moving on

i have grown increasingly frustrated with some of the more technical aspects of blogspot and so i have decided to move my operation elsewhere

earth surface machines

from BLDGBLOG: Earth Surface Machine

I actually like to think of them as reefs,
check out the link to see more and learn
a little bit more about these amazing installations
designed by Philip Beesly

technorati tags:generative, installation

Blogged with Flock

fiddling

I've been playing with the site layout in an unobtrusive way. I don't know why the top bar still doesn't display correctly I must be doing something wrong, not sure about the side bar either, too green? what do you think mythical audience?

playlists and stuff

Indie-pop girl's mix 02

1. Boards Of Canada - Heard From Telegraph Lines (1:09)
2. Final Fantasy - Song Song Song (4:31)
3. Stereolab - Margerine Melodie (6:17)
4. Rilo Kiley - Troubadours (3:25)
5. belle and sebastian - le pastie de la bourgeoise (3:10)
6. The Pipettes - July (2:47)
7. Built To Spill - Liar (5:11)
8. Jens Lekman - Black Cab (4:54)
9. sufjan stevens - the avalanche (3:14)
10. Jens Lekman - Jens Lekman's Farewell Song To Rocky Dennis (3:55)
11. Jamie Lidell - What Is It This Time? (3:05)
12. Stereolab - Bop Scotch (3:58)
13. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah - Over and Over Again (Lost and Found) (3:09)
14. deus - If You Don't Get What You Want (3:49)
15. Morningwood - Nth Degree (3:55) 16. The Pipettes - One Night Stand (1:40)
17. Vive la fete - Tu connais la derniere (3:40)
18. The Pipettes - I Love You (1:37)
19. Psapp - infra red (2:50)
20. Gospel Of Progress/Micah P. Hinson - Don't You, Pts. 1 - 2 (5:55)

And to spice things up... some pictures from my work in progress presentation yesterday, modelled in rhino and 3Ds max and rendered in bryce 5.

the nightstalker returns

Apologies to you my imaginary audience for the lack of content in recent weeks, I have been wallowing in despair and self-loathing laziness once more. I also had a little presentation of my recent work yesterday so I had to scurry a bit to produce said recent work. I decided to make things easy for myself and wow the crowd with some digital design rather than spend frustrating hours making actual jewellery.

It seemed to go well and comments were generally positive and constructive. So now I'm technically speaking on holiday although it just feels the same really, I feel like I've been on holiday since the beginning of the year. In terms of extra-curricular activities I made two new mix tapes for Indie-pop girl who turned 21 more than once in the last month, I might share the tracklists if I feel so inclined, I'm just too lazy now.

I also went to see The Squid and the Whale on tuesday, accompanied by Indie-pop girl who is also something of a film buff/fanatic. It was a fun day and the movie was pretty great but quite hectic in places. I also went to see The Da Vinci Code on sunday with Emo-girl, again it was a fun date but the movie was a bit sucky in my opinion. The whole Da Vinci Code thing is such a storm in a teacup thing for me. I mean come on, Dan Brown is a hack writer, who just happened to get lucky by stirring up some religious controversy and managed to make a ton of money in the process. What followed was just a band-wagon avalanche of people cashing in on the media frenzy. Anyway enough rant. For your browsing pleasure here are some pictures and links...


















theverymany has lots of pretty pictures of generative models built with rhino and VBscripts

generatorx is where I go these days to get my generative art freak on lots of digital beauty and programmed delights

more generative prettiness at biothing















VVVV is probably going to be my new programming obsession for the next few weeks
this is taken from SVVN a blog by the guy who runs SEEN another generative art blog.

About the post title, my sleep pattern has radically altered so that I now sleep during the hours of daylight and rise from my coffin when the hours of twilight descend

surface- breathe - dive!

just a quick post, to say i'm still alive with all my parts still attached in the right places. I have three holes in my stomach, and it really really hurt to pee for the first few days, that happens apparently when the urologist shoves a camera up you willy. A fact which they NEGLECTED TO TELL ME!!! i had to discover that painful truth for myself ...

needles

I'm going in for surgery in a few hours. Just a routine little hernia but it scares me anyway, the sterile cold theatre, the needles. I have this nightmare sometimes where I wake up too early and they're still busy...

