Sunday, March 26, 2006

things to do

Hello!!

Stuff is going on, first I was supposed to go hiking with a colleague today in the south of Brabant. I folded like a cheap lawn chair. Two nights of out in the city, and a somewhat unfavorable weather forcast played into my decision.

Any way, I rescheduled the hike and now I rest at home. That isn't allowed, I feel guilty everytime, I am not out and about, unless I am very ill. Oh well, it is first day with really nice weather here too. I shall make a trip to the Kuekenhoff?


The Strp festival was great! It is similar too a festival that first appeared last summer in cleveland. Art and Technology the creation of something substantial and how it effects and influences or is apart of culture.

Highlights of the festival:
1.Solar bugs (i think there was a movie in the 80's with the guy from magnum PI in it or rebecca from cheers)
these were very interesting though
2.A pong game with pain (everytime you loose, you either get electric shock, a rubber whip, or heat applied to your hand.
(also, reminded me of the scene in a James Bond movie.
3.Hissing Madagascar Cockroach controlled Robot! No programming involved, the "CPU" was the roach. Cool!
4.A device that ? well.. how to describe? It was a speaker on a radius arm. The radius arm was attached to an vertical axle that was rotated by an electric motor. The speaker was a an input output device. It had a motion sensor for input and the output was 15" sub and a standard High Pass tweeder. The device acted like a sentry of sorts in that it outputed this static random noise pattern at high dB's. Once it "decided" the arm rotates, the distance of the radius really allows the speaker to move quickly with some velocity. I hope that speaker was bolted down good, it could knock someone out if it let go. Anyway, as it rotates it the signal level changes and the characteristic noise pattern does as well.
The result is a really startling creation, which as you listen to it, began to create a very interesting acoustic pattern, the hall became part of the instrument in that the acoustics of the room generated other tones that could be heard allong the principle sound out of the speaker.
Basically it was really cool!
5. A virtual indoor running simulator. Real time decision making by the runner results in the image or scene the runner is running in. So, you run on a treadmill and infront of you is a huge screen and initially two images appear, left and right on the screen. By runing to the left or the right the choice is made on the scene that the runner will run in.
6.A band that samples itself with a video camera on the stage while they are perfoming then they do some quick editing and processing on stage, while the song is still going on, and the loop the just shot footage into the current song and sample themselves. Cool!!!
7. Really good video and music interaction in all stage performances. ( the James Bond mix was fantastic. A track completely made on stage by clips and samples with the insync video and the accompanying audio. Over top some really hard hitting bass tones!
8. The event was all under one roof, an old Philips Lighting Factory.

Purchased Items
1. A book titled "Strange Sounds" Music, Technology and Culture by Timothy Taylor
2. DVD titled work of director Spike Jonz. Only checked one video on it so far, Da Funk by Daft Punk. I have never seen the orginal video but it seems this one is a collectors cut.
3. Alot of Bier.

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