Alexander Rishaug and I just completed a mini-tour of Norway, playing gigs in Oslo (The Villa), Bergen (EKKO Festival), Trondheim (The Black Cube at Verkstedhallen) and finally the Insomnia festival in Tromsø this weekend. Thanks to everybody who turned up! In Oslo we were fortunate to have Andreas Paleologos in the audience with a HD camera, resulting in the video above (possibly the nicest documentation of our set to date!)

The Rishaug vs. Watz project is now over two years old, having debuted at Lovebytes 2007 in Sheffield. It continues to be a very satisfying experiment in exploring sound and visuals as a continuous narrative space. I look forward to seeing what possible new iterations it can take, not least of which will be the upcoming release of Alexander’s album and possible extensions of the project into installation form.

Exploder, wall drawing (made with 1 cm black tape)

It’s always a pleasure to do new types of work when an exhibition calls for it. This time the occasion is “system:system”, an exhibition of 30+ artists opening this Friday in the defunct St.Cecilia’s nun’s convent in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. According to curator duo Adam Henry and Christina Vassallo (aka Super Square), system:system is…

…a three-day event that reflects on the nature of associations between parts of a whole. The title is a play on the term “complex systems,” which are characterized by their connections and tendencies toward unpredictable behavior. The organizing of this event evokes these qualities and embraces the small world phenomenon of strangers being linked through minimal degrees of separation to form a dynamic structure.

The list of artists is full of friends and family, including Peter Kirn, Yeni Mao, Derick Melander, SoftLAB, Studio Mode, Lee Wells, and many others. See the full list here. Random Number has some very promising photos from the installing.

Left: Original Exploder image / Right: Projection with distortion

Given the nature of the building, which is filled with tiny rooms that previously served as bedrooms for the nuns, I wanted to do a physical installation rather than using projectors or screens. I’ve been wanting to try to do a wall drawing for quite a while, using artist tape to trace vector outlines from a projected image.

After doing a few sketches I chose to base the walll drawing on Exploder, an “exploding sphere” form I have done variations on in the past (see Architek209 and GasWorks). Rendering it as a wireframe meant that it is technically feasible to trace while maintaining an implication of movement in space. The number of polygons had to be reduced to control the number of lines in need of tracing, but the form proved to take the scaling down well. Rather than worry about the inevitable distortion caused by the projector I decided to incorporate it, making sure the form could stretch to cover the entire wall while taking on an exaggerated perspective.

I’m quite pleased with the result and will definitely be expanding on this strategy in the future. Come along to the opening this Friday to see it in person!

• Opening reception: Friday, Oct 23, 7pm – 10pm
• Performances by: Matamoros and New Idea Society
• Address: St. Cecilia’s Convent, 21 Monitor Street, Brooklyn, NY
• Facebook: system:system event

Jer Thorp: NY Times: 365/360

Processing visualization head Jer Thorp is putting his money where his mouth and publishing 7 pieces of code in 7 days, free to download and experiment with. Judging from the three that he’s released so far they’re not your standard 20-minute sketches either:

1. GoodMorning! is a Twitter vizualization, showing users around the world popping up on a globe as they utter the magic words “good morning”. With a little geocoding and spherical mapping thrown in, this is a sweet sketch
2. NY Times: 365/360 uses the New York Times open data API to retrieve news stories for an entire year and draw connections between them. The results combine complexity with elegance for that true infoporn look.
3. tree.growth revisits that old classic, the L-system tree. Thorp uses colors and abstract “leaves” to great effect.

With such a strong start, one certainly looks forward to seeing the next four sketches to come. It’s not so common to find sketches of this complexity freely available, so they’re a great study for users who are on the threshold of making more complex applications.

Good news for Processing heads who use sound: Damien de Fede has released a new major version of his excellent Minim library. Along with bug fixes, new features include:

• added functions to FFT for doing forward transforms with an offset: forward(float[] samples, offset) and forward(AudioBuffer samples, offset)
• added a freqToIndex(float freq) method to FFT for finding out the index of the spectrum band that contains the passed in frequency.
• added a stop() method to AudioSample, so that playing samples can be immediately silenced.
• added setPanNoGlide(float pan) to Controller, which will snap the panning setting of a sound to the provided value.
• added setInputMixer(Mixer) and setOutputMixer(Mixer), which allow you to specify which Java Mixer object should be used when obtaining inputs (AudioInput) and outputs (AudioOuput, AudioPlayer, AudioSnippet, AudioSample).

Download from the Minim project page. Read more about the development process on the Compartmental blog.

