Jenny and I DVR the show Project Runway and after the end of the show there is always the leftover first five minutes of the next program.  Directly following Project Runway is this weird show called “On The Road with Austin and Santino”.  Everytime it comes on I get confused with thoughts like, “What IS this show?”  and “Who IS that guy?”.

It’s basically two designers, one flamboyantly gay one and one sort of New Jersey trying-to-be-tough-guy-but-really-can’t-because-he’s-partnered-with-this-guy guy, go to some middle american persons home and give them some kind of makeover.  
 
The flamboyantly gay one is Austin and it’s not that he’s flamboyantly gay that cracks me up, it’s just the faces he makes, especially in his interview setups. I bet the editors of this show have a lot of laughs at the hilarious freeze frames that grace their monitors so often.  The drawing I did is a freeze frame from one of those interview setups.  Within a four second piece of interview footage I was able to pull tons of funny faces.  I had to be pretty selective and ultimately it was really tough to decide which one to draw.

Anyways, here is the drawing I did.  I don’t really feel like I was able to capture that special something that makes his face really so funny to me. He kind of just looks like a surprised guy. Oh well.  I don’t know which one I like better, with the rays behind him or without.  I think the one without the rays may be funnier but I also like with.

I had a hell of a time getting the hex touch-plate section to look correct in perspective.  Where I ultimately left it was a compromise and it still doesn’t look very good to me.  Before I finish the complete design I will have to fix the proportions of the Hex-plate.  The keyboard body is based off of a Roland System 100 keyboard.

I still think it looks like a rad melding of two kinds of synths but it still needs tweaking to really hit the concept home.

I downloaded Inkscape because I don’t own illustrator.  Inkscape is a free open source alternative to illustrator.  It has a few things that I find kind of quirky but overall I think it works pretty well.  I’m still getting to the bottom of it anyway so at the moment I’m fairly uneducated on the ins and outs of the program.

This was the first time I’ve ever used a tablet to draw something in the computer.  I have to say it was a revelation. I just went freehand with the pencil tool.  I haven’t had as much fun drawing since I was a kid drawing alone in my bedroom on a school night.  I remember finding a certain peace and enjoyment drawing when I was a kid.  I could seriously draw for hours back then.  Nowadays, I get bored easier and distracted.

Last night was a good night.

Bongo’s a great guy and a kindred spirit in the DIY sense.  He is a maker himself.  He dabbles in woodworking and electronics.  He’s built a many things including a laser harp with his son and an absolutely beautiful 128 Monome out of walnut and basswood (check it out!).  We have corresponded through email before playing with the idea of building a floor model monome that you play by hopping on it with your feet.  That would be too cool!

He has taken on the application called Pure Data in order to create applications for the monome.  He has already created a Pure Data version of the most popular monome app MLR.  Pure Data is a program for building programs.  You connect little boxes that perform functions together with patch cables.  It’s the equivalent to MAX5 except that it’s totally free.  Though its much less popular than MAX and the interface is a little uglier it’s completely free and open source, which is in sync with the whole philosophy of the monome company.
 

Anyways, hopefully this demo video will drum up some more users of his app because it is pretty awesome.  In a nutshell, it’s MLR with an on the fly switchable sample bank.  Meaning you can have up to 56 different loops loaded in a single set.  What’s more is that when you record patterns with it you can switch out the loop on the fly and here how the pattern sounds with different loops.  This, to me, is definitely the most fun part of the app.

You can download the app for yourself here.

There is a whole lot more functionality to the app that I didn’t even get to in the video below but I did show some of the basics.  I hope you enjoy!

I could have filmed these guys all night.  I would get one insect in place and then I would shoot it for twenty to thirty minutes.  There wasn’t a bad angle.  The tough part was performing pans and tilts on them.  It’s not very easy to slowly pan across a half inch of space.  I found that if I held my breath and tensed my stomach muscles I could get some fairly smooth camera movements.

