Video artist Lavasir Nordrum hast just posted the third of four short movies created together with the Sverm group. The first short movie was titled Micromotion, and the second was titled Microsounds. This month’s short movie is called Excitation, and is focused on the first half of an even or action. This will be followed by a short movie called Resonance to be released on 1 January.
For the last couple of years I have been involved in an artistic research project called Sverm, in which we investigate the artistic potential of bodily micromotion and microsound. We are currently working towards a series of intimate lab performances in the end of November. As a side-project to the performances, we are also working with video artist Lavasir Nordrum, on the making of four short videos documenting the four main parts of the project: micromotion, microsound, excitation, resonance. ...
What to do when a DVD is stuck in the drive on an old iMac, and it refuses to booth up? There are numerous ways of doing this, including: Start up while holding down the mouse button. Start up while holding down the Option key, then hit the eject button. Start up while holding down Command-Option-O-F, to enter the Open Firmware prompt, then type “eject cd”. Start up while holding down Command-S to enter recovery mode. Unfortunately, none of these worked. Finally, I found a tip about just physically stopping the DVD from spinning up during boot. So I tried sliding a few yellow note-it stickers inside of the DVD drive. This nicely prevented the drive from spinning up, so that the regular boot procedure could continue. Sometimes a mechanical solution is the best.
Travelling on the excellent (and frequent) Valencia metro this morning, I noticed that music was played in the background. Or, to be more precise, I noticed it after a while. I started my travel in the middle of the city centre in the rush hour, so most of the soundscape was composed of three elements: the noise of the metro cars while moving the noise of the massive ventilation system inside the metro cars (I am not really sure why they made so much noise, but at least the air was fresh) the noise of people speaking Since most people left at the stations in the city centre, I was travelling more or less alone the last part out to the airport. And it was then that I noticed that music was being played. It was not unpleasant, but it was surprising. I am used to background music in shopping malls, etc., but not on public transportation. While playing soft background music may be a successful method of making people feel more comfortable, I found this particular example to be disturbing in, at least, two ways: culturally and sonically. ...
I just discovered that it is possible to create blog posts from TextMate (see introductions here and here), so this is my first attempt. To also add some content to this blog entry, here is a short video I shot at Shiphol airport in Amsterdam yesterday. Walking through the otherwise busy airport, I noticed that they had set up a small artificial “park” in the middle of all the shops and cafeterias. There were some visual content, trees and posters, but the most interesting was the audible part: park-like sounds with birds, etc. The visual part was ok, but I think the sound design really made the installation work well. ...
I have been using Dropbox occasionally over the last few years to sync files (installers, etc.) between multiple computers. I never felt comfortable about using it for things I am working on (and private files), especially since they did not provide any form for encryption of the files. After the Dropbox security problem a couple of weeks ago, and the updated terms allowing them to look at your files, if needed, I am even more suspicious about using Dropbox for anything. ...
To organize files I have for a while been creating folder names that start with today’s date. I typically create a number of folders each day, and had grown tired of doing this manually. Then I came across a page describing the wonders of Automator, and decided to give it a try. It all is very simple. I create a small automator script containing the following two elements: ...
Documentation is a necessity for both researchers and artists. Both scientific and artistic output requires an audience, people in a concert venue, a museum, a lecture room, a web page, etc. In some cases the documentation of the work may be closely connected to (or even the same as) the scientific or artistic “product”. In other cases, documentation serves the purpose of merely being a summary of what you have done. ...
I am happy to see that the first point in the new UiO strategy plan is interdisciplinarity, or more specifically: “Et grensesprengende universitet”. Interdisciplinarity is always easier in theory than in practice, and this is something I am debating in a feature article in the latest volume (pages 32-33) of Forskerforum, the journal of the The Norwegian Association of Researchers (Forskerforbundet). I have written about interdisciplinarity on this blog several times before (here, here and here). In the new article I use interdisciplinarity to not only refer to adjacent scientific disciplines, but in a more general sense. I use some of my own work as the point of departure: the video analysis work that ended up as the Musical Gestures Toolbox started out as an artistic project, was later developed within my scientific PhD work, and is now being used for both artistic projects (e.g. by Victoria Johnson), research on ADHD (Terje Sagvolden’s group) and clinical use in the analysis of children with cerebral palsy (Lars Adde). ...
Cleaning up on my hard drive, I came across a couple of .wks (MS Works spreadsheet) documents from 1994-95. I don’t really need to get at the contents of these files right now, but I think it could be useful to be able to open them at some point. So I tried to see if I could open them with any of the office programs I have on my computer (MS Office, Numbers, OpenOffice, NeoOffice). ...