshops and science promotional events from many fields of Science.

Wikiversity School of Mathematics – Wikiversity is a Wikimedia Foundation project devoted to learning resources, learning projects, and research for use in all levels, types, and styles of education from pre-school to university, including professional training and informal learning.

AMSER Mathematics – AMSER (the Applied Math and Science Education Repository) is a portal of educational resources and services built specifically for use by those in Community and Technical Colleges but free for anyone to use.

Math.com – Math.com is dedicated to providing revolutionary ways for students, parents, teachers, and everyone to learn math.

Intute Mathematics – Provides free access to high quality resources on the Internet. Each resource has been evaluated and categorized by subject specialists based at UK universities.

Free-Ed College Mathematics – Offers a wide range of free online math courses and study programs.

English and Communications

Open Yale Courses (English) – Open Yale Courses provides lectures and other materials from selected Yale College courses to the public free of charge via the internet.

Writing Guidelines for Engineering and Science Students – These guidelines for engineering writing and scientific writing are designed to help students communicate their technical work.

MIT Writing and Humanistic Studies – The MIT Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies gives students the opportunity to learn the techniques, forms, and traditions of several kinds of writing, from basic expository prose to more advanced forms of non-fictional prose, fiction and poetry, science writing, scientific and technical communication and digital media.

Merriam-Webster Online – In this digital age, your ability to communicate with written English is paramount skill. And M-W.com is the perfect resource to improve your English now.

National Novel Writing Month – Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.

Lifewriting – A complete text of the 9-week writing class a professor taught for years at UCLA.

Guide to Grammar and Writing – Grammar and writing techniques, lessons and quizzes.

Purdue Online Writing Lab – Over 200 free resources including lessons on: writing, research, grammar, and style guides.

Foreign and Sign Languages

BBC Languages – Teach yourself a new spoken language online.

American Sign Language Browser – Teach yourself sign language online.

Livemocha – Start learning a new language online for free.

Learn10 – Gives you a language learning habit that’s hard to kick. 10 new words; everywhere, every day.

One Minute Languages – Learn a new language via podcasts that are updated regularly.

Mango Languages – Over 100 lessons, shown to you in PowerPoint style with interstitial quizzes, to move you through any language without cracking a book.

Multiple Subjects and Miscellaneous

OpenLearn – The OpenLearn website gives free access to Open University course materials. Multiple subjects are covered.

Capilano University OpenCourseWare – The Capilano University OpenCourseWare site is a free and open educational resource for faculty, students, and self-learners throughout the world.

University of Southern Queensland’s OpenCourseWare – Provides access to free and open educational resources for faculty members, students, and self-learners throughout the world.

YouTube EDU – Educational videos on YouTube organized by subject matter.

LearnHub Test Prep – Raise your test scores with free practice tests & counseling on various subjects.

iTunes U – Hundreds of universities — including Stanford, Yale and MIT — distribute lectures, slide shows, PDFs, films, exhibit tours and audio books through iTunes U. The Science section alone contains content on topics including agriculture, astronomy, biology, chemistry, physics, ecology and geography.

United Nations University OpenCourseWare – Showcases the training and educational programs implemented by the University in a wide range of areas relevant to the work of the United Nations.

Brigham Young Independent Study – BYU Independent Study now offers free courses in different areas of study. These areas include Family History, Family Life, and Religious Scripture Study, Personal Dev elopement, etc. Use these courses as a starting point for your personal studies or just to add insight to an area of interest.

University of Utah OpenCourseWare – Provides access to free and open educational resources for faculty members, students, and self-learners throughout the world.

United States Nation Archives – The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is the nation’s record keeper. Valuable records are preserved and are available to you, whether you want to see if they contain clues about your family’s history, need to prove a veteran’s military service, or are researching an historical topic that interests you.

Wikiversity – Wikiversity is a Wikimedia Foundation project devoted to learning resources, learning projects, and research for use in all levels, types, and styles of education from pre-school to university, including professional training and informal learning.

UMass Boston OpenCourseWare – Various online classes provided free by UMass Boston.

About U – A collection of free online educational courses from About.com.

Academic Earth – Online degrees and video courses from leading universities.

Free-Ed – Clusters of courses that support your preparation for today’s fastest-growing careers and critical academic disciplines.

Connexions – A place to view and share educational material made of small knowledge chunks called modules that can be organized as courses, books, reports, etc. Anyone may view or contribute.

TED – Motivational and educational lectures from noteworthy professionals around the world.

Intute – Provides free access to high quality resources on the Internet. Each resource has been evaluated and categorised by subject specialists based at UK universities.

Boston College Front Row – Boston College Front Row is a Web site that offers free access through streaming media to tapes of cultural and scholarly events at Boston College.

Free Books and Reading Recommendations

LibraryThing – LibraryThing connects you to other people who are reading what you’re reading and allows you to see which books are popular in various categories of reading.

Textbook Revolution – Links to free online textbooks and other educational materials.

Book TV – This is the companion site to Book TV on C-Span2. The site holds some current interviews with authors, many past interviews, opinions, reviews, and featured programs through online video.

Bookboon – Bookboon provides online textbooks for students in PDF format. The free ebooks can be downloaded without registration. Our books are legal and written exclusively for Bookboon. They are financed by a few in-book ads.

Scribd – Scribd, the online document sharing site which supports Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF and other popular formats. You can download a document or embed it in your blog or web page.

BookYards – BookYards is a web portal in which books, education materials, information, and content will be freely to anyone who has an internet connection.

Planet eBook – Free classic literature to download and share.

E-Books Directory – Thousands of ebooks on various subjects to download and share.

Read Print Library – Free online books library for students, teachers, and the classic enthusiast.GoodReads – Get great book recommendations and keep track of what you want to read.

The Online Books Page – University of Pennsylvania database with over 30,000 books.

Public Literature – Thousands of familiar classics, children’s books, plays and poems, as well as books by new authors.

Full Books – Thousands of full-text nonfiction and fiction books.

Many Books – Free fiction and nonfiction ebooks for your PDA, iPod or ebook reader.

Get Free Books – Thousands of free ebooks to download.

Project Gutenberg – More than 20,000 free books from the first producer of free e-books.

Bibliomania – Thousands of classic books, poems, short stories and plays.

Classic Reader – Large collection of free classic books, plays, and short stories from more than 300 authors.

Bartleby Fiction – Classic anthologies and volumes.

The Personal MBA Recommended Reading List – MBA programs don’t have a monopoly on advanced business knowledge: you can teach yourself everything you need to know to succeed in life and at work. The Personal MBA features the very best business books available, based on thousands of hours of research.

Books Should Be Free – Free audio books from the public domain.

Educational Mainstream Broadcast Media

BBC Learning – Online learning, support, and advice. This site offers internal and offsite links to a vast amount of materials.