The video below is just a taste of the overall footage I captured.  It’s also just a teensy sampling from Colleens collection.  (by the way, the two boxes of insects in the picture above is only one part of her collection).  I plan on doing more shoots with these insects.  I’m playing with the idea of working them into one of the music videos I’m slated to work on.  I also think it would be awesome to try out The Sphere Arm on some of these guys.

Well, I hope you like the video below.  The music in it is a song called “Happy But Years Behind” from an artist named hlp and it was created for the Monome Community Remix Project V2

Well, I spun my wheels real good on friday night but saturday night and some of sunday afternoon were real good.  I was able to add a new feature to 64(video)Fingers which is long overdue.  One of the biggest problems with my app was that in order to record seamless patterns you needed external sync or some kind of click track to know what the tempo was.

Now, that isn’t a problem because I added a new toggle mode for the buttons.  Now, you can choose to individually toggle each video clip on or off and select the division you want it to repeat at.  That way the video clips can act as their own click track and you can record your patterns easily over top.  It’s still not perfect but it can already be pretty fun to stack video clips on top of each other and play with their rate of looping.

The video is cut up a little because I am pretty horrible at performing on the monome without practicing a bunch but it does demonstrate how you can stack looping clips over one another to create a rhythm which you can then record your patterns over.  The app actually preforms better than the video shows.  You can see some freezing happen in the video frame but I think it was due to the screen capture software.

Anyways, I hope you enjoy!

Anyways, I knew how I was going to accomplish it.  Then I got to patching and ran into brick wall after brick wall after brick wall.  Max 5 can be the most frustrating software.  Searching for answers in the documentation can very time consuming.  I usually think I’ve found my answer but then run into another brick wall.  You’d think it’d be a breeze because it’s a visual programming environment except sometimes I think it hinders me from making clean patches.  I have the tendency to make gigantic mouse traps just add up some numbers.

Oh well.  I posted on the monome forums and my good buddy Raja came with an answer.  He actually pointed out that I had the right idea!  The problem didn’t have anything to do with my quantize patch but has everything to do with my 64(video)Fingers patch.  Unfortunately, I think it might just be another monster mouse trap without needing to be.  I will be putting a bit more attention on this app because I want to use it soon.

I have been selecting out some of the shots I recorded a long time ago for my office Instruments posts.  I really want to put together an office instruments preset on my 64(video)Fingers.  Anyways, thanks for listening.

I decided to take my camera out and hit the streets. Perhaps, I thought I could capture some macro textures from around Fullerton. I stopped by a Fullerton bar called Mulberry Street to see the Nerdy Thursday show put on by my friend Jesse La Tour. I watched the show until it ended around midnight.

I still hadn’t done anything creative. I told my friend Kevin that I was heading out to find some creative thing to do and he perked up right away. He quickly began throwing out all of these ideas. I was flattered by the fact that he was so energized to help me out.

So I decided to do one of his ideas. The idea was we approach someone outside and get them to say 5 to 9 words. Then we’d go up to somebody else, tell them the previous words and get them to continue the thought with 5 to 9 more words and so on and so on.

I thought it was a cool idea as I am a big fan of improvisation but I think maybe we chose the wrong time of day to do it because pretty much everybody was inebriated. It devolved pretty quickly but it’s all good. It was a good idea that I would be willing to try again but next time I’d be stricter and I’d do it during the day.

I should warn you that if you have children who follow the blog with you that this one might be a little inappropriate for them. I like to keep the blog kid-friendly for the most part because creativity should be for all ages. Never the less, here it is.

Anyways, her voice is just one of her musical talents.  While we were cleaning out her sewing room I came across this sheet music.  It’s a composition that Jenny wrote for Piano and Clarinet.  I photocopied it and tucked it away for a future creative project.  Tonight I decided to finally start that project up.

