blog

Drop-Crotch 2.5

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 09:11:00 -0400

I spent all night building my new vintage-Walkman enclosed Xbee-powered Drop-Crotch controller. So excited! Schematics coming soon.

Drop-Crotch and Pool at Tisch Gala

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 08:52:00 -0400

I’ll be performing Drop It Like It’s Crotch at the annual Tisch Gala champagne reception, followed by a screening of The Pool at the Dinner party. Expect dancing to be had, and black tie optional to be interpreted as clothing optional.

Snowyman by Saadi (Official Music Video)

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 18:04:00 -0400

This year I got the awesome opportunity to work with Nerenda Eid on Saadi’s official music video for Snowyman. I altered my previous wayang kinect project to create more dynamic movements on the puppets and collaged a couple scenes based on the Nawang Wulan and Jaka Tarub story.

Funny enough, I wasn’t expecting to actually be in the music video. But eagle-eyed viewers might just catch a few seconds of my fancy dance moves in silhouette.

Drop It Like It's Crotch @ Cameo Gallery

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 10:58:00 -0400

The premiere of ‘Drop It Like It’s Crotch’ at the ITP NIME show. Three performers accompany music via FM radio by beating their amplified drop-crotch pants based on Sumatran Randai folk theatre.

Concept & Design: Antonius Wiriadjaja

Performers: Antonius Wiriadjaja, Michell J Cardona and Johann Diedrick

Thanks to Greg Shakar and Brett Murphy for their guidance, Chika for the projections and Roopa, Alex & Rose for the documentation.

Cameo Gallery
December 11, 2011
Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY

ITP Camp 2012

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 23:20:59 -0400

This year, I’m going to be involved with ITP’s annual summer camp for adults. It’s been a blast so far working behind the scenes, but I recently got a fair share of on-screen time as well. Check out the camp videos below! And when you feel ready to jump in on the action, apply!

Documentation of The Pool at IAC

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 01:59:00 -0400

Premiere of The Pool at IAC with live music by Merche Blasco 12/2/2011

The Pool (standalone with original soundtrack)

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.

Directed by Antonius Wiriadjaja and Valentina Camacho.

Music by Merche Blasco. Sound Design by Phan Visutyothapibal.

Special thanks to The Pool’s swimmers, Yoni Ben-Simhon, Nelson Ramon, Eszter Ozsvald, Paul May, Ju Yun Song, Eric Hagan, Emily Webster, William Jennings and Alex Kozovski.

Thanks to Daniel Shiffman for his guidance and patience.

Wayang Kulit and Live Webcast via Asia Society

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 14:41:35 -0400

I will be performing with Gamelan Kusuma Laras and Mayangkara at Ki Purbo Asmoro’s one night only performance of Javanese Wayang Kulit at Asia Society on March 16, 2012. Tickets are sold out, but a free live webcast is available at asiasociety.org/live

Gamelan Kusuma Laras and Asia Society with Support from the New York State Council on the Arts, the Consulate General of Indonesia and Cakra Inc. presents

Déwa Ruci: Bima’s Spiritual Enlightenment
A Javanese Wayang Kulit
(shadow puppet theater)

Performed by Ki Purbo Asmoro, dhalang
Accompanied by members of Mayangkara (Solo, Java)
and Gamelan Kusuma Laras (NYC)
with English translations provided live by Kathryn Emerson

FRIDAY MARCH 16, 2012
8:00 p.m.
ASIA SOCIETY
725 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10021
(212) 288-6400

Can’t make it to this program? Tune into AsiaSociety.org/Live at 8:00 pm ET for a free live video webcast.

Co-sponsored with Asia Society, Cakra Inc. and the Consulate General of Indonesia, New York.

This program is made possible in part by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

This program is part of Asia Society’s ongoing initiative Creative Muslim Voices in Asia, supported by the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art.

ITP NIME 2011

Fri, 25 Nov 2011 02:37:00 -0500

Crotch FM

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.

Cameo Gallery
93 North 6th Street
Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY

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The Pool by Valentina Camacho and Antonius Oktaviano...

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 13:10:00 -0500

The Pool

by Valentina Camacho and Antonius Oktaviano Wiriadjaja

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)

RSVP by Tuesday, Nov 29
itp.rsvp@nyu.edu

http://itp.nyu.edu/bigscreens

I got to perform as Keyboard Cat channeling Lady Gaga today! One...

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 21:50:00 -0400

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...

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 22:50:06 -0400

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.

Testing (really) Big Screens

Sun, 02 Oct 2011 01:59:00 -0400

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.

We were both running pretty low on sleep, and the experience was surprisingly draining. Walking away, I think both of us had reservations about our original idea but didn’t want to bring it up. After a couple days, we looked back on our experience and had to admit defeat. Our first project is too ambitious, and although we are fans of linear narrative, it won’t work on this scale and dimension.

