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My fortnightly visuals gig is now twice as often: Mind! at The Dogstar every Wednesday night. It’s starting to sound like a lot like work…

And yes, I shall continue with the mind puns. I hope you don’t, er, get bothered so much by it. ;o)

I went to Denmark last week to celebrate the double birthday I share with one of my best mates. It’s a somewhat disheartening thought that I’d not seen him for a year, but while I was there I managed to forget about all the time (and troubles) in between and it felt like I’d never left, and the previous birthday was only a week or so ago. Time is a funny thing, or at least our perception of if can be. It’s all in the mind! More tangible, and certainly tastier, were the nice dinners I had – Chinese in a restaurant on Thursday, fried pork (a Danish specialty) at a friend’s house on Friday, turkey at another friend’s on Saturday – not only because of the food, but because they were occasions with friends.

-G.

Posted in: Mind!, The Dogstar, Work by subpixel / Tags: Chinese, fried pork, Mind!, turkey

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I went to Notting Hill this evening, ostensibly for the Notting Hill Carnival, but by the time I arrived the carnival had already finished for the day. I met up with the friend I went to meet, had something to eat and a chat with him and his friends, and afterwards we went into The Duke of Wellington on Portobello Road. It was crowded. Extremely crowded. Had been there for a while with my bag and a jacket on a table behind a couch against the wall in the corner, and left them there while I went outside for about a quarter of an hour to make a phonecall. Before the end of that call I’d mentioned that I’d hoped no-one had nicked my stuff, and was relieved to find it moved slightly, but still there. Five or ten minutes later, different story. Oh… no… don’t tell me…

Suffering from attachment. Attachment to the bag, which on days gone by traveled and journeyed with me to faraway places attached to my main backpack. Attachment to the jacket, which, while I didn’t really like it, served a purpose. Attachment to the stack of fliers I’d stickered and written on the night before, which I was going to give away of course, but had some intangible (and potential financial) value. Attachment to the £1.49 can opener that I’d bought last year in London, taken home to Sydney and brought back to Europe with me this year; on a few occasions it gave access to that basic necessity of food, and with that a small feeling of power and majesty. Attachment to the £3 mini tripod I’d bought for my camera at a computer fare off Tottenham Court Road; though I’d only used it a few times, it held so much potential. Attachment to the daggy emergency rain poncho that my mum had given to me as one of the many small items she thought I might need just before I left home for Europe last year. I drive her crazy sometimes, but in her own small ways she still tries to protect me. Attachment to the tiny bottle of Blink’n'Clean, which i don’t think I can reasonably leave home wearing contact lenses without, even though I often don’t use it while I’m out, and I knew I’d have to replace eventually. Attachment to the memories that are triggered by any and all of the physical objects that are now gone. In the bag was more than stuff, it was a connection to my past, to where I have been and to who I am. I’ve always been a hoarder, and I think I’ve just discovered why. I’m afraid of forgetting. If a picture is worth a thousand words, how many words is an object worth? It is a picture, many pictures, and more.

It is a strange situation that the entire area of the carnival was teeming with police, but something basic like theft of personal belongings goes on regardless. I asked one of the several officers standing outside (some five or ten metres from the scene of the crime!) about reporting it and was given the location of an area designated for making reports, a few minutes’ walk away.

Before going there, I spoke to the manager at the bar and was surprised at how helpful he was. His opinion is that theft is really terrible, that taking other people’s things to sell for maybe a few pounds is really low. He took me up to the office to review the CCTV footage. Unfortunately, even though there was one camera facing that corner, it was too dark and far away to be able to reasonably make out details of who was there or what was going on. He took down my details, but I don’t think there’s anything more he can do.

I made a report at the special location then headed back towards the tube. The bar was just closing, so I had a quick look around inside to make sure my things weren’t on the floor somewhere – of course they weren’t, but it didn’t cost much to check. The main cost left was the fact that this fussing about meant that the tube had now closed and I had to find another way home. The P.C. who took my report called to let me know that he’d entered the report into the system, give me a reference number and ask for a couple of more details. The police here seem to be mostly polite and helpful where they can be.

