Amplified Drop-Crotch Pants based on Sumatran Randai folk theatre
December 11
8 - 11 pm
Three performers accompany music via FM radio by beating their amplified pants. ‘Drop It Like It’s Crotch’ will premiere at the ITP NIME show at Cameo Gallery.
by Valentina Camacho and Antonius Oktaviano Wiriadjaja
The Pool brings a calm space for meditation, introspection and relaxation to the lobby of the IAC building. Swimmers break the surface, explore the 120 foot wide pool and interact with each other. It is a journey for both themselves and the audience.
Hosted by IAC for ITP Tisch School of the Arts New York University
ITP Presents Big Screens
Friday, December 2, 2011 From 6:30pm to 8:30pm IAC HQ. 555 W. 18th St. @11th Ave.
6:00 pm Doors open 6:30 pm First showing 7:15 pm Remarks 7:30 pm Second showing (shows are identical)
I got to perform as Keyboard Cat channeling Lady Gaga today! One more to cross off my bucket list. Thanks, ameliechucky, for letting me shove my hand up that lovely felt pussy cat!
I got to be part of Cyrus von Hochstetter’s awesome second musical instrument for NIME. He attached three vibration motors on Michael Colombo and yours truly and gave us simple rules for making noise depending on which buzzed. Colombo stole the show with “Tom Igoe. BlEaarARrGGhH.” My instruments broke before I got to document it, but it will be posted soon.
This semester, I am working with Valentina Camacho, a very good friend and awesome creative partner, on content for a 120-foot-long screen at the IAC building. This is the fifth year Dan Shiffman has offered the class, and he takes great lengths to make sure we don’t reinvent the wheel. He provided us with several strategies and templates for every software imaginable. We were able to put up content within the second week of class, and last week got to test out our project ideas on one third of the screen.
Valentina is an amazing illustrator. We created a storyboard, sketched out some scenes/characters and she vectorized them for our animation. But as soon as we put them up on screen, everything looked different. The colors were off, brush patterns were magnified and subtle vector graphics became off-putting.
Fortunately, our time in grad school has taught us to always have a plan B. The night before, ITP’s equipment room also happened to acquire a new waterproof case for the Lumix LX5. I walked away from my coding and jumped in the pool with some mardi gras beads. We rendered out a 3840 X 1080 video of the camera under a faucet, in the pool and in puddles outside my apartment. It was intended to be a simple test, but the results were very visually stunning.
NIME Assignment: “Inspirational Sounds”: Bring a one minute audio clip of music to share with the class and explain why you find it compelling. Try to identify the qualities that appeal to you or that make it well suited to the purpose for which you use it.
I chose to share a minute of music that I recorded while visiting Saturday morning Gamelan rehearsals at the pendopo (front hall) of the Mangkunegaran Palace, in Solo, Java, Indonesia.
I went there on my last day in Solo, with my friends Mas Jon and Mbak Nana. Because they’re two of Solo’s top students, we got in from the back door, hung around the courtyard and waited for the orchestra to invite us to play. There are two well known sets of Gamelan in the palace that were built in the 17th century. These instruments are considered holy and venerable spirits live within them. I was told that the ones we got to play with on the day I went is even older.
The sound was incredibly rich, and the rhythm and melodies are very different from the contemporary classical pieces we at New York’s Gamelan Kusuma Laras play. The kendhang (drums) is beat with tabuh (mallets), unlike contemporary kendhang playing. The balungan (melody) players are responsible for only two or three notes, but if they don’t get it correctly then the entire piece falls to pieces. The simplicity and sacredness make it feel primordial. And to think that people gathered here hundreds of years ago listening to the same music is intense. Listening to the recording does not quite capture the ethereal ambience of that Saturday morning, but noticing the chirping of birds, the shutter of my camera and the gaggle of tourists is an interesting side effect of recorded audio. They help settle me in that memory, which audio recorded in a studio would never do.
I made a terribly terrific faux pas by referring to Pak Hartono, descendant of the kings of Surakarta, in the formal. But he brushed it off and even invited me to play for the last two pieces. As soon as we finished, the crowd of elderly players rushed us from our seat to cover the instruments with thick red cloth. It’s to cover them from dust, they tell me. I also shot some video of the experience, but the sound quality was not as good and I needed to condense the 30 minutes of audio into a minute. The result is the MP3 above.
Assignment 1 for Electronic Design and Prototyping: Read a schematic and assemble circuit on a breadboard.
I don’t exactly know if that’s what it’s supposed to sound like, but I built this Tone Burst Generator based off of the schematics Paul Rothman provided.
This year, I have been learning as much as I can about the Javanese court arts, including music, dance and live theatre. Part of what interests me is how stories like the Ramayana and Mahabharata can be passed on for generations without the need of archival technology. Furthermore, different cultures at different times utilize different methods of storytelling in order to transmit them to the next generation.
The Wayang Kinect project is an exploration of storytelling ancient texts in new mediums. Using a Microsoft Kinect as a sensor, users are able to interact with and manipulate a digital puppet on a projected screen.
The web applet, which controls the puppets using the position of the mouse, can be found here. Full description, videos and code are after the jump.
Over the past few weeks I’ve been fooling around with the Microsoft Kinect. I spent a large chunk of my time installing all the software needed to use Sensebloom’s OSCeleton library by following Tohm Judson’s tutorial. Once everything was installed, I was frustrated the Processing examples provided by Sensebloom was giving me errors. Fortunately, I found out I wasn’t the only one. After renaming a few functions I got it to work perfectly (the fixed code is down below).
After some time, I got the example to work with Toxiclibs and was able to attach a puppet frame to a user’s hand after calibration. Video and the code after the jump.
This year I got to check out SXSW in Austin, TX for the entire festival. I mostly worked during the interactive portion, so most of the fun was had at day shows with friends. I discussed the interactive and film events at the art:21 blog, but didn’t cover nearly everything. I also didn’t finish processing the photos until today, to my friends’ dismay.
It’s proudly powered by Wordpress and Thematic, but we felt it was more important to point out the orchestra is a non-profit organization and not distract with too many links.
Midterm Assignment: Build off of the concepts we’ve covered this first half of the semester, however you should feel free to think non-traditionally, i.e. your midterm need not simply be a Processing sketch. Please include both visual and text documentation of your project, i.e. you might include a short paragraph description, links to relevant projects, video documentation, screenshots, or online applet, etc. The midterm need not be a finished project, it is useful to use this time to build out a single component of a larger idea.
