Analysis of Kevin Baldwin playing Grab It!

March 1st, 2012 · CpILL · art No comments - Tags: abstract, analysis, art, music, performance, poetry, video

Some interesting ideas here:

A set composition which is moved forward by live triggers.
Using an acoustic instrument as a controller. Possibly using pitch detection.
Using video, text and spoken word for “conceptional content” in combination with the abstraction of music/sound.
Integration of poetry medium was nice.

I wasn’t so much impressed with the actual choice of content of the piece but the delivery and the fast pace of the musical style combined was very effective. I imagine live it would have a great impact assuming you were standing close enough.

He seemed stuck behind the instrument and sheet music so would be physically constrained in meeting the audience and thus have less options with engaging them.

Ideas for future directions from here might be:

Gesture recognition, i.e. series of notes, a “music phrase” as triggers for navigating the composition, perhaps allowing for non-linear compositions. Also for triggering smaller sequences of visuals/spoken-word
Different interface to make music which allows more interaction with the audience. Perhaps wireless sensors.
Noise!

Composition is like Gardening which is like Surfing slow-mo

November 25th, 2011 · CpILL · art 159 comments - Tags: composition, generative, music

Brian Eno is famous for his generative approach to composition and in this talk, Composers as Gardeners, he talks about how he arrived at this idea. The main jist of it is that he was influenced by the book The Brain Of The Firm, The Managerial Cybernetics Of Organization in which Stafford Beer talks about what we call today Emergent Behavior

What happened in Stafford’s work was that he was talking about organization and how things organize themselves in this new way. And there was one sentence in the book which I think I still remember, he said ‘instead of trying to organize it in full detail, you organize it only somewhat and you then rely on the dynamics of the system to take you in the direction you want to go.’ And this became my sort of motto for how I wanted composition to be.

This all reminded me about a video interview with Curtis roads in which he talks about a book he was reading on landscape gardening being really about composition.

What I find inspiring about what Eno is his discovery of the “talent to surrender”

And another way I can translate that is to say it’s a repositioning of ourselves on the control/surrender spectrum…What we’re not so used to is the idea that another great gift we have is the talent to surrender and to cooperate. Cooperation and surrender are actually parts of the same skill. To be able to surrender is to be able to know when to stop trying to control. And to know when to go with things, to be taken along by them. And that’s a skill that we actually have to start relearning.

Steve Reich had a sort of orthogonal idea of Music as a Gradual Process in that he would design a generative process that would operate by itself.

Musical processes can give one a direct contact with the impersonal and also a kind of complete control, and one doesn’t always think of the impersonal and complete control as going together. By “a kind” of complete control I mean that by running this material through the process I completely control all that results, but also that I accept all that results without changes.

When looking at performance that involved generative elements i always saw this as a lack of control (and perhaps imagination). Now, instead, i see it as the skill of going with the moment, sort of like surfing on a giant chaotic wave.

Semantic Web for Open Design

April 17th, 2011 · CpILL · idea, life, work No comments - Tags: cool, design, idea, metadata, rdf, semantics, web, world-aid

I just watched Cameron Sinclair on open-source architecture

…and at the end, on the “What will it take” slide he is talking about an information system not design or architecture at all! It then occurred to me that there is a potential use for RDF an the semantic web here. If you can design some metadata that can describe all the important features of the 3000 designs Cameron has on his laptop then you might be able to create a search interface that can find best designs for any given environment.

Its a big leap to first describe the designs adequately with a certain meta description but I feel you just have to start and then it will get better as you figure out whats needed.

Even better than search is that you might get machines to take certain situations/problems (i.e. this much space, this much power, this much water efficiency etc) and automatically find design solutions to solve the problem(s). You might need to assemble a hospital/school/basic housing in the desert/jungle/mountains with only scrap wood/metal/bamboo with 2 people working on it who are only proficient in hammer&nail/tying-rope/chopping-wood etc

This is the first real-world use for the semantic web I’ve every thought about and once you realise what its useful for (i.e. making the real world machine readable) you can apply it to anything!

I need to start doing some research and getting into it!

Mass renaming files

April 3rd, 2011 · CpILL · work 15 comments - Tags: awk, command line, mac, OS X, shell, tip, trick

Nice little shell one-liner to mass rename foo*.jpg to bar*.jpg
ls foo*.jpg | awk '{print("mv "$1" "$1)}' | sed 's/foo/bar/2' | /bin/sh
Leave off the last pipe to get a preview of the output first ;)

Heres a variation I used to keep just the first part of a file name before the first space (i.e. when Finder makes a copy of a file say)
l -1 *.jpg | awk '{print("mv \""$0"\" "$1".jpg")}' | /bin/sh

Generation Why? Why Not?

March 13th, 2011 · CpILL · schmeg 53 comments - Tags: article, culture, facebook, online, response, social networking

I just read Zadie Smiths’ Generation Why? and it bugged me…

Zadie’s main argument seems to be based on “I don’t like Zuckerberg so therefore Facebook is also bad”.

It seems a fairly shallow understanding of Facebook and the medium in general. I don’t like Facebook but mainly for the politics of intellectual property, not because it doesn’t model a human properly. But who said it was trying to? Mobile phones are not trying to model your social life and they have a list of your friends too. He also has assumed that everyone uses Facebook the same way he does and that all relationship you have with everyone are the same (ether all shallow or all deep).