A collection of early sketches for a new piece, titled “Bridge Hypothesis”. It looks at the the bridge as a spatial stereotype, deconstructing it into formal expressions. This video was compiled from Quicktimes I saved as I iteratively experimented with and improved the code. I like that you can see the spontaneous evolution from a primitive wireframe representation, to increasingly stylized forms that reference the bridge as spatial stereotype but clearly have abandoned all regard for gravity.

I am making this piece for “Bright Nights”, an evening of projections on the anchorage of the Manhattan Bridge in DUMBO on October 7th. The event is part of a program of events in connection with the Centennial celebration of the bridge.

Bright Nights will feature the works of myself, Burak Arikan, Motomichi Nakamura and Lee Wells. The event is curated by Christina Vassallo. Practical details follow:

• October 7, 2009 / 7pm – 10pm
• Manhattan Bridge Anchorage, Front & Adams Street side in DUMBO, Brooklyn
• The event is free and open to public.

See the Random Number site for more details about the other artists.

I’ve uploaded some HD videos from the Stockspace series I did a while back. You can see the whole set on my Flickr: Stockspace set. There you can also see them in proper HD resolution, which helps preserve finer details of the geometry.

These were originally created for use as TV spots for Knight Capital Group. Most of the time they get aired on financial networks very early in the morning, since traders love preparing for the opening of the market by obsessively watching news.

They were also shown on the NASDAQ screen in Times Square once, on an occasion where the Knight CEO rang the morning bell to open the NY Stock Exchange that day. As a recent immigrant to New York that certainly felt gratifying.

The L key on my laptop keyboard is missing.

I dropped something heavy on it and destroyed the key socket. Life is difficult. The lack of L seriously interrupts my flow. To survive I have written a widget that copies the character L into memory whenever I click on it (that’s why I wrote the floating window hack.) I’m coping better every day. A few days ago I would simply wiggle the little stump that’s left of the key socket in the hope of producing a single character, or keep a spare L in the search field of my browser for easy copying. Now a single click will do, followed by the mental remapping of L to Ctrl-V. There are 33 L’s in this sad little story.

PS. #1. Yes, I know I can just buy an external keyboard. In fact, I’m sure I’ll cave in given a few more days. But I resent the fact that a decent keyboard is more than $100 in Norway, and I wonder how much money I’ve spent on computer mice and keyboards over the years. I seem to recall paying a preposterous amount of money for a Microsoft Bluetooth keyboard at one point. It must have been back when I was still doing consulting work. That kind of thing ruins your sense of perspective, a good consultant can always make the unreasonable seem like a good idea.

PS. #2. Thanks to CopyPasteCharacter.com for inspiring me to write my missing letter widget. Here’s a cheer for all the really difficult characters in Unicode.

Processing does not provide any direct mechanism for manipulating the look of the sketch Window, but Java natively supports tricks like turning off the window chrome, explicitly setting window position and making a window “float” over all other UI elements. All of this can be accessed via PApplet’s internal “frame” field, which holds an instance of a Frame object representing the window your sketch is running in. But even so, Java won’t let you have free reign without a little trickery.

The following hack demonstrates how to make a window that has no OS chrome, always stays on top of the UI and has an explicitly set screen position. You can even use the cursor keys to move the window around the screen.

Personally, what I like most about this hack is that it gets around Processing’s (or possibly Java’s) assumptions about a minimum window size of ~120×120. If you specify a size that’s less than 120 on one side, Processing will be pad that side with grey pixels to reach the minimum. But with this hack you can have tiny windows that you can micro-manage to your heart’s delight. I use it to make debug dispays, small control panels and other useful things.

Update: @CedricKiefer pointed out another Processing example that allows for transparent and even irregularly shaped windows. It’s Windows-only apparently, I bet this kind of thing is a major violation of Apple GUI laws anyhow.

Update 2: @ideoforms took my post literally and made a sketch with multiple bouncing windows. Nice.

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As documented in this thread on the Processing forums the TileSaver class seems to be broken for current versions of Processing. Sadly I’m not sure what the problem is and I don’t have time to fix it right now.

However, I tried the original TileSaver code posted back in 2006 and miraculously that still works. This would imply a larger issue with the unlekkerLib library and Processing 1.0, which I’ll have to address when I have the time.

For now, here is a link to a working Processing sketch using the old TileSaver code: TileSaverTest.zip

After several requests I’ve taken the time to make unlekkerLib compatible with Processing 1.0. Apologies to anyone who’s been inconvenienced by the lack of a 1.0 version.

In particular, STL export should work again. However I haven’t had the chance to test the code very much, so please let me know if you find any bugs.

• unlekkerLib0003c