I went through and deciphered the piano part and recreated it with midi notes in Ableton Live.  Man, it was not easy.  This is no simple piece of music.  You now how most songs, as original as they may be, have some sort of repetition to them.  Well, this one doesn’t really.  Each bar has something new and a little different to it.  So reading it and translating it to midi was a real challenge.

The song is called “Niobid”.  It relates to the children of Niobe in greek mythology but I don’t really know the story so well.  I will have to question Jenny about it.  It really is a beautiful piece though.  This is only the piano part.  I will be adding the clarinet next.  I did the best that I could to give the midi notes some life by adjusting their velocity and position.

I hope you enjoy.

I don’t think this one turned out as good as my previous fluid macros on Day 169 / Miniature Cosmos but the ingredients I used this time around were a bit more creative.  In the video below you will see (in order of appearance) chicken stock with saffron (given to me by my friend Dave who cooked an incredible meal that night), squeezed tomato juices, the fluid from a snowglobe, the snowglobe fluid mixed with balsamic vinegar and olive oil, and finally, rancid stagnant creek water.

The music in this one comes from the Monome Haiti Benefit Album.  The title is “071011″ and it was made by Kelly Cain and Brian Crabtree, the creators of the Monome.

I hope you like!

What happens is I create a new thing called a “class” and inside of that class is all the code for one particular thing within my overall program.  It allows me to encapsulate blocks of code which I can then initialize multiple times in my main body of code.  So, if I design a class that draws a car on the screen I can then very quickly make a full freeway of cars.  It’s still a little shady in my head but I am understanding the basics of it now.

Below is my sketch which now uses class functionality.  For the sake of variety I have changed the code up a bit so that it’s something sort of new for you to play with.  You can download the source code for this sketch here.

I’m hoping to experiment quite a bit with different combinations of things.  I’m looking forward to gutter water or algae laden stream water where perhaps there are little creatures swimming around in it.  Last night I filmed some basic household fluids.  When you watch the video below you will see (in order of appearance) Frothy soap bubbles, balsamic vinegar mixed with olive oil and rum, diet coke and finally dishwashing soap.

I filmed everything using a camera stand with the lens peering directly into a petrie dish.  Below that was the lightbox which lit everything up.  The music in the video below is by a monome user named Stephen Ball.  He created the song for the Monome Community Remix Project V3.  It’s really the perfect track for this montage.

Enjoy!

It’s funny.  This blog has been extremely helpful when it comes to thinking creatively, and I’ve done more creative projects in half a year than I’ve done in just about my whole life.  But where this blog actually hinders me is in learning things on a long term basis.  I could never practice guitar for this blog.  Sure, I could do it for one night and consider it a creative thing but I can’t as well post guitar practice every night.

So, late saturday night I made a patch on the modular.  I started with a technique called “Cross-Modulation”.  Cross-Modulation is hard to explain.  I plan on doing a video demonstrating cross-modulation more in depth in the future.  For now I will describe the basics.  Basically, OSC1 and OSC2 are sent to the speakers.  OSC1 is modulating OSC2, and get this, OSC2 is also modulating OSC1.  Huh?  Yeah, it can hurt your brain a little when you try to picture what is going on.  In a sense each oscillator is sort of battling each other for control and actually, that’s just what it sounds like.

Cross-modulation can scream but it can create beautiful sounds as well.  For this patch, I found a sweet spot and then sequenced the Pulse width of OSC2 with a make-shift sequencer using a mixer and a clock divider.  I sent both OSC’s through their own Lowpass filter.  I sent the Ringmod out through another lowpass and into input three on the mixer.  Finally, I sent my last remaining Oscillater, OSC3, and sent it through a lowpass gate, the BBD analog delay and into input 4 of the mixer.  I created another makeshift sequencer using the rotating clock divider and a mixer and sent it through the quantizer into the CV of OSC3, which created the high pitched scales.

Finally, on Sunday, I patched Volta into it and recorded a performance.  I changed up the sequences and recorded a second performance.  I added my drumbeat in Ableton.  The drumbeat comes from my creative project on Day 104.  And Finally, I went through and cut the performances down into a single five minute song. This doesn’t count as my creative thing for Sunday. I’ll be posting that one tomorrow.
 
I hope you will enjoy!

Watch out, this one is a little noisy.

I’d been planning on trying this out for awhile now.  When I saw this post on the MAKE blog about an artist who sculpts things out of the graphite on the tip of a pencil I knew I had to try it out.  I read that he uses no magnification at all and his sculpting tools are a razor blade and a sewing needle.
 
Last night, I got home from work early and Jenny had plans to go out with the girls.  So, I found myself alone in the house with a lot of time on my hands, the perfect time to try this project out.  I grabbed a pencil, a razor and a sewing needle and I sat down and zoned in on this for an hour or two.
 
I didn’t expect to make anything beautiful of course.  I did expect that it would be a discovery process and it was.  It’s interesting that he uses no magnification because once I got this sculpture in front of the macro lens I realized that parts of it weren’t exactly what I expected.
 
There was a point though, while sculpting, that the pencil tip just fell into focus for me and I had no problem seeing what I was doing.  One weird effect that I was experiencing was that I saw the sculpture as one thing while using my left hand then I’d switch to my right hand and it suddenly looked different to me.  Weird brain trick maybe.
 
Anyways, I’d be willing to try this again.  It’s a very meditative and you find yourself breathing slower in order to get control of your wrist.  It’s fun also to make something so small and then see  it in the macro lens.

The idea began with the interest in making a “for” loop which would, when mouse pressed, create a series of circles each 10 pixels larger than the next.  I had trouble making it work in time.  What would end up happening is I would press the mouse and instantly all the circles would appear at once rather than one after the other.  That’s when I hit the reference material and found a function called “millus”.  Millus stands for milliseconds and it allows you to trigger code at any point within time.  It took a little finagling to get it to work but thanks to the Learning Processing book it eventually did.

After I finally got it working I decided to go into the sketch and change the circle into a rectangle and then into a line.  Each shape had it’s own unique quality.  I wanted to set a keyboard command to switch between the shapes but that is where I couldn’t go any further.  I plan on implementing it once I get to the bottom of how it’s done but for the meantime I decided to just post all three sketches for you to play with.  
 
The circular one is my favorite but sometimes I think the line one is the best. Oh well.

Have fun!

 
 
 
The Circular Sketch:  To begin, click and hold the mouse in position to see the circles appear.  Then play with mouse movement.  The ‘z’ key will clear the screen.  The ‘a’ key will add the second effect and the ‘s’ key will remove the second effect.

 
 
 
The Rectangular Sketch:  This one works the same as the first.

 
 
 
The Line Sketch:  This one works similarly to the two above but you will notice the behavior of the line is a little unexpected.

I decided to follow her progress and see how she adjusted her sketch.  Eventually, I broke away and experimented with my own ideas.  The thing with Processing is that it can be pretty easy to understand the basics of how it works and translates your code but without experimentation it can be tough to figure out how to use that knowledge.   For me, I decided to play with lines and the different ways to have lines connected to the mouse position.

To play, click and drag in the box below.  The ‘z’ key will clear the screen.  Enjoy!

So, I’m back to figuring out how to do my creative thing while at the office.  This particular creative thing sounds boring at first but it turned out surprisingly cool.  It’s kind of a throwback to my previous office instruments posts.  I did a few of those posts.

I filmed and recorded the room tone of various places throughout the office.  Each location has it’s own unique sound.  After I collected the footage I brought it into final cut pro for editing.  The concept was I’d start off slow and then ramp up until the room tones are quickly being sequenced one after the other.  Eventually, they are going by so fast that it turns into a room tone rhythm.  I also got a little crazy with the editing.

