Posted by jerry on July 18th, 2007 — Posted in Journal, New media
Many will have been to the SecondLife in-world 3D sim of Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings, but Robbie Dingo has taken us a step further into the creative process with a machinima video in which he takes us through the process of building such an environment to good effect. Pity about the overused Don McLean song though.
I particularly liked the re-treatment of the village windows to move from a day to night representation. Interestingly, you won’t find this sim in SL anymore – it was built in a temporary space and has since been deleted, leaving only the movie – a true simulacrum: a representation of a representation when the original has been erased. Thanks to Sharon for the SLURL link to the 3D world version, and to Angela Thomas for the steer to Robbie Dingo’s site 🙂
Cheers
Jerry
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Tried the new talk browser on NMC last night – and it works 🙂 I had a conversation with Anya Ixchel.
First impressions – this is pushing the technology to its limits. The browser is quite unstable, causing me to crash a couple of times. The voice is clear, but then breaks up in segments with buffer over-runs as the processing power of the computer gets a bit overwhelmed.
I was able to play some fiddle into SL for the first time, using this medium which was great. But in the end Anya and I reverted to typing as the voice eventually became too broken up for clear communication.
It is certainly a good start, but I doubt if can be used if there are several people on the sim at any one time.
Separately, it was good to catch up with Radhika the other night – it’s amazing where former cyberminders are turning up 🙂 As she points out, it’s almost like the old MOO days.
I was enthralled within minutes of entering the exhibition with three things catching my eye – in addition to the large planispheric astrolabe displayed with all the parts separated so you could see the exquisite engraving. The three things were: part two of a thirty part Qur’an (koran) from the 9th century AD in which the text block observes the proportions of the Golden Section, discovered by Pythgoras and reintroduced to Renaissance Italy. But Islamic mathematicians were well aware of the Golden Section, and there is evidence of its use throughout the Islamic world long before the Italian renaissance. The second was an 11th century part of a Qur’an which has disc motifs inserted at key passages in the test, which reference other passages – a form of 11th century hyperlinking.
And the third was an illustration of Noah’s ark under construction, in which most of the woodworking handcraft skills are illustrated – frame saws used to slab timber, planes used to smooth, a bow drill for hole drilling and so on all in wonderful detail.
I could go on about the decorated glassware and delicately carved caskets, but suffice to say it is well worth the entrance fee – we rarely get to see European private collections, and especially those put together with a connoisseur’s eye as well as this one.
The exhibition is on until late September
Cheers
Jerry
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As part of the AVAIR (Ars Virtua Artist in Residence) program, which provides sponsorship for new media artists in virtual 3D world SecondLife, this forum provided an opportunity fo rthe artist to share his experience working as an artist-in-residence. The forum was attended by 27 ‘avatars’ (virtual presences) – numbers deliberately limited to reduce lag and traffic pressure on the server providing the ‘space’, and was simaltaneously webcast to http://slcn.tv/ where I watched the presentation.
Kligerman has set out to use his architectural sensibility in building both a display space and a series of visual works. He has explored the play of light on virtual objects, and has built an installation called “Hyper-spaces”.
One of the more interesting questions from the floor concerned how he articulated the distinction between the ‘gaze’ of the viewer/avatar and the ‘gaze’ of the camera view – which can be quite separate from that of the avatar.
I’ve never quite been able to get CD-standard recordings out of my computer – until now! Yes it’s a new toy, a TASCAM US-122L – and I really wasn’t sure how it would go when I bought it based on internet reviews – via eBay. So what is this thing? It’s a device to plug your musical instrument or microphone into your computer via USB and it converts your analogue input into MIDI input.
Until now, I had been using a small four channel mixer into the mic input of the iMac. Previously, there has always been a bit of hiss or noise from the desk and effects pedal – always low, but present. This is the first time I have had truly clean signal input via the USB port with a two-channel midi interface.
In the box is the TASCAM US-122L unit, a USB cable (which powers the device as well as provides input-output) three CDs – one to install the driver, one to install Cubase lite and one to install GigaStudio3.0 – for windows machines. I was mainly interested to see how it would perform with Tracktion studio recording software – having just upgraded to Tracktion3.0.
After installing the driver on the mac, I plugged the TASCAM unit in and it lit up straight away. The device can take two inputs – and it has both jack and canon sockets. It also has a switch to provide phantom power for mics that would otherwise need a pre-amp.
There is also a headphone socket so you can hear either the input or the output to the computer – or a mix of the two. The device has almost zero lag or latency, and the sound is very clean – no noise or hiss at all!
The Tracktion studio recording software was able to take the midi input without difficulty and I was quickly able to get some nice clean recordings – so perhaps a CD is not out of the question now. Here is the whole recording studio!
Overall, the device is compact, and it performs its fairly simple function of taking your analogue instrument input and turning it into clean digital signal very well indeed.
Okay, don’t take my word for it – have a listen to my fairly average playing of Ashokan Farewell. I thoroughly recommend this device if you are thinking of recording sound on your computer.
Cheers
Jerry
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