Haruka is the Official Illustrator for our Dirty Suzie project. She is also the artist responsible for the 100 Hugs project.
I managed to grab this (slightly photoshopped) picture of Haruka at the end of a Kabuki photoshoot she was doing for Blessi. She was just removing her makeup when I stopped her for this (hopefully not too clichéd) split identity look.
Long time no post, and as I’ve been and still am very busy this one will be short.
The 3rd year Sculpture, Performance, and Installation students (myself included) are holding a little mid-semester state-of-art exhibition in the College of Fine Arts performance space. A few images are currently online in a Flickr set, but there shall be more soon, once I get some more from Maja.
I put in two works; one quick and fun readymade, and an electronic sculpture that took quite some effort to make. The second is called “A device for measuring time”, and presents itself as an absurd device that counts with no reference to standard time periods or divisions. It’s all about the subjectivity of time, and how this reality conflicts with the presentation of time in political/economic/rat-race word as vitally concrete.
Not much blog activity recently - sorry.
Check out the placeholder for the Dirty Suzie (subculture photo magazine) website. It features an exquisite illustration by Haruka Nishii, and is sitting happily at http://www.dirtysuzie.com.
Please comment any feedback you have for it.
I’ve now set up the Internet TV infrastructure to allow us to easily host a “video channel” of Carrie & Vostok episodes. A Carrie & Vostok channel is available which, in after downloading Democracy, will allow easy subscription to episodes downloaded distributively via BitTorrent.
The channel is empty at the moment, but hopefully will soon be teeming with movies! 
Musical Instrument Digital Interface, or MIDI, is an industry-standard electronic communications protocol that defines each musical note in an electronic musical instrument such as a synthesizer, precisely and concisely, allowing electronic musical instruments and computers to exchange data, or “talk”, with each other. MIDI does not transmit audio - it simply transmits digital information about a music performance. (from Wikipedia entry)
Many may know that I’m a keen musician with some sound engineering experience. This project is to combine music and geekery interests and see what comes out of the mix. Yesturday I completed my first MIDI device. It is just a test of concept really; the first step in hopefully some more advanced MIDI/sound manipulation.
I use a PIC16F84 chip at 4Mhz to directly talk to whatever MIDI device the circuit is connected to. The homebrewed MIDI transmit code was taken from Ross Bencina’s site on MIDI development with PIC and Basic Stamp which, if you are interested, is a great resource.
Here is some of the technical material to help you get started quickly on your own MIDI project:
Edit: If you are experimenting at all with MIDI output devices, you will probably benifit from a computer based MIDI monitoring program. This lets you examine the raw MIDI data being sent by your device, and helps greatly in troubleshooting. I am currently using the aptly titled MIDI Monitor found at OBD Software as it is free and does a fine job.
Edit: I’ve recently completed a remote automation project that lets you turn 110-240vac devices on and off via the a webpage or WAP on a mobile phone. It’s a very fun project! If you’d be interested in a write-up (schematics, code, etc) then leave a comment here, and I’ll get writing!
The Beautiful Machine - 2005
The Beautiful Machine was both an opportunity to design and etch my own circuit, and a cathartic personal engagement with my love-interest of the time.
The face of said love-interest is etched onto one side of a dual-sided circuitboard, and forms part of the circuit. On the other side is a solid state arrangement to control the segmented LEDs. There are two-modes; “LOVE” and “NONE”. Not particularly difficult to interpret, although it reflected my surprise at how quickly and profoundly changes can happen.
Gateway - 2005
Mid-february 2005 I returned from a working trip to Holland, where I had been working on a 3-month IT contract. All this exercise of the left hemisphere, as well as the experience of being around nerds for months, had left me in an odd head-space that obliged me to make this art.
Gateway is a 50cm x 50cm fantasy landscape featuring Z-guage figures of people and cows. It can be reasonably described as a chintzy engagement with a metaphore for the internet / virtual reality; The tiny figures approach and stare in awe at a huge silver metalic, flashing, phalic tower which thrusts out of the earth - Go Go new technology!
Surveillance - 2005
Having gotten Gateway out of my system, I set about producing something a little more substantial and edifying. Surveillance was my first relatively mature video-piece, and uses captured and manipulated stills of Gateway. Surveillance is stylistically and thematically inspired by the admittedly quite clichéd Cyberpunk genre (images relating to neural-networks, etc), but also is the progeny of our contemporary “War-against-Terror” governement policies. There is a dab of humour in it too.
Those interested can view a reduced-quality version of the video (1.26mb).
I guess I should disclaim that neither of these artworks was really intended to further the Great Artistic Discourse, and were mainly giving me the opportunity to experiment with various media and themes. However, I think Surveillance managed to subvert the originally naive kitch of Gateway.
Last year I created an interactive installation using a wooden sphere as the interface through a to a piece of custom-programmed software. Since then it has been renamed from Panarbocon to Natural Experience, and exhibited as part of Elastic 2005; 3rd Annual Emerging Art and Design Award.
Here finally is a 744kb clip of the view through Natural Experience (WMV format can be played on Macs using the VLC player), as someone uses the wooden sphere. Interacting with the sphere allows you to “look” 360° around the forrest panorama. The clip is pretty short, and does not rotate more than a few degrees, but it can allow you a better impression of what the experience of using it is like.
I’m in the process of blogging descriptions of a few of my older artworks, for the sake of completeness and a sense of progression. This is the first, there are more to come which will be similarly titled…
Unattached - 2004
This work was exhibited as what appeared to be a normal, unplugged telephone on a plinth. The quick dial buttons had labels such as “The Queen”, “Elvis”, and “Mum” thanks to a friend, and many people at the exhibition thought that that was all there was to it.
There was in fact more going on, and those who jokingly lifted the receiver to their ear and said hello, or those who had seen others using it and tried it themselves found that there was a conversation going on over the phone. True to an aim at sincere and truthful artwork, I had rung up girls that I liked, and recorded the conversation as I asked them out. The result was that I had about 10 minutes of recorded conversation of getting rejected. :S These conversations were burned onto a CD, and played through a discman connected to a homebuilt short-distance FM transmitter, to be picked up a radio wired into the apparently disconnected telephone (The radio power was patched through the phone so that the radio was only on while the phone was “off the hook”).
The willful masochism of ringing these girls and getting rejected was one of the most draining experiences I can remember!
via Boing Boing:
A new suite of free and open tools let you watch TV, make TV, and recommend TV in a way that’s easier, cheaper and more accessible than ever before.
A pakage like the Democracy suite was inevitable - combining the technologies of RSS (syndication/subscription), BitTorrent (scalable distribution), and VLC (multi-format, multi-platform video player) to form an essential tool for the new internet-based grassroots video distribution model.
Democracy has just been released as beta for PC, with a Mac version already released and Linux on the way. It seems well-suited to take its place as an ubiquitous technology to replace conventional TV.
The experience of Democracy is great. Fire it up, pick some channels, and leave it running. Flip to it whenever you want to watch your video — it’s as easy as turning on a TV…
I’m sure those of you who pay an interest to this blog will know that my colleagues and I are working on an epidsodal, free-range video narrative called Carrie & Vostok (more information through its dedicated site). Essentially it brings the stylistic diversity of the world’s budding video poducers/artists together in a conceptually coherent narrative about two characters - capturing the postmodern nature of different gazes apon any scenario. I don’t really need to explain how Democracy has arrived at the perfect time to fit the needs of this project. Serendipity or providence?
Subscribe to all content
You are currently browsing the archives for the My Projects category.
| www.flickr.com |