07.30.2010 Processing project, or, I'm a video artist now?
I've been working on this project in Processing for a bit now. My attempts to actually embed it in a website, so that YOU can use it at home, have been stymied by the fact that the video objects I'm trying to use don't work in Java Applets. What I really should do is rewrite the whole thing in openFrameworks as an exercise -- the code's not that fancy -- so that it runs faster and I can give it to you direct.
At the moment, it only runs on my computer. I'm working on a downloadable version, but in the meantime, here's a little test video. The idea for final installation is that you'd have a screen inside of a frame, showing the room back to itself (like a mirror). But in order to be reflected in the mirror, you have to make sound. Otherwise you just leave little "ghost trails"...
Posted by charlie williams
06.16.2010 Pie and Genetics
I was in Denmark teaching last week. On my last day I had some time to walk around and I stopped into a café for a coffee. There was a pie-and-coffee deal, which I'm a bit of a sucker for. The motherly woman running the place asked me (first in Danish, which encouragingly happened with increasing frequency during my few days there) if I wanted sour cream or whipped cream to go with the pie. I said "whichever one is more Danish". Thankfully she took this as the half-joke I meant it and said "Whipped cream, definitely. Sour cream is I think French."
What with my Scandinavian/English ancestry, I'm a bit of a dairy-fat junkie, truth be told. Emma says that where some people have a sweet tooth, I have a fat tooth. So I was fairly delighted when the proprietor picked up a gigantic canister of homemade whipped cream (no gas-propelled flavorless '50s-misspellings whip, here) and squirted some on the pie slice. Immediately, though, it ran out. So she sent me to my table and promised she'd being me more as soon as it was ready.
After a few minutes, here's what I got. Basically it's a cereal bowl full of dense whipped cream:
(Note also the fresh-squeezed oj and really quite good filter coffee. England, take note.)
Posted by charlie williams
06.01.2010 Cultures of Collaboration: Some thoughts
A bit ago, after I arrived in Bath, I was asked to come talk to a class studying collaboration. It didn't occur to me until they asked me, but almost everything I've done artistically has been some sort of collaboration or another. So preparing for the class was helpful to me in that way, but also because it made me sort out my thoughts about collaboration and try to come up with something interesting to say on the topic.
My notes for the lecture, in slightly edited form, are below:
Looking over the collaborative work I've done in the past, and the relationships that have resulted from those working processes, I see them in every case fall into one of two types of collaboration. There's certainly some overlap between the two, but for simplicity I'll call them by the terms 'Creative' & 'Professional'.
A. Creative – collaborating more to co-develop concepts, ideas. Process-based.
B. Professional – collaborating more to seek complimentary skills. Results-based.
Ask for general examples from students. Possibilities:
A. Art installation, Band, Experimental theatre/dance, Indie films (sometimes)
B. Band, Film, Professional theatre/dance
So, B, the 'professional' collaboration, is kind of like taking your car in to a mechanic. You don't have the skills to do that yourself, so you want to hire those skills. Do you want the best person for the job? What if the best person costs one million pounds? Ok, you want the best person for the job — but within your means.
A, the 'creative' collaboration, is more like a compost pile, or making, er, beer or bread. Something that involves micro-organisms, anyway. The idea being that you put the right ingredients together and wait and let whatever happens happen.
Not that a creative collaboration doesn't take work— it takes at least as much work to do A well as to do B well. Everyone has to put in a lot more time into a creative collaboration for it to really be great, is the point. Alternately, a professional collaboration can have radical new ideas or processes in it— that's just not the main point. The main point in that case is producing. Any ingenious solutions you come up with are nice, but at the end of the day not ultimately why everyone's there.
Note that there's crossover. It's possible (theoretically/occasionally/under special circumstance) to have both kinds of collaboration at once. Or (more reasonably) it's possible for certain bands, let's say, or theatre troupes to be "A" collaborations and others to be "B" collaborations. But at any one point you can usually look at an endeavor and place it in one or the other category.
