Whilst I’m not about to condone their action on my blog, I see it as vital that the discussion around this topic is kept alive. The Rudd Government continues with a string of conservative, right-wing policy decisions around social liberties in this country and expects to proceed without community consultation.
Whether you agree with Anonymous’ (at least at this time) publicity stunt or not, we should all be questioning the path we are now heading down when it comes to freely accessible information.
Note: Whilst I do not agree with Government preventing Internet users from viewing any websites, I don’t suggest you view many of those on the blacklist. It’s not for those with a weak constitution. Seriously. (Viewing the blacklist is safe – the web addresses generally speak for themselves.)
Update 10/09/2009: The results are in. Anonymous successfully brought www.pm.gov.au to a grinding halt. I wonder what the repercussions of this will be?
We went through the basics of keying (or matting) in both the lecture and tutorial this week. Programs like After Effects have really made this process much easier than it used to be. It doesn’t take much digging through older music videos to see what a nightmare it must’ve been (though I’m sure some of these video creators would argue that this is a pre-meditated effect)…
(Yes, the above is a shameless Severed Heads plug. Buy the music and tell them I sent you, so I get better marks at uni)
Disparate ideas came together quickly in class this week. With the amazing assistance of a guest tutor (who’s name escapes me now – note to self: find out name and compliment guest tutor), it wasn’t long before we made quick work of the structure of OSC and had a prototype sketch up and running in Processing.
Processing (left) and OSCulator (right) speaking to each other via OSC
As you can see in the above image, both Processing and OSCulator use the surprisingly logical OSC syntax. In this example, I’m sending the pry (pitch, roll and yaw) information from Wii remote number 1 to Processing. Each of these can be isolated as individual variables and put to use. For the mockup lighting rig sketch I put together in Processing (you’ll need the oscP5 library for this one), pitch and roll of the Wii remote change the intensity of the six lights represented in my original Concept Pitch…
This week marks the halfway point for the semester. It’s a mildly frightening prospect to know that there’s only a couple of months before I need to produce a finished piece.
Presenting where my project is at was a little difficult, because unlike most of the other works being shown in class, mine will not necessarily be linear. Until I start working with dancers, I’m still unsure how much of my composition will be structured and how much will be triggered by the movement of the performers. And so, the sound piece I played the class had a fairly arbitrary structure to it – simply for the sake of presentation.
It builds on the loop I had made earlier, and each segment of the piece is triggered by movement of the Wii remote (and hence, it’s a little jumpy)…
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Once again, for the trainspotters: rain, drumstick hits and the crumple of the accordion bellows join the previous recorded sounds in this project.
Bouncing all the sounds into usable loops in Ableton was a process that became far more time consuming than I imagined. Because my working project consists of Rewiring Pro Tools and Ableton, and spreading effects between both programs, I had to: record each element to disk in Pro Tools; bounce it down and; then prepare it as a loop in Ableton. At least this experience has made me wary of keeping some extra time up my sleeve before the project due date.
Research
My biggest worry for this project looks like it is now sorted: the dancers. I was fortunate enough to be introduced to a working dance instructor and had a meeting with him this week. I’ll go into more detail about his work in the future, but for now, he sounds very interested in my geeky world of bringing together dance and technology and will be arranging for a few dancers to begin collaborating with me next week. I can’t express how much of a relief this is – now I can really get moving on the business end of the project.
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