Piconet, PureData, coding with the bricolage look

So, yeah, posting has been slow. I have been incredibly busy, what with work, freelancing, and fun little projects going on. After Motherboy XXX, I've fallen in love with Pure Data, and am writing a lot of patches with it. What I like about PD versus, say, Processing, is how it satisfies my need to create collage out of everything. Whereas in Processing, you're just going top-to-bottom writing lines and lines; in PD my code is a beautiful object, in addition to the work it outputs.

I'm part of this SWAN Day Festival (SWAN= Support Women Artsts Now) organized by vocalist/composer Eva Kendrick. The festival features up-and-coming female composers, and Eva asked me to submit something electronic. Instead of performing some ambient electro or ”Intelligent” dance music, I opted to create an installation for the actual performance space, that would exploit and recontextualize the idea of “space” in an auditorium. By space, I don’t only mean the physicality of the room: its acoustics, its size, depth. I wanted to transform our involvement with the space as spectators, and explore the expectations we hold of a space when we enter it to become audience members.

So my piece, Piconet, is written in Pure Data, and consists of 4 shotgun microphones mounted in the 4 corners of the audience space. Room noise is segregated by frequency (0-200 hz, 201-600 hz, 601-1100, and 1101+), run through a chain of delays, randomly sampled, and passed along the audience at various playback speeds through speakers placed around the auditorium. I'll become more eloquent in describing the idea as I compile my program notes, but the gist of it is that the piece both ruptures and heightens the sense of relative privacy you require to be an attentive, respectful, and absorbed spectator. Writing the patch in PD has been a total joy-- here's a screenshot so far:



If you're in town, you should come to the show. It's at CMCB on Sunday, March 29 at 6:30 p.m. (34 Warren Ave, in Back Bay.)

In other news, I launched the Surfing Club platform as part of Share:Cambridge (share-tv.us/journal). Some kids have already started to post to it, and I'm hoping it'll take off. (I especially think Bechtold would have lots of excellent stuff to contribute!) Some kids have already tried to vandalize it, but that only pointed out weak points that I had to secure/reinforce. (I thought it was you, Jonny, but nope, our culprit remains at large!)

In other, other news, I have earnestly reworked my artist's statement. It's simple and it's honest: I want you to come outside.

In other, other, other news, I got a G1 for 100% free thanks to Shell and her awesome friends at Google. I can't wait to dust off my Java and start making apps. I'm particularly excited to use somehow use GPS positioning to control audio parameters. I have a big idea in mind, but it will have to wait until I have a bit more time. As of yet, I've only said "Hello World" to the phone, and have instead used it to check my emails, gloat via Google Chat about how I got a free G1, and play sudoku on the T.