Additionally, with B you tend to have Someone In Charge. There's a "boss" to report to, even if that's downplayed in the day-to-day workings. With A you may have a leader who gets everyone together, and is the sort of "guiding light" but that leader tends to step aside whenever discussion starts and let other ideas carry as much weight as his or her own.
There are some obvious advantages to each approach: A tends to lead to radical new creativity and ideas, B gives polished, presentable results.
I bring all this up, though, and think it's important because lots of problems with collaboration happen when you think you're in one type, but the other party thinks you're in the other. As an example, for one of the first film scores I write, I was hired with a lot of talk about wanting an "experimental" score and giving me lots of freedom to "make a statement" …but when it came down to it, after all the money was spent and the score was recorded, they wanted a very traditional score. Lots of time and energy was spent revising the semi-final score to meet the producer's notes, when really I could have just written the score he wanted in the first place, if he would have approached me with "we want a very traditional score for this film, we've temped it a certain way and we think the temp works." Of course, I might not have been as interested, or I might have asked for more money in that case, because imitating a temp is much less fun than actually writing music. In summary, though: this could have been a really nice collaboration, if everyone involved knew what they wanted from the beginning, and had the communication skills to ask for it directly (I include myself, certainly, in the lack-of-communication department for that project. As the score which they'd initially found fresh and exciting started to dissatisfy them, I let my confusion take over and tried to manage competing advice from the director and producer, instead of trying to get them to all sit down and reëvaluate the first conversation we'd had about music in the film.)
The reverse can happen too: I recorded with a musician once who was amazing, completely ridiculously good player, very precise and delicate and never needed more than one take to do anything. In the studio, though, I found that this person had no patience at all for an "A" collaboration — I was somewhat organized, had charts for all the songs we were doing, but a lot of the details were left wide open. If she asked any question about her part, she wanted an immediate answer, whereas I wanted to hear what each one sounded like, maybe more than once, try it out, give it some thought, etc. Overall this was a good collaboration, but because we weren't on the same page about process, I think it was much more stressful than it needed to be for both of us.
A good collaboration example in Type B: Nearly every film score. It goes like this: there's a director and a producer (often on small films the same person) and they have spent a year on a script, finding money, finding locations, getting permits, shooting an incredibly expensive mile of film, getting it scanned and edited, and are now finally thinking about music. They are terrified that music will destroy their film. As the prospective composer, I reassure them that I want to further their vision, that I love the script, that it's all going to be great. I demo things like crazy until they agree, and we both think the music is doing what the film needs. Then we go into the studio and record as cheaply as we can get something good. I take it home and mix until they're even happier. At no point do I fight with them or act sad if I have to throw out an idea that I love and have spend 20 hours on because they think it's "somehow not quite gelling with the scene". It's their film! Any understanding I have of it is based on a couple of weeks, whereas they've been doing this for probably a year. Even if that means that they have lost all perspective and are making bad decisions, it's their baby and when your baby is a film that means that it's yours to kill. The couple of times when I have thought a director's decision about a certain musical cue is just crazy and wrong, about half the time it turns out that they were right when I watch the film a year later.
Good type A examples abound, but they're harder to talk about in a general sense. In all of them, though, someone has a concept. Ideally everyone involved hangs out, drinks beer, gets to know each other, and then develops some ideas on their own. Then we all reconvene, drink more beer, give feedback, set schedules and repeat the process. The big downside to the type A collaboration is that about half of the time it doesn't actually result in a performance. New work is generated, ideas come up, there's lots of raw material there, but as the whole thing is so open-ended, if there's not a cutoff point or a deadline or a grant with rules about spending, it's easy to just work and work and tweak and then eventually life gets in the way and you have something, but not the completed work you set out to do. My piece "A Capsule Held Static" was written for a project where musicians would write a score first, and then filmmakers would make a film to it. There was a big meeting with beer, I went away and wrote that piece, but then by the time I finished it the grand project had fallen apart. I'd still like to see a film to this music, but it's certainly had a life of its own as a sound-piece.
