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Showing posts from 2005

iPod Cult

I just recently joined the cult of the iPod. Actually, I'm waiting for it to come in the mail, but when it does I'll be a full on audiofile. I've been looking into all the cool stuff I'm eventually going to get to do. I'm curious about the whole podcasting world. It would be nice to get into doing alittle one of my own, but I'm not sure how much work that takes to get started. I'm sure I'll learn all this stuff over the next few months of owning my little audio device. I havn't been adding to much to this blog as of late, but I'm sure there really aint much of a readership. So, it's fine if I don't add to this regularly. I'll just wait for the first few complaints that I havn't "blogged" in awhile.

The Walker Channel

To follow along with my last post on the banff website link I just found a link for a site that has an archive of lectures on various artistic practices. http://channel.walkerart.org/archive.wac

Banff New Media Institute

I was recently sent a link to the Banff New Media Institute site. It has video of a conference on the history of media called " Refresh" . If you want to see any of the footage go check it out here:

Liquid Sculpture

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http://www2.liquidsculpture.com/fine_art/index.htm I've just found a link to this site of a photographer who takes photographs of water dropping. His images are totally amazing and one day I want to take pictures of water droplets in movement. I took a picture of water drops on a tent that I'm trying to sell at our local Roca Jacks. Some one saw my picture.

Jason Forrest

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This guy, Jason Forrest, has been my newest musical find over the past few days. I think he's got some really cool ripped up, glitch rocky stuff going down and I like his methods of sample selecting. I just picked up two of his albums and they both rip apart old rock songs from the 70's including Styx, Elton Jon, and many others. I would love to make music like this guy for sure. More stuff to come I suppose. I'll mention more about him when I have more time. Go check the pitchfork article on his latest album. I also found a video of his here and a nice interview with him on CBC's Brave New Waves here . The CBC interview was done in 2003 I think and it only slightly mentions his albums. This Jason Forrest fellow also used to go under the name Donna Summer and I believe he was urged to stop using it and his real name stuck. I'm sure this means nothing to you readers out there, but I urge you all to go out and find a copy of his music and take a listen. It's wor

The Uncanny: Experiments in Cyborg Culture

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I've recently picked up a book from my local library called "The Uncanny: Experiments in Cyborg Culture". I found an article at popmatter that some of you interest in learning more about this book, without having to read it, can go check out. I'm only getting into the first little part of it, but I'm very curious about this intersecting world of life and technology. The book has a number of essays on cyborgs and the arts and doesn't make me want to be a cyborg at all.

Marshall Mcluhan

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So, I got a book from the library on Marshall McLuhan and I was reminded about this interesting man. I went and found a page on Wikipedia about him and remembered listening to a recording of his I found on ubuweb . It is called "The Medium is the Massage". It's an interesting collage of sounds and quotes and anything else they could get their hands and ears on. The recording can totally and fully be found here . Please listen to it, be happy and take what you can from it. I found it inspiring and I hope you find it an interesting window into the world of media. I'm curious about the man who was Mcluhan. He seemed like a compulsive creative thinker who was always thinking about his world. I find that I have many of the same qualities as he did, or it could be that I hope I do.

Art Sale

We had a little, tiny artsale this afternoon at a local coffee shop called roca jacks. It was wonderful yet no great sales were done. I did get good feed back from my art that I tried to sell. Though I kinda think that my pricing was a bit high for an art sale. I think my pieces were worth that or more, but alas no sale. I'll have to keep that in mind for the next thing I try to sell. I did, however, end up selling a CD of my music. I've had strange random sales of the CD. Usually it's someone buying it out of some curious interest in the graphic or something. Now I have to go and print my next batch. Yesterday I taught a small workshop on photoshop. It was a relative success. Only to nice, creative ladies came in to learn from my instruction. Offered up what I knew and they seemed to get some ideas out of it. Here are 3 of my semi-important tips: 1. Go check out Image After for good stock photos. 2. Google image search is wonderful and helpful. 3. photoshop tv

Nov. 23rd at Gabbo's

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Come to this event a Gabbo's on the 23rd. It'll be a kicker...I'll be DJing first part of the evening.

Einstein

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Last night I went to a discussion on whether or not Einstein's was right with his theories. It was a thought provoking night and I wanted to learn more about Einstein afterwords. I was really curious about a certain part of the discussion where the talk went into "space-time" and how time can be bent. I felt a bit in disbelief in the whole thing. But, I'm totally curious to see where they were going with this idea. The guy giving the discussion talked about how an atomic clock on earth would end up having a different time than an atomic clock orbiting in space. It seemed to me that this would have more to do with the object or mechanism than whether or not time was "bending". But, I really don't know all of the details. I don't really want to believe that it's true though. I feel that their should be a constant, universal time that we all exist in.

Street Art

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I find myself wanting to draw on anything and everything. There are many walls, signs, boxes, and other objects that call me to put something on them. At this point I haven't done much of this kind of art, but it feels like the city needs more of it. I think it would colour our city so nicely. We need to be surprized by what we see in our city, not bored or annoyed by the big box stores. I really want to approach businesses and ask them if they would allow me to make interesting paintings on their walls. I want to pick out a few places were I really feel like something needs to be there and then talk to those owners and convince them that they need to let me do it. Or i could just sneak in and do it ;) I should also mention the graphic above was found on the wonderful street art website woostercollective.com That's my thought for now...