I guess it'll be fine.

well if i stop posting for a while then there's probably complications...

presentation

from lina hanssen

ok so im up really early today cause i have to present some theory work. so now i'm gathering files and programs together to staple together some sort of last minute -thing- to show to people. i'm hoping that if i put in enough flashy grafx and complicated words that they'll go oooh and forget to notice how badly prepared i am.

the basic layout will be something like a primer. Introducing some ideas around my work and showing some work that others have done.

so here is a quick run thru

designing differently.
design through making
CAD and emergence
Isomorphism and numbers
Design by numbers

okay so thats kind of a jumble of most of the key concepts that my work entails.
basically what i'm trying to do in my practical and theory, is come up with alternative design strategies. I'm not outright challenging conventional strategies or confronting anyone. I'm just suggesting that there's other ways of doing things and sometimes those other ways can be very interesting and surprising.

So how does one design differently? what does that mean? Its a pretty broad statement and you can interpret it in many ways. Personally I've always had this idea of design being a linear process. Its almost like a stereotyped narrative. In fact it seems to be the old narrative of progress dressed up in trendy language. It goes something like... You have a problem, you must find a solution, you draw some sketches, you refine them, you build models of your refined sketches to see if they work. you build refined models, you arrive at a model that works, you produce a refined manufacturing of your final model which becomes your final piece.

Now this would be fine if the problem had a static context. If it had limited or no variables. What if you have to design furniture for a very small two room apartment with very limited space. If it were me I'd start designing around multi-functionality. Make objects that functioned in more than one context, and -crucially- design for adaptability. The user should be able to re-configure the objects to meet their changing needs.

That for me would be a primary point in a design process. Is the product/object adaptable and in the same breath is the process which it derives from adaptable and flexible?

What I've come to realise is that design as a process is similar to converstion or design is akin to conversation. There is constant back and forth in a healthy design process. Without this the design is stale. In a hierarchial top-down design process everything follows from the initial design, everything is pre-determined, there is no room surprise or adaptability. If the model is turned upside down however and we design from the bottom-up we allow for the happy accident and flexible models which can be changed with changing needs.

ok I'll discuss more on this later i have to go refresh my proposal now and see if it still holds up.

yay

I am freeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
w000t!!!
I have finally cut all ties with my boring job, now i want to block my ex-boss' mailbox with spam until he chokes haha.
Apologies to my mythical readership for my lack of recent posts. I am deep in an undertow of lethargy and depression I'm going to see my doctor later and we'll probably talk about dosages and stuff to see if there's any way I can stop feeling like I want to kill myself or everyone around me. Of valuable assistance to me in this time has been the availability of season 1 and 2 of Grey's Anatomy and lots and lots of chocolate from the 7/11 across the street.

In work news I've been doing.... very little. Well I made a tiny pendant and I started to mod my cdplayer case and will post picture of these later today in an edit. I've also made another playlist for a girl. She like aggro emo type stuff so its an aggro emo kinda playlist. QED

1. Patrick Wolf - The Libertine (4:23)
2. The Kills - Superstition (4:40)
3. The Mars Volta - Inertiatic ESP (4:23)
4. 65daysofstatic - Await Rescue (4:44)
5. Boris - My Machine (2:01)
6. Explosions In The Sky - Your Hand In Mine (Goodbye) (2:05)
7. Sigur Rós - Sæglópur (7:39)
8. Menomena - Oahu (5:17)
9. Explosions in The Sky - First Breath After Coma (9:33)
10. The New Pornographers - Use It (3:26)
11. Stars - Reunion (3:41)
12. The Kills - Fried My Little Friend (2:08)
13. Joy Division - Digital (2:50)
14. Lark - Grey Evening (3:18)
15. Explosions In The Sky - The Only Moment We Were Alone (10:14)

feeeelings!

