NYU ITP 4-in-4

What is a 4-in-4? According to NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program:

Do a creative project every day for four straight days.

Projects must be completed in a day, so they need to be as compact as they are creative

Each project needs a name and documentation posted by the end of the day. Each should be a stand-alone accomplishment

4-in-4: 2

By voidit on Day 2, March 2010

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4-in-4: 1

By voidit on Day 1, March 2010

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For Day 2 of 4-in-4 I promised myself I’d make a max/msp patch. I’ve done max purely with midi, but I’ve yet to do anything with audio. The patch takes in audio in 2 second chunks and randomly assigns it to a buffer. While that’s happening a random buffer is selected for playback and routed through a delay. Essentially, you can remix songs live as they’re playing.

Here’s two recordings I made.

The Books – Be Good To Them Always
Bjork – Hyperballad

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Sundays and Thursdays Pt 3

By zf213 on Uncategorized

This mini Sundays & Thursdays story is done! It took way too long! Here it is! Click for full size! Woooooooooooooooooo!

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Sproutcore

By dp1244 on Day 2, March 2010

I wanted to know more about Sproutcore, the open source framework that allows you to create native style applications on the web. Â There’s not much for me to mention. I mainly was running through the tutorial. Â It was great fun and I got to use the Terminal alot which always denotes a feeling of authenticity.

Difficulties

The main issue was learning about bash inputs. Â There was a string of code that read:

export PATH=`pwd`/abbot/bin:$PATH

I assumed I was supposed to just type that in. Â That doesn’t work. Â I learned that some computers have .bashrc

I don’t have that either. Â But I do have a .bashprofile and that’s where I needed to add the export path. Â After that, it was simply a matter of going in Terminal, typing up to the directory I plan on working on and running sc-server. Â Good times!

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Day 3 – Mash Up: We Will Rage You

By dp1244 on Day 3, March 2010

We Will Rage You (Linda Ronstadt vs RATM)

I have finally, after talking about making mash ups for 4 years or so, created one of my own. Â ”We Will Rage You” is a combination Linda Rondstadt “We Will Rock You” vs RATM “Maggie’s Farm” Â I had to use Soundtrack Pro, cuz I’m not about to buy Ableton Live. Â I learned the best way to make it is by cutting up each section of the song, any differential just give it’s own track. Â The issue with doing that is if you need to slow down any of the instrumentals, I’ll need to find a way to coordinate the changed sample rate. Â After Using 11 tracks (3 more deleted), and 8 1/2 hours, it’s done. Â It’s my first, but I hope people who like mash ups and Rage Against The Machine will like it(NOTE: apologies, there’s 8 seconds of silence at the top, no clue why).

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photoshop fun

By jelani on Day 3, March 2010

Used 4 headshots of diana and a few custom brushes to create this. It was pretty fun. I havn’t done anything creative with photoshop in far too long.

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Linkages: Beam & Crank

By Morgen Fleisig on Day 2, March 2010

This is turning into a tutorial in Flash, and is a work in progress.

I spent last night drawing up a Beam & Crank linkage in Vectorworks from Marks’ Mechanical Engineers’ Handbook:

That part didn’t take too long, so then I drew it through 15 stages of rotation, assuming 15 frames per second of animation–so 360Â° Ã· 15 = 24Â°. Â So far, pretty easy, but then I printed the images as PDF’s and imported them into iMovie HD. Â Definitely not the way to go. Â I ended up with a pretty crude bit-mapped animation:

I tried PNG’s, and the line work was better, but I had the setting wrong for maintaining the canvas size, so every frame had a different proportion. Â This effect might come in handy some time, but not here:

I then realized that I needed vector-based animation. Duh. Flash. I knew I would need to learn it or something like it sooner or later. No time like the present. I don’t have it installed, but I figured out how to export the Vectorworks files as a .DWG into Illustrator (each layer can also be copied and pasted), and then exported as a Flash movie:

Beam & Crank linkage, “as used on side-wheel steamers.”

To follow up on this, I plan to do the same with:

Drag-Link Mechanism
Rocker Mechanism
Sliding-Block Linkage
Swinging-Block Linkage
Turning-Block Linkage

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Difficult

By jelani on Day 2, March 2010

I was given the topic “love”. A poem. And maybe a picture. It’s title’d difficult.

difficult

thin lips and eyes
to wind –
through marriage of wine
dancing moments
and kiss from hot wings

smooth like a fire
like a
stolen hag
belly rotten green and gray
and a wind passes through the centre
(more…)

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Sundays and Thursdays Part 2

By zf213 on Day 2, March 2010

Work on this one is going a little slower than expected…but no fear! Coloring was about half got through today. Here are the first three pages colored (no text yet) …the next three shall be forthcoming tomorrow. Technically this is now a 2 in 4.