Each of these types has significant strengths and weaknesses. Theoretically, it should be possible to start as a Type A collaboration, get some radical new ideas, let them germinate or gestate or whatever metaphor, and then convert your team into a Type B collaboration and pump out professional-level work on a budget, meeting all your deadlines. But this hardly ever happens. It's incredibly hard to convert one into the other.
Why might this be difficult? Well, people with very different skill sets sometimes have a hard time speaking the same artistic language. So for them a Type A collaboration would be challenging— those are, most often, made up of people in the same field: experimental theatre troupes, some bands, some dance companies. Also, once a group has a dynamic and habits and has developed a certain way of working together, it's very hard to just say "okay, we're going to change all that now."
There's one other way to have your cake and eat it too, though: Pixar rather famously has creative teams that work like a Type A collaboration — they sit around generating ideas and concepts and scripts. They work on new animation techniques. And then once a project is ready to go, it gets turned over to the "B" people, who follow a Hollywood timeline and get the thing done so that everyone can make a zillion dollars. This works quite well for them, and I think it does so largely because the teams are (a) separate, but with (b) good communication between them. Also rather importantly/famously, the groups are paid the same and are given the same status within the company. So there's not a sense that certain work at the company is "real" creative work or the "real Pixar" and other stuff is just schlock. (The above link is hilarious, but here are two other good articles on Ed Catmull and the culture of creativity there.)
All of this is most important (thanks for reading this far) not because one kind of collaboration is inherently better than the other— they're not— but simply because any collaboration will go better if all parties know what to expect. We're lacking a vocabulary to talk about these differences, and I think that using these, internally or explicitly, will help you navigate future collaborations more smoothly, to see what people want when they don't know how to say what they want, and to respond in creating in a way that will give you the best experience and end product— and hopefully get you called back the next time.
Student exercise: Write down two examples of collaborations you've had. Say which type you think they were and why. Volunteers to share with the class & discuss. What could have helped this be a better collaboration?Posted by charlie williamsNext, Write down a creative goal and say what type of collaboration you think it should be, and why.
Questions
05.24.2010 Accidental wordle
Working on a Max project, I suddenly needed screen space and dumped all of the explanatory text into a corner. (It flies back into place in "presentation mode", for those 99.5% of you who don't happen use the program)
The text is surprisingly pretty. It occurred to me that it sort of looks like an inelegant Wordle:
I didn't finish it today, and so I can't drink any Pimm's until tomorrow. Motivation is important! And Pimm's is delicious.
Posted by charlie williams
05.23.2010 Wine Label
"Every year, people gather at Maipo church to pray for the safeguard of their lands. Surprisingly, the vineyards seem to have been protected ever since."
Snark-tastic! Subtle! And the wine was good too.
05.23.2010 Stick insects and worms
Okay, okay. We got these a while ago. I'm just now getting around to posting. The stick insects have grown from this:
to this:
Shedding many times in the process, and eating a despicable amount of ivy. That plant may be the most common thing in England, but we might still cause a shortage if this keeps up.
Every week I sneak up to the Museum of Bath at Work with my wirecutters and snip a few branches. They have loads. There's a small child who shouts HELLO if he/she sees me from his/her yard (it's hard to tell with kids sometimes, okay?)
Speaking of androgyny and gender balance, did you know that stick bugs are almost all girls? And that— despite the fact that males exist occasionally in their species— they can reproduce on their own? It's like Jurassic Park meets, I don't know, clams.
We've had two shedding accidents so far. In the first one, a stick got some skin stuck on the end of her tail, causing some problems with excretion. We were afraid she was done for, but no! She's just completely stopped shedding and growing. And maybe some other things, but again: it's hard to tell. All the other bugs are about 4 times bigger than her now. Thankfully they're peaceful and herbivorous, unlike praying mantises.
The second one was more tragic. One of the sticks got caught halfway out of her skin and sort of imploded in the process. It wasn't pretty. I'm hoping it was just a fluke and that the rest of them are happy and healthy, and not barely avoiding such similar incidents each time they molt. It did make me reflect on the benefits of being a vertebrate, though. Snakes wouldn't have that problem because their structure comes from the skeleton; they just use the skin to keep things in. Insects, on the other hand, really are shedding their skeleton each time. And apparently it's a big risky deal.
