Randy Jones

Performance for mobile office

During a workday, take a laptop to a coffee shop where you can be seen by other laptop-based workers.  Order coffee or tea.  Run a program that fills your entire screen with grey “snow.” Stare at the screen while drinking.  When your drink is gone, pack up and leave. 

Inspirational update

Hi there,

So, there hasn’t been much activity here lately because the activity has been over here. I’ve been making a new instrument to play and will get back to playing more when the instrument is done.

Mainly I wanted to share this video just now.  We see a lot of art + technology projects these days.  But consider: how many of them really make someone’s day better?  And I don’t mean the artist’s day.

MSP / Jitter Functional Overview

One of the aspects of Max/MSP/Jitter that can make the learning curve steep is the large number of objects, around 500 last I counted.  To help digital media makers with this learning process, I made a kind of annotated index to some of the most useful MSP and Jitter objects in various categories.  Feel free to download it here, and let me know if it helps.

Max/MSP/Jitter Classes

I’m doing a series of Max/MSP/Jitter classes in Seattle over the next few months.  Some of these are at 911 Media Arts, and I plan to do a special small one at the SEAC Clubhouse as well. 

Multitouch Prototype 2

Here’s a demo video of the controller I made for my thesis project at the University of Victoria.  My thesis is available here, and hopefully gives enough information that a motivated person can make one of these with a nice audio interface, $50 in materials and a lot of patience.  If you try it, let me know!

Multitouch Prototype 2 from Randy Jones on Vimeo.

New 2up.jit.centroids

A Max/MSP/Jitter external I made in 2004---how time flies---just got a major update to fix some long-standing bugs.  Improved match algorithm is improved.  Help file is now in Max 5.  Price: still free.

“My Fellow Prisoners”

Rah! Rah! Six for Two!

Chladni Videos

Chladni Patterns 3 from Randy Jones on Vimeo.

It’s been a hectic few months in a very good way.  The summer proper was spent finishing and defending my M.Sc. thesis, this wonderful indian summer afterwards has been about playing couple of very different live shows: an ambient party in Mendocino county, and our own Decibel Festival.  Both were amazing in different ways and in general I feel lucky to be doing such stuff, though getting prepared for these things it’s true I’ve invested a lot of sitzfleisch making technology when I could have been gardening.  Now I get to share more of the results, though, the fun part of the process, and I’ll be documenting here at least a little.  As a start, I made some movies yesterday of the waveguide mesh model I used in my thesis work. 

Vids on Vimeo

I put some of my work on youtube a while back, but was never happy enough with the result to bother broadcasting the fact.  Vimeo, however, is pretty badass, so now I can put some decent videos on the net without editing my site.  Here’s a little piece called “OVNItos.” I did it in 2006 to test out render_node.  Check this channel in the future for new live cinema pieces, more documentation on my multitouch controller project, and so on.

New Eyes for the Mind

Here is an essay I wrote for The Cinematic Experience, published by Sonic Acts Press, Amsterdam.  In which I point to some ideas from the history of experimental animation that can shed light on where it is we are going with Live Cinema.  And hopefully address some of my pet peeves without being too peevish.  I’ve corrected a couple of typos and resisted the urge to do anything about meanings.