by pixelpusher on Thursday 5 June 2008
[Software, Blog]
A software art project that remixes the skylines and sights of cities I’ve lived in and visited. Download at: NYLONCityBlob
Awhile back, in 2006, I put my lifelong obsession with New York City’s buildings to good use. 2006 was the year my wife and I moved to London to start a new life as expatriates, reversing the colonial journey that started our home country in favor of the old country on the edge of a new, powerful-again Europe.
Leaving New York, I felt like a traitor. New York is in my family’s blood. My grandfather loved nothing more than to take us around the sights - the Empire State, the Twin Towers, Macy’s, the countless delicatessens shining as culinary diamonds in the rough preserve of Mexicans making Chinese food and Chinese baking Pizzas. My grandfather spent all his years in New York, knew every inch of the serpentine BQE (Brooklyn-Queens-Expressway) slithering over and through industrial Brooklyn on its way up north to upstate and sweet oblivion, finally exploding into the Hutch, the Cross-Bronx, and the Bruckner.
Not that he would have ventured that far north - he hated grass, and crickets. Especially crickets.
I don’t want to give the impression that my family is parochial; they’re well-traveled and world-wise, but they always come back. I still haven’t returned.
I ‘ve turned my world travels into an art project - just as the skylines of all the places I’ve visited and lived get jumbled in my head over time, this software remixes them and rescales them and blends them into a chimera of a city. I’ll add to it over time but right now it is NY (New York City) LON (London). Sometimes it gets intimate, and small places crowd out the big, important, impersonal ones. Use the mouse to navigate. Mac-only (for now). Enjoy.
If you’d like to show it somewhere, please contact me at pixelpusher@flkr.com, I’m open to the idea.
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It’s that time again - your favourite bi-monthly audio/visual even returns! Starting around 7:30pm and lasting until 11:30pm, on 5 June 2008 Spencer Mash (SS_R) & PixelPusher present a night of soundscapes, experimental music, and visuals as part of the ever-popular, on-going Immersion series at The Flea-Pit, London E2. [schedule]
Immersion is a free-entry experimental music/sound-art event featuring a soundtrack of electronic atmospheres, noisescapes, pulses/rhythms and tones/drones.
Immersion is an arena for new and established artists performing live experimental electronic music; using laptops, synthesizers, field recordings, circuit-bent electronics and prepared/processed/custom-made instruments.
Immersion promotes the whole notion of DIY/independently generated music - free of commercial constraints, or constrictions of catagorisation.
All sounds are partnered by stimulating projected visuals processed live and tailored for each performance.
The Flea-Pit is a unique cafe-bar/arts venue with comfortable retro furniture - and a gallery/performance area, in the heart of east/central London’s vibrant art scene and is located only five minutes away from Shoreditch High Street. Nearest tube: Old Street (exit 2).
Read more… »
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It’s that time again - your favourite bi-monthly audio/visual even returns! Starting around 7:30pm and lasting until 11:30pm, on 3 April 2008 Spencer Mash (SS_R) & PixelPusher present a night of soundscapes, experimental music, and visuals as part of the ever-popular, on-going Immersion series at The Flea-Pit, London E2. [schedule]
Read more… »
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Area 10 Media Lab in Peckham is holding a weekend full of lectures, workshops, seminars, and live performances from 11-12 April 2008.
The live events will take place on Saturday the 12th from 7PM until late (£5 entry).
I’ll be playing along with a good portion of Openlab London, and many others.
Workshops & seminars & lectures:
10am-5pm on Friday 11th April (free)
10am-6pm on Saturday 12th April (free)
More info: http://www.crealab.info/digitalab/doku.php
Address:
Area 10 Project Space
Peckham Square
London, SE15 5JT
(The building behind Peckham Library)
Bus: 12, 36, 37, 63, 78, 436, 345, 177, 312, 343
Train: Peckham Rye / Queens Rd. Station
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by pixelpusher on Tuesday 25 March 2008
[Software, Blog]
You’ve probably heard of Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, and Picabia. If you haven’t, and especially if you have, and you happen to live somewhere near London, go directly to the Tate Modern to see their new exhibition of their combined works, do not pass go, do not collect $200. This exhibit is so chock full of major works that you can easily get lost, or worse, distracted.
From the Tate Modern exhibition website:
In the 1920s Duchamp ostensibly gave up making art works to play competitive chess. But he was fascinated by the idea of creating virtual forms. Helped at times by Man Ray, he experimented with stereoscopic views and built a number of devices that generated the illusion of seeing a drawing or design in three dimensions.
The devices that “generated the illusion of seeing a drawing or design in three dimensions” consist of what look like CAD drawings on circular plates; circles of increasing diameter nestled inside one another, filling the whole disc, or filling part of the disk along with the skeleton of a 3D cylinder, and other fractal-looking drawings composed of similarly nested, self-similar shapes. The discs (there are many of them) are aligned in a grid pattern, and each slowly rotates. Staring at them gives the impression of a 3D objects slowly spinning on an off-center axis.
I was a bit blown away by this concept, dating from not long after the invention of electrical machines. I’m not a great art historian, but a friend called this Op-Art and I agree with that classification. Now, the brilliant thing about having computers around to do drawings for us is that we aren’t limited to making a simple disc of optical illusions spin at a constant speed. First off, we aren’t even limited to a single version of that disc. I can make an almost infinitely variable sketch of rings-within-rings, and spin them at a variable rate based on a simple software program (Processing; source code included).
I showed this to a few friends the other night at one of our OpenLab OpenSalons (a fairly casual get-together where a few of us show some works in progress, drink, eat, and geek out), and Robert Atwood pointed out that there’s no reason to limit the sketch to rotating the entire disc - we can make every inner ring of it spin independently. As we discussed what it might look like, Claude quietly made this happen (using Pd/GEM).
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by pixelpusher on Tuesday 25 March 2008
[Blog]
http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=2209224391&topic=3696
I’m not part of this workshop, but I thought I’d post it for those in/near London looking for Max/MSP classes.
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by pixelpusher on Wednesday 13 February 2008
[images, video, Visuals]
My first thought after (and during) this past Immersion at The Flea Pit, London - Where did all you people come from?! People were queued up in the hallway leading to the performance wing of The Pit for almost the entire night. It got so crowded that I had to stop videoing the event, people were in the way of my camera. We had to trust our laptop screen in the back while doing visuals because we couldn’t see past the crowd to the screens!
Of course, this is a good thing. Thanks to everyone who showed up! Your enthusiasm and energy makes these (free) events worthwhile.
PixelPusher Set 1 with Gabrial Da Piaz (Quicktime divx, 19MB)
Read on for videos and images and more
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by pixelpusher on Tuesday 4 December 2007
[Blog, Past Performances]
Nov. 25, 2007
Here in the European heart of global finance that is London, there are no shortage of closed, corporate-sponsored, invite-only events promoting proprietary products with secret formulas and patented ideas. A refreshing break from this trend is the perennial Openlab series of events, now in its fourth incarnation. Openlab is a loose collective of artists, computer industry professionals, and performers whose main goal is to spread free software an ideas through events with talks, workshops, and performances.
Openlab4 took place 25 November at Melange, an aspiring art-friendly venue just north of east London’s art-clogged arteries of Old Street and Shoreditch. Read more… »
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Openlab4
>>=========<<
25th Nov 2007
Free Software and ideas
talks + music + visuals + performances
brought to you by Openlab
Event Details
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