Around the same time that we got those pets, we got an even more-numerous collection of home-composting red wiggler worms:
Urgent live worms DO keep cool. Soooo cool. Emma named them all Mo'nique, we hydrated the starter-compost block, and emptied the envelope onto it. Within a few seconds they were all out of sight, exploring their new home.
And for the next few days, they were finding the limits of that home. A small but steady parade of dried-out worms at breakfast seemed to siphon off the adventurous among them, and since then they've been quite content. There are some small white mites in there, now, too, but they don't seem to be causing problems or escaping into the rest of the kitchen.
After a bit, we noticed some small round things in the compost. Looking it up on the ol' Internet we found that they were worm eggs! Looking close you can see a tiny, tiny worm inside. (If I had a better camera you could look close and see that right here. Maybe someday.) Then, a week ago or so, tiny baby worms everywhere in the compost!
We must be feeding them the right vegetables.
Posted by charlie williams
05.18.2010 All your Conway are belong to us
I'm working on a series of "game" pieces, where instead of a score the musician(s) have a set of rules that they follow. Each player is trying to win the game according to the rules, by interacting with a computer algorithm.
As you may know, I'm starting with a simple game: Tic Tac Toe. (Or, for the hemisphere I'm in at the moment, Noughts and Crosses.)
My idea for a very complicated game, though, involves manipulating the course of Conway's Game of Life via sound input, trying to get to some prespecified end state. This could produce some beautiful visuals for the audience to watch as the piece/game progresses.
Anyway, I found an implementation of Conway's Life for Max/MSP. (Hooray for not having to program that myself.)
These are my favorite accidental shapes to emerge so far:
If I could make those into an animated GIF, I would. Sigh for proprietary graphics formats.
Once Tic Tac Max is up and running, I will post it here. Email me if you'd like to be a beta tester.
Posted by charlie williams
05.07.2010 My Parallels Line
I know. It's silly. But I always kind of feel like some kind of technological wizard when I boot up a Windows machine INSIDE my MacBook Pro. Seeing the DOS boot and then the not-actually-physically-present graphics card reset... man. Crazy.
Yeah, I'll probably be excited when I get my first virus, too.
04.24.2010 Emma & Charlie's library: Reference section.
Today we got a new bookshelf on freecycle*. Now instead of piles of books on top of one bookcase, we have neatly organized and (at Emma's passionate insistence) alphabetized-by-category collections across two shelves.
Organizing our reference section made me laugh. Here it is, the list of titles in its entirety:
- Collins Canadian Dictionary,
- Collins Carbon Counter,
- Collins gem: Dinosaurs,
- Collins French Dictionary,
- Collins German Dictionary,
- Collins Latin Dictionary Plus Grammar,
- Collins Scrabble Companion,
- Collins gem: Pirates,
- Collins wild guide: Trees,
- Collins gem: Wine,
- Roget's International Thesaurus– Third Edition,
- The Wordsworth Dictionary of Sex,
- The New Harvard Dictionary of Music,
- Tonal Harmony (Kostka & Payne),
- Lonely Planet: Europe,
- Dictionary of Music (Morehead),
- Logic Pro 9 and Logic Express 9,
- Learning Actionscript 3.0,
- A Man About A Dog,
- Rough Guide– First-Time Around The World,
- The Oxford Companion to Music,
- and the Mon Tricot Knitting Dictionary.
*technically, really Freegle, because there was some problem with Freecycle. Whatever.
Posted by charlie williams
04.19.2010 What I'll do after this summer
It's official about the ol' MIT'ness, now. The MIT-miss. Or whatever.
On the upside, just before I found out I was thinking "Man, if I got into MIT it would really kind of screw up my life." I've got things planned through October, and tentative stuff I'm really, really hoping to do in January and throughout next year. So, you know, while a free masters' degree would have been nice and, yes, I would have taken it had they offered, and yes, I'm going to do another, stronger application this fall for 2011, I think I'll have plenty to do and to make and to grow here, and everywhere, just not there.
