OvniLounge Album on BandCamp

I decided to do a little experiment with BandCamp. Although most of my music is available for streaming / downloading free via SoundCloud, I've basically run out of space-time there. And BandCamp looks particularly good as a site for promoting and selling music. So I decided I'd make a couple of things available through them.

The first is the original OvniLounge album. This is a set of tracks from around 2006, loosely themed as "lounge music for flying-saucer people". It is lounge, as in background, listening music. I think there are some strong melodies there (to my usual plangent taste). But it's also fairly OVNI (UFO in Portuguese) - in other words, weird and uneasy. It's an extremely COLD album, which despite busy chattering percussion evokes the chill of interstellar space. The beats are "raw from the DAW", untreated FruityLoops of heavy thuds and nervous rattling. Not at all danceable to your average primate. It's kind of IDM, but probably doesn't sound much like your archetypal IDM either. If I have to give some kind of pointer I'd say it's a bit like LFO or some of the interludes in an early Black Dog album, though I'm clearly not worthy of such comparisons.

BandCamp don't host free downloads, so you have to buy, but I'm allowing you to set your own price, starting at $3. If you like it, by all means feel free to signal this by paying more :-)

Tonight I knocked up a quick YouTube video for the first track (cut and pasted out of other YouTube finds, of course).

New Blogger

Finally, Google have upped their game with Blogger. Both design and functionality.

Did you notice in the last post on my exhibition that the pictures are now in a gallery when you click on them?

Big Society in Action

So, the UK government no longer feels it necessary to ensure people have enough food, and hands off responsibility to a charity.

This makes me VERY angry indeed. Someone posted that this is "collapse". But it's nothing of the sort. There is not sense whatsoever that the government can't ensure that there's enough food, distributed fairly enough, that no-one goes hungry. It can simply commit money to bulk buy enough food for the UK in the next year if it wanted to.

That it doesn't is a political decision.

Pictures From The Exhibition

A couple of pictures from Machine Gardens at the Goldsmiths MFA end-of-year show.


Four Pieces

Green Cogs on a Black Background

Crank

Sound, Spaceship Earth and Fanged Noumena

Solar Powered RepRap

Great! Someone built a RepRap that runs on solar power (and doesn't need a computer, just gets the file off an SD card).

Sunlight on Translucent Machines

The sun started shining on some of my Perspex machines and I had to grab the camera. Beautiful.

(All machines will be in the exhibition this week, but sadly none of them will look like these photos under the fluorescent lights)

RepRap Quality Improvements

Its official, RepRap has now surpassed the commercial Fused deposition modeling 3d printers in machine affordability, price for filiment, and NOW build quality.

According to the RepRap blog.

La Mer Revisited

Gisel is updating her site, and wanted to embed the soundtrack I did for the ballet "La Mer" in 2004. (A remix / transformation of the piece by Debussy)

It's already on SoundCloud but needed some retitling. So that seems like as good an excuse for a revisit as any :-)

Check out Gisel's stunning scenery.

  La Mer by Mentufacturer

Will Hutton on Successful Capitalism

Nice paragaph :

Successful capitalism is an incredibly difficult phenomenon to create and sustain. It depends on entrepreneurial flair, yes, but also on ideas, institutions and processes ranging from great universities to innovative financial organisations that do not always appear spontaneously by the operation of free markets. They sometimes have to be designed by public action. Great businesses and wealth flower in strong societies that equip their entrepreneurs to prosper. The framework which supports this costs money, and it is proper that the rich should contribute proportionally.

Gothic Cathedral Play Set

This is nice. A Gothic cathedral playset for 3D printing.

RIP Michael Hart

Sad. The Michael Hart, the founder of Project Gutenberg has died at the relatively young age of 64. Obituary here.

End of MA Show, September 15th

I'm coming to the end of my MA in Computational Studio Arts at Goldsmiths. 

It's been a lot of fun and I've had the chance to play with a whole stack of things I've wanted to get into for a while, including Physical Computing (Arduino + electronics, 3D printing and other desktop manufacturing technologies, motion tracking etc.)

For a while I was seriously thinking that I may go on to try a PhD in the same area, but I'm tending away from that now. (In which case I have to find something else to do with myself.)

In mean time, here's the joint end-of-year show, just down the road from Kings Cross station in London. Opening night is the 15th September.

Updating My Homepage

I'm updating my homepage

My homepage isn't a blog, but I want to put some kind of marker on it, to indicate what I'm up to at the moment. You can glean that from this blog too, of course, but often where I am is swamped by things I'm thinking about and ranting.
Synaesmedia.net will be a view of what I'm doing, stripped of day-to-day chatter. (Although with links to it all on the side.)

New Blogger UI

Yea!

Thumbs up to the new Blogger UI. It's about time they revamped it, and I have to say, it's pretty good. Particular win is having analytics built in to the dashboard. OTOH, what sucks is that blank lines in HTML editor don't automatically become paragraph breaks in published text. WTF?

"All Your Pont" Revisited

I'm continuing to update my Goldsmiths portfolio. Added a page for the motion tracking / projection mapping game we did in Paris.




Here's a link to the full portfolio

Flower Brush Revisited

Flower Brush revisited.



At the beginning of my MA course at Goldsmiths I wrote a little graphics program I'd been thinking about for years. It illustrated a simple principle : painting with multiple dumb agents. Later on, thinking more about patterns and reading about William Morris and wallpaper design I realised that simply by making the brushes "wrap-around" when they went off one side of the canvas I could make far more interesting repeating patterns.

Soon after I'd implemented the change, I found SpoonFlower, which does on-demand printing on fabrics and uploaded a couple of patterns. You can see (and buy) them here.

Anyway, it's nice to be able to go back and find a new twist on an old sketch. There's more promise in the original Flower Brush idea than I've really done justice to, even now. But this feels like a good step forward.

A follow up video showing a crank (turning rotary into reciprocating movement).



Once again, this comes out of my software and is cut on a laser-cutter.

Zewp! is the anti-Gbloink!

So here's a video of my latest work-in-progress : a piece called "Machine Gardens" for my end of year art exhibition in September. But I also want to take this playful experimentation into "programs-becoming-things" further. I'll keep you all posted.