Biography – The site holds videos to past interviews and biographies on people in topics that range from Black history to women’s history.

Book TV – This is the companion site to Book TV on C-Span2. The site holds some current interviews with authors, many past interviews, opinions, reviews, and featured programs through online video.

CBC Archives — Relive Canadian history through thousands of available radio and television clips.

Discovery — This channel is home to several different networks that focus on the military, animals, travel, etc. The Discovery site offers a “Video of the Day” from its home page, a separate online video section, and a Discover Education center where teachers can accumulate materials for K-12 teaching. It’s impossible to list all their offerings here, so go discover!

History Channel – Visit the Video Gallery for a selection on historical topics. Like the Discovery Channel, this network provides many opportunities for you to gain access to information and reference materials.

NOVA — Watch current science shows or browse by category. PBS sponsors this channel.

Research Channel — Speakers, researchers and professors present revolutionary thoughts and discoveries. Use their Webstreams and an extensive video-on-demand library for research.

Weather Channel – You can learn about weather all over the world, but the Weather Channel also offers dynamic content based upon seasons and special conditions and a special multimedia and education section.

Online Archives

American Memory – The Library of Congress provides extensive multimedia offerings on various topics through their American Memory Collection, including their outstanding Built in America project that showcases historical buildings through photographs.

Fathom – This archive, provided by Columbia University, offers access to the complete range of free content developed for Fathom by its member institutions. The archives include online learning resources including lectures, articles, interviews, exhibits and seminars.

Internet Archive Open Educational Resources – A digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form.

National Archives – Provides primary source materials from NARA along with lesson plans for teaching with those sources.

National Climatic Data Center – The NCDC, a division of NOAA, maintains climatic archives, including lists of storms in given counties, and records about global extremes, etc.

The Rosetta Project – A global collaboration of language specialists and native speakers building a publicly accessible online archive of all documented human languages.

September 11 Digital Archive – This site uses electronic media to collect, preserve, and present the history of the 9/11 attacks.

U.S. Census Bureau – If you think the Census Bureau is all about numbers, you might be surprised to learn about their archived photographs, daily radio features, and more available through their Newsroom.

Directories of Open Education

Google Scholar – Provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites.

OpenCourseWare Consortium – This site provides a portal to search through hundreds of free courses or to add new courses you know about to the database.

iBerry – Check out this site for a huge directory of open courseware organized by school and subject matter that can point you in the right direction for any type of learning.

Self Made Scholar Directory – Free online directory of web-based classes and courses.

Bugs & Scan Synthesis

2011-12-27T23:50:00.000-08:00

I have been wanting to adapt my scan synthesis software to make agent based music. The agents that I am using are HexBug NANO bugs. This video is glitchier than I would like (the audio seems to get stuck periodically), but it is still an interesting sketch. The tuning system creates interesting ascending and descending patterns. There are more opportunities. It is an entirely different task to create a software for something that will continuously move. It makes me think about the environment that the bug agents occupy. Fun for a one day sketch.

Decision Making

2011-12-27T18:20:00.000-08:00

Decision Making. I am wondering now about decisions made in the act of composition, where the composer is creating the paradigm.

Derivative work including Electropology

2011-12-27T17:20:00.000-08:00

Keith Kirchoff and I have done some derivative works with my set of piece entitled Electropology. I just received the following email that describes the latest installment. This work uses material from myself and Roberto Morales.

Hi Roberto & Christopher:

Last week, flutist Solomiya Moroz and I gave a short concert at OpenSound in Sommerville, MA. For our final piece, Sol improvised on flute and I controlled the electronics. All of our electronics were taken directly from Contortions and Electropology; Sol was mic'd, and I controlled the wiimote. At various points, I began interspersing parts of Electropology. The recording isn't well mixed (there was only a zoom mic), but it gives you both an idea of our re-imagining of your two pieces.

AUDIO of Contortions + Electropology

TubeGnosis

2011-12-16T01:55:00.001-08:00

http://tubegnosis.com/

In VItro Oink - ICMC 2011

2011-12-15T16:16:00.000-08:00

Just found the IVO 2011 ICMC performance online! This is Keith Kirchoff performing at the conclusion of our lecture on the piece.

engine noise

2011-12-13T14:53:00.000-08:00

pitched feedback

2011-12-12T18:01:00.000-08:00

No-Input Pärt: ‘Fratres’

'Fratres' pour console no-input (extrait) from Christian Carrière on Vimeo.

Camera : Jimmy Hayes
Console : Christian Carrière
Research residency, Summer 2011
OBORO, Montreal, Canada
oboro.net/
Console : Allen&Heath GL2400-40
Thanks to Claus Frostell of Erikson Pro, who lent me the console, which made this project possible. eriksonpro.com/

baroque Les Paul

2011-12-11T05:34:00.000-08:00

I have been refining my process of sound file to score translation. The latest is a test run on some Les Paul. It actually comes out sounding sort of baroque (although I need to edit the rhythm some). After playing around with the file and getting the results that I satisfy me I paired it with a simple harmonization routine. The flute with electronics below is very crude, but an interesting start. I am planning something that will bring these ideas together with scan synthesis. Here is the progression thus far

Original

solo flute

flute with electronics

design

2011-12-10T18:23:00.001-08:00

The Fundamental Elements of Design from Erica Gorochow on Vimeo.

sonification

2011-12-10T12:42:00.000-08:00

An interesting project. Happy to see what Mickey Hart is up to.

Messiaen

2011-12-09T00:16:00.000-08:00

I am on a bit of a Messiaen kick. Here are some interesting vid's

Reading I stumbled upon Messiaen stating that hist modes of limited transposition along with some rhythmic devices are "the charm of impossibilities" - in that there is no hierarchical "tonic" implied.

2011-12-04T06:27:00.000-08:00

I really like how google music froze, it occupied one screen of spaces for an afternoon.
Well, a new harddrive put me back a week, but my computer feels fresh a again (nice to have 300GB open as opposed to the 8 before the harddrive crash). Been putting software back on and that always means lists that I go through to find new and interesting.
Here is a good one for audio/video

I have also been spending a lot of time with SuperCollider. In the process of updating some of Curtis Roads SC1 code. I am close, but not happy with it yet.

gesture v tools for repetition

2011-11-28T12:45:00.000-08:00

"Typefaces, however, are not bodily gestures-they are manufactured images designed for infinite repetition."
-from "thinking with type" by Ellen Lupton

That is an interesting and obvious distinction. It starts me thinking about what implications that has in the world of creative work, images, sounds....

interesting web projects

2011-11-18T15:29:00.000-08:00

Different takes on distribution

anOtherOne

2011-11-17T15:19:00.000-08:00

Well the sounds to notation project has been evolving. I always seem to stray from direct representation. In my earlier post, the correlation was obvious. In the piece I just worked out for percussion trio, I followed my ear, which seems to have lead me away from direct representation to something I rather like.

