Why Buxton doesn't bother with computer music any more?

Carissimi TML People interested in new matter, temporal textures, movement+media,...

We have a conversation on "material computing" that's beginning to fill out with interesting references.  Thanks to Adrian for this one.

- Xin Wei

Begin forwarded message:

This system already had a lot of what people are still trying to get into including physical models, arduino like processors (6809), dsp processors (TMS3210),
visual programming etc.
http://www.billbuxton.com/katosizer.pdf

For TML agenda Wed 5-6: lighting experiments

(Thanks, Spike, for board info which will be useful for future.)  Spike and I are on the same page about first steps: we can do well by starting as simply as possible and just wire to what we have in-house - dumb fixtures and iCue motorized mounts, and some LED components.  Instead of talking endlessly about sophisticated gear in the abstract, I'd like to see actual light modulation installed in our lab, running all the time, so we can hack it live, and so people other than technical experts can participate in the  design and evaluation of our lighting modulation apparatus from the get-go.   (I am thinking in particular of Tristana Rubio, Liza Solomonova, David's students, Patrick & his students, Komal, and me :)

It's a challenge, but I want to intercalate tech development finely with live action studies, and minimize programming in the abstract.   Here are the motivating "games" that I want to build as soon as possible, as demos and reality-checks AKA Cruelty-checks (in the spirit of Artaud).

To be concrete, let me pose some feasible first steps.  Who'd like to join us in realizing some of these experiments this term?  Please invite / recommend someone who can work with us on the practical and elementary makings this month.  (Navid  or Spike, can you invite Ted to contact me cc Morgan, please?)

(1) Wire the camera-based tracking to
regular static fixtures via our dimmer (done), 
iCue motor - to make a tracking spot,
some RGB fixture.

(2) Chase spot game with kids (XW, M?)  -- or we could map Navid's moving virtual sound sources to moving spots.  If video then we could vary the color and texture according to sonic cues.

(3) Color spots  mapped to blobs by  rank .   Rank by size or speed.  Devise rules such as   
3.1  Intersect => a third color, or
3.2  Same speed (even if different location) => blend colors,
3.3  Same curvature => blend colors.

(4) Map vegetal, solar, building (Tristana, Komal, or Patrick's students) and other non-human temporal patterns to params  (ie color, intensity) of fixtures mounted behind pillars or plant boxes, or other architectural accents in the room EV 7.725.  I think we should map such slow data to state rather than to actual lighting parameters.   This will take a weekend of collective re-wiring, to be scheduled perhaps in collaboration with Zoe & Katie (Annex / PLSS2 plant project).

Quality of light is not important at this stage - we need to create an entire signal path first and interpolate computational modulation.  "Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien"

Xin Wei

FQRSC proposal, AIS essay Minor Architecture

Hi Harry, Patrick,

I've had the pleasure of chatting with each of you individually.   Shall we move things along by putting together some "lab" notes  of experiences over the past year ?
We can generate this in three different forms  -- each of us has different strands of writings to do anyway...   let me contribute by re-posting two pieces of writing.   

Instead of artificially making yet another bit of work, I propose to work with what we each have done or need to do anyway.   So for example:

Patrick's got a set of projects with his studio over the past year, whose documentation as material to inspire the next phase.   Links to the project blogs would suffice.   We also talked about a Simondon essay that I'll be happy to look at soon. 

Harry's writing up some thoughts about the construction of apparatus, and the relation between apparatus and experiment for the prospectus which could neatly draw from and inform the various installation experiments.

I think at some point we talked about creating a project blog.   We have already two passworded spaces TML private WIKI    and the   posterous blog which you can re-format however you like.   They can be passworded to restrict as you like.   To just the three of us is fine for a start.

Here's the narrative of our FQRSC temporal textures proposal


and here's the Minor Architecture essay for AIS 26.2


Onward toward our joint article(s) I hope!  I'm hoping that we can work toward publication, scientific as well as EU support.  (First milestone date is Aug 15 for a Letter of Interest.)
Xin Wei

__________________________________________________________________________________
Canada Research Chair • Associate Professor • Design and Computation Arts • Concordia University
Director, Topological Media Lab • topologicalmedialab.net/  •  skype: shaxinwei • +1-650-815-9962
__________________________________________________________________________________







[Temporal Textures] Terry Tao: flows on Riemannian manifolds

Adrian, Andy, Michael, Tyr, Sean,

Another wrinkle for our scientific research agenda discussