I'm a software engineer and artist.
I worked at Bell Labs and AT&T for 20 years in New Jersey,
and for Network Appliance in Silicon Valley for 9 years.
I'm interested in programming languages, algorithmic composition,
networked collaboration, atypical controllers,
event-driven graphics generation, and realtime video processing.
I've been inspired in recent years by something described
in this quote by Larnie Fox:
"There is a yet unnamed art movement that may prove to be of some
significance, and Burning Man is close to its center. It often manifests
itself as circus, ritual, and spectacle. It is a movement away from a
dialogue between an individual artist and a sophisticated audience,
and towards collaboration amongst a big, wild, free and diverse community.
It is a movement away from galleries, schools and other institutions
and towards an art produced in and for casual groups of participants,
more akin to clans and tribes, based on aesthetic affinities and bonds
of friendship. It is a movement away from static gallery art and formal
theater and towards site-specific, time-specific installation and
performance. It is a rejection of spoon-fed corporate culture
and an affirmation of the homemade, the idiosyncratic, the personal.
It is profoundly democratic. It is radically inclusive, it is
a difficult challenge, and it is beckoning."
What are people doing here?
In the last week, Tune Toys have been used 1795 times.
Here are the most recent MIDI files generated:
I collaborated and performed with Michael Broxton at LoveTech SF.
I used NthControl (my experimental Python-based controller using the Mimo USB-connected touchscreen) to control
the musical parameters of an 8-channel MIDI looper.
I played everything into the looper in realtime with a MIDI keyboard, using
Spectrasonics Omnisphere for the sounds.
The notes were also sent via OSC to a second laptop to trigger
Python-generated graphics (derived from my previous Python visual music efforts) and
further processed in amazing ways inside
Michael Broxton's Phosphoressence
software, controlled in realtime by Michael using two joysticks. To the left
is a picture of our two rigs, and to the right is a
YouTube video of the performance.
January, 2010
I gave a talk covering my music, software, performances, and installations at Expression College for Digital Arts. It took over 2 hours to cover it all -
here are the slides I prepared.
January, 2010
I gave a talk for the PyGameSF group, showing
my recent experiments and evolving touchscreen interface, written in Python
for use in controlling the parameters of a musical/visual performance.
December, 2009
I took the Monolith 2.0 controllers to
LoveTech and set them up in the interactive art area for people to play with.
My installation for Burning Man 2009 - Monolith 2.0 - was successfully deployed. Dinko Matkovic, Claudine Naganuma, and Leah Chubb helped to install it on Saturday and Sunday before the event opened. It was up and running on Sunday night, and worked well all week, day and night. Here's the description and pictures. Check out the youtube video to see it being used.
August, 2009
SHARE San Jose participated in Starry Night at Villa Montalvo.
August, 2009
With invaluable help from Dinko Matkovic on the physical aspects, Monolith 2.0 was finished in time to have a party at our house before dismantling it for its journey to the playa.
SHARE San Jose participated in the SubZero street fair in San Jose.
Here's pictures.
May, 2009
I'm busy working on an installation for Burning Man 2009 - an 11-foot high monolith with interactive music controls in the side. Most of the work is going into the physical aspects - designing a steel base that can support it in high winds without any guy wires.
May, 2009
I did video work with LoopyCam in the This Here show at Temescal Arts Center in Oakland.
Another great jam with SHARE San Jose at Villa Montalvo. This video shows what was happening.
March, 2009
I did more video work with LoopyCam in the This Here show at Temescal Arts Center in Oakland.
February, 2009
At this month's SHARE San Jose jam, we experimented with transmitting live visuals done in Sacramento by Scott Davey. They were sent with ichat, projected, and then post-processed to produce a second projection. It worked very well - both sides of the connection could see and hear what was going on. There was a lot of other homebrew software and hardware in use that night as well - check out the video.
February, 2009
I did video work with LoopyCam in the This Here show at Temescal Arts Center in Oakland.
January, 2009
I did a solo performance of visual music at the Luggage Store Gallery in San Francisco as part of the Music by the Eyeful series.
I combined my latest two systems, taking the graphical output of Galaxy
(a keyboard-driven version of Finger Painting with Planets) and providing it as the video input to
LoopyCam.
Two projectors showed the output of both systems simultaneously, side-by-side.