Here a blurb that I wrote about it
The work is derived from several Grateful Dead concert recordings of The Other One, the central ones being the August 13, 1975 show at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco and the May 22, 1977 show at the Sportatorium in Pembroke Pines Florida. To produce the score, audio is selected and segmented. These clips are then translated into a list of frequencies and amplitudes through the use of a Fast Fourier transform. The resulting material is used as the basis for the score. The direct translation and interpolations between different sections pitch and rhythmic collections was assembled. This material has been manipulated with algorithms and by hand. The resulting score does not identifiable as derivative. Still the unique acoustic characteristics that define the performance, the acoustics of the venue and the recording serve to constrain the end result.
Just a black and white photograph captures light and form this work investigates the acoustic character of a place and a piece. Direct translation is of course a possible objective, yet it is not the goal of my work. anOtherOne exemplifies an exploration of the inherent transformation of data as it moves from one form to another. For example, the energy behind the strumming of an acoustic guitar is experienced very differently by a person hearing the resulting sound. anOtherOne uses digital transformation and the perspective of the listener turned composer to take this translation of energy one step further.

Here is a midi mock up. THe samples are decent, but it is still not ideal.
anOtherOne

random vids

2011-11-09T08:54:00.000-08:00

11 02 2011 --- 1102 2011

2011-11-02T18:02:00.000-07:00

Palindrome DAY!

For years I have been working on translating sounds into notation. It has been possible for a long time, but not necessarily for me and not the way I wanted. Well today I finally!!! got it. I am very excited that the hard part is over, now on to composing!

Here is the example I have been working out.

piano

sine tones

recording

Mix 2

2011-10-20T11:06:00.000-07:00

Mix 2

Still working the material from Scott and myself. This seems to flow better. I'll know more in a few days.

Timbre Melody

2011-10-20T08:27:00.001-07:00

I have become rather obsessed with this piece. Particularily the opening (until about 2:00), beyond that it I loose interest as the flurry of pitches get in the way for me. I am thinking that the opening melody is played out through several times, then after 2:00 what had been long tones using breath and the space between notes for the compositional form in the begining is articulated with pitch.

and

and

new audio

2011-10-18T16:48:00.000-07:00

Recent rain in Palo ALto has unleashed a beautiful cloud of bugs that swirl around the trees. Yesterday Scott Cazan and I spent the day in a studio improvising. Today I edited one section of that. The opening may be a bit cliche in terms of the use of reverb. I have been reading a biography of James Cook. The author is doing a great job (maybe to good?) of connecting the issues of today with the seeds in the late 18th century. The window into his life is thus far focusing on context. It is refreshing not to be confronted with hero worship.

mix1

1980's

2011-09-29T01:50:00.000-07:00

z z z zip

exercise and fun, with a moral message.

metal comes from trees

wow everything is terrible

tempi experiment

2011-09-28T14:05:00.000-07:00

drumSink

Just working with playback speed. This is a simple example of some stuff I have been thinking about. I am intrigued how the different tempi establish themselves. I have some more complex examples in mind, but this is an interesting beginning.

My dear wife says about upon hearing this...
"This is K whater and we're playin the weird stuff"

She was expecting this to be something I was listening to on the radio.

Talk on Data

2011-09-27T06:27:00.000-07:00

Cory Doctorow, "Designing for Human Sensors, Not Human Barcodes"

and the Dead Sea Scrolls

James Brown _ September Song

2011-09-20T14:25:00.001-07:00

The compression of youtube is annoying, but a really good performance.

Audio Haptic Navigation Environment

2011-09-20T11:48:00.000-07:00

AHNE – Audio-Haptic Navigation Environment from Matti Niinimäki on Vimeo.

Machine Art

2011-09-06T11:30:00.000-07:00

Great machine performance from the groundbreaking of SFMONMA.

new sketches

2011-09-02T22:55:00.000-07:00

A couple of new sketches.
And a some new audio.
SpacesL1_V1

Lungen

2011-08-28T21:11:00.000-07:00

A video from Lungen. I did sound for this in 2008.

Ken Keasey

2011-08-19T14:01:00.000-07:00

electronics in tatoo

2011-08-15T09:40:00.001-07:00

Simultaneously compelling and frightening.

Tattoo electronics could have medical applications from Northwestern News on Vimeo.

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God Complex

2011-07-29T15:35:00.000-07:00

This is a very compelling talk on the God Complex and why trial and error is not as obvious as we think.

Compositional Technique

2011-07-23T12:28:00.001-07:00

I got hit over the head today with a couple reminders about how I compose. First there is this part of This American Life.

It really keenly addresses the emotional part of creating art. There is this interesting rendering of "Love Hurts" I noticed in there that they sing "Love Hurts" and how the guitar follows that as if it were a slapback echo. Regarding the content of the show, she points out the necessity of going through the literature. This reminds me of what a music education is, but here it is fueled through angst.

The other thing that hit me over the head is Don Casey's "This Old Boat". What I am noticing in reading this book is that he has created a method of boat restoration that is in line with my thoughts on composition. I have always had the sense that one does not create anything new, but notices unique details in the life they have and if they are a gifted artist can help others to see these details. Details that create wonder and awe. They are of course around us and very benign, but then that is also how life can be thought of. I have always thought the challenge is to see the stuff around us in life as remarkable and interesting, to pull out the facets that cornerstones to supporting the transcendental in our universe. There are many things that go into the equation of how art is created, but starting from and working with the dream aspect, that will move one further than anything else, in my humble opinion. I suppose that is the importance of the story, and the story teller and the shaman, and the poet. What is unique about art music is the sheer abstractness. We have entered an age where sound no longer need be as abstract. Media and electronic art have opened up the ability to connect the music we love and appreciate to the devices and technology that entwines with our existence in the way the vines interlace themselves in great old trees. Let us just hope that these vines recognize the relationship that they are involved in and do not squeeze to tightly. Or put another way, I hope the Robots (or maybe iRobots, or facebots or Google-bots) and the economic forces they represent (or their Martian masters?) are benevolent.

Here is some good material from Casey's book. While not exactly on the dream aspect (he does say more on that later) this get at it and more importantly adresses aesthetics in an honest and pragmatic fashion. It is part of the equation and in fact, the top of the proverbial totem pole.

Perhaps it seems odd to you that beauty leads my list of boat selection criteria. Assuming that most boat purchasers intend to sail away from shore farther than they can swim back, shouldn’t something like seaworthiness lead the list?
Let’s understand this list, shall we? The boat you select should satisfy all ten considerations, seaworthiness included. The purpose of the list is to provide an orderly sequence to the evaluation process, not unlike measure, cut, fit, and glue in the carpentry process. Similarly, every step is required.
I lead the list with beauty because, for most of us, boating—sailing in particular—fills some kind of aesthetic need. There is nothing pragmatic about pleasure boating. It is entirely a romantic endeavor. If the sight of the boat you are considering does not quicken your pulse, she will ultimately prove unsatisfactory no matter how seaworthy, commodious, or practical she is.