Zadie assesment is shallow because he hasn’t really looked at the Facebook medium and understood what its doing, and more importantly whats new there. The friend feed is a (the) personal feed of information on your social network, creatred by the people YOU deem worth to call friends. I personally am constantly culling this list as to me, its really only useful when it has people I care about on it. I don’t have the same self-esteem issues that Americans seem to have wrapped up in “popularity” and evidence of it (or I assume Americans have this based on Movies and all other culture they project). Whats new about it is that its a PASSIVE way to keep up-to-date with what the people you care about are doing. The reason you don’t write emails/letters/faxes/tellagrams to EVERYONE you know/care-about is:

(a) It takes to much time (but this doesn’t mean you don’t care or are less of a person as Zadie seems to imply.
(b) Now that we are in an age where we can actually keep track of all these people we are in contact with a far greater number of people than every before and 1-to-1 communication with them all would be a full time job
(c) Facebook makes it possible to stay in communication with people as they update there info (email/phone numbers/address etc) which also requires a watchful eye if you trying to keep an up-to-date address book.
(d) You writing to them in an active way DEMANDS they are also active in keeping up else you think they are ignoring you and then you take offense or start to think they are not good friends etc etc. Imagine if everyone you knew sent you an email once a week. It would be a full time job just responding.

What are the positives of Facebook that I find make it worth persisting with:

1. Passive socialising is easy and lest you stay in contact with more of the people you would like to but don’t have time normally. I’m pretty anti-social and this makes me more social than I have ever been.
2. Messaging in Facebook is spam free. Unlike email you can only receive messages from your friends and if someone sends you something you don’t like you can ban them and you never receive something from them again. As far as direct communication goes its ideal.

Also, Zadie hasn’t put Facebook into the historical context (in fact all Zadie’s research seems to be based on seeing the film), which was the birth of the idea of the “social” online. If you know anything about Computing Science or Computing Scientists you’ll immediately realise that the word “social” is as new to the field as it is to proponents (that was a joke: ha ha). If the modeling of human relations is clumbys, its only because its new to Comp. Sci. and will only get more detailed and accurate. Its not society, its just a tool!

Zadie admits that she was addicted to Facebook for awhile. This is not because Facebook is some new game. Its simply reveling something that was already there in people. I can say this because its ONLY about people. All the content is about people made by people for people to consume. Facebook is actually pretty minimal in that it doesn’t add much to what people put up on it, and they can put up everything the digital-verse has to offer. Once the first networked computer game was on the market it quickly became obvious that interaction with people will always be more interesting than with computer opponents. The internet became amazingly popular because its all content made by real, every day humans. YouTube showed us that reality TV is more interesting than the mediated TV Exec. idea of what is interesting. Human-to-Human interaction is the most adictive thing online (and offline) and thats why Facebook is addictive, it actually has very little to do with Facebook.

But there is something deeper in Zadie’s article, which is jokingly thrown around but never actually takes seriously, the smell of generation hatred (or fear) which has also wafted by when I have read about the introduction of Radio, Movies, TV (MTV) etc. Which is just conservative at its heart and scared of change.

Online Security Service idea

January 11th, 2011 · CpILL · schmeg 7 comments - Tags: idea web service money

Facebook tracks the country you usually login from and if you login from elsewhere in the world it asked you some security questions. This is tracking location based on IP and seeing remembering where your usually at.

This service could be separated from Facebook and made a stand alone service that any large website could pay to attach to their site.

It could be enhanced to track OpenID login accounts and also made more intelligent if the account owners used something like Google Latitude so their current location could be matched automatically. This might also enhanced banks online security for credit card transactions etc.

7 ways games reward the brain

November 3rd, 2010 · CpILL · research 17 comments - Tags: games, learning, research, TED, video

This seems to be the tree I’ve been barking up for a long time now. Summary of Tom Chatfield’s 7 ways games reward the brain

1. Experience bars measuring progress.
	- Give people an Avatar and they can take ownership
2. Multiple long & short term aims
	- 5000 targets not interesting. 5-20 interested
3. Reward effort
	- Every little bit!
4. Rapid, frequent clear, feedback.
	- Immediate is best.
5. An element of uncertainty
	- Uncertain rewards
	- When we predict something wrong we get excited about it.
	- Dopamine, neuron transmitter associated with learning.
6. Windows of enhanced attention.
	- Memory - find moments when people are more likely to remember
	- & confidence - reward system make people will to take risks
7. Other people!
	- The most exciting reward

Engagement!

Recursively remove .DS_Store files

September 14th, 2010 · CpILL · work One comment - Tags: code, command line, development, git, mac, snippet, tip

If your working on a coding project and your submitting it to version control, heres how to remove the meta-schmeg that OS X leaves around:
find . -name '*.DS_Store' -type f -delete
If your using GIT as your versioning control system then I’d suggest making a .gitignore file in the root of the project after running this command and before you git init to save yourself some bother.

Compare two folders’ contents

September 9th, 2010 · CpILL · work 13 comments - Tags: code, command line, development, snippet, tip

On a Unix/Mac you can use:
diff -rq folder1 folder2

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