Add comment | March 14th, 2010

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A Day with Greg Borenstein

By Morgen Fleisig on Day 1, March 2010

Saturday Greg led a small ITPlatoon to the Retro Arcade Museum in Beacon, NY, and documented it for the ITP Spring Break 4-in-4.

I documented Greg.

Here is a list of the conversations we had on the 1-hour, 20-minute train ride going up, followed by those on the train coming back:

Going Up:

Missing the Train. Even though I wanted to go on an earlier train, I almost missed this one, leaving my apartment after noon and thinking I could get to Grand Central and buy a ticket before 12:45. The subway closed it’s doors just as I made it to the platform. I made it nonetheless.

Museum of Jurassic Technology. A cabinet of wonders in LA.

Open Streetmap. An open source mapping project. Could be useful for the game Julio and I are developing around The Battle of Brooklyn. There are also a number of online services to convert art to vectors

Palisades Geology. It is a lava uplift, crystalized into vertical hexagonal columns. I tried to point out Tom Thumb, which is a lone column still standing after the others collapsed, but there was too much fog on the river.

Atari ET Cartridges Burial. A semi-urban legend about an Atari dumpsite in Alamogordo, New Mexico. Greg is building a model of this.

Maya Blender Tutorial. Very thorough, and, remarkably, by a child going through puberty. It is amazing that a child can now teach adults thanks to the Internet. Scott and Greg are both working their way through this tutorial.

Robert Heinlein’s “And he built a crooked house”. About an LA architect who builds a hypercube house which collapses in on itself after an earthquake. Greg sent this to me yesterday morning.

Grokking. Coined by Heinlein in A Stranger in a Strange Land: “to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed.” From here, we moved to the year that Greg became a geek because he wanted to become a musician, and so built a website about it.

Bridges. As we went under the Tappanzee, we talked about how it was being replaced, possibly with a bridge that would carry a train to reduce auto commuters. This led to the horrible condition of the San Francisco Bay Bridge, and how they are expending resources to reinforce it that impair progress on the new span. We wondered out loud why the Golden Gate has no problems, and then Greg brough up the smaller study for Golden Gate in Portland that Scott identified as the Saint John’s. Scott and Greg then talked about how dangerous the Sellwood Bridge is, and that after the Minneapolis bridge collapse, the Sellwood was rated a “0″ from 1 to 100, where 1 is the worst.

Oregon. Florence. The Mckenzie Lava Beds. Astoria.

Daylight Savings Time. This causes insoluable computer problems between time zones.

Big Games. Capture the Flag in the rain in Washington Square. Both Sarah and Tianwei took massive falls. From Scott’s angle he was really scared that she had broken her neck. Greg couldn’t believe he had tagged her with sufficient force, as he had been quite conscious of being careful. Scott talked about how he had been completely focused on maintaining footing while slippery. Greg mentioned an alternate form of slow play, where you can only take one step each time a bell is rung. They then went onto strategy in that game, discussing field size, number of players, and flag locations, and complained again that we had overhid our flag.

Native Americans. The Long Now talked about how Cincinnati once had a population of 1 million. Read the Francis Parkman Reader.

3-D Printing. Scott’s Toy Design prototype. He’s moving to Casting. Mike suggested having it priced by Shapeways.

Indian Point. How is it’s safety record, what is the evacuation plan for New York, and is it a terrorist target? Reed College has the only student-run nuclear reactor. You can drop nail clippings into it and tell what kind of rings that person is wearing because the metal from the rings migrates into the nails. Using radiation to look at paint layers below. Damien Hearst should paint over a Picasso. His skull was bought by Russians.

Big games. High Noon hatred. Jelani liked it. Why are Jelani’s emails teal, and why is he downloading images from Forchan?

Forchan. AT&T succeeded in shutting it down for 5 minutes.

Connecticut College. It was the number 2 soviet strike target after Washington because it was across the river from a naval sub base that carried nuclear warheads. Electric Boat is in New London. The Pacific fleet is in the Hood Canal near Bremerton. Dick Couch’s Pressure Point is a great thriller read on the hijacking of a Trident with the Bainbridge Ferry. Other thriller writers: Clive cussler et al.

Forchan. They completely undermined Time’s list of the most influential people.

Castles. West Point. Bannerman’s Castle on Pollepel Island, destroyed by exploding shells and gun powder in 1920.

Forgetting Things. I packed up my camera and left it by the door. Greg went home specifically to pick up Slonimsky’s Thesaurus of Scales, took a shower, and left it there. He didn’t remember until he was five blocks from home.