Everything was driven from my playing on a MIDI keyboard.
The performance was recorded - here's the youtube video.
January, 2009
I used a much-enhanced version of my LoopyCam system to perform with Herb Heinz's new improvisational group thishere. Here are a couple of pictures showing what it looked like. Note that the loops no longer are restricted to being shown in 4 quadrants. This version had up to 8 loops, and they could move around while looping.
December, 2008
I did some more work on my LoopyCam system
and created
an installation for the front window of the ATA Theater/Gallery on
Valencia Street in San Francisco.
For the entire month of December, a camera in the window was pointed out at the sidewalk, and video loops were continuously captured, processed, and displayed on a monitor.
People could also control the installation with their iphone or other wireless browser.
Here's a
newspaper article about it.
For an "opening night performance", Mira Cook (a friend and dancer) helped to provide the motion and images captured in the video loops - here are clips from that performance.
November, 2008
I performed at the New Nothing Theater, doing music and visual
simultaneously with new custom software.
Everything was done by playing on a normal MIDI keyboard - the notes I played
were looped, and triggered the visuals.
Here are two videos from that performance.
October, 2008
I did a video installation/performance as part of
Chance Operations,
another
great show at the Climate Theatre.
My piece was called "Captured Accidents", and I used my
LoopyCam to capture and randomly process
live video loops of the DOUBLE VISION dancers and show visitors.
Here's some video clips showing what the projected results looked like.
October, 2008
The SHARE San Jose group had a terrific
and fun session at Villa Montalvo in Saratoga, with
lots of MIDI and OSC networking and experimentation.
Here's some pictures and description.
LoopyCam is my latest hardware creation.
It's a handheld game controller with a security camera attached, and it
lets me interactively record and overlay up to four video loops. I can also
insert new recordings in the middle of existing loops.
Very portable, very interactive, and lots of fun to play with.
The security camera automatically turns on infrared LEDs in low-light
situations, so it works great even when there's very little light.
August, 2008
And another year (my seventh) at Burning Man.
The playa surface was very hard to bike on, so I wasn't able to get
around nearly as much as normal. I performed once at the Entheon camp
(doing music and video with my custom controller and a keyboard),
and Claudine and I did several nights of
realtime video looping
at our own camp, for the entertainment of our neighbors and passers-by
(who were also included in the looped video). See my
burning man page for a few pictures.
I gave a talk about my Python-based work with VST and Freeframe plugins at a PyGameSF meeting. The slides I presented are here and here.
May, 2008
Finger Painting with Planets
was shown again (this time as part of the
DOUBLE VISION group), in a show at the
Climate Theater in San Francisco.
The show was called "Night Lights - an Evening of Luminous Environments,"
and included several dozen light-oriented installation artists and performers.
Here's a
video (50mb) showing what members of DOUBLE VISION did at the show.
For this show, I simplified the interface of my installation so that
it was easier to switch
each finger pad from graphics to music, and provided only a single page
of parameters. People therefore had an easier time playing with it, with much
more consistent results, and I got a lot of compliments about it.
To the right is a video showing clips of the installation at the show.
May, 2008
Here's a video I created which shows a compressed version of my performance at Different Skies 2007. 2 hours of interactive video performance compressed down to 2 minutes. See the entry below for October 2007, for details about the Different Skies event.
I created an installation for Yuri's Night 2008 at Moffett Field,
called
Finger Painting with
Planets. The picture here shows
what it looked like, and
here's a closeup of the custom
controller I built. People used the multitouch pads to place and move
planet-like objects whose simulated gravitational attraction created
the graphics, which you can see demonstrated in the video to the right.
Here's
instructions for using it.
The software used Salvation
as a freeframe host,
a freeframe plugin using Python to do the graphics with Cairo libraries,
and Chipmunk
to help do the physics simulation. The freeframe plugin communicated
using OSC to and from KeyKit, which managed all the device interaction
and music generation. Music was generated both directly by the pads and as a result of planet collisions. The controllers
used a Doepfer USB64 to interface with the knobs and buttons, and
a Pertelian LCD display to
label the knobs and display their values.
February, 2008
I did a gig with Tim Conrardy, doing music and graphics at Works Gallery
in San Jose. I used new software that generates graphics using simulated
gravitational attraction between objects. The software also did MIDI looping.
