8/7/05 23:42 - permalink - email - category: Incantation
Tonight Ania, Marta and I took in Teatro Zinzanni's tent filled with wonders: circus/dinner/theatre where performers mingle with attendees and you never know who's next to shed working role and swing from trapeze, perform intricate contortions or wrap sex itself into an aerial dance of translucent curtain and sheer daring.
As I scanned the crowd's rapt expressions, I realized the division, the separation between audience and performer, between passive viewer and actively viewed... creator and taker.
As Svetlana the Russian princess of contortion worked her pliable body in defiance of the form "everyone knows" people take... as Bianca Sapetto spun through air with only tenuous connection to safety and security yet made it look easy as breathing... as Les Petits Frères jumped from the ground and into motion as spinning cartwheels and stacks of men three high without benefit of ladders or launchers... I realized the problem.
I was inspired tonight to greater action, larger roles in the stage I know as Life, a grasping of the power in each and every one of us to change, re-arrange and create.
How many of us roll through life without true excellence in anything, adept at nothing save passive absorption? How many of us base decisions for the path we walk on what will pay the bills and what "seems like a good idea?" How many people wish to "live a normal life" within the "normal range" of human abilities because "we all know" it's what we all should want, bowing to the pressure of peers and policy, making "No" an answer to the calling of our true selves?
Tonight, these exceptional performers were a perfect image of the life we all could live, in anything we bring formidable will and desire to bear upon. There was no passivity, no waiting, no watching. It was all doing and daring and making it so.
You will revolutionize your life by simply refusing to accept imaginary limitations wrought from air by social control and laziness.
You must surmount only one problem.
The problem is your accepted definition of "normal."
Wait... let me get the emphasis correct.
The problem is your accepted definition of "normal."
Max/MSP 4.5.5 + Jitter 1.5
8/5/05 11:13 - permalink - email - category: MaxMSPJitter
Software updates are falling out of the sky. I bumped up to Max/MSP 4.5.5 and Jitter 1.5 simultaneously yesterday. The elves at Cycling '74 are so deserving of fame and fortune.
Max/MSP 4.5.5: The utility update from stratospheric reaches of the firmament, this is the one I've been waiting for. My patching efficiency has just been improved half again, and I'm already a fast patcher.
Templates - Just what it sounds like: save a patcher as a preset starting point. I do this already with a specific workbench file, but my command/ctrl-s enthusiasm has overwritten it on more than one occasion. No longer a worry.
Shortcuts - User-editable shortcut text allows me to create small text names which expand to commonly created objects with very long names.
Clippings - I can paste the contents of often-used patchers directly into my current work from a contextual menu. I will never again recreate sfplay~ with a loop message plus bang.
Prototypes - Customized gui objects can be saved as prototypes and recalled without all the cut and paste craziness. It's library development time. Can I get an "Iya Cthulhu" here?
Encapsulate/Decapsulate - Select your grouping for a subpatcher, hit command-shift-E and watch in wonder as your selection transforms into a subpatcher with its connections preserved. The reverse is flawless, as well.
New from Clipboard - Copy the text of a patch from email, the many back and forths on the Cycling '74 Max list or the web, flip to Max and hit command-shift-N. There's your patch, in all its reconstituted-from-ascii glory.
mxj~ - Signal processing externals in Java. This is going to be a blast.
Jitter 1.5: Multiprocessor support, compressed RTSP streams and Java/Javascript support. I've been working mightily with js externals of late, and am thrilled by the promise of the Java/Javascript addition to Jitter.
Perhaps because I'm currently deep in the wilds of Max/MSP/Jitter land this update hits me with the power of one thousand years. Yesterday I sorted out the license for the tools release as a variation on the Creative Commons Share-Alike with a twist. With hard work and luck, daevlbox will pop at Daevlmakr's relaunch along with everything else.
Ableton Live 5 Alive
8/3/05 21:00 - permalink - email - category: Gear
Live has been in my music-making arsenal since version 1.5 and it just keeps getting better. Once Ableton added MIDI to the mix Live basically replaced Digital Performer as my studio's heartbeat. Every release adds new capabilities without sacrificing immediacy of use. Amazingly, Ableton created Live barebones and added major features in a series of well-wrought steps, forging the program into a conceptually designed masterpiece without direct sacrifice to the perceived whims of a "me too" marketplace.
Live 5 continues the refinement...
Clip Freeze - I take digital audio and turn it into something else. I stretch, mangle, warp, destroy, re-fry, transmogrify until I end up with something so far from previous form you would be hard pressed to even admit the possibility of connection. This, my friends, requires serious processing power. The kind of power which will reduce your CPU to molten tears and keep your caffeine of choice steaming by simply placing mug near chip. Ableton's brilliantly managed Clip Freeze will turn an entire column of massively effexored clips into static samples, in place and with a single contextual menu click. I can then continue compositional mayhem using the frozen clips. A later tweak to the effects chain is as simple as unfreezing the track.