There was a long queue in the Biegel shop in Brick Lane on my way home. All I wanted was a sausage roll, and I had to have an argument with the guy who’d jumped the queue in front of me. Somewhat by accident, perhaps, but his explaination to his friend that it was better I be let in front because I was angry (about the theft) belied the fact that he was the person who was being unreasonable in the first place.

Good news when I arrived home – I’d asked SCEEN Magazine about how to obtain a copy of issue #2 and they wrote back to me to say how (and that i can get it delivered to London). Yay! More good news that a Couchsurfer in Linz can host me for the duration of the Ars Electronica Festival next month. Double yay! I also have an email from Unity Selekta about some tracks to practice with for Mind! – even though it is ‘work’, it is still good news. Oh, and I left out that just the fact that my home is still here and it hasn’t been robbed is good news! My laptop is still here (typing on it now) and iPod, left on the table in my room, and I’m supposing everything in my pack, which is (unlike the day bag taken from the bar) locked and cable-attached to the wall… there seems to be a little bit of inconsistency in my managing of security!

-G.

Posted in: Ars Electronica, CouchSurfing, Festivals, Personal Security, Work by subpixel / Tags: Notting Hill Carnival

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From the What’s Cooking? department…

I’ve been to a couple of VJ events this week: the vjlondon.org meetup on Wednesday at T-Bar, and Immersion (a live experimental electronic music + visuals gig) on Thursday in The Flea Pit. I’ll mention that it’s great now living in Shoreditch, as both these venues are only a short walk away from my flat! :o)

Back to the story… it has occurred to me on more than one occasion that I will probably want (need?) to get into 3D at some point, and at these two events I saw some nice interactive 3D animation by pixelpusher (Evan Raskob), an earlier version of which can be seen in the video from the previous post (London VJ Meeting, Wed 9 July at T-Bar). I’m talking about the kinetic squiggles (which are input as gestures via his digital tablet) which zoom around. Evan had been working on this simple idea since last meetup, upgrading it from 2D only to 2D and 3D (combined), allowing multiple gestures to be loaded up as a set before “launching” (these are my own terms, I don’t know what Evan calls them!). I’ll have to clear some space on my Laptop (or get hold of another external drive – the one I brought with me from Sydney is out of reach at a friend’s house while they are at the Boom! festival in Portugal!) to upload the video I took at the event, and until then all I can say is that it looked quite amazing. That particular visual is produced in Processing from processing.org. I haven’t had much of a play with it just yet, but it looks promising! From the home page:

Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions. It is used by students, artists, designers, researchers, and hobbyists for learning, prototyping, and production. It is created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook and professional production tool. Processing is an alternative to proprietary software tools in the same domain.

I’ve also had a word in my ear from Dr Mo about XNA the last couple of times we’ve met. I’d had the idea that I might use DirectX to build my own visuals engine at some point, and Mo’s feedback is that XNA is nice to work with, especially as the coding is done in C#.

I found myself installing the XNA Game Studio last night and discovered there is a free 3D modeling package: Truespace 7(.6) from Caligari. Upon further investigation I see that Caligari (or at least this product) is now owned by Microsoft, hence the plug from XNA. I remember the name “Caligari 4D”, and think it may have even been one of the packages available back in the day of the Amiga.

In any case, this eventually ends up in looking at videos of 3D animations, and this excellent example appears in Vimeo Staff’s Choice Picks:

Interstellar Sugar – Suryummy from Suryummy on Vimeo.

It reminds me of stuff done by the demoscene crew Farbrausch. If you like Suryummy’s video, you should check out the stuff that Farbrausch pump out in real-time!