I feeeeeel the sleeep coming over me. I'm so bored with this job now. Its friday and no-one seems to want to go on the internet for exorbitant rates.... what gives? come on you people! So I gave my boss notice that I wanna quit, he hasn't read it yet but I'm hoping I get a call tommorrow.

too much stress and hassle, but i've posted before on this topic so I'll stop there. I would rather talk about... my thesis topic!!! yay!

so to conclude my half-assed acount of the PComp workshop which ended like three days ago i will briefly summarise the consultation i had with Nathaniel. (I thought i'd have more in common with Ralph but it turns out I felt more comfortable talking about my stuff with Nat)

> memories of the future
> past futures

thats what we started out with, anyway mostly just old movies and their kooky conceptions of the year 2000

> http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056119/
> hiroshima mon amor
> vertigo
> 12 monkeys
> a boy and his dog

more movie talk... dammit it all made sense at the time.

> structures
> jewelry for your house
> weighted and "tensed"
>
> manuel de landa - generative art and 3d genetic
>
> running operations on jitter matrices that are, in their "natural
> state," 3d objects.
>
> visual thesaurus
>
> bronwyn lace

rough weekend

spent my weekend in heady excess of weed and too much World of Warcraft which is why there have been no postings till now. So to summarise friday's pcomp stuff quick. We had another morning programming session with Nat and looked at some more max/msp stuff mostly jitter motion tracking and body tracking.
I may have some pics of this which i'll post later in an edit if i can find them. The afternoon we spent working with the basic stamp again and got it to send serial data from the chip to max/msp. Today this little process culminated in some group projects to do some basic stuff, seeing as my group wasn't very cohesive i just went my own way and started playing around with controlling and morphing a 3D object in max/msp with a lightsensitive diode. It was fairly primitive but i can honestly say that the possibilities make me very excited for future experiments.

very early...

early in the morning over here, hello all, fixed the time zoning so the timestamps on the posts should be accurate now. I'm up so early 'cause i have to write a mix cd for a friend and i've been putting it off; anyway here's the playlist

1. The Delays - Wanderlust (3:57)
2. The La's - There She Goes (2:42)
3. Joy Division - Digital (2:50)
4. Stars - Ageless Beauty (4:05)
5. The Pipettes - It Hurts To See You Dance So Well (1:06)
6. Islands - Rough Gem (3:36)
7. Various - Spongebob & Patrick Confront The Psychic Wall Of Energy - Flaming Lips (3:37)
8. The Lucksmiths - ShirtWeather (2:44)
9. I'm From Barcelona - Treehouse (5:01)
10. Islands - Jogging Gorgeous Summer (2:47)
11. The Decemberists - The Sporting Life (4:40)
12. Math And Physics Club - Movie Ending Romance (2:14)
13. Sufjan Stevens - All The Trees Of The Fields Will Clap Their Hands (4:16)
14. Suburban Kids with Biblical Names - Love Will (3:11)
15. math and physics club - everybody lies (3:13)
16. Casiotone For The Painfully Alone - Bobby Malone Moves Home (3:14)
17. Sufjan Stevens - Decatur, Or, Round Of Applause For Your Step Mother! (3:03)
18. Patrick Wolf - The Railway House (2:24)
19. Menomena - Oahu (5:17)
20. suzanne vega - language (3:57)
21. Elliott Smith - Sweet Adeline (3:15)
22. Sufjan Stevens - Chicago (6:04)

what we did at school today.

Day three of pcomp workshop, willfully overslept by gagging the snooze button this morning so I only got to class at around 10 ish. We finished our milmoe boxes that we worked on yesterday.
see pics for details. Then it was time to go test them out in the computer lab. and we got to make an LED flash, then i had to leave for therapy and when i got back it was after 12 and i was feeling a bit drained so i just went home till 2 when we did some more max/msp coding. This time we looked at the MSP aspect of the program which is basically what sound artists and musicians use so we worked through some tutorials to build volume faders, buffer players and loopers.

i've worked with that kind of stuff before very basically in audiomulch but its so exciting to actually build your own DSP tools you can control exactly what the program does and you can just keep adding stuff to it




















the milmoe box in all its glory
flashing light thingy yay!

