Small Studio

if you're singing by yourself
music by uma floresta
ghosting small studio
deedee popper, caity gwin, patrick gallager, jeremy pheiffer, layla guest, peggy gould and tony schultz

Primer

Primer (2004) offers additional insight into time-travel, capitalism and schizophrenia. Mathematician and engineer Shane Carruth wrote, shot, directed, produced, edited, composed sound and starred in the film on a shoe-string budget of $7000. The film received critical acclaim and the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. Utilizing an extremely technical vocabulary and complex plot structure, the film requires multiple viewings to get a handle on. Stick it on your ipodio using this link.

Virtual Physics

For the past few weeks we have been building physical simulations. They have all been based on the double integrator structure. In the first wave development of Max Colony we elaborate particle simulation in one, two and three dimensions using the scalar, vector and matrix implementations respectively.

We have also been working with real forces measured by accelerometer based game controllers. Here is some homework to keep your mind tight over break. Enjoy.

Podio.

7

Music by J Underdog, Uma Floresta, Devin Anderson and Brobdingnagian Bards

For full quality version click here.

Pentopticon

Testing the recording system for wednesday's hermeneutic.

Breadcrumbs

We can build a map for navigation by dropping breadcrumbs as we wander. When we come across an old breadcrumb we remember where we were when we dropped it and how we got there before. In naming that place we create a mark and an utterance and dig a flag into an unstable landscape.

Evolution of a Crawler

Time Axis

This is a utility for graphing numbers over time. The slider changes the scale.

Time Bandit

Uptown, Otis Houston Jr bends time by performing at extremely low frequency over long durations. An auto-regressive low-pass filter shows his presence in the same low bands inhabited by landscape features such as trees, bridges and roadsigns. Otis' still acts retain a high kinetic energy in the frame of the passing viewer due to their great velocity and his close proximity to the road. As his text indicates, the scattering interactions are complex and worth serious study.

Capital also works as a time machine in multiple ways. First is through propagating past debts into the future through interest and the setting of present prices through speculation and secret knowledge. True believers say the market is the most intelligent predictor of the future. Some think otherwise.Downtown, on Wall St. Otis trys to communicate to foot traffickers. Here the time scale and landscape require different tactics: the voice and higher frequency gestures are used since duration is blocked by the state. Otis has a good understanding of capital since he spends time with bankers moving weight in the financial district. They are big and sloppy he tells me. Though they push a lot around they inevitably leave a mess for others to clean up. Perhaps naïve art is not so naïve.

Timex

Schizophrenic time travel uses image as a tool. Chris Marker's 1962 French sci-fi classic La jetée elaborates this. The film, consisting almost entirely of still photos, depicts a post-nuclear future in which the protagonist is subject to experiments to displace him in time. Whether the travel is real or imagined remains ambiguous. The goal of his trip is to avert nuclear war and recapture lost love. This is the inspiration of Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys.

Rodowick analyzes this film and other sci-fi cinema using Deleuzian film theory in Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine. Roy Brand's first year studies in Philosophy and Film is using this text. As the year progresses we might find them to be a useful resource in developing these ideas. Can we think of any other texts or films which play with these concepts?

@Book{Rodowick1997,
author = {Rodowick, David Norman},
title = {Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine},
publisher = {MIT},
year = {2004},
address = {Cambridge},
isbn = {0822319705}
}

Martian Time-Slip

"Mrs Miltch is utilizing music as a method of reaching the autustic children at B-G...the dance,in particular."

"There is a new theory about autism," Dr Glaub said. "From Bergholzlei, in Switzerland... It assumes a derangement in the sense of time in the autistic individual, so that he environment around him is so accelerated that he cannot cope with it, in fact, he is unable to percieve it properly, precisely as we would be if we faced a speeded-up television program, so that objects whizzed by so fast as to be invisible, and sound was a gobbledegook--you know? Just extremely high pitched mishmash. Now this new theory would place the autistic child in a closed chamber, where he faced a screen on which filmed sequences were projected slowed down--so you see? Both sound and video slowed, at last so slow that you and I would not be able to perceive motion or comprehend the sounds as human speech."

A genuinely good looking boy... and such terrific coordination. The way he sprinted about, on the tips of his toes, as if dancing to some unheard music, some tune from inside his own mind whose rhythms kept him enthralled. We are so pedestrian compared to him Steiner thought. Leaden. We creep along like snails, while he dances and leaps, as if gravity does not have the same influence on him as it does on us. Could he be made from some new and different kind of atom?

