Randy Jones
visual music and softwarenews
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.
the 911 classes are as follows:
Intro to Max/MSP - Dec.10, 6-9pm
Intro to Jitter - Dec. 17, 6-9pm
Max/MSP night school - Tuesday-Thursday, January 13, 15, 20, 22 6-9pm
Jitter night school - Tuesday-Thursday, January 27, 29, February 3, 5, 6-9pm
course descriptions and more info are at http://www.911media.org/workshops/ .
costs for the 911 classes are
for the 3-hour classes: students - $ 10 members - $ 15 non members- $ 35
for the night school classes: members - $ 255 non members - $ 325
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I am also planning to do a special intensive class at the SEAC Clubhouse, a space on Capitol Hill for electronic arts events. This class will be approachable if you have taken one of the one-night intros, or worked through some of the tutorials on your own. The idea of the intensive is that there will be topics for group study, selected in part by people attending, as well as work time where I can come around and do one-on-one assistance with people. If you bring a project or idea of your own to work on, I want to you be able to make significant headway on it during the class.
Cycling’74, publishers of the software, has agreed to give the participants educational discounts on the full Max/MSP/Jitter package, during or one week after the class. The full bundle is normally $699. The class will be $400, which is about what you will save on the educational discount, so if you are thinking of getting Max/MSP/Jitter anytime soon hopefully this seems like a good opportunity. Maximum enrollment will be 10 or 12.
The class will be five three-hour evenings. I would like some input here on what time will be best for people. I want to start Jan. 5, and have it either MTWThF that week or Mondays and Wednesdays on the 5th, 7th, 12th, 14th, and 19th. either 6-9pm or 7-10pm. If you are interested in the class, please send me an email to rej [at] 2uptech.com with a preference for one-week or Mon/Wed, and the 6-9 or 7-10 time slot. What I’ll do then is: find the best time, and take deposits from people by PayPal to reserve seats. And if you would like to take a class but January is just too soon, let me know and I’ll keep you posted.
A bunch of people over the past few years have told me they wanted to take a class like this. So I hope this one meets yr needs!
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.
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.
Mobile Billboards
I’ve just written a nice letter to the Mayor that will probably get a form-letter response. The jist was: should driving a truck in the city all day, for no other reason than hauling around a billboard-sized ad, be legal? ‘No’ has been the immediate answer from everyone I’ve bounced this off of, and I’m not talking about the Adbusters set. People hate these things. It seems like you could make some pretty cut-and-dried laws about this kind of thing. Ads on trucks already hauling stuff: OK. Ads on trucks hauling no stuff: NOT OK. Maybe a politician eager to establish himself as a “green” candidate could see some profit in this idea. Or maybe that’s naïve of me because of the power of the ad lobby, but anyway I spent half an hour turning my annoyance into action, and that feels good.
Check this out: an online brochure that promotes mobile advertising as “an environmental choice.” Why environmental? Because it reduces waste. Waste of what? Your ad dollars. It looks like they are recycling cars into metal shoes too, that’s good to know.
Lachenmann in Vancouver
This Saturday I’ll be in Vancouver helping perform live electronics for a very special concert of works by Lachenmann and Nono. Lachenmann is visiting to lecture, so we hope we do a decent job. Making the Max patch for Nono’s tuba piece has been an educational experience, one about which I hope to write more later. But for now, just the show details:
Vancouver New Music, the University of Victoria, the UBC School of Music and the Goethe-Institut are pleased to host Helmut Lachenmann, one of the most influential European composers of the 20th and 21st century. With Special guest Helmut Lachenmann, Max Murray, tuba; Dániel Péter Biró, live electronics; Randy Jones, live electronics; Kirk McNally, live electronics; Jee Yeon Ryu, piano; Franklin Cox, cello;AK Coope, bass clarinet; Franklin Cox, cello; Jee Yeon Ryu, piano Works include Post-Prae-Ludium per Donau by Nono; 15’;Serynade, 25’, Pression, 10’, Allegro Sostenuto, 35’ by Lachenmann.
More info here.
“And I Don’t Mean the Writer’s Day. ”
I’ve been reading some Amy Hempel lately on Chuck Palahniuk’s strong recommendation. Like just about all writers I respect, she has an utter lack of pretense and a way with packing as much meaning into as few words as possible. Traits that translate well into music, and that I hope for my own work to have. This interview at powells.com sums up her approach in about fifty words that sum up three-quarters of everything you need to know to make good art in whatever field.
Interviewer: When you teach creative writing, is there one piece of advice that seems to resonate more than others, seems to work, with students?
Hempel: Not so much a piece of advice as a question to keep in mind, which is the most basic of questions: Why are you telling me this? Someone out there will be asking, and you better have a very compelling answer, or reason.
There are people who have been raised by loving parents to believe that the world awaits their every thought and sentence, and I’m not one of them. So I respond to that. Is this essential? The question might be, Is this something only you can say—or, only you can say it this way? Is this going to make anyone’s life better, or make anyone’s day better? And I don’t mean the writer’s day.
Last Minute Notice
Come see me and Kamran Sadeghi perform live cinema at Cinema by Design, tonight at the Northwest Film Forum. Free! 8pm.
Brakhage in Victoria
I’m happy to announce that a Stan Brakhage screening in Victoria, a project I have been trying (however intermittently) to make happen for a year now, is a go. Thanks to Michael Hoppe at Cinecenta and the UVic Art Department, we finally have funding for and dates for the screenings. In two consecutive Tuesdays, Cinecenta will be showing the entire Vancouver Island Quartet, four of Brakhage’s later films which are, as Marilyn Brakhage puts it: “grand meditations on childhood, adolescence, middle age and Stan’s imaginings of heaven—richly metaphorical and rhythmically beautiful. “
JAN 29 (7:15 only)
2 BY STAN BRAKHAGE:
THE CHILD’S GARDEN AND THE SERIOUS SEA (1991 80 min; colour; silent; 16mm)
THE MAMMALS OF VICTORIA (1994, 30 min; colour; silent; 16mm)
FEB 5 (7:15 only)
2 BY STAN BRAKHAGE
THE GOD OF DAY HAD GONE DOWN UPON HIM (2000, 50 min; colour; silent; 16mm)
PANELS FOR THE WALLS OF HEAVEN (2003, 32 min; colour; silent; 16mm)
More about this DVD
I have a first batch of 50 Six Axioms DVDs, each bearing 32 minutes of visual music in NTSC video, Dolby 5.1 surround audio. I had the discs duplicated at the very nice Protape Northwest here in Seattle, used my rubber-stamp kit to print on them, made 50 origami cases out of translucent vellum, and numbered each one. I am sending the disc out to a few people to see if anyone wants to release it on a larger scale. But if nobody wants to do that, these will be the only copies. Either way they’ll be the only ones I wrote on.
If you want one, you can have one for twenty dollars+shipping. To reserve a copy, please write me an email with your shipping address. I’ll let you know how much shipping will be, you send funds via paypal, and I’ll mail you a DVD and thank you for supporting experimental visual music.