The video here is a collection of snippets from an
hour-long live improvised performance.
Longer musical selections from the performance can be found here and here.
The graphics software is a noteworthy advancement for me - it makes use
of Python from within a
Freeframe plugin,
using Cairo for drawing the graphics,
and using
Chipmunk
for the physics simulation.
This means that I'm finally able to combine the two types of graphics that
I've been doing separately for the last few years (geometric, and
video/bitmap processing) in a single programming environment
on a single machine.
January, 2008
A bunch of videos I've done with dud are now posted on YouTube, under the username dudland. Check them out. To the left is sample showing the kind of graphics I was doing in 2005.
November, 2007
dud performed at 21 Grand in Oakland as part
of the Art Murmur. I used some new realtime video-processing software to
generate and manipulate video loops of live camera feeds. There were two cameras - one inside capturing the musicians and dancers, and one outside capturing passers-by
and (occasionally) dancers. The two camera feeds were processed, looped, and mixed, and projected with 3 projectors on the inside walls of 21 Grand. There was also a projector and screen outside, so passers-by could see what was going on as well as see their own image when the outside camera was mixed in.
October, 2007
I participated in
Different Skies 2007,
a week-long gathering of extraordinary musicians with a mountain of
synthesizers and other musical equipment. The week was spent
composing music and preparing for a concert on Saturday night.
With 20 or so musicians, I was the sole visual performer,
using my iGesture pads to draw graphics in realtime to fit the music.
The event is held at
Arcosanti in the Arizona desert - this was the fifth year of the event.
Here's a review of the concert, and here's some blogs and photos of the week.
Although the Woodstockhausen 2007 event was cancelled due to rain,
I performed the piece I had prepared, anyway, at a small gathering.
Here's a video of the piece, recorded and prepared by David Tristram.
It was called "Finger Fresco 2.0", and both the music and visuals were
generated in realtime using the iGesture pads and my custom software.
August, 2007
My sixth year at Burning Man. This one was particularly dusty,
but entertaining as always. See my burning man page for
details, pictures, and videos.
July, 2007
I performed at the Skronkathon event in Oakland, doing a piece
I described as "Theme music and title sequence graphics from a 70's TV
action series gone horribly wrong". I generated visuals and music
simultaneously using the iGesture pads and a keyboard.
June, 2007
I went to the Autonomous Mutant Festival with the Double Vision group and had a lot of fun showing Betty Boop cartoons, doing visuals, visiting other camps, and just hanging out. The picture here
is of our camp. More pictures here
and here.
June, 2007
I took Finger Fresco to
Electro-Music 2007 in Cheltenham,
Pennsylvania.
I also did 3 visual performances, in support of Lynn Bechtold,
Margaret Noble, and Reverend Mofo. Feedback on my visual work was
gratifying - one person called it "amazing visual poetry" and another
said it "was like another musical part".
This picture shows a bit of the visuals
I did for Margaret Noble's set.
May, 2007
I did a couple of visual effects (bubbles and other things projected
onto a transparent scrim) for Claudine Naganuma's dance performance
"Nothing Left to Chance", at SomArts in San Francisco.
May, 2007
My latest interactive installation is Finger Fresco,
which I set up for people to play with at the fabulous
Maker Faire 2007.
I performed with dud inside the tiny frankenart mart in San Francisco,
projecting onto a screen in the storefront window.
February, 2007
I performed with dud at the Temescal Arts Center in Oakland.
Claudine Naganuma and some of her students danced, and
Franz Keller and I did visuals with two projectors.
February, 2007
At my retirement party (I've left Network Appliance after 9 years),
I was totally surprised and totally honored with a fire-dancing
performance by Rebecca and Wolf from Nocturnal Sunshine. Click on the image to download a video of the performance.
January, 2007
I participated in an event with the
Double Vision group,
at the Red Ink Studios in San Francisco. Here Wendy Marinaccio is
dancing with my graphics in the background.
I participated in a fundraising event for the
Double Vision group,
at the DragonBar in San Francisco.
The picture to the right shows my projected graphics on the wall.
For this event, I used a new performance controller I built containing
three iGesture Fingerworks pads and a JLCooper CS-32 slider/button box.
Here's some
pictures and a
video (15 seconds into the video you'll see me, the new controller, and then the graphics I'm generating on the wall).