Check out the video!  And I recommend listening with headphones if you don’t have external speakers.  The true beauty of these sounds can’t really be appreciated on laptop speakers.

I hope you enjoy!

A Doepfer LED

A Doepfer Knob

A Doepfer 1/8 Jack (ugly eh?)

A Patch Cable

An 1/8 plug

The Woodgrain on a Monome

A Monome Button

Work is beginning to ramp up again and last night I worked pretty late.  I didn’t have much time to do my creative thing but luckily it was an opportunity for me to test out my new crazy lens.  I had always planned on renting this lens for a Macro week on the blog.  Inspired by the film “The Fountain” and for a music video I was working on at the time I had always planned on doing some Macro fluid experiments.  I got a chance to do something similar on Day 048 when my co-worker Todd brought in an Eye-Clops microscope camera to work but with this lens I could be recording it all in Full HD! Imagine the Slitscan experiments.
 
I had figured on renting it for a week but about a month ago I spotted it for sale at a local camera shop.  They had marked it down almost 50%!  I thought, “shoot, I could sell this guy for more than that on Ebay”  So, I opted to purchase it.  I will be selling of some vintage lenses that I don’t really use anymore to offset the cost so I may post a link to those when they go up on Ebay.
 
Most of these pictures are at full magnification except for the picture of the #4 near the top.  Suffice to say, I am looking forward to seeing the world in a new way.

I made another variation on a code.  This time I took the example for Random() from the Processing website and added my own spin to it.  I added mouse and keyboard functionality.  I added the draw() function to make it a continuos sketch.   Then I just went to town on the Random() function.  I added it wherever I could think of it.  Eventually, I tweaked it into a place I thought was visually pleasing.

Experiment by clicking and dragging around in the box below.  Press “a” to randomly place horizontal rectangles and “s”  for vertical ones.  Press “z” to clear and begin again.  Feel free to download the source code here.

I hope you enjoy!

If you’re an artistic type and have thought about learning to program but have no clue where to begin, let me recommend Processing.  It’s the bomb.  I wandered past it a while back and clicked on their Flickr stream and I was blown away at how great the art was that people were creating with it.
 
I have always sucked at math and this has been my major downfall in life.  Geometry I understand but algebra you can forget about it.  That’s been the top reason why I only take the programming thing to the first or second level. I want to be able to design and create things with interfaces and moving parts but in order to do that I have to know what I am doing.
 
I decided last night to go back to my reading.  I decided to make a variation on the drawing a continuous line program.  I added some control functionality.  If you click and drag in the square below you will see rectangles appear.  The faster you drag left and right the larger the rectangles will be.  If you press “a” you’ll get a color, press “s” for a second color, “d” for a third color and “f” for a transparent rectangle.  Finally, press “z” to clear and begin again.
 
I need to do more Processing.  When I do understand what I’m doing and I can make artistic decisions based on that, it’s all the more satisfying.  If you’re interested, I can recommend two books.  The combo of this book and this book is quite good because the first one holds your hand and helps you understand and the second one is more of a quick reference type book.  So while you’re learning you can quickly check the other book to make sure your syntax is right.  It looks like the guys at MAKE have just come out with a book on it and it ends with integration with an Arduino board, which is my ultimate goal.
 
If you’d like to download the source code click here.
 

I put the question out on my facebook of who might be out that night to see the meteor shower and my old High School friend Eddie replied with this location.  He goes annually to watch the stars here.  I am so glad I went.  It was nice to catch up with him.  My buddy Jeff, luckily, was also able to join me for this spontaneous excursion.  The view was amazing and the conditions were near perfect.  I got to witness some amazing meteors crossing the sky.  Unfortunately, I didn’t capture any of the real good ones with my camera.  I initially thought I hadn’t captured any meteors but once I got home and was able to sift through the shots I found that I actually did get a couple on film.  The three shots at the top are the three largest ones.  Beyond the meteors I did get to take some beautiful shots of the night sky.  I finally succeeded in getting that star-trail shot that I attempted and failed to get on Day 081.  Plus, the LA Basin below was quite a sight to see.