Also on the upside, I get to stay here and keep doing what I love all the time. Anyone need long-distance composition?
04.03.2010 Favorites and Misses
Exchanging emails with several Chi-town friends (and hearing about the spring weather there! Whoa!) prompted me to make a "things I like here/things I miss" list...
Best things about being here:
- Running through the hilly English countryside and thinking about the last 1000 years in this area. As it turns out, a lot has happened
- Being rid of the mental clutter and habits that come from living in one place for a long time
- Living a life that's almost completely art-driven
- Lots and lots of music. As many great/interesting/successful bands in the Bath/Bristol area as in the whole Midwest, easily, I'd say
- Free health care — even for visitors
- Nearly all of my food comes from within 50 miles of where I live, without me really having to think about it. That's just how the British eat
- Bad meat and good fish makes it easy to eat healthy. Half of that is also how the British eat
- Two sheep in every park, instead of lawnmowers
Things I miss most, besides of course everyone I know and love in Chicago (that's too important to put on a silly list)
- American beer (you know, the good stuff, not what the world knows about)
- Cultural diversity free of connotations of class or immigration-status
- BBQ
- Mexican restaurants open late. Or, anything open late, for that matter
- Lake Michigan and its accompanying parks and trails
- Listening to records on that lovely monitoring system
- Speaking without having to think about accents
- The smell of the air. Here is nice, but I miss there
Thoughts? Posted by charlie williams
03.29.2010 Randomized lightswitches
Based on an idea by Dirty Electronics guy John Richards, I built these today:
I saw his version of this when I went to University of Plymouth's Peninsula Festival of new music and electronics.
Here's another video, with the lights on, so you can see what's going on with the structures themselves:
What's happening is that there's a starter for a fluorescent lightbulb wired into a circuit with a red incandescent bulb. When you turn on the power, the starter tries to "start up" a fluorescent tube that isn't there. It cycles fairly rapidly and completely unpredictably. When it's trying to turn the switch on the circuit is connected and the lightbulb is on. When it's "warming up" the starter itself emits a glow, and the lightbulb is off.
I haven't tested it yet, but supposedly the starters emit a tiny radio shriek every time they turn on and off. So by putting a radio near them you also get a sound effect.
As soon as I can make £10 I'm ordering some ambient light detectors to put on these, so that this randomness can control other things, too.
Posted by charlie williams
03.28.2010 Four recent and illuminating screenshots
First, I may need to cut down on freeware. I'm sometimes close to running out of pixels. But all of these are so useful!
Second, content now needs to be emotionally stable in addition to well-encrypted?
Third, I got Elon's very-helpful Sibelius error:
Fourth, this (seen on NYT's More Articles automator) just made my day. Keep headin' in that direction, Tea Partiers. I'm at a safe distance.
03.07.2010 Hacking Google Street View
In researching an artist residency, I came across American artist Ben Kinsley. I've seen only a little of his art, but he's certainly got a sense of humor and passes the infamous "I'd like to have a beer with that guy" test.
Saliently, he organized a series of street events for the passing Google Street View car, around his neighborhood in Pittsburgh. I found them just by searching for "Sampsonia Way" and then exploring, which is maybe the best way to find it. Block after block of normal street-view, rainy day, sunny day, and then... what's that girl with the umbrella doing there, twice? And then it all goes wild...
Anyone know of other Street View interventions? Besides that poor Finnish guy. (Oh. That's been taken down. Probably for the best.)
Posted by charlie williams
03.05.2010 Outfixed.
Yesterday I gave a lecture on collaboration to Bath Spa University Composition MA students. Preparing for it made me realize how much of my work has been collaborative, and led me to some other insights about collaborative processes that I'll write up soon.
But.
At the end of my presentation, after playing some film score clips, I played "Auto Video: Sorely Missed" from my website, and discovered that the clip there had no sound. Yikes. How did that one slip by me?
It's fixed now. If you were bamboozled by a strangely flickering, silent video before: please go watch it again...
Posted by charlie williams