October, 2006
I posted some
videos showing keykit on youtube.
You'll find a tutorial of keykit's GUI from 1994 (actually it was still named keynote back then), and another much more entertaining and geeky demo from 2002.
August, 2006
I went to Burning Man again, and performed
three times, including once on the Center Camp main stage.
Three friends (Herb, Mark, and Claudine) joined me and shared our RV.
To the left is the hardhat I decorated to wear at night.
Pictures and videos are here.
June, 2006
Cathy and I went on a 2-week vacation in China, with our friends Rick and Sue.
Here are a LOT of pictures.
May, 2006
Yet another show with Double Vision,
this time a big 2-day extravaganza called
"Evolutionary Patterns & The Lonely Owl (Mutation #2)"
at the CELLspace performance space in San Francisco.
I created two projector-based installations, each one controlled by a pair of
driving controllers. One installation was the
"Bouncing off the Walls" one I did at the Spectra Ball, but this time
using driving controllers instead of the dance pads - the driving controllers
were easier for the audience to figure out. The other installation
was a purely-graphic one where people used the driving controllers to
"paint" by driving around, firing and bumping into graphical sprites which leave trails as they bounce around.
Here's a
short video showing a bit of
what the installation looked like in action, along with a bit
of what else what going on during the show.
Here's some larger and more comprehensive
video from Friday night,
video from Saturday night,
and
photos
showing all the different things that were happening at the show.
April, 2006
Another Double Vision group
event - this time at the spectacular Spectra Ball in San Francisco.
I created an installation using the old familiar dance pads - audience members
used them to create a projected maze and fire bouncing balls into
the maze. As the balls bounced off the walls of the maze,
they would trigger bits of music coming from the corresponding walls
of the actual room they were in. The name of the installation
was (not surprisingly) "Bouncing Off the Walls". Here's
a video of double-vision at spectraball - at 3:00 minutes in there's a segment showing my installation.
November, 2005
I performed with the Double Vision intermedia performance group
at Mad Horse Loft in Oakland. The event was called
"Evolutionary Patterns & the Lonely Owl (Mutation #1)" and combined
dancing, painting, music, video, and algorithms in
an intense maze of installations that the audience wandered through and
interacted with.
My contribution was an interactive music installation
using 2 Fingerworks iGesture pads which controlled a
multi-color DNA-inspired "Game of Life" program (written in keykit and python)
that generated music and projected graphics onto the walls.
Here are
some pictures
and a
video (at 2:00 minutes in there's
a segment showing the graphics of my installation).
December, 2005
An article about KeyKit, by Dave Phillips, was published in the Linux Journal last March - At the Sounding Edge: Introducing KeyKit. It's a very nice little summary of KeyKit for Linux users.
October, 2005
I gave a talk at BayPIGgies, the Bay Area Python Users Group, about my Python-based audio and video projects. Here are the slides I used.
October, 2005
I performed at the Y2K5 International Live Looping Festival with Herb Heinz - we called ourselves hoopla. We used hoops (written in keykit) to do MIDI looping, and used ergo (written in Python) to generate graphics from the MIDI. Here's an MP3 recording of the performance. I talk a bit at the beginning - skip to about 12 minutes in if you want the best music.
August, 2005
I went to Burning Man again this year, but I didn't do an art installation.
We took our 5th wheel RV, and Steve Klinkner joined us.
Pictures and videos are here.
July, 2005
I've now started using vvvv and
freeframe plugins
to integrate and process camera images into my visual improvisations with dud.
There are a growing number of video samples of this work at
dudland.com.
I've started working with Herb Heinz's group dud. I'm writing python-based
software to do OpenGL graphics triggered by MIDI data from the drummer.
See dudland.com.
August, 2004
I went to Burning Man 2004. My installation this year was called
Radio Free Quasar - an antique radio outfitted with a computer generating
audio and a laser generating visuals. Check out the description and pictures.
December, 2003
I stumbled across a review of my performance at the Works in September.
It's at the bottom of this newsletter.
December, 2003
nosuch.com no longer lives in a bedroom closet.
It now runs on a virtual server maintained
by globalservers.com. Bandwidth for downloading
mp3s and other things should be greatly improved.
October, 2003
Pictures of the lyre appear in some of the many photo albums of
burning man and the decompression. E.g.
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
and
here.