Regarding the aquasition of technique, the following is something that has me wishing that I was still teaching composition at UCSB. What took me a year of fumbling, he has said in one paragraph.

Even if changing the bulb in a cabin light is the most complicated task you have previously attempted, that is no reason to assume that you cannot give substance to your vision. The skills required are not difficult and we begin most of the chapters with a simple project that allows you to learn and practice those skills. For example, in the chapter on working with fabrics, we begin by constructing a simple skirt to protect the hull from the fenders. If you can sew the seams and hems required for this simple item, you can also make a bimini top; the skills required are essentially the same. Likewise, if you can cut and install a plywood shelf, you can build an entire cabinet. And if you can paint the inside of a locker, you can refinish a hull.
Clearly it is not possible to detail every imaginable enhancement project, but it is possible to address virtually all of the necessary skills. You need to master only the basic skills illuminated in the following pages to effect the transformation of a sound but tired older boat into a jewel that will turn heads in any anchorage, get you there in safety and comfort, and yield immeasurable pride—and measurable savings.
What more can you ask?

I am sure that this analogy between sailing, sailboat repair and composition, not to mention sea stories, marlinspike knowledge as Clifford Ashley puts it in "The Ashley Book of Knots", is not something that is universal, in fact, I am pretty sure that I am in a minority in this. But that is precisely part of my point. For me, sailing and music are something that I can both feel, think, and dream about. They excite imagination, emotion, intellect and the adventurous spirit that is uniquely mine. And, while others may not hold these same two disciplines in their being, each person has something, or things that they know as intimately. That is the universality, that is the shared human bond.

I am reminded of an interview with Curtis Roads where he speaks of book on LandScape Design as a great book on composition. I went back and watched this interview in order to find the moment and in video one 3:45- 4:10 stands out. I quote.

For me, composing is about the telling [a] story. The sounds are born. They live. They change. They meet other sounds. They collide. One sound destroys another. They merge together, they get married, they get divorced. They get unstable. They change identity. They mutate and then they die. So it’s all about a narrative. It’s a narrative about sounds.

and
"Challenge me intellectually, challenge me aesthetically."

Here is the bit on the Landscape Design Book. "The Education of a Gardner" When Curtis and I get together I often do tour the garden and it is remarkable. His compositional technique is present in both.

ANd a great finish

Miss you Max

String Vibrations

2011-07-21T12:33:00.000-07:00

This is an interesting video using a strobe to illuminate moments in a strings vibration cycle. This has me thinking about the video project that I working on where I use a single row/column from a video matrix to with a dancer moving in order to alter the image space. I am not sure how I want to tie this all together, but there is something mixing in my brain.

This video is a great exploration of voltage control.

I have been thinking about my crackle synth and the art of rope tieing. Not sure how I will bring these together, but it is also kicking around.

Iconic Business Card

2011-07-19T05:44:00.000-07:00

Working on a new business card, among other projects.

Noemie Goudal

2011-07-05T17:19:00.000-07:00

Noemie Goudal

Jud Painter

2011-06-29T11:16:00.000-07:00

One of my guilty pleasures is Poldark. You can read more on this series here and here.

My favorite character is the servant, Jud Painter. For some inexplicable reason I feel compelled to copy out a chapter that I read last night in the first book of the series, Ross Poldark, by Winston Graham. It focuses on Jud's speech patterns, which I find so interesting.
Pages 301 - 303

III
The found Jud gloriously drunk.
Some part of Ross's threats had stayed with him through his carouse, and he was not on his back, but within those limits he had done well for himself.
An ostler had got him to the front of the Red Lion Inn. The three horses were tethered waiting, and he was quarrelling amiably with the man who had seen him this far.
When he saw the ladies coming he bowed low in the manner of a Spanish grandee, clinging with one hand to the awning post outside the inn. Bit the bow was extravagant and his hat fell off and went floating down the rivulet which ran between the cobbles. He swore, unsettling the horses with the tone of his voice, and went after it; but his foot slipped and he sat down heavily in the street. Am small boy returned his hat and was lectured for his trouble. The ostler helped the ladies to mount and then went to Jud's aid.
By this time a lot of people had paused to see them off. The ostler managed to help Jud to his feet and covered the tonsure and fringe with the damp hat.
"There, ole dear; stick it on her 'ead. Ye'll need both 'ands for to hold yer old 'orse, ye will."
Jud instantly snatched off the hat again, cut to the quick.
"Maybe as you think," he said, "because as I've the misfortune of an accidental slip on a cow-flop therefore I has the inability of an unborn babe, which is what you think and no missment, that you think as I be open to be dressed and undressed, hatted and unhatted like a scarecrow in a field o' taties, because I've the misfortune of a slip on a cow-flop. Twould be far superior if you was to get down on yer bended knees wi' brush an' pan. Tedn't right to leave the streets before yer own front door befouled wi' cow-flops. Tedn't right. Tedn't tidy. Tedn't fair. Tedn't clean. Tedn't good enough.
"There, there now," said the ostler.
" 'Is own front door," said Jud to the crowd. "Only 'is own front door. If every one of you was to clean before 'is own front door, all would be clean of cow-flops. The whole lathering town. Remember what the Good Book do say: 'Thou shalt not move thy neighbor's landmark.' Think on that friends. 'Thou shalt not move thy neighbor's landmark.' Think on that and apply it to the poor dumb beasts. Never --"
" 'Elp you on yer 'orse, shall I?" said the ostler.
"Never in all me days has I been so offensive," said Jud. "Hat put on me 'ead as if I was an unborn babe. An' wet at that! Wet wi' the scum of all Powder Street: drippin' on me face. Enough to give me the death. Drippin on me 'ead: a chill you get, and phit! ye're gone. Clean yer own doorstep, friends, that's what I do say. Look to yourself, and then you'll never be in the place of this poor rat oo has to assult 'is best customers who is slipped in a cow-flop by danging a blatherin' wet hat on 'is 'ead from off the foul stream that d'run before 'is own doorstep with should never 'appen should never 'appen, dear friends, remember that." Jud now had his arm round the ostler's neck.
"Come along, we'll go without him," Verity said to Demelza, who had a hand up to her mouth and was tittering helplessly.
Another servant came out of the inn, and between them they led Jud to his hourse.
"Pore lost soul," said Jud, strokin the ostler's cheek. "Pore list wandering soul. Look at 'im, friends. Do'e know he's lost? Do 'e know he's for the fire's? Do 'e know the flesh'll sweal off of him like fat off of a goose> And for why? I'll tell ee for why. Because he's sold his soul to Old Scratch 'imself. And so've you all. So've you all what don't 'eed what the Good Book do say. 'Eathens! Eathens! "' Thou shalt not move thy neighbor's landmark. Thou shalt not-' "
At this point the two men put their hands under him and heaved him into the saddle. Then the ostler ran round to the other side as he began to slip off. A timely push and another hoist and he was firmly held, one man on either side. Old blind Ramoth stood it all without a twitch. Then they thrust one of Jud's feet deep in each stirrup and gave Ramoth a slap to tell him he should be going.
Over the bridge and all the way up the dusty hill out of the town Jud staying in the saddle as if glued to it, haranguing passers-by and telling them to repent before it was too late.

