Tim Stutts: ITP Project Blog

ITP’s Nick Hasty has joined the Haiku News team.

We aren’t in a position to use RSS feeds yet, so in an attempt to
keep the material for the haiku generator nature themed we have
chosen to look up environment related words in Wikipedia, grab all of
the text from the introductory paragraph for each word, and dump them
into a larger text file. These words are as follows:
environmentalism, Green Peace, global warming, solar power, nuclear
power, nuclear weapons, petroleum, endangered species, ecosystem,
pollution, tobacco, cannabis, hunting, lumber, water treatment,
whaling, recycling, Sierra Club, Blue Green Alliance, invasive
species, agriculture, genetically modified organisms, organic farming,
organic food, Food and Drug Administration, biological warfare, giant
panda, african elephant, asiatic cheetah, blue whale, and eastern
gorilla. For added spice we included entries for George Walker Bush
and Osama bin Laden.

Read more

I took these in Central Park, after noticing the patterns formed between the fence wire and branches, that were brought out by the snow.

I was browsing Wikipedia today looking for text dealing with the environment, and discovered this lovely gem, which had somehow slipped past the radar of the community. Hours later I checked back, to find it corrected. We should think twice before we take opinion as truth, especially when anyone can potentially join a site like Wikipedia and, in a masked attempt to avoid plagarism, present information based on personal bias, as opposed to formal research. Perhaps the motivation to join such a site in the first place is to have one’s own say. This user was obviously more biased than most. This coincided with Mushon Zer-Aviv addressing the broader issue with Wikipedia in Tactical Media.

Sometimes you just have a song stuck in your head, and try as you might, it doesn’t seem to go away. Then maybe another song with a similar chord progression or rhythm wonders its way in, and soon these two become indistinguishable.

Justin Timberlake’s “Cry Me a River” is a song about being cheated on by a lover, characterized by Michael Jacksonesque vocal hooks, electric piano, drawn out orchestral strings, and a swingy hip-hop beat. Chamillionaire’s “Ridin’ Dirty” is a rap anthem that dares the authorities to, “catch [him] ridin’ dirty,” featuring fast rhymes, orchestral stabs, and a crunky beat. When placed side by side, Kid 606 style, with the slightest adjustment in tempo, these two tracks align and form a unique counterpoint, both harmonically and lyrically.

In a future project, I envision a harder, more intricate mash-up, with both audio and music video.

For now there’s “Riding A Dirty River.”

We live in a day and age when the news is updated by the minute. This is a great resource to us, but at the same time, it can cloud the mind with an overabundance of information.

Haiku News simplifies. It takes an RSS feed from a chosen news site, and creates click-able poem links in the traditional format of five seven five, using a content-scanning, syllable-counting algorithm. Poems are composed and published online just moments after a breaking news story.

No longer just found alongside the personal computer, the mouse and its variations have invaded our mobile communication devices, portable music players, and gaming consoles. Among the interface types are the traditional mouse, track pad, tablet and track ball. All of these allow the user to control the XY position of a pointer, along with some kind of modifier in the form of buttons, scroll wheels, and pressure sensors.

In observing people using the mouse, I’ve noticed that there is always distance between the gesture communicated by the hand and resulting action on the screen. Though increasingly more fluid, the action is lost in quantization; the transfer of the analog gesture into the digital domain. The tablet, with its pressure-sensitive pen pointer, has succeeded the most in overcoming this limitation. In Photoshop for instance the tablet can be used to create lifelike brushstrokes. An alternative to capturing the human gesture via mouse interface is via scanner, though this could arguably add an interrupt to the creative flow. Artists frequently employ this technique as a beginning phase for a work, which they will later colorize and process in software.

A small handful of companies have released alternative pointer devices. While working as a sound editor in Los Angeles, I began to look into other solutions, after a friend of mine, who worked in video restoration, acquired carpal tunnel syndrome. The products I found included foot controllers, head-worn line-of-sight detectors, and a number of modifier key devices. Although accommodating to the fatigued wrist, these interfaces add even more distance from the gesture than the aforementioned devices, and serve as a last resort, rather than a solution to creative expression. As an example, using a foot pointer device to drag an automation track in a multi-track editor such as Pro Tools, would take hours. Feet just aren’t able to do what hands do best.

In conclusion, perhaps the best way to quantize gesture is to involve fingers, as well as the hands. The glove comes to mind, though this device, when manifested as an array of ribbon sensors, fails in its relevance to 3D space—the hand motions through the air, but the computer desktop remains two-dimensional. To interface with the modern computer, it makes more sense to remain in the two dimensional realm. I propose a solution, which I have already begun to develop, that is a series of vertically mounted XY sensitive fingers, connected to a board. With a traditional mouse in one hand and the new device in the other, sixteen separate instances of the two dimensional are controlled at the same time, acting as a modifier, yielding complex gestures, allowing for data to be treated separately or summed through various means.

This patch created in Max / Jitter takes a video I created from a photograph I took of the Lyric Diner and reveals it in blocks by row. The rate of the second row is half that of the first, then a third of the first, and so on, while the framerate remains constant. The coll object, with it’s ability to stash an array of data, was especially useful for streamlining the process. Download the patch and related files here.

Photo I took of the Lyric Diner located at East Gramercy, Manhattan

Non-Max users can view the resulting video here.

We’re into week 4 of the Eyebeam Internship. So far my tasks have ranged from taking measurements in the gallery space, reasearching voice processing techniques, capturing Cory’s Nintendo pieces into video, and installing plastic over a ventilation duct, that had previously been spewing out ice cold air. I enjoy interacting with the other artists residents, including Angie Eng and ITP alum Mouna Andraos. It’s also nice to get over to the Chelsea once a week and explore a new area.

I received the 16 CTS joystick controllers in the mail late last week, and have since affixed them to a perf board. Initially I was overly ambitious about wiring all 96 connections (2 ground, 2 power, 2 arduino returns for each!) in one shot, but at the recommendation of Carlyn Maw, I have decided to keep things simple and use only 3 of the joysticks for now. The Arduino board has only 6 analog inputs, so to use more joysticks will require multiplexers. The next course of action is to experiment with materials for the grass blades, and also determine the best use of the interface, perhaps to control a brush tool in a graphics application or audio plug-in parameters in Ableton Live or sixteen simultaneous games of Pac Man or for building 3-D landscapes in Terragen.

I wonder what Cory would think of this?