I’m really getting into the idea of learning some programming. Maybe not really difficult, complicated programming, but the kind of simple language coding set up for people who want to do audio/visual things. You know, programming for artists.
This past week was full of information and experience (and some intense moments). I had my first first-hand experience with hardware. An Arduino board. It’s so pretty! All blue and silver. Shiny! I got the LED to blink and everything. Bending little wires can be so satisfying.
So Hello Wired World. I'm all ready for the next baby step.
On Thursday I went to Tresor (an historic techno club) for the closing of their IOSONO speaker system. It’s a wave-field synthesis system (if you don’t know what that is—and I don’t expect one would—look it up online. There are sites with graphics that can explain it much better than myself.) It was the closing because apparently the system wasn’t being used effectively by DJ’s who played there. So for the last night they got a DJ who could really use the system: Monolake, a fairly well known electronic/computer music artist. Also known as Robert Henke...also known as one of my teachers.
As you can imagine, it was superbly entertaining to see him in that context, turning little knobs and frenetically bobbing his shaved head above multicolored blinking sound equipment. The same goes for the various classmates of mine who showed up. We danced and geeked out, discussing and critiquing various aspects of the sound system and our teacher’s set.
Oh, did you know you can make music with waterdrops? And flame? You should check out Paul de Marinis. He came to give a talk/presentation about his work. It was amazing to hear about things he thought of….like playing holograms of records with lasers (this really works!). He was using computers in the early 70’s already to program music and also did things like hack Mr. Spells for the first time. He did a lot of things that were very humorous but obviously took huge amounts of dedication and effort. He came to give this talk on Monday and became something of an instant hero to those of us students who were present.