Sci-Fi

2011-06-28T11:33:00.000-07:00

This is a stellar sci-fi pilot of a show that never was. The fleet protecting the solar system, grovey music, ice cube trays as tablet devices, what more do you need.

Some facts here.

Ideas

2011-06-27T10:47:00.001-07:00

This is an interesting collection of observations from the Wall Street Journal. The first one, regarding active engagement in reading, is what caught my attention and one that I would like to see more information about.

WEEK IN IDEAS
JUNE 18, 2011
Week in Ideas
By CHRISTOPHER SHEA

Intelligence
Stupidity Is Contagious

Everett Collection
A study found that college students who read a short script about a moronic soccer hooligan subsequently did worse on a test of knowledge than a control group.

College students who read a short script about a moronic soccer hooligan subsequently did worse on a test of knowledge than a control group. But the deficit disappeared if the readers were encouraged to carefully notice how they differed from the character in the story.

Sixty-three Austrian students read "Slow on the Uptake," about Meier, who wakes, is confused by an adage on his calendar, gets drunk, attends a soccer match and misses the outcome because he brawls. The students either summarized the story or underlined passages where Meier differed from them. A control group of 18 read a story with an innocuous protagonist.

Afterward, on a difficult test covering geography, science and the arts, the students who had read about Meier but not underlined how he differed from them scored from 30% to 32%, compared to about 37% for the control group and for students who distanced themselves from the character.

"A Story About a Stupid Person Can Make You Act Stupid (or Smart): Behavioral Assimilation (and Contrast) as Narrative Impact," Markus Appel, Media Psychology (April-June 2011)

Personal Finance
Confidence in Debt
Young people "experience debt as empowering," according to a study, and the effect is strongest for people who come from the poorest families.

Researchers looked at the responses of 3,079 people from 1979 to 2004, in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. They ranged in age from 18 to 34, although most were in their early-to-mid 20s. The survey included data about credit-card and educational debt, and measures of respondents' self-esteem and sense of mastery.

For students from families in the bottom 25% of income, self-esteem and perceived mastery rose steadily with both educational and credit-card debt. The education itself didn't drive the rise in self-esteem; given two people with the same demographics and schooling, the one with higher debt had higher self-regard. Similar but less-consistent effects were found for students from families in the broad middle income ranges.

Only at age 28 did educational debt (though still not credit-card debt) become a drag on self-esteem.

"Youth Debt, Mastery, and Self-Esteem: Class-Stratified Effects of Indebtedness on Self-Concept, Rachel E. Dwyer, Laura McCloud and Randy Hodson, Social Science Research (May)

Blend Images/Getty Images
People who fill out bubble forms, like those ubiquitous fill-in-the-circle tests, use distinctive pencil strokes that can be used to identify them, researchers report.

Privacy
Bursting the Bubble
People who fill out bubble forms, like those ubiquitous fill-in-the-circle tests, use distinctive pencil strokes that can be used to identify them, researchers report.

They programmed a computer to take stock of 804 potentially tell-tale aspects of people's pencil strokes on such forms. These include the mark's center of mass, the variance of pencil-strokes from the bubble's radius and the depth of shading, as well as more mathematically advanced measures.

The computer analyzed 92 student surveys, checking a dozen marks from each respondent. Then the researchers scrutinized eight marks from a randomly picked person. The computer identified its man or woman 51% of the time. The correct answer was among the computer's top three choices 75% of the time and was 92.4% of the time among the top 10.

The method could be used to catch students who hire proxies to take their SATs and teachers who change answers on their students' high-stakes tests. But employers, the researchers said, could also use it to monitor the voting habits of their employees, since some jurisdictions, in the interest of transparency, release scans of voters' bubble forms, without attaching their names.

"Bubble Trouble: Off-Line De-Anonymization of Bubble Forms," Joseph A. Calandrino, William Clarkson and Edward W. Felten (to be presented at the Usenix Security Symposium, August)

Getty Images/OJO Images
A study claims that brain scans of consumers who listen to new songs can better predict hits than directly asking the consumers what songs they like.

Neuropsychology
The Brain's Pop Chart
Forget that focus group or that rave in Pitchfork or Rolling Stone: A study claims that brain scans of consumers who listen to new songs can better predict hits than directly asking the consumers what songs they like.

In 2006, 27 people aged 12 to 17 rated 120 songs by different unsigned artists while having their brains scanned. The researchers eventually analyzed all recorded sales for each song—including singles, albums and compilations—through May 2010. Sales data could be found for only 87 of the songs.

Most were duds, but three sold at least 500,000 copies. There was no correlation between the test subjects' ratings (on a 1-to-5 scale) and sales. But researchers did find a link between units sold and activity in the nucleus accumbens, a brain region linked to reward and anticipation.

The scans predicted about one-third of the hits, defined as songs with sales of 15,000 to 35,000, and 80% of the nonhits. But that was still impressive, the researchers said, given the capricious nature of the music business.

"A Neural Predictor of Cultural Popularity," Gregory S. Berns and Sara E. Moore, Journal of Consumer Psychology (forthcoming)

Habits

2011-06-09T14:16:00.000-07:00

One habit I have is putting a picture on most posts. This picture is from last weekend when we were sailing in SF Bay and spent the last night at the San Francisco Marina before it was closed for renovations. This Marina shares space with the Golden Gate Yacht club that will be hosting the Americas Cup in Two years.
The power of habits in the life of the creative individual. This will be my point of contemplation next week as I travel in Amsterdam. Here is a good quote from the commencement speech at Ringling

Habits are powerful - people don't realize how powerful habits are, and how much of their success or lack of success in life is attributable to sheer habit. Be aware of your habits, and what is turning in from an occasional to a regular thing, and what are the regular things that you don't even think about any more, because they are so habitual that they have become invisible. Down to the very basics: how much and when do you sleep, what you eat, how you sit, whether you walk or bike or drive. When and where do you get your best ideas? What sorts of activities and conversations leave you feeling happier and smarter? What do you continually do that leaves you feeling demoralized. Be mindful of your habits. Make them intentional.

music of

2011-06-07T02:03:00.000-07:00

A Study
This uses the built in microphone to sample the room at 2AM. I am prone to swiping the keyboard, so that is heard as well. I can't resist making sounds. Oh well, someday I may not. This works well with headphones and not well with speakers.

A picture from and sounds for my dearest lil sister

at&t learning

2011-06-06T18:05:00.001-07:00

at&t learning

2011-06-06T18:05:00.000-07:00

Berios wife

2011-06-02T01:41:00.000-07:00

things I hear

2011-06-02T01:15:00.000-07:00

Fluid Automata by Angus

Double tap for princess

says de Angus

Sublime Frequencies

2011-05-27T10:27:00.001-07:00

Lecture Audio
This is a lecture by Mark Gergis of Sublime Frequencies.
Here is the website for Sublime Frequencies

This is a very thought provoking lecture. I am still processing it so there is not much I can say, but I will point out that I would love to see someone who thinks like this suggest international policy for our government. This is also one of the few record labels that I will decidedly support, not because I have to, but because I want to.

Chicken chicken

2011-05-18T05:48:00.001-07:00

Chicken

David Gordon

2011-05-17T20:42:00.000-07:00

Some interesting videos by David Gordon.

The piano needs a better recording but I find the video presentation interesting.

immersive architecture

2011-05-16T11:38:00.001-07:00

A shot from Curtis's birthday party in the Santa Barbara channel. We sailed the 32' Heather Jean in sloppy 7 foot seas with 25knots gusting to 35. That all means we truly earned the wine that evening and there were many a good stories.

EUPHORIE is 1024 from Jerome Monnot on Vimeo.

I am very curious about the projection techniques. The light interface is clearly only triggering a limited range of sounds, but this is a effective.

This is an interesting listen. The more I think about my dissertation and the difference between automated and manual music, the more I consider the glitchy idm type experimental electronica.

Gary Shteyngart

2011-05-13T19:30:00.000-07:00

This is hilarious and the bits I have heard from his book are really quite good.

Terry Gross did an interview with him on Fresah Air and it is worth hearing.

National Jukebox

2011-05-11T23:23:00.000-07:00

National Jukebox! Historical Recordings from the Library of Congress. Now I just need an Android app of it! Does it feature nationalist music?

Robuts

2011-05-05T09:05:00.000-07:00

Robots used to explore evolutionary hypotesies.

Laxative Wow

2011-04-29T10:38:00.000-07:00

All matter of madness in reading this one.

Image Play

2011-04-29T10:27:00.001-07:00

A couple of non panorama images stiched into a panorama.

Wave facts and some sound

2011-04-23T22:29:00.000-07:00

The above image is from a drive from SB to p alt where I stopped at Denner to pick up a few bottles of wine and well, I had to sample and stare at the hills.

For waves which do not require a medium, such as light or gravity in general relativity

from wikipedia on doppler

and

The upper frequency limit in humans (approximately 20 kHz) is due to limitations of the middle ear, which acts as a low-pass filter. Ultrasonic hearing can occur if ultrasound is fed directly into the skull bone and reaches the cochlea through bone conduction without passing through the middle ear.

from wikipedia on ultrasound

some step sequenced filtered granulation on 2 cello samples
I am in the process of imagining how to make this a realtime application for a string piece. Even this long example of subtle variations on a 2 looped cello sounds, not more than 3 seconds each, is rather interesting. I am working out how I want to use this on a live signal and what to play with it. I sort of like some of the sounds and simply want to transcribe them, which may be the piece. I spent 3 hours listening to stuff like this yesterday, and really enjoyed it.

some more step sequenced filtered granulation on 2 cello samples

This is the room (studio E at CCRMA) where I spent Thursday making a piece in memory of Max Mathews who passed away at 84. It is an 8 channel piece that uses the smae technique heard in the above material, but on Max's stuff. (Daisy, Phasering Tensor Love, an interview and Max playing Chopin with the Radio Batton).

At the concert that I performed at CCRMA on Thursday evening (where I presented ToLEtFony) they played Numerology. I had not heard this piece before. I love it!!

This is an interesting collection of ">EA history videos.

3d sound via a cross talk filter.

an elegant machine

Drawingmachine by Eske Rex from Core77 on Vimeo.

HD slo mo

2011-04-21T11:43:00.000-07:00

Locked in a Vegas Hotel Room with a Phantom Flex from Tom Guilmette on Vimeo.

Some New SuperCollider Ideas

2011-04-21T00:40:00.000-07:00

Above is an image that I created on my phone while waiting for a concert to start at UCSB. It was a player piano concert and featured a work by Luke Thomas Taylor in support of his Qualification Exams. It was a very good and a very Luke piece. The drawing is a procedural drawing app where I build and erase layers. It is conceptually similar to this audio, only more free. Maybe the audio will be more free in a few days...

I have been remaking the same patch/audio program for 3 or so years on and off. This is my latest installment of an approach to granulation that affords me the automated control I wish. This version is made in SuperCollider (others have been in MaxMSP). What is significant in this latest iteration is that there are 4 short sounds that are repeated over and over and the what changes is the granulation. The sounds are passed through a series of 50 bandpass filters and are granulated with a rhythmic series that is ties to each of these granulations. The pattern starts together and spreads out before conforming again. Each of the four sounds have unique control parameters (actually they are regions that continually shift).They are sort of like step sequencers that move through a series of filters. I am happy that I was able to construct this so simply and elegantly after all these years of thinking about it. Also, there are some interesting sounds that I rather like.

SCidea1

SCidea2

I like this one best.....
SCidea3

and the idea applied to Roy Orbison.....
SCidea4

Classic Links

2011-04-18T10:56:00.000-07:00

http://youtu.be/Kl6nsbaMv3w
http://www.horus-online.com/home.html

Abstract Woody

2011-04-12T12:47:00.000-07:00

I watched a lot of Woody as a small child, Popeye as well. And while I did watch many other things, these are what I consider the classics that have had the greatest impact on my world view, aesthetically and pragmatically. The NYTimes say this

“Culhane essentially ‘hid’ his artful excursions in plain sight, letting them rush past too rapidly for the notice of most of his audience,” Mr. Klein writes in the 15-page article, titled “Woody Abstracted: Film Experiments in the Cartoons of Shamus Culhane.”
In the article Mr. Klein describes Mr. Culhane, who was credited in his work then as James Culhane, as a devotee of the avant-garde. He was influenced by the writings of Russian theorists like Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin, Mr. Klein writes, and spent evenings at the American Contemporary Gallery in Hollywood. There, he watched films by Fritz Lang and Jean Renoir, might have seen paintings by Oskar Fischinger and definitely “was inclined to wear a beret.”

Mr. Klein writes that one of (Culhane's) experiments was a two-second piece of an explosion in “Woody Dines Out,” from 1945. He finds the frames “improvised like visual music” in what Mr. Culhane acknowledged in his autobiography, “Talking Animals and Other People,” was an Eisenstein-inspired moment.