I experimented with various ISO’s and shutter lengths but eventually opted to set the camera to time lapse multiple 30 second exposures.  If I exposed the sky for any more than a minute the stationary stars would begin to trail and kind of ruin the shot.  Below you can watch the time lapses themselves.  They’re not very long so I have them running at half speed to give you more time to see everything.

I hope you enjoy!

 
PS: I also want to add a little apology for taking so long with the speaker Instructable. I have it mostly written. I need to organize my photos and double check the speakers to make sure I didn’t write something wrong in the description.
 

This wasn’t as easy as I thought it was going to be.  It wasn’t getting the plants in there and arranging them that was so hard.  It was keeping the glass of the light bulb clean.  My big mistake was that I didn’t dry out the sand.  I pulled it right out of the bag that I picked up from Home Depot.  The sand felt a little moist and in turn it got stuck all over the glass inside.  Cleaning the inside is a bit of a pain because you have to use a paper towel attached to a wire and the towel get soiled pretty quick so you have to replace it often.

For the stand, I bought a cheap square frame from Marshalls and a package of rubber feet from Lowes to rise it off the ground.  Emptying the contents of the lightbulb was not too hard and you can watch a tutorial how to do it yourself here.

Anyways, I know what I’d do differently if I were to do it again and it’s not like I don’t like the way it turned out.  I still think it looks pretty cool.  Now, I just have to ask Jeff how to keep these guys alive in there.

In other more exciting news, check out the sweet Tee Pee that Jenny made for June this weekend!  She’s been working on it with her friend Nicki for a couple of weekends and this afternoon the two of them finished it off.  It’s really beautiful and I love the way it came out.  June loves it the best though.  When she first realized that it had a door she said “wow!”.  Then she proceeded to collect all her “babies”( her dolls) and played with them inside.

 
Also worth noting, I have started the instructable procedure for my Ikea-hacked speakers so hopefully in the next day or two I’ll have that up and available as well.

Anyways, I didn’t get a chance to start on my creative thing until midnight.  I am building a pretty ingenious kit that a person named Wil Lindsay designed.  It’s called the Bliptronome because it’s a conversion kit that turns a ThinkGeek toy called the Bliptronic 5000 into a monome.  Well, an Arduinome to be specific because it utilizes the arduino protocol.  The build could be accomplished easily in a day but because I didn’t start until so late this will have to be a two-parter.

I’m building two of them simultaneously because I’m giving one of them to my buddy Jeff because he’s always wanted a monome but has never been prepared to spend the kind of money needed to get a real one.  Hopefully tomorrow I can post a video of them in action.

 
NOTE: The populated board in the picture above has a small mistake. I soldered the 6-pin header in the wrong spot and had to desolder and move it to the correct position.

I apologize for the delay in getting this video up.  My weekend has been very busy with taking care of the baby which has given me hardly enough time to even form a paragraph than post something with any detail.

Lastly, if you’ve downloaded the After Effects project from Day 150 I have found a problem with the 720p vertical composition and it has been fixed.  I still have yet to upload it but I need June to take a nap first.  Sorry!

It’s pretty cool.  My build is a little larger than Edwins and definitely not perfect.  There is some shifting that happens when flying around but I still captured some pretty cool imagery.  The reason I built it was due to my recent slitscan experiments (horizontal and vertical).  I think the movement that this rig is capable of might be interesting once sent through the slitscan factory. For the music video I’d like to build a larger version, large enough for a persons head and shoulders to fit in the center

You can check out a bit of the footage I captured below. I shot at 60fps and conformed it to 24fps slomo in order to make the movement smoother.  Also you can see Edwin Bonts video of his creation in action as well.