"Could the schizophrenic be running so fast, compared to us, in time, that he's actually in what to us is the future? Would that account for his precognition?"

@Book{Slip,
author = {Dick, Philip K.},
title = {Martian Time-Slip},
publisher = {Ballatine},
year = {1964},
isbn = {0679761675}
}

Motility

Trying out mobile bloging from ipod touch. This is Alexa at the joyce. Fun fact.

Our Networked Technobody

Okay players, you are now inside the blogosphere and that is dope to me. This is a powerful and expressive component of your sprouting technobody. Might I suggest that you take a tour of the dance blogosphere and see what it has to offer.

My flavorite dance-o-blog is quodlibet by Matthew Gough. Described as "contrapuntal texts on dance & performance technologies (dance-tech) etc" quodlibet is beautifully written, thoughtful, visually rich and updated often. Matt Gough is our friend and our dance partner. I have guest written on quodlibet and hopefully we can have Matt over here for a play date.

Another place to get down with some hot dance-o-blog action is great dance with Anna Brady Nuse's move the frame and Doug Fox's kinetic interface. Anna's blog addresses dance on screen while Doug investigates the culture of science and technology with a focus on the body and movement. Anna is a choreographer, filmmaker and dance film curator. Doug is an OG dance blogger, dance enthusiast and spirited advocate of dance online.

The winger is also a prime piece of web real estate run by Kristin Sloan and a crew of co-contributors. Kristin started the winger while she was a member of NYCB. She has since stopped dancing and is now the company's director of new media. I also write for the winger. You can see adds for some of my writing on the southbound side of the FDR near 125th st. Brian Gibbs, founder of tag-sf, is also a frequent contibutor to the site. He is really generous in sharing his work online, posting great dance videos and photography.

Another place of interest is dance-tech.net aka deep space sector 9. This is a social network run on the ning platform. Social networks are incredibly sticky traps which seduce with a poly-panoptic gaze and one should be careful while navigating them. The network admin is Marlon Barrios. His contempt for physics and calculus makes him an exciting fiend to bump heads with.

Last but not least is Tonya Plank's swanlakesambagirl. Tonya is a prolific writer and reviewer on her blog and for the huffington post. Tonya writes about live dance performance, dance on television aswell as arts, politics and culture. Tonya did amazing first hand coverage of the Sean Bell murder trial. Tonya is also a lawyer and a novelist and a competitive latin dancer.

So check out this ever growing online dance world. Greatdance and the winger have fairly exhaustive blogrolls from which you can find the 100 some odd dance blogs on the internet. Hopefully we can have a few nyc dance bloggers do a panel at a dance meeting sometime this year. Lets encourage Rose Anne Thom to invite some of these folks to talk to our students about this emerging dance space.

Welcome Back

At the drfi conference 2008 sheila creevy described this blog as part of "new wave" arts research and dance practice. Its good to have a name finally. If you are thinking of studying dance and technology you should take a look around and see how we do. Here are some links to take you back to media with supporting language.
SPACE CADETS
PLAYER PARTICIPATE
ENTROPY
DANCE GRAPH

Artifacts

Science!

In the spirit of art, science and media from semiconductor films.

Ideologies

Artifacts

photo by Matt Spanglerphoto by Nicky Digital

Dance Plans

Reds

Red Detachment of Women

In the camp of the Red Army beside the Wanquan River, a newly formed Detachment of Women is being trained. Wu tells the Red Army soldiers the enormity of the Tyrant of the South's crimes. She then ceremoniously receives a rifle and is accepted as a member of the Women's Detachment. With determination, they plan to liberate the those under the oppression of the tyrant.

Red Army

I am raising a red army for May 20.
21+

THNKHRD

DNCHRD is an event thrown by LVHRD, part of happycorp-global's family of branding companies. Their respective logos are concatenated below.Their site describes DNCHRD IV as "a dance competition in 6 colors. Six color-coordinated dance crews led by 6 Dance Captains show off their choreography during an interactive rock show."

I have been asked to participate as the red Winger team Dance Captain.

The dance war format is particularly fascinating to me. In the space of dance-culture-technology I crave both a proving ground and a place to create cultural war machines. The lesson here, be careful what you wish for and be clear what you are fighting for.

Some background on the organizing entity LVHRD.

LVHRD's New York chapter opened in October of 2004 to a seed group of 100 diverse individuals. Membership was officially closed in May of 2005. Currently, new members are evaluated on an individual basis involving participation, creative pursuits, and professional diversity. Through this criteria, LVHRD maintains an active and varied network of members.
LVHRD is something of a chimera, part art circle, part drinking club, part secret society and part branding machine. Dewar's is their most visible advertising partner. It supplies alcohol for all of their events and its branding can be seen throughout the LVHRD website, photography and video content.

Events include costumed members of the New York culturati drinking and partaking in competitive silliness like eating the contents of a vending machine or building urban models from cheese. They are fun and exclusive.

an ‘ideological,’ scientific, or artistic movement can be a potential war machine D&G (ATP 422)

For DNCHRD the silliness is the dancing itself. The colors are empty signifiers made to represent nothing of import. It is simply meant to distinguish camps.

I did a video shoot for this project on Sunday in the UNIQLO store. Of all of the other team leaders I seemed to be the only one with a real interest or capacity for dance. The comradery with the other captains was fun and dancing in retail space felt socially transgressive so I got a kick out of it. I got a bit confused when asked to dance with the clothing.I am not sure I know what I am getting into or how I feel about a the confluence of commerce and culture wars. To me red stands for radicalism and an anti-corporate ideology. Red stands for passion and sanguinity. When it comes to spirited beverages red stands for apple cider.

Going to war means fighting for something you believe in, not just doing it for fun. Perhaps I dont know what I am getting into. Perhaps LVHRD doesnt know what they are getting into either. We will see on May 20th. I am looking for a crew. Let me know if you are interested in battling in a dance war.

I am playing your game but I am playing my way. --Otis Houstin Jr aka Black Cherokee

Symmetric Antisymmetric Interpolation

Given two vectors, v and w, we can linearly combine them to yield their symmetric and their antisymmetric combinations using vector addition and subtraction.
The combination (v+w)/2 is invariant to switching v and w and is therefore termed symmetric. Lets call it s so that s=(v+w)/2. Graphically s can be drawn pointing from the origin to the point midway between the terminal points of vectors v and w. We can think of it as the average vector.

The combination (v-w)/2 reverses sign by switching v and w and is therefore termed antisymmetric . Lets call it a so that a=(v-w)/2. Graphically a can be drawn pointing from the terminal point of s to the terminal point of v. Similarly -a is the vector pointing from the terminal point of s to the terminal point of w. We can think of it as the difference vector.

This is a nifty representation since v=s+a and w=s-a. To interpolate between v and w we need only vary the parameter t from -1 to 1 in the expression s+t*a. Of course there is a max patch that demonstrates this. You must save and reopen this patch to get it to initialize properly.
Happy interpolating! Code in the comments section.

Space Cadets

Learning to navigate the force fields of deep space takes practice. A kinesthetic and mathematical understanding of an expressive instrument enhances its creative possibilities.

Music: Cops at the Door by Die Kapitalist Pig
Duck: Jon Kinzel
Biplane: Cavin Moore
Moonbug: Sarah Rosner
Cruiser: Meghan McCoy

Rotation

With vector vectoria Matt brings us from vectors to rotations, another vector quantity. Rotations play part in some of the deeper mysteries of physics. In OpenGL rotations determine the orientation of a graphical object. Here is a 3-D vector toy. The code is in the comments section. The patch has rotations going all over the place. Using a spherical coordinate system makes it possible to generate these rotations in q (theta) and f (phi). In the guts of the patch the orientation of the graphic arrow model is determined by using theta and phi as euler angles.

Vectors

A vector is a line from a point in space to another point in space. It has both magnitude and direction. Bound vectors begin at the origin and are determined by the location of the terminal point. There are many different ways to represent vectors.Cartesian coordinates present the most straightforward means of representing a vector. In cartesian coordinates vectors can be added and subtracted by adding and subtracting their respective x, y and z coordinates.Physical quantities such as force, acceleration, velocity and displacement are all vector quantities. In the gravity simulator we dealt with all 4 of these in their 2-D vector form. We also are dealing with vectors when extraction accelerometer data from the Wii remote.