These pics don't actually show the final box though, there's stuff that they added later, but as i had leave early for my stupid job i missed it.

Also did a little jewellery work tonight so i'll probably post some more pics tommorow as well as the next progress report from the workshop.

links for the week

seeing as i'm doing a workshop on physical computing i decided to look for some related sites

this is the projects page for the interactive telecommunications programme at NYU

i've allready blogged them, but here again are Nathaniel and Ralph's sites

a local pcomp site with lots of info

arduino is a cool open source physical computing platform that works with processing yay!

physical computing tutorials and how/tos at ITP

data continued

Started actually doing real work for the workshop today. The morning was devoted to an in-depth introduction to max/msp with Nathaniel Stern. we basically just looked at some of the basic elements such as the metronome box, message box, number boxes linking boxes and things of that nature and we wrote a hello world program.

the afternoon was devoted to building what Ralph and Nathaniel call a millmoe box which is essentially a bunch of inputs and outputs and other controllers and gizmos all connected to a basic stamp chip all stuck on a bread-board which is then placed into an ordinary lunch box or any other container for the sake of neatness.

so far so good, tommorow we start programming audio apps with max/msp and we also start adding components to our millmoe boxes.

more pics later
For more info on max/msp check out the cycling 74 website as well as this wiki page.

new data

have had such a enervating day, (that means refreshing right?) anyway, so a few weeks ago i signed on for a workshop here at school on physical computing. Then dear reader you will remember i had a very aggravating week previously and subsequently almost forgot about the whole thing. I came late for the first session so i missed the morning presentation this was however not really much of a problem seeing that as soon as these guys started talking i knew that something great had befallen me. Through sheer chance i had signed on for something that would finally re-awaken my desire to work in emergent design. I had become so despondent over the last few months with the whole subject, as I knew most of the theory so well but was frustrated in terms of knowledge of how to implement my design projects as i had no resources and knowledge at my disposal, so along comes mr Ralph Borland and Nathaniel Stern with their knowledge of Max/MSP and programming microchip controllers.

basically what it boils down to for my own work is i will finally be able to translate data sets into information that i can plug into design systems and vice-versa, what i'll be able to do after this course, i think, is to take data sets, related to a project at hand or completely arbitrary, doesn't matter, and plug that data into programs and systems which can ultimately translate that data into physical objects.
































nathaniel stern presenting some of his interactive video work, nathaniel's quite the man when it comes to max/msp. (he's the guy wearing the funny hat)

new shizza

so yesterday was probably the most crap day i've had in ooh years probably. But it was made up for in no small measure by a cute girl who brought me lunch, a great night out with some friends of mine and ricardo villalobos' new record as well as the new aphex twin chosen lords cd.

grrrrrr*2

Today is a really crap day. My boss calls on the fone and screams at me for answering it wrong, whilst this is happening, I'm trying to send a fax, binding a project for some poor girl and helping a computer illiterate with e-mail, aaargh!!!! anyway the rush is over for now, I anxiously await the next disaster. If the asshole boss would just organise the store equipment better then I'd probably be able to do a better job. But nooo, we complain till we're blue in the face and nothing ever happens. The point of sale till software is hopelessly out of date and it uses a GUI that reminds me suspiciously of delphi. The binding contraption should be called the mangler. The printer works... when it wants to. I dread the day that the wi-fi hotspot finally comes and i have to learn a new system that will be good in theory but shittily done in execution. and will probably result in me having to placate angry customers.

grrr

had a bit of a crappy week so far, hence the lack of recent updates. Also i've been sacrificing lots of not really free-time to the ever-hungry maw of world of warcraft.

so for my phantom audience that exists in potentia here is some more art/stuff for the week

cool 3d grafx fom some guy, shows how he made images from imagined spaces in his head

art/culture stuff here

time for blossoms in sakuraville

fonts

wierd stuff, keep clicking

have a seizure

ze frank

do not call

more art for the week

Jess Hutchinson another fellow blogger who's well into her plushies, check out the archives. She makes robot plushies too!




