Istvan Kantor

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I have this job at the Neutral Ground art gallery and recently I was helping out with a performance art symposium. It took place over the last week and it had some pretty crazy performances to go check out. I went to a panel discussion and was fairly inspired about these peoples thoughts on performance art. I've never really thought much about it before, though I now realize that I do it a lot without really considering it performance art. I'm not even really sure if I would want to start calling it that, because I think that would eventually take the fun out of being silly in public. The major performance for this whole event was a man by the name of Istvan Kantor. He a very aggressive, industrial act that was very extra sensory. I don't think I liked everything about his performance, but he did some pretty interesting stuff with audio using a sampler, a big mixing board, and some dvd's of his. Here is a link to his site: Link

An addition

So I've been busy with other things lately and I haven't had much time to add to this blog of mine. It's not like many people read this, so I don't have to be too worried about not adding something every day. The last few weeks have been preoccupied with planning for both a Halloween party at gabbos and a haunted house at a friends apartment building. Both were amazing events and I'm happy with all the people that came and wish the people that missed it had got a chance to see both of them. I was going to be teaching a class on MAX/MSP at the Neutral Ground art gallery this last weekend but no one signed up for it and it just didn't happen. There will be a catch up some time soon for people that might want to do it some other time. We'll see when it happens.

War on Terror party

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This up coming week an art collective I'm somewhat apart of is going to have a few things going on to make the time of season more exciting. We are having a party at the Gabbo's night club on Dewdney. It should be great, we have alot of interesting plans for decorations and interactions with the crowd that's coming to it. We are going to try and wrap the entire place in black fabric of some sort. We are going to create a small space for the dancers to dance in. The excitement wont be held back on this one baby....oh no..........no holding back! We are also having a haunted house on the next saturday and sunday. It'll be at 2210 15th ave. at the corner of 15th and Lorne. We are taking over the basement of an old apartment building and I want to fill the place with interesting, terrifying sounds. I group of "artists" really want to make something wonderful for people to explore and enjoy. Hope people come out to it.

EM411

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I have recently put a song of my making on this site. It's a fairly helpful place to find out about the inner workings of electronic music. My track can be found and downloaded here . I've had some nice comments from people and it's encourageing for me to go make more. I would like to put more up in the release area, but they only allow for people to upload one song every 60 days.

Work

So, I am looking for work in the next few weeks and I ask of you blog readers to feel free to point me in the direction of good places to work for someone that has decent experience in audio production, graphic design and compute science.

Loopin'

I've been playing around with the looper pedal I rented the other day. I still have it for alittle while longer and then it must make it's way back into the rented bag and go back to the rented store. I've had good experiments with various instruments and vocals. I'm a big fan of harmonizing. It sounds good and I would like to figure out how to record it correctly on my computer, but that'll come in alittle while. At the school today I was playing with audacity and I was havin' some wonderful experiments with multitracking and singing along with myself. Fun stuff for a cold day.

Collage

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Some fellow artists and I will be having a little collage afternoon at a friends Art Gallery. Hopefully the graphic is somewhat readable. I made it using photoshop and I was pretty happy with the look of it. I keep on wanting to make more professional graphics. It would be nice to design stuff like this for a living, but that's still off in the future. But, until then, I shall keep on keepin' on with little projects here and there. The collage event itself is put on by the 11th ave. art collective. It's another event to allow us to try and flex our creative muscles. If you, the reader, are interested in this art group.......the website is here . Today I got the chance to go into the SOIL lab and play around with MAX. It was a fun little romp through audio processing. I got to teach a little bit of the MAX aswell. FUN!!!

Workshoppin'

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At the end of October I shall be teaching a workshop at the Soil Media lab which is a part of the Neutral Ground Art Gallery. The workshops will be on MAX/MSP and PD, which are just the coolest things since sliced beats. They are music related programs that I play around with semi regularly and look forward to showing other people how to use them. I'm also going to be doing another experimental workshop in the middle of November on photoshop. It's going to be a neat little jam session where everyone that comes in gets to contribute to a photoshop image which each person getting a certain amount of time to add to an image and then passing it on to the next person. I'm looking forward to this. I'm not totally sure how or if it's going to work, but it certainly has the potential to be interesting. Let us look forward to these days. I picked up a looper pedal from the local music instrument shop and I'm going to make the most out of it over the next month as well.

Community Radio

In this time of CBC strikes I want to point out those radio stations or at least one that has still kept on going while CBC hasn't been able to answer our questions. 91.3 FM CJTR has been going strong these past few weeks and well before that. There are a number of great shows, including my own, which provide an wonderful assortment of musics. I truly miss our CBC, but it's nice to have a break to remember that there is other great things out there aswell. Keep up the good work....you radiohosts you!

VVVV

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The other day I found out about this new visualization software called VVVV. A company called Meso from Sweden designed it and it's frikkin' wikkid. If you go to vvvv.meso.net you will be pleasantly surprized at this little piece of heaven. The program it self operates much like puredata or MAX/MSP. If you arn't familiar with those programs, they are visually programming environments to be used for experimenting with and compose music.

Processing

I've been playing around with a programming environment called processing and it's super wikkid. I've come up with some good results. They won't be shown to the masses yet, but they are well on their way to being something visually pleasing. Come back and check it out later ok. The processing software can be found at processing .

First post

Ok, i tried to write something and it failed so here is a simplified version of it. This blog wil mainly be used for thoughts on work I've been doing. I'll try to get my ideas of interesting designs, interesting pictures I've seen, or just generally things that catch me some how. I'll try to keep my personal life out of this, but it's always bound to make it's way it since there arn't any nicely defined lines between the two worlds. This bloggging system seems to offer more options than livejournal does, so I'm excited to experiment with this.