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Landon
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Rufus the dog
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InSight - Performed at Peninsula Arts Festival 2012
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Peninsular Arts Contemporary Music Festival 2012
So #pacmf has finally been and gone, and although I didn’t stay for all of it I was heavily involved in proceedings on Friday night through to Saturday. First up was the debut performance of inSight, using software I developed to emulate the hallucinations apparent in the condition Palinopsia. From a stage, an iPad faces an audience and projects the real-time camera input back to the audience. The performer then interacts with the iPad drawing their hallucinations onto the iPad screen in order to communicate the hallucinations as they happen. The audience can then see these hallucinations (over the camera feed of themselves) as they are projected.
Furthermore the interaction with the iPad sends control data (wirelessly) to musical software, again programmed by me, on a laptop musifying (i.e. turning into music) the visual information, according to the setup of this software. Below is a photo of the performance with Alexis on the left hand side interacting with the iPad. On the right is Simon, the flautist who performed to a score and improvisated with the visual hallucinations generated. I might put up the music software on here soon, as well as a video of the app interacting with the music. The next step in developing this is to integrate a controllable (and suitable) soundbed into the app itself using pdlib.
After inSight, I performed with the BCMI (I haven’t got any photos as yet, but you can just about make out the equipment minus me in the middle of the photo above). As I can’t split the video signal of the interface to the projector I have to have a video camera pointing at the screen and take a feed from that to the projector. True to form the camera turned itself off after about a minute into my piece, however in hindsight I think this was a blessing in disguise. I’ve struggled with the concept of just projecting the interface I look at, and after the camera turned itself off the theatre was left in total darkness. Only my face was list by the monitors in front of me and people had to focus on my concentrated gaze instead of rather inhuman interface being projected. In fact someone even commented on it being “…a masterclass in concentration” (which it does actually feel like), and a few people liked how the darkness allowed them to focus on the music. Although the projector cut out I think people had long enough to draw the link between the icons and the musical control, so I’m glad it happened as now I feel confident in taking a whole new approach to the visual aspects of performing with (what I previously considered to be) such a ‘non-performance’ system (i.e. the gestures involved are extremely difficult for the audience to perceive. Perhaps projecting a close up of my eyes, or even moving away from such a direct link of display will be next to explore.
Finally, Saturday saw the iPad Trio performance. Where three performers were stationed in a triangle configuration with the audience inside. The performers then played a ‘piece’ using commercially available iPad apps. I have to say I felt that the surface of musical potential was merely scratched upon, as it was more meanderings of noise as opposed to structured music, and therefore the Trio felt rather disconnected. The most interesting part of the piece was the integration of audience members (with their own iPads). This actually worked really well (although felt rather short-lived), and with greater co-ordination and preparation could have been excellent. Still, it’s pretty rare to see a contemporary music festival attempt some forms of inclusivity for audience members, especially where the playing field is so level.
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[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
I think I made this in CSound some time ago. It has the words ‘String Quartet’ in the file name so clearly I’m processing someone else’s recording. It’s funny when you stumble across something you once made but can’t remember creating it.
edit: After listening to this a couple of times it hit me that I used this with my guitar in the intro for a Tanka set I did in a wet Berlin, October time 2010.
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Creating test apps with distribtution profiles in Xcode4
The whole provisioning of profiles when developing an iPad app is real fiddly to setup. I’ve got two profiles, one for development and another for ad-hoc distribution for testing devices (Alexis, who lives far far away). For the inSight project we have 5 devices for testing and development and managing them turned into a bit of a nightmare especially after one intense night of a .proj not archiving properly and then not installing properly (to one of the devices away from a development Mac) the next morning. The following intends to make some sense of what’s currently going on:
To set up a remote device (i.e. one you don’t have directly in front of you to connect to your authorised Xcode) you need its serial number, which can be found by clicking on the info tab in iTunes. Within each provisioning profile (developer & ad-hoc) you can set-up and assign the devices in the provisioning portal through developer.apple.com. Each remote device needs to have a mobile provisioning file (.mobileprovision) installed before it can accept the test apps. This file is simply dragged and dropped into iTunes with the device connected.
Now for creating the test app so email to the testers.
We have a template Xcode project for archiving as there seems to be a back end setting that determines the type of archive you create. These are differentiated by the icon of the archive in the organiser.
XCode Settings:
For OpenFrameworks is seems that setting the target build for iPhone is far more stable for both iPhone and iPad than choosing iPad or Universal from the devices menu.
Then clean build the folder and select Archive under Products in the menu bar.
This icon means that the wrong archive has been done for creating a .ipa app that can be sent to the ad-hoc and distribution devices.
This icon is the correct type of archive for distribution. I’m still unsure as to what the difference is or what the setting is that changes it, but I don’t really need to know right now.Select the archive you want to convert into the test app in the Organiser and select Share. Here you can choose which profile it builds for, ad-hoc or Developer and then save as. Job done.
http://diaryofacodemonkey.ruprect.com/2011/03/18/ad-hoc-app-distribution-with-xcode-4/
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3578158/adding-devices-to-team-provisioning-profile
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Adding an image above a post in Wordpress
On each post create a custom field called img_post_header with the path to the img as the value.
As we want the image to appear on the main blog page and the single post page the following code needs to be added in loop.php and in loop-single.php above the title call
<img src=”<?php echo get_post_meta($post->ID, ‘img_post_header’, true);?>” width=”500px” height=”200px”/>
H&W is optional.
NTS. NEVER call a page template home.php. I’ve no idea why but it causes massive confusion. I guess there’s some reference to home elsewhere that WP just doesn’t like.
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/image-above-title-of-post -
Xmas jam = fine success
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[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
I did a Tanka show last night in Bristol, man was I under prepared. Here’s a track I played.
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Model Boat at the Fleece 8/12. Finally, a photo of us playing exists.
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This is too soon. Really need to finish off the set!
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On Zak’s suggestion I’ve knocked up a quick guide to installing Wordpress in MAMP as there doesn’t appear to be one out there. It’s a dead simple process, but I’m likely to forget it so having a reference is gonna be handy.
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MailChump
Creating eNewsletters with MailChimp is pretty simple if you can use one of their templates. However, if a designer gives you a layout which doesn’t fit one of the layouts it seems easier to handcode the mailout than hack around with a template. You can upload a .zip with an index.html, assets and img folder.
Things to remember:
1. Include all the reset.css info in the html header. For some reason mailchimp was not picking up the reset.
2. Forget about aligning divs next to each other/in-line (aka http://www.mobilebeer.co.uk). Use TABLES (remember those?) wherever you can.
3. Most web clients (Gmail/Hotmail) etc ignore CSS. This means they don’t pick-up google-fonts (although desktop clients do). MailChimp has an option to post CSS inline (with the HTML). Always check the results when doing this as sometimes this can put the HTML out of joint and you need to put more HTML code into the CSS, such as making table properties into classes.
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[Flash 10 is required to watch video]
Testing some Model Boat stage pyrotechnics. In hindsight this was definitely a wise idea to do before the show.