Aaw isn't it adorable? Wish i could knit like that





























Nice to see some local girls are making a go at fashion in the big world out there

some pix to relieve the monotonous green

me (middle) and my post-grad jewellery cow-orkers
they're both really sweet and not cows at all

















my buddy righard playing some expiremental madniss at a local gig

















a girl with blue hair!! hah! the image quality is crap 'cause its from my pre-digicam days when i only had a crappy motorola fonecam (motorola sucks! don't ever get one!!!)

flicred

I've put up the images on my site on my own little flicr page so for those interested in the jewellery and stuff that i so rarely produce, i'll put the link in the side bar as soon as i get approval of content or whatever.

art for the week

some wonderfully surreal illustration at James Riches' site

whilst i wouldn't call it art joby's gorillapod is certainly a great idea, i've allready thought of a dozen uses that i'd put it to

i've never seen an ipod case that i really liked but magpie comes pretty close to sublime

a friend of mine recently got himself a cactus friend from myplasticheart its way cute. My fav's are the teddy troops with removable helmets.

love these re-purposed sleeve/stockings from mindwhatyouwear.com

Jaco Haasbroek, is one of my favourite people and a good friend he does happy paintings and stuffed plushy toys. You'll probably be desperate to buy some of his work in four, five years.

Righard Kapp is another one of my bestest friends and he runs a record label in Cape Town its called one minute trolley dash and its brilliant! (carefull tho i don't think the site is very firefox friendly)

that wierd creepy feeling

doing the same things only the location is different... okay that was a lame way of saying i'm working a shift at an internet cafe, only its a different branch and it looks like i'm going to be here till 12 tonite, how exciting.
I have to get back to work at my bench, it feels like my post-grad course is one extended holiday with the occasional workshift to make money for sustenance. Have almost finished one commision which should get me a bit further ahead on my back-log.


















See! more kitties, i have two more after this one then i have some bunny pendants to do and somehow i have to come up with a cartoony themed b-day gift for a friend before next weekend

art for the week

i love this guy, he builds the coolest processing applets

Eboy makes pixelart

Lina Hansson does quirky illustration that made me laugh out loud

some joanna love

a fellow crafter/jeweller cally creates

technorati

the astute reader will note that i have registered myself on technorati in the hopes of gaining a larger readership, there's also a little search thingy embedded in the sidebar, so now you can search for stuff...

(men) at work

another late nite and another nite at work, all things considered i guess its nice being a till jockey at an internet cafe' all the free internet you can swallow and all u need to do is help the ocasional clueless customer. Spent about 20 hours yesterday working non-stop on a commision which turned out into a total disaster. At 7 in the morning it suddenly hit home that i still had 133 little silver shapes to work off and polish and there was no way i would get it done by the deadline. My fingers being completely raw and fuct by this time from the constant abrasions. I would include a pic but its too gross, imagine swollen red and covered in sharp cuts and u get the idea.

i have a new side project that i want to do, (these come about once every few days and its rare that i actually do anything about them) slow shutter fotography, film, i want to see if i can make a short little mood movie with my digicam open the shutter nice and long at nite time and see what comes out.

shift number thwee

seven hours on a sunday at least i get more cash today.
2 hours 30mins left.

i have to stop playing knights of the old republic it ravenously consumed 7 hours of my time yesterday it was spectacular i started playing at three and when i looked again it was past ten...

shift number two

good thing too spent all my last shift's money on booze and hookers



some thoughts on productivity...
productivity can be enhanced or degraded by

1. state of mind (mood +behavioural modifiers)
2. physiological status (hit-points +char bonuses)
3. talents&skills (char class +char bonuses)
4. distractions (subquests)

knights of the old repulic 2 is the most addictive rpg i've ever played!