Of course this video was created with software other than TrueSpace. Suryummy lists in a comment: maya, adobe*3, particular, live, reactor, absynth.

There is talk on the London Electronic Music Meetup (EMM) group about an Ableton Live DJ Workshop on a Saturday some time soon. I saw Live being used at Funckarma’s Dubstoned ep launch in London, but it wasn’t a “live” set, it was a DJ set, using Live. I want to know more… about using Live generally, but also because I know it has some sort of capability for triggering visuals. I have a project to work on with a DJ here in London, Unity Selekta, to produce visuals for his gigs, and I think I’m going to need some sort of sequencer. Live may be that sequencer.

-G.

Posted in: 3D Animation, C#, Group Meetings, Interactive, Parties & Nightlife, Personal Education, Processing, Shoreditch, T-Bar, The Flea Pit, VJ / Visuals, VJlondon.org, Work by subpixel / Tags: Ableton Live, demoscene, Dr.Mo, Farbrausch, Funckarma, Immersion, pixelpusher

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YouTube video link: Filmclip: Conqueror | Jun 08 by spxl

I met with reggae DJ Unity Selekta in Brixton to discuss visuals for his gigs, and made this video while he played a track.

The turtle in the was spotted swimming about the aquarium in the O2 Shopping Centre in Swiss Cottage (London, Jubilee Line).

Visuals and video by subpixel
http://subpixels.com

Track (unknown) played by Unity Selekta
http://www.myspace.com/unityselekta

Brixton, London, United Kingdom
Wed 25 June 2008
YouTube Category: Music
YouTube Tags: spxl subpixel visuals reggae

Posted in: Brixton, Music, Subpixel, Subpixel's Creations, Video, VJ / Visuals, Work by subpixel / Tags: reggae, turtle, Unity Selekta

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Not just one. Not even two. Three. And a bit. count ‘em! One!.. order of magnitude. Ah-ah. Two!.. orders of magnitude. Ah-ah. Three!.. Three orders of magnitude! Ah-ah!

Orders of what, you ask? Space. Not to move, but maybe to ‘grow’. I’ve been long suffering with disk space issues – Windows telling me that volume D: is low on space, and Volume C: is very low on space – seemingly every few minutes – was starting to get to me. It’s only taken me a week (since I took it down from the cupboard) to get my external drive reconnected. We’ve been ‘apart’ for about 8 months now… the separation anxiety must have passed some time ago. Probably swallowed up by the experience of roaming about in Europe for a few months. Anyhow, my hundred-meg-or-so between two internal drive partitions situation has improved by over a thousand times: the external disk G: has 255 gigabytes free. Even though I know it’s true, it’s hard to really fathom. Two and a half thousand times more space. Wow. Who’da thunk it? It brings into perspective how much we really take technology for granted.

My first hard drive, an A590 side-car unit for my Amiga 500, was 20MB, with an (at the time) impressive 2MB Fast-Ram expansion. Sure, it was a step up from using floppies, but it wasn’t all that massive; only – around 25 discs. These days you can score a Terabyte drive for not much more (actually… maybe less!) than the A590 was back in the day. Of course you need to account for inflation, and back then I didn’t have so much spare cash… but still, a terabyte is over 200 DVDs. Er, let me recalculate that – to be fair I should probably be talking dual layer DVDs, not single layer… Well, you do the math. It’s still an impressive number of whatever units you’re talking about.

I’ve used my ‘little’ USB memory stick these past couple of days (not amazingly effectively, but at least got it out of my bag and plugged it into something!) – even that raises the question of how this $100+ piece of technology from only 2 years ago can now be had for around $10 (for 1GB, and okay, maybe the brand makes a difference, but sill). The mind boggles. In the same timeframe it seems that drink prices have gone up a couple of bucks… who is making the money? (Or, perhaps more worthy of consideration, what are we, generally, wasting out money on?) Something isn’t right.