The longest such experimental sequence was in the seven-second steamroller smash-up in “The Loose Nut,” also from 1945. And, later in that cartoon, Woody is blown into an abstract configuration that Mr. Klein, in his article, calls “the convergence of animation and Soviet montage.”

Here is the abstract from the paper

In his autobiography, animator Shamus Culhane describes the mid-1940s as a period of artistic awakening for him, when he engaged with the works of film theorists such as Russian Formalists Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin.Working at that point as a director at the Walter Lantz studio, he resolved to put theory to practice and began experimenting within the Lantz cartoons, taking liberties with approved storyboards to apply modern techniques.Working largely on such commercial fare as Woody Woodpecker cartoons, Culhane had little latitude to create anything that was avant-garde, so he employed a hit-and-run approach, offering moments of musical and filmic experimentation.Although the Woody cartoons might seem an unlikely vehicle for this, this article reveals how the wild and zany Woodpecker characterization provided a fairly ideal opportunity for Culhane’s modernist mischief to blend in with the frenetic vigor of these short films.

Here is a video.

And.. sorting algorithms explained through dance

And now for blob transportation....

GOOP SCOOP

And this is a really great inspiration. Some very good insight buried in the pretension (it s not to aggressive, but there).

Publication Today.

2011-04-08T13:47:00.001-07:00

A new article that I wrote on In Vitro Oink was just published on eContact!

The descriptive blurb reads
In Vitro Oink is a composition exploring the translation of two piano sounds into a work for piano and electronics. This overview traces the compositional process and illustrates the use of Wii-remote in both the creation and performance.

Suwappu

2011-04-06T07:49:00.000-07:00

This is just beautiful. There are some interesting ideas behind this (in the following quote) but I am in love with the sound world of this video, it is so elegant.

Suwappu is a group of characters that can take lots of different forms. Primarily (or initially), the toys seen in the film - a set of collectible and swappable figures, readable by connected devices, opening up a layer of content. The Suwappu's head signifies his personality, and his pants signify his environment - the app produces content according to its reading of each half.
Beyond these toys, we think Suwappu is a new kind of content platform, with various exciting social, creative and commercial possibilities.

Our project name for this has been Haitsu. Haitsu is the art of hybrid communications, a made-up idea that we find useful. It's a little bit philosophical (the belief that combining advertising, content, media and product is the future of communications), and a little bit practical (looking for interesting hybrid clashes, like analogue and digital). Project Haitsu is part of the Making Future Magic series of collaborations.

instrument

2011-04-04T10:45:00.000-07:00

There is a subtle character to this advert which I find refreshing. It is also interesting to note that when the camera is shifted or rather there is a different camera, there is a different microphone so you can hear more or less of the contact noise.

Six Degrees of Freedom

2011-03-29T10:26:00.000-07:00

6DoF are the ways that an object can move in 3 dimensional space. Naval engineers (or anyone for that matter) use this to discribes boats (or anything for that matter) and I find the phrase to be a very beautiful on.

It is also what a wii-remote will report to you. Of course, if you swallow one, there are only 2 degrees to freedom.

Decision Making

2011-03-14T16:00:00.000-07:00

And a good article

Japan Meltdown

2011-03-13T00:49:00.000-08:00

With the massive leakage of nuclear reactors in Japan, are all of the Science Fiction Stories about to come true?

tornado

2011-03-12T12:01:00.000-08:00

Meta Loops

2011-02-28T23:25:00.000-08:00

I am doing sound for a play at the Palo Alto Children's Theater, Metamorphosis, by Betsy Franco. To that end I have created a bunch of loops of drum material. I project that this is a good combination of teen music (the story is a coming of age tale, wrapped in mythology and with a modern setting). So this is the filler between Acts. I was going to use it for scene changes but they are to fluid and this sound would likely be to disruptive during that. Still, it is the first time I have spent an evening with a step sequencer making some interesting, related patterns.
drum1

drum2

drum3

drum4

drum5

drum6

drum7

drum8

drum9

drum10

drum11

drum12

drum13

drum14

drum15

drum16

drum17

drum18

drum19

drum20

drum21

drum22

drum23

drum24

drum2loop

drum3loop

drum4loop

drum5loop

drum6loop

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2 vids

2011-02-15T13:10:00.000-08:00

This is an interesting video. Not perfect, but a good start.

This is an interesting starting point and a great teaching tool.

Sampled Room from Mateusz Zdziebko on Vimeo.

Goodiepal

2011-02-10T01:29:00.001-08:00

GOODIEPAL from Team Video on Vimeo.

Cloud Sonification Part 2

2011-02-07T13:43:00.000-08:00

PhD Recital

2011-02-02T23:14:00.000-08:00

It has come to pass that on 01.21.2011, I completed a recital as part of my PhD requirements at UCSB. Place the date in the middle of the month and you have the year. It was a great evening with only one minor computer crash, several minutes into the first piece.
The order of events
1. cmptr tap
2. Grey Ocean
3. Fish Affected by Dreams
4. SoundLines
5. ToLEtFony

The video of cmptr tap is not in my posesión yet, but it will be posted when I have it. Then I will explain it as well.

Grey Ocean is a fixed media piece where I took the wind speed data and used it as a sound file. I granulated the waveforem (chopped it up if you like) with wave height data. In this way I combine the conditions on the ocean to make a piece that sounds like... well the ocean. Sorta. The cool thing for me is that I did most of this in MatLab. After all these years I am using some of those maths.
Grey Ocean _ _

Fish Affected by Dreams is a piece that I have been writing for Shannon McCue for three years. This was the premier and it was really an amazing thing. I am very happy it. Fish Affected by Dreams crosses live viola, processed viola and prerecorded material. Fish symbolize spirituality as they live in water. Since dreaming is the free association the brain goes into during the phase of sleep where nutrients are being loaded into the brain, fish do indeed dream. Fish dream about the things they see, smell, taste, fear and enjoy while being awake. Dreaming that you go to a fish market means pleasure and joy. Seeing decayed and rotting fish at the fish market indicates distress that will come in the disguise of happiness.
Fish Affected by Dreams _ _
(recording updated 02.14.2011)

SoundLines is a collaboration with Katherine Hawthorne. In this I take the image of of her, as captured by a video camera and read a couple of lines from the video matrix. The video is in greyscale, so those lines are turned into waveforms which I build up in a semi improvisatory manner. This is our best performance to date, even if the camera taking this video didn't perform well.

Sound Lines from Katharine Hawthorne on Vimeo.