Spherical Coordinates

Spherical coordinates provide another system for describing locations in 3-D. It uses the coordinate r, q (theta) and f (phi). Like polar coordinates it makes use of a radial coordinate. The length of the line joining the point to origin is the coordinate r. This same line subtends an angle q (theta) with the y (up/down) axis. As in the cylindrical system f (phi) determines the angular coordinate in the x-z plane. This is often referred to as the azimuthal coordinate.
Here is a patch that lets you play with 3-D spherical coordinates. The code is in the comments section. Since it uses cartesian coordinates we translate from spherical to cartesian as we send messages to OpenGL.

Here is how spherical and cartesian coordinates are related:

x = r cos(q) cos(f)
z = r cos(q) sin(f)
y = r sin(q)

Cylindrical Coordinates

Cylindrical coordinates specify a point in 3-D with a mix of polar coordinates and cartesian. Polar coordinates use a distance and angle measure to locate points in 2-D. Cylindrical coordinates use an additional distance measure to locate points in 3-D. For this example r and f are two polar coordinates and y is the third. We can translate from cylindrical to 3-D cartesian coordinates using r and f to determine x and z and using y as it is given.
Here is a patch that lets you play with 3-D cylindrical coordinates. The code is in the comments section. Since it uses cartesian coordinates we translate from cylindrical to cartesian as we send messages to OpenGL.

Polar Coordinates

The polar coordinate system is another way of keeping track of points on the plane. Instead of using Descartes' x and y coordinates to determine the position of a point we use r and q. The polar coordinate system is based on a line drawn from the origin of coordinates to the point. The length of this line is r. The angle between the line and the x-axis is q.
The mathematical relationship between cartesian and polar coordinates goes as follows.

x = r cos(q)
y = r sin(q)

The objects cartopol and poltocar convert between cartesian and polar coordinates. The angle is measured in radians. The code is in the comments section.
Lots of very exciting mathematics surrounds this relationship between polar and cartesian coordiantes by way of exponentials and complex numbers. One such jewel is Euler's formula.

Coordinates in OpenGL

Here is a patch that lets you play with a 3-D Cartesian coordinate system using OpenGL.
OpenGL uses Cartesian coordinates x, y, z for placement of objects, light source, viewpoint and focus point. The code is in the comments section.

Cartesian Coordinates

Coordinate systems allow us to refer to points in space using numbers. There are different kinds of coordinate systems and they can have different numbers of dimensions. A very familiar coordinate system is the 2-D Cartesian coordinate system.
In this coordinate system two numbers, x and y, specify a point in a plane. The name Cartesian comes from Descartes who is said to have "invented" the system while laying in bed sick and watching a fly crawl across the tiled ceiling.

The above 2-D Cartesian system can be expanded into a 3-D cartesian if we simply add a third dimension, z. As x determines the left/right position and y determines the up/down position the additional coordinate z determines the back/forth position.

Convolution

Convolution is one of the jewels of Fourier analysis.
It is the Fourier transform of the multiplication operator and useful in physics and signal processing.The integral equation for using the quantum mechanical propagator K reduces to a convolution if it depends only on relative differences in space and time. K=K(x-x',t-t')Here is a patch using convolution with a drifting time series and a set of different kernel functions. The output time series is the convolution of the input time series and the kernel function. Click on all of the different kernel functions to see how they change the output signal.
We are colonizing a field. Source code in comments section.

Player Participate

Gondry's film and installation at Deitch Projects, Be Kind Rewind, presents a refreshing view of culture, putting value on process and participation over product and profit. Making computer games out of ourselves, our movement vocabularies and the environments we inhabit, follows this same philosophy.

“I don’t intend nor have the pretension to teach how to make films. Quite the contrary. I intend to prove that people can enjoy their time without being part of the commercial system and serving it. Ultimately, I am hoping to create a network of creativity and communication that is guaranteed to be free and independent from any commercial institution.”-Michel Gondry

nice moves: Cavin Moore
nice music: Real Nice by Should Have Thought of That

Think Tank

Discourse is a dance. Sometimes it feels fun, sometimes dangerous. Here is the artifact from friday's think tank. We can learn from the content and form of such improvisations, improving our communications by getting rid of the bad style and keeping the good.

Click To Play

Gravity Fields

To use the force you must learn the force. Gravity is Newton's force.
Simulation is a great way to learn about gravity. So is dancing.
This is a simple physics engine for simulating a particle in a central force field. The code is in the comments section. Here is an example of what you can do with it.