In all, I wish I was ‘wasting my money’ out at Wiseman’s Ferry this weekend, catching the likes of Kruder & Dorfmeister, Steve Bug, and Tiefschwarz at the Playground Weekender music festival. Had a case of the kinda-sensibles and decided I need to focus a bit on work… what’s happening to me?! For future reference, leaving the office nearly 24 hours after you arrive probably isn’t that sensible. At least not without a proper nap. :o)

I think K&D are doing a 4 hour audiovisual set tonight. Probably right now. Can’t hear it. Can’t see it. Missing out! Actually, I think Tiefschwarz are meant to be playing at the Chinese Laundry tonight… I went down to Laundy a couple of weeks ago to see Gui Boratto – I went to see him at Fabric in London last year, but was disappointed by the situation with the room being too crowded to dance in. And what was it like at Laundy two weeks ago? Bloody awful… stood outside in the queue for an hour, watching dozens of people on the ‘guestlist’ go in before me. Even after 1am. Poor form, Laundry. Poor form. When I asked about the situation at the front desk, I was informed that ‘this is common now in Sydney’. News to me. I can only hope the girl was lying or sadly mistaken. In any case, Gui did good, but the venue failed. I don’t think I’ll be heading back there for any more gigs in the near future. 25 bucks for a 1 hour wait with inconsiderate door staff and/or a really awful door policy (most of the people waiting were pretty pissed off).

Enough of the bad stuff already!… I’ve been rearranging some files on my drives (internal and external) to make better use of the available s.p.a.c.e… and became distracted by some software lying about. A mysterious ISO I had sitting in a temp folder: OpenCD v07.02, file date in March last year. What’s this?.. Ahh.. an Open Source software compilation. :o) The Open CD project is no longer active, but seems to have turned in to Open Disc – High quality open source software for Windows. Worth a look. In any case, as a result ended up downloading a newer version of Inkscape (an Open Source vector graphics editor) and had a squiggle. I should get my Wacom tablet out and start doing some more squiggles… I want some more vector-art-type stuff to use as overlays in my visuals, and would prefer to use my own content if I can, though might have an experiment for a while mixing ‘available’ materials.

-G.

PS: News just in (shortly after posting this item) via text message from a friend:

Hey giorgio! Future music fest 2day-night, chemical bros best fucken visual show i ever saw! U missed a good one.

Double damn!! ;o)

Posted in: Computing, Festivals, Graphics, Science & Technology, Software, Subpixel's Creations, Work by subpixel / Tags: Gui Boratto, Inkscape, Kruder & Dorfmeister, Open Source Software, Playground Weekender, Steve Bug, The Open Disc, Tiefschwarz

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At the end of last year one of my mates was talking about problems he was having with staff for his company. They’d hired a graduate who looked good on paper but who then didn’t turn out so well. Following was a process of interviewing other potential employees, this time with some technical questions in the interview, and my friend was dismayed at the general lack of fundamental understanding from candidates – people who have supposedly completed degrees in computer science (or related) but who have problems with some basic concepts.

He asked if he could run the questions by me to see what I thought, and we sat out on his balcony one afternoon with him asking them to me similarly to in his interviews (perhaps a little less formally!). He’d lent me a book on C# programming the week before, and although at that point I’d only read around the first five chapters, that knowledge, and a vague recollection of some things I’d learned about C++ in uni many years ago, was enough to get me through more of the questions than any of the candidates he’d interviewed. After that he suggested that if I could get ‘up to speed’ in .Net then he might hire me… well, we’ve been talking about it some more, and I’ve been doing some learnin’ at home and in his office, and this week the company gave me an offer. Signed it today, so now it’s official. :o)

Of course now it means I have a little less free time on my hands, but it is in the city, so maybe I’ll be out and about a bit more.

The office is on the other side of the block to where I used to live. It’s a pity that now live out in the ‘burbs… I miss my city apartment!

-G.

Posted in: C#, Sydney, Work by subpixel /
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