We are now producing more content from real footage of water, and perhaps with real-time manipulation from the viewers’ interaction. Hopefully in the next few weeks, things will come together. But before burying the fruits of our labor, I wanted to share the images we created, because they really do look beautiful. Just not on a Brobdingnagian scale… Now to concoct a plan C and D.

NIME Assignment: “Inspirational Sounds”: Bring a one...

Sun, 18 Sep 2011 23:30:00 -0400

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.

Electronic Design and Prototyping: Assignment 2

Mon, 18 Jul 2011 14:21:00 -0400

Assignment 2: Assemble a circuit on a perfboard.

I built a basic hackduino on a perfboard and stuffed it into a cookie box to celebrate my good friend Michelle’s birthday.

But she walked in as I was building it, which turned out to be a good thing because I needed her help setting up the bandsaw.

Many thanks to http://jos.ph/ for his awesome schematics and instructables.

Code taken from Tom Igoe’s Tone Output Using Arduino tutorial.

Electronic Design and Prototyping: Assignment 1

Mon, 11 Jul 2011 12:57:38 -0400

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.

Materials:

Schematics:

Wayang Kinect

Fri, 27 May 2011 15:36:00 -0400

A write up of my experience installing and displaying Wayang Kinect in the ITP Spring 2011 show is forthcoming… stay tuned!

Nature of Code: Final

Tue, 03 May 2011 02:47:00 -0400

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.

Presentation Slides:

Wayang Kulit, which translates to “leather puppet”, are puppets made from ox hide and controlled with rods made of either bamboo or buffalo horn. Indonesian Shadow puppet theatre has been performed for over ten centuries and has been proclaimed by UNESCO as an “Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity”.

The Wayang Kinect project will incorporate new technologies to tell traditional Wayang stories in an updated contemporary context while continuing to safeguard the traditions of Wayang Kulit theatre. Furthermore, the Microsoft Kinect can be utilized to record a well known dhalang (shadow puppeteer) and further preserve Wayang Kulit’s performative history.

The code for this project is based mainly on Daniel Shiffman’s examples from his Nature of Code course. I am utilizing OpenNI’s drivers to control the Kinect, and the fabulous Toxiclibs libraries to manipulate the pixel physics. I’ve been learning about Javanese music and shadow puppetry from members of the Gamelan Kusuma Laras Orchestra, to whom I am greatly indebted.

Videos:

A single user controlling the puppet

Two users, two puppets:

Code:

Digital Wayang with Kinect

Mon, 11 Apr 2011 21:31:00 -0400

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.

Stickmanetic with toxiclibs

Stickmanetic working with PBox2D

Flowfield Changing over Time

Mon, 28 Mar 2011 21:43:57 -0400

Nature of Code Assignment: Create a flow field that changes over time.

I took Dan Shiffman’s flow field code and added a time function to change the perlin noise values over time.

The applet is found here.

Video of the applet in debug mode and the code found below.

Code:

SXSW 2011 (One Week Later)

Sun, 27 Mar 2011 15:37:00 -0400

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.

I had major gaps in my memory during the week, mostly after a Wu-Tang show. But my camera shows pictures of the kind strangers who helped me home via the E Bus.

Friday 3/18, Wye Oak played an awesome set at Mohawk. Their guitar and drum arrangement reminds me of a reverse gendered White Stripes, but with more enthused and dare I say more talented drumming. I’d definitely keep an ear out for them.

Speaking of enthusiasm, Bombay Bicycle Club finished the 3rd annual Music for Listeners line up with a crowd pleasing performance. They roped in random Texan cowboys walking by the pizzeria with sheer musicality alone.

At night, I got tired of waiting in lines to get into venues. So I mostly stuck with less crowded bars and walked randomly into an amateur strip show.

I can’t say enough nice things about Austinites and South By’ers. They’re so friendly they ask how are you’s with candid interest. They’re not a bad looking bunch either.

But admittedly some didn’t seem to enjoy the added traffic and party pollution.

Of all the venues I got to check out, St David’s Church was the most random - first of all it’s a church and we were all drinking. Secondly, the space was acoustically impossible. Laura Jansen made it work, however, stealing our hearts with her sung diary entries.

Sadly Austin cuisine didn’t really steal my heart or my gut, but two major food-related events stayed in my mind. Strangely even though I go to ITP I didn’t get to meet Clay Shirky until after his keynote about social media and the recent revolutions in the middle east. He kindly invited me to a dinner with ITP alumni despite the fact I’m still a student. And the second is Amy’s Ice Cream on S Congress, which I give cred for its adorable staff and for staying open late.

The last show I got to see was Uh Huh Her at the Continental Club, only a few hours before my flight home. It was a perfectly formed rock and roll ending to my incredible SXSW journey. By then, however, I was missing my beautiful New York City. Not even a 12 hour journey home due to bad weather could sour my mood when I lay on my own bed in Queens to crash.