So progress has been made. I’ve secured a 5×7 LCD screen from my friend Christian Croft, and I’ve got a seperate code written that uses the same code as the one below to record video input and then render that into text mosaic form. Now the trick is to merge the new code with the old code and organize them in such a way that they function together and that the code shifts smoothly from loading the image to picking up video.

I’ve also decided to use Joyce’s Ulysses as my book encasement. My reasons for this choice are lightly explained in the description below, which I submitted for the Winter show:

The act of reading consists of a twofold relationship between text and reader. A text is a world wrought with careful choices and composed of deliberate details. Internal mechanisms guide or manipulate the reader and set certain processes in motion; circumstances are dealt, limitations are imposed, and positions are impelled.

Though a reader may believe it a space in which to freely dwell, explore, and contemplate, in actuality a text is a set of built-in biases, hidden protocols, and inherent agendas determining how meaning is expressed and transferred.

Yet textual meaning is contingent on the reader’s engagement with the text, and all meaning ineluctably bound to the reader’s subjective mode of interpreting and filtering information, which is framed by the reality the reader inhabits. As it is this aspect of interpretation that initially determines how a text is understood, received meaning can cohere in a form far from what is intended.

Intertext is a visual analogy illuminating this two-way relationship between reader and text. It represents how a text both forms and informs the reader as well as how the reader molds and animates the text. Encased within a hollowed version of James Joyce’s Ulysses (chosen for its physical and metaphorical depth, its continual susceptibility to new modes of interpretation, and the novel’s play with how meaning is extracted by the reader) is an LCD screen displaying Joyce’s image as rendered by a mosaic of the novel’s text. While the reader peers into the book, the words shift from showing the representation of Joyce to an image of the viewer captured by a nearby camera.
—-

Coming from an Lit background, I’m interested in the merging of literature (or the novel or tracts or text or the written word arranged in some way motivated by aesthetic or philosophical intent) with digital technology. I’ve been playing with text mosaics in the Processing language, specifically implementing an author’s text into an array that forms the pixels of a paiting, photo or representation of that author, and I want to create a processing app that visualizes my feeling of what the act of reading does to the reader.

My idea is create an app that does the above described, but also have the text mosaic dissipate and have the words scramble across the screen, but the reconstitute as an image of the app’s viewer. I’m thinking of finding a small lcd screen, placing it in a hollowed out book, placing an iSight or something above the book, and have the app triggered when the book is open. In effect, the viewer will open this strange book with a usb cord hanging out of it, see the image of the author as comprised of the author’s text, begin to read the text, be mesmerized by the fancifal swirling of text, and the gasp as the text shows their own face.

I’m excited by this. I really think powerful writing can reconsititute and change an individual. I’m about 1/4 of the way through the coding, and have yet to begin on the hollow book encasement or finding an lcd. I’ll post the progress as it goes.

What I’m currently working with (click on the picture): +++++

I’ve also started working with live video text mosaics, and am working with how to load a text file that will constitute the image. Once I get this together I’ll have to find a way to merge the two so that the author’s text portrait merges with the viewer’s image via a color change or something.

Ever since I first saw the movie Altered States, in which research scientist William Hurt manages to revert back to a primitive human/simian state via psychadelics and a sensory deprivation chamber, I’ve been enamored with the idea of sensory deprivation chambers. Thinking of this movie while considering my p-comp final, I decided I wanted to do something that would accentuate auditory and tactile stimulations through removing the sense of vision and better bridge the connection between hearing and the body. Ideally, I would one day create sound installations that envision the body through sound, that is, an individual would gain a new orientation of the corpus and better understanding of their personal proprioeceptive senses through participating in an installation that traced/mapped bodily movement and location sonically within a space.

Allistar, Chul and I have decided to work together for the final, and I talked about some of the above ideas and we’ve wittled them down to creating something slightly more manageable, though ambitions nonetheless. We want to creat accessible enclosure, darkened within, that contains a chair in which to sit and an contoured handspace filled with sand, water, or some other small, dense and malleable objects . As the participant moves their hands among the sand etc a sound wave will be generated/augmented in accordance with the hand/sand movement. Beneath the sand will be FSR sensors that will detect the shifting weight of the sand etc. The point is to create a relaxing environment in which anyone will be able to create a unique sonic experience through simple movements.

Or so i hope.

I would love to be able to present this for the fall show, but we’ll have to see how things turn out.

Roy A. Vanegas and I are going to colloborate for our Algorithmic Composition project. Since all I listen to lately is Arthur Russell, I decided I wanted to try to create something influenced by him. I wrote some cello pieces and a little beat on ableton, and Roy is writing some violin parts. I was influenced by Betsey Biggs, who spoke to our class, specificially a piece she wrote that was comprised of a single sheet of segmented and disparate measures that the musician’s performed in some improvisational manner that I can’t remember right now. But I think if I do the same thing, then run the parts through and algorithm that will randomly shuffle them into a new arrangement each time it is enacted then that might be a good way to compose this thing using maths and computers like everyone will in the future.

We’ve been in talk with some string players here at ITP and they’be agreed to asist us. I’m thinking were gonna do a live performance like Steve Reich’s counterpoint works, where the musician plays in dialogue over prerecorded music. I just saw Electric Counterpoint performed by Pat Methany live at the Steve Riech 70th birthday bash extravaganza at Carnegie, Music for 18 Musicians was performed too. I liquified. So steady beat with fuzzed or reverbed and droning strings is what is on the menu. I love drones. All goes back to Heavenly Music Corp. Oh, I might play electronic drums if they ever arrive, otherwise I’ll just be on laptop. But everything is up in there air. That’s where I like it.

so it’s just a bunch of different ideas. some may stay. some may go. and the last chord in the “chords” section is an 1/8th note too early. i’ve fixed, but takes too long to repost.

–>here

Here’s a video of Allistar and I doing the motor lab.

Group6

Group Members
Marc
Nick Hasty
Kyveli Vezani
Bryan Wall

Proposal
For our midterm project, we have come up with a unique way to remind someone that they may be leaving their apartment without their keys. The idea is that there will be a motion detector of some sort located near the exit of the apartment. This could also just be a sensor attached to the door or the doorknob. If the user crosses this field (or opens the door) and does not have their keys on them, a small signal (either light, sound, or a combination of both) will go off to let them know. The plan is for the signal to be small enough that it will not be a nuisance, but distinctive enough that the user will notice it when it goes off.

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Here’s my snail-paced progress with processing:

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My first meditation for Algorithmic Composition required running English text into the Babelfish language translation algorithm of our choice, then running that translation through another algorithm and repeating the process until we see fit, in order to see what sort of strange permutations occur in the process and how far the final permutation strays from the original.

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For Meditation #2, which asked us to sonify space filling curves, I choose a Peano Curve and a Peano-Gosper Curve. This is the site I got my starting axiom and production rules from:
http://mathforum.org/advanced/robertd/lsys2d.html

Here you can see specific space filling curves unfold a generation at a time:
http://ejad.best.vwh.net/java/fractals/lsystems.shtml

Here they are:

http://www.itp.nyu.edu/~jnh251/algo_comp/Meditation2/Peano_Curve_Vibes.aif

http://www.itp.nyu.edu/~jnh251/algo_comp/Meditation2/Peano_Gosper_Curve_vibes.aif

I used Processing to compute the data and determine my the parameters for CSound, which generated the sounds.

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