ToLEtFony is a fixed piece that I have been working on since June. The primary sound materials are recordings of Tape Loop Echo Feedback of an analog impulse generator. The Studer tape machine and the impulse generator were controlled by Christopher Jette while the mixing and the equalization were controlled by Curtis Roads.
ToLEtFony _ _

Susone Performance

2011-01-27T20:40:00.000-08:00

I just got the program, poster and recording from my Italian debut (to bad I wasn't there). Finally found a link for the theater. The trombonist is Michele Lomuto and he does an amazing job with Susone. This was presented as part of AIMI

AUDIO

Cloud Sonification

2011-01-27T18:46:00.000-08:00

I am starting a new project sonifying clouds, this is a collection of sketches and ideas. This is being built in conjunction with a class taught by Sasha Leitman and Trimpin at Stanford.

Artifacts

Here are some notes on the design sketch
1. possibly use peek~ , jit.peek~
2. Will have to read each line, convert each sample value as the amplitude of the grain associated with it.
3. DATA reduction:: could average little clusters of sample values to change the resolution of the camera focus.. or maybe just change the size of the matrix!!!! duh
4. hearing what the camera is seeing
5. make a grain poly

the question is how to sonify a video matrix

interaction....
- people could disturb the streams, choose water or clouds (hence up or down) -- how diffuse water, maybe have fans that suck up and down -- people could control the suck direction (either or)
- will altering the side blowing be interesting? not just a vortex
- lighting can change, this could be interactive
- motion sensor controls cloud generation
- grain waveform could be reactive (interpolate between different waveforms?)

design...
- 4 cameras facing the center, each projects sound into the center of the room (means 8 speakers)
- use box with open front? have all sides open? (this is a problem for the camera)
- dynamic lighting? (changes what is seen) what are the easiest lights for this (LED with reflectors?)
- can have a series of little moveable fans so that people can control them (interact)
- could use 8 speaker (2 stereo sets) or a ring

explore....
-how sculpt clouds? several main sources channel the air to arrays of pinholes

sonification...
- grain poly has different waveforms in drop down menu, (interpolate between different waveforms?)
- grain amp = presence of cloud
- grain waveform = ?
- grain rate = presence of cloud? low amplitude and low rate for almost nothing -- talk to Bjoren about granular issues (artifacts of so many grains? like FM?)

Creativity

2011-01-24T17:12:00.001-08:00

SoundLines 01.21.2011

2011-01-24T02:44:00.001-08:00

Sound Lines from Katharine Hawthorne on Vimeo.

Interesting Videos

2011-01-18T10:46:00.001-08:00

Article

Demonstration Reel from Sculpture on Vimeo.

website

Classic Shatner

2010-12-31T09:30:00.000-08:00

Phasing Percussion

2010-12-30T20:30:00.000-08:00

A picture from my mother, while she and my father were visiting Palo Alto for Christmas.

I have been experimenting with having several streams of percussion sounds out of phase. In this case it is three separate sounds and they are controlled by a single master tempo. I am beginning to like this work, which is an extension of some earlier phase experiments in SuperCollider. The patterns still feel a little predictable, but I am starting to find the sweet spot. It looks like these will be the last 2 things I put into my 2010 folder on my server. So goes 2010!

Take 1 ----->

Take 2 ----->

DropsV4

2010-12-22T17:01:00.000-08:00

Another instalment in the development of Drops. Finally got some of the bass hits I wanted and some of the spatial counterpoint. Maybe it is still to subtle, tomorrow will tell.

Also had a great walk across Stanford today. I found this piece of metal along the way.

DropV4

Bells

2010-12-21T16:41:00.002-08:00

I have been making some sketches for a collaborative project with Jean-Pierre. My side of the idea is a world of sounds that respond to different time frames. The following are a set of bells that I made in SC and am rather taken with the sound of. This is an improvisation where I shift the amount of reverb and the tempo clock.

The picture has nothing to do with the project other than it is a place that I once was that had metal and skin objects for me to hit.

Bell Improv One

Shotwell Performance and a new sketch

2010-12-17T09:01:00.000-08:00

I have been continuing work on the the Ocean Drops sketch. Here is another take.
Drops V3

Also getting ready for a performance tommorow in San Francisco. Katharine Hawthorne and I are performing SoundLines.

SoundLines from christopher jette on Vimeo.

I am also going to do a solo laptop set of Computer Tap with projection. It should come off nicely.

The event will take place at Shotwell Studios. Here is the info.

AIM: Artists in Motion
Footloose presents at Shtowell Studios
Saturday, December 18, 2010 8 PM

Choreographers and composers showcasing their work are:
Christina Miglino & Adderly Bigelow with sound by Damon Macgregor and Griffith Snyder
Sheila Coleman & Sophia Leiby with composer Gretchen Jude
Katharine Hawthorne with composer Christopher Jette
PLUS special guest Sheena Johnson/REBEL HOME
Feedback welcome following performance. Cash bar open before and after the show.

Shotwell Studios: 3252-A 19th Street, between Folsom/So. Van Ness, San Francisco, easy street parking, close to 16th Street BART/MUNI
Admission: $5-$10 cash/checks only at the door
Info/Res: (415) 289-2000 ftloose.org

Ocean Granulation

2010-12-12T12:00:00.000-08:00

I made a granulation tool that uses weather data for the sound files and control files. I have been experimenting with this granulator and have come up with this sketch of a piece. Who knows, it may be a finished piece. It is actually pretty close to the fabulous sound that a hurricane makes. And this is about as long as one of those blows would last. It would be more convincing if there were things flying about though,

OceanScape V2

Thrilling Thriller

2010-11-30T00:04:00.000-08:00

I am working my way through some papers in order to put together a component of my dissertation. The idea is to consider the technology that I used for InVitroOink and contextualize it in the field. The current paper is on the "User Experience" ( Hassenzahl, M., & Tractinsky, N. (2006). User Experience - a research agenda [Editorial]. Behavior & Information Technology, 25(2), 91-97.). User Experience can generally be defined as considering product design beyond the purely work related usability paradigm of design. Simply put, this is the why of why people buy Ferrari's when a Geo will get them to work.

Reading through the article I came across an example in the experiential component of the paper that caused me to reflect on my role as an artist. First the example. "Consider the difference between 'a mystery thriller on one’s bookshelf ’ versus ‘being awake all night because of the thrilling story, which unfolds while reading’." This example reminded me of Bob Cogan mentioning that he loved to read mystery novels. I thought it an odd thing to say at the time and it has stuck with me over the years. I find different ways of understanding this statement again and again. Tonight as I read this paper, I consider the excitement of mystery novels and of Bob's work and the similarity is apparent. It also helps to focus my attention in my own work, the notion of excitent and the peaks and valleys of this arc is what keeps one engaged, be it music or literature.

I also came across a project called Gustbowl. When I can create something so relavent and engaging that is aesthetically motivated I will be thrilled.

Here is the song that has been stuck in my head and I worked through learning today.

another version

well said

2010-11-24T12:37:00.001-08:00

I often start research with a Google query. What I like is that this sign can also work on the level of metaphysical. Well that is why it is on the sign of church.