Launchable Arrangement Locators - Drop them all over your track at key locations, assign MIDI or qwerty keys to them and then play the broad arcs of your music, with quantization, in real time. You will never create arrangements the same way again.
Live Clips - Save a library of individual bits and pieces of sound, with all the effects, settings, audio or softsynths gathered into one Live Clip. Drop the Live Clip into a new track and it's all there, just as you made it.
And that's only the first few stairsteps up the mountain to the sky. New effects like Beat Repeat, Saturator and the customizable Arpeggiator, new ways of auditioning portions of audio, new ways of packaging sets of sounds and settings in Live Packs, batch pre-analysis of entire directories of audio... more unexpected fun than I realized I wasn't having in many moons.
Two Plus Two Equals Five
8/2/05 15:19 - permalink - email - category: Politics
Some parts of America still think for themselves, although I'm not sure we're still "American." When someone steals a nation they redefine a nationality. The San Francisco indie City Lights Booksellers & Publishers at Columbus and Broadway is getting the message out:
"Gentlemen, what are the four evils?"
"Religion, fascism, tyranny, ignorance."
Yesterday Mr. Bush endorsed the teaching of Intelligent Design in American schools. Last month he inked a deal to provide India with nuclear technology, in direct violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It strikes me as generally unwise to place the power to destroy entire cities in the hands of someone who holds a literal interpretation of religious myth as equal to scientific knowledge.
City Lights has succinctly defined the Bush doctrine across a wide range of policy. If you oppose Bush's mission, you oppose his "America."
And if you oppose "America," you're one heartbeat away from "anti-American."
Regroup
8/1/05 15:23 - permalink - email - category: Flow
July was a tail-kicker, by all accounts.
Deep breath, pull the fabric of the universe together and jump from point (a) to point (b) without covering the distance between... what a dream this would have been.
Instead, I covered the expanse one hard-won step at a time. When the going gets tough, the tough get tougher. There's so much I can't even begin to cover in a single entry to this weblog, so instead I'll unravel and reweave by inches and strands across the future.
"Strip your feet of lead, my friend, strip your feet of lead." - Bauhaus, Spirit
Chief Iconoclast - Daevlmakr Media
Designing Monsters - vitruvius.livejournal.com
reading
Emma Bull - War For The Oaks
Thomas Jefferson - The Jefferson Bible
Baggini & Fosl - The Philosopher's Toolkit
listening
Beta Two Agonist - Zero Point Field
Daevls On FlightDynamics
Dankoe, Gorbunov, Zemlyanikeen - Far East Sessions
recent
Cycling '74 Loves Cats
Seemingly Solid Things - Glenn Gibson @ GIVEN
drmArm
Life In 3d
It's Full Of Stars
Retracted Landing Gear
|
This is a Flickr badge showing public photos from vladspears. Make your own badge here.
|
category
2Second(fuse) 7
Action 1
Atmos 3
Biome 1
BlueDeceiver 2
Creation 6
Daevlmakr 12
Exorcism 16
Flow 10
Futurism 15
Gear 19
Idea 4
Image 3
Incantation 19
Knowledge 5
Listen 18
LiveMusic 3
Locate 2
Look 3
MaxMSPJitter 16
Politics 16
Quote 1
Read 10
Science 2
SoundDesign 4
Technology 3
Tinderbox 5
Unfälle 2
Vegetarian 3
Vision 2
month
03_02008
02_02008
01_02008
11_02007
10_02007
09_02007
07_02007
06_02007
05_02007
04_02007
03_02007
02_02007
01_02007
12_02006
11_02006
10_02006
09_02006
08_02006
07_02006
06_02006
05_02006
04_02006
03_02006
02_02006
01_02006
12_02005
11_02005
10_02005
09_02005
08_02005
07_02005
06_02005
05_02005
04_02005
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
weblog
bldg.blog
Cesare Marilungo
Chris O'Shea
Christian Fromme
Dan Winckler
Data Is Nature
David Fine
Doug Miller
Hal Rager
Hihiromi
hyperTextuality
Information Aesthetics
Jacob Appelbaum
Jaeysin's Xylophone
Jeff Vail
Jeffrey Radcliffe
FlightDynamics
Mac Tonnies
Maehymn
Mark Bernstein
Marsha Vdovin
Martin Spernau
Mediapathic
Neomarxisme
Onegoodmove
Pascal Venier
Seth Elalouf
Sex In Art
Steven R. Livingstone
The Nonist
Trond Lossius
link
Better Humans
Council for Secular Humanism
Creative Commons
DailyKos
Diesel Sweeties
EFF
FuturePundit
The Heinlein Society
HMC MediaLab
IFTF
Make
New Scientist
The Panda's Thumb
Press Think
Questionable Content
Rarefaction
ScaryGoRound
SpaceSuitGroup
Scientific American
legalese
All written material on 2Second(fuse)
authored by Vlad Spears is published under the
Creative Commons Some Rights Reserved license
Attribution - NonCommercial - NoDerivs 2.0
Fight corporate ownership of culture:
Create and Disseminate!
