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January 26, 2006
Some follow up questions...
1. An area of interest
Live performance, both visual and aural.
2. A couple of questions... want or need to know about this area?
Is live performance at odds with the editable/fire-and-forget world of the internet?
What/Is there a divide between new/exciting and familiar/stodgy in creating interfaces to encourage specifically live creativity?
How married is the world to the ability to edit before communicating?
In the increasingly super-savvy/behind-the-scenes aware world, is the illusion of live enough?
3. Identify a method or process...
What happens when in the internet chat/message board community, everything is sent and seen in real time, without the sender having to press the enter key?
- creating a system similar to a common internet piece (bulletin board, chat) that disallows editing
- allowing people to see not only the final output but also the process of the editing of a piece of chat/bulletin board post.
Separating the design of the physical interface from the final output considerations?
- with "gaming the system" so popular, what happens when the separation between the interface and the output ventures into absurdity?
- dancing about architecture!
4. ...actual topics...
Not ‘a game’ or ‘experience’ or ‘interactive film,’ find a subject/setting/character/narrative.
Video game culture
Photography/Photoshop culture
5. Pair your topics with a genre and an audience...
Internet/MMO?
The ultra-internet-savvy of the high school to post-college world.
6. Commit to a term...
User
Posted by diamante at 11:05 AM | Comments (2)
January 19, 2006
Three Items chosen by some crazy music person...
After the break are three items and my takes on them. It wasn't until after I had chosend them that I saw some semblance of a line through them...
Item 1: Alesis AirSynth
http://namm.harmony-central.com/WNAMM01/Content/Alesis/HotPick/airSynth.html
The Alesis AirSynth an interesting entry into the world of electronic instruments back in the mid-late 90s. It certainly wasn't a hard concept to market: creates amazing sounds just by moving your hands through the air! And there is no doubt that it did just that; making music was another thing entirely. After a while, Alesis moved the AirFX technology from music maker to sound alterer. As an instrument, it was simply too hard to use without a significantly higher amount of skill than most people were willing to attain.
Difficult as it is to use, I found the AirSynth to be a wonderful plaything. It was so much closer than I'd seen previously to: the image of magic from high fantasy and Japanese anime, with arcane hand and finger motions and convoluted gesticulations giving life to forces and beings we could only dream of. Okay, so all it was doing was playing a strange sound while my hands were in a certain position in the air, but I loved playing round within its space, imagining that I was drawing flows of energy or guiding wind through tightening spirals...
Item 2: Improvisation
http://www.apocalypsewow.com/random/improv.mp3
Music improvisation was one of the scariest things in the world to me. Back when I was a young 10 year old boy, I couldn't fathom being able to conjure up music on the spot. I actually hid under the piano when my teacher was first introducing the concept of improvisation to me. It was just too much for me to handle...
Eventually it grew into something I learned to accept. I stopped being afraid of wrong notes. I started learning how to work with what I knew to make things keep consonant.
This improvisation that I did when I was 16, however, was so far beyond anything I did previously.
Kind of a mix of Chopin and Scriabin, strong melodic figure that occurs many times throughout the piece. Interesting build throughout.
Up to the second before I played the first note, I had no idea what I was going to do. I was confident in recording an improvisation on this amazing piano that I was allowed to touch as one of the favored piano students in the DelMarVa area, but I just hadn't a clue.
By the end of it, I still wasn't sure what I had done.
All of my very best work seems to share something in common with this improvisation. Once it hits, that's it, it's done, it's ready to go. Once it's done, I look back at it and have no clue the why and how of making it. In the middle of it, I seem more conscious of the hand and finger position than I am of the resultant music (not unlike how I play my airsynth). I am so in the moment that the notes I just played and the notes I am about to play seem as far off as next year.
Being in the middle of a great improvisation is the best musical experience I've ever had.
Item 3: Before Sunset
http://imdb.com/title/tt0381681/
Before Sunset feels a lot like my improvisations. Its motion is such that I don't bother tracking the path but instead focus on how wondrous each individual moment is. Each phrase, each motion seems to beg for my attention, much as each note I played in that improvisation grabbed me. The nearly 1-to-1 passage of time in the movie is fascinating, almost improvisatory; it goes well with my respect and admiration for other masters of the live venue, from talk radio to tabletop RPG DMing. It makes me wonder about the possibility of doing something of that scope in a truly live setting.
Performing live is the one constant I've had in my thesis brainstorms...
Posted by diamante at 11:11 AM | Comments (0)