October, 2003
The world tour of the lyre continued on October 12, at the
Burning Man Decompression event in San Francisco.
Here's a bunch of pictures of the decompression event.
September, 2003
I did a 30-minute performance at the
Works gallery in San Jose. I used my usual controllers of late - wireless
keyboard hung around my neck while simultaneously dancing
on 2 dance pads. This time I used a new set of sounds,
and a less-dorky strap to hold the keyboard (if it is at all possible
to look less-dorky when you have a qwerty keyboard dangling from your neck).
September, 2003
I took my big lyre (see below) to Woodstockhausen 2003. Here's
a 40-second video
of the lyre in action. The video is 6 megabytes, in mpeg format.
The first 20 seconds show the lyre playing pre-recorded music, and
the second 20 seconds show people dancing on the pads and
generating their own music. See my Woodstockhausen archive
for more details on Woodstockhausen 2003 and previous years.
August, 2003
I took my big installation (Dancing Under the Stars of Lyra) to Burning Man,
and people enjoyed it a lot. Cathy went with me and helped - I couldn't have
done it without her.
See lots of pictures and a video.
June, 2003
I finally gave my talk/demo about KeyKit at the
dorkbot-sf meeting.
Here are the large number of powerpoint slides I used. The slides contain lots of good info, most of which I flipped
through very quickly so I would have time to demonstrate things.
Naturally, afterward I remembered all sorts of things I forgot to
mention during the talk.
It was a packed house.
Here are some pictures of the dorkbot event.
Using a wireless qwerty keyboard and 2 playstation dance pads,
I performed a diverse 20-minute set of music at 26Mix in San Francisco.
Here's audio of the performance.
I participated in this year's Woodstockhausen 2001 concert. I wrote
a piece called "Oops, I made a typo()", a real-time improvisation that I performed by
typing on a computer keyboard. Here's a description, pictures, and audio.
July, 2001
Cathy and I took a 1-week vacation to Mendocino and Seattle.
Here are the pictures.
June, 2001
On June 29, I sat alone in my room in San Jose, California,
and played a live 15-minute performance at the opening of a new Internet cafe (The Jade Room) in St. Louis, Missouri. KeyKit was used to
send the MIDI data in realtime over TCP/IP
- from my Win98 PC through my
Linux web server to a Win98 PC in St Louis - all three machines were
running KeyKit. Here's the
MIDI file containing the entire live performance. It's solo piano stuff, a medley of various compositions and improv.
Thanks go to Chris Deckard for making it possible.
May, 2001
Another (short) composition - DNA #1 -
derived from some genetic algorithms I'm playing with.
April, 2001
My latest composition - 23 Shots of Expresso - was played at the
"Algorithmic Shorts" concert at UC Santa Cruz.
March, 2001
Yippee! I've upgraded this server from a 233 Mhz Pentium II to an
800 Mhz Pentium III. Things should be quite a bit snappier.
October, 2000
More ancient tapes have been resurrected and converted to MP3s.
The USENET Tapes is my archive
of the tapes (and 1 CD) that were done by members of the rec.music.synth
netnews group, back in the late 1980's and early 1990's.
Fresh Roast
is a new Tune Toy. It's a more advanced application of Expresso,
with drums and more musical output.
March, 2000
As long as I'm dredging up things past and putting them on my web site,
I figured I might as well include my original posting of the
Stevie vi clone, which has
evolved over more than a decade into the popular vim editor.
March, 2000
While converting cassettes to MP3's, I decided
to also do my Octave++ cassette from 1994, which
contains two noteworthy pieces - Renaissance Ninja and Sunrise/Another Day.
March, 2000
I dug out the five MMML Tapes
that MMML members put together in the late 80's and early 90's,
and decided to put them online as MP3 files.
March, 2000
Life Forms
is a new Tune Toy. It generates music using Conway's game of Life.
January, 2000
I reworked my entire web site, giving it a fresh look and more
useful front page.
Power Flower is my latest
composition, from the Rock Garden 1 project.
December, 1999
The
Rock Garden 1
project produced 7 final 'gems'. Hurray, I now have
another composition for my next CD!
October, 1999
Rock Garden 1
is a new collaborative project in the Composer's Quarry.
The deadline for final compositions is December 1.
I created an installation for Yuri's Night 2008 at Moffett Field,
called