Eat Before the Museum. We’re all starving

————

Coming Back:

Muybridge and Etienne Jules-Marey. Greg studied them in college and wrote a paper about them that I would like to read. I would also like to put together a Muybridge object library for Processing.

Thesis. ITP process compared to Harvard GSD. We had one semester of thesis prep to write and define our thesis, and then one semester of production. It would be a good idea to define our projects earlier.

Greg’s Thesis at Reed. On the academy Awards.

Reed College Thesis Tower. All theses are stored in one part of the library. When alumni return, they place money in their theses, face value dependent on how long ago they graduated. Freshmen scour them for food money, and spend hours reading old theses.

One of Greg’s Favorite Theses. A 1937 comparison between Hitler and Mussolini’s types of fascism, and which would predictably fare better.

Congress, What They Do, and What They Don’t. The problem is the American people: we voted them in, and we think we can have everything the way we want it without raising taxes. To dig us out of the financial situation we are in now will take a transformational biotech invention like e coli excreting gasoline.

Jefferson. He had strange value systems in both the way he dealt with friendships and money. And then there’s Sally Hemmings. He was a zealot, and believed the Revolution should be permanent. Elections for him were a method of achieving this. He would be completely in favor of term limits.

Craig Venter. He has discovered 1000s of unknown species, and is currently working on synthetic organisms engineered to make fuel. The delieation between species is artificial. How is a frog different from a fly if the frog eats flies. Classification is a form of edge detection for us to understand the world. We are an ecosystem to 3000 species. If we killed them we would die. Are complex organisms such as humans the result of collaborations long ago between more primitive separate but symbiotic organsims?

Video Game Mechanisms. The mirror utilized as method of gaining distance. Greg’s project “Face Fight” had a problem due to this: one person’s face was twice as far away as the other’s.

Teachers at ITP. Styles of critique and engagement.

Ideas for Final Projects this Semester. Call to Prayer at Dydima. Turtle Acoustic Chamber. Sounds a turtle might hear.

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Weather Viz

By jelani on Day 1, March 2010

On the first day of christmas…

well, I’ve never really played around with this sort of stuff so I decided to make a simple visualization of weather temperature and wind data using Processing. You can plug any image into this sketch. Just remmeber to change the width and height values. (Also, it plays nicer with even numbers). The colors it changes to depends on the outside temperature.

You can download the source and play with the app here.

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Whitney Museum Visit

By dp1244 on Day 1, March 2010

My girlfriend and I disregarded the terrible storm and our general illness and trooped it over to the Whitney Museum. Â There were many exhibits. Â Some were terrible. Some were amazing. Â Here were my 3 favorites:

1. Â Watermelon Woman – Cheryl Dunye

I was captivated by this piece. Â The piece included a large collection of photos from a career that never existed. Â Cheryl Dunye created a fictional black lesbian actress named Fae Richards, who was wiped away from Hollywood’s memory and proceeded to make a film and a collection of historically accurate photos to chronicle her life. Â I’m a huge fan of film, art, narrative, subversive material and alternative reality. Â It was very rich with details, including photos of unknown friends and candid photos from throughout her life. Â What excited me the most is the hope that younger generations will look at it and not realize it is fictitious. Â I think the world would be better for it.

2. Â Lee Bontecou – Untitled

There was one piece that stood out as one of the Coolest Things I’ve Ever Seen! Â It looks like Steampunk Volcano Park. The artist in question stopped showing new work for 20 years from 71-91, which would seriously mess me up, personally. Â I think the piece in question was during her ‘stasis’ period, but according to the internet it was made in 1961. Â This is the best picture I can find.

3. Â Master of the Universe/Flexmaster 3000 – Aurel Schmidt

Sadly, this had nothing to do with He-Man. Â This richly detailed work is at once captivating. Â The veins are all cigarette butts or earthworms. Â I’ll forgive the explanation that it is the embodiment of creation and destruction and focus on his use of our everyday detritus as the building blocks for his minotaur. Â Frakking genius.

1 comment | March 14th, 2010

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You Are the Son Of Man

By Mike Cohen on Day 1, March 2010

According to ITPedia, my Day 1 project was “something with CV.” Â And that is what I did. Â My first idea was to make a yawn tracker, so it was time to hit up the code.

Having never done anything with computer vision before, I didn’t know exactly where to start. Â I figured I’d start with Jitter. Â I downloaded the cv.jit library and started messing with face and blob detection. Â Face detection was easy…trying to find an open mouth…not so much.

After much toiling, I decided to try something a little more ridiculous and fun. I decided I’d superimpose things on faces. In particular, I thought it would be fun and ridiculous to turn people into the famous man in the Magritte painting, “The Son Of Man.”