40mins to go 2 customers

all alone

its my first real shift at work today, all alone ... till ten tonite
maybe i'll post some random links, boredom internet browsing...
4 hours 15 mins to go

3 hours to go....

check this out
http://www.fromamouth.com/
some of the funniest characters i've ever seen specially the post-it gallery

2 hours 20 mins to go....

45mins to go...

00 mins to go and my last customer wont leave! aaargH!

3D news

I'm reccomending newtek's lightwave program for implementation in our faculty maclab it seems the best deal in terms of pricing and capability, from the specs i've looked at it seems to be ok for osX. Besides which, if they could do effects for star wars with this app its sure to come in handy for jewellers and graphics students

why oh why did i volunteer to work in an internet cafe?

training shift 2 today its hell people working an 8 to 5 shift with only three hours sleep is terrible

later..... only three more hours to go

in 1965 randy gardner got into the guinness book of record for going 11 days without any sleep at all, i wonder if i could go 12 days...

....1 hour 15 minutes to go

more permanently

got a network link in my room now which means that... in teory i should be able to post on a more regular basis... we'll see how that goes.

more pix

my so called "snow white" piece.
If disney found out about this i'd probably get a lawsuit slapped on me.













tension and perspex cubes, i won a prize for this one

did i mention i'm a jeweller?

robbie & dalekboy two robotic objects, they were supposed to be cufflinks but i never got round to finishing them













the passenger. its just a funny little thing, a little bug that seemed to emerge spontaneously between the cracks of adjacent ongoing projects













green goop. need i say more?













the happy squid ring...









my knuckleduster hollow construction ring project











beastie boyz














S&M kitty and frank the bunny

















tension cable and perspex piece i had to make a very solid constructed catch for this thing just to have it pass in metal tech

new stuff

i got new accomodation with a bunch of guys in a university house which is so close to campus its practically next door, i have also never lived with so many guys so i don't really know what to expect about that, in digital news i'm trying to get a mac emulation thingy started on my system (i like os X cos its pretty and i think its more stable) i also got hold of directory opus 8 and will give it a try my gratuitous beta binge did'nt really take off as everything i tried just took too much effort so i'm back to processing now which i still like to play with very much but have little results to show. i have been posting a bit less as we have been undergoing province wide powercuts so i dont always have inet access. anyway here is a pic of a pretty girl....

my flatmate is a bitch

I moved to some new accomodations in early February and i'm allready sick of it. Its miles from campus and much too expensive and the woman who i'm sharing it with is such a fussy bitch, she's barely thirty but she goes on like an old lady. Everything has a certain way that its done and it has to be done THAT WAY! God! it just drives me crazy the other night she fussed about the fact that i forgot to put the seat down, tonite i get an angry sms because i switched off the geyser (as she instructed me to do every nite!) and now she has to wait an hour for hot water, well tough! if its not the geyser then its the fact that i should clean the whole flat every second week even tho i hardly go into the lounge. Yesterday she demanded money for electricity as if i'm supposed to pull it out of my ass right there. I'm giving it till the end of February if the situation doesn't improve she'll come home one day and find me gone.

I'm feeling like joyriding with gratuitous beta software... hmm lets look at the options.

there's flock which is looking very promising, open source browser goodness.
http://www.flock.com/

there's processing which is technically still in beta but i've had few hangups with it and seems stable

http://www.processing.org/

no wait i think i'll browse around sourceforge and see if there's any fun to be had, maybe i should look for something to use with my camera

ze next phase of operations can begin

I got a camera!!!! at last I can take halfway decent pics (halfway I said i'm still getting the hang of camera jiggle anyway these were taken in the fine arts dept at Stellenbosch Uni where I live and work) .

Additionally this post is being uploaded through my phone since I finally got gprs internet working. Not however thru cell-c but thru vodacom which is much nicer to its customers anyway its much cooler to be billed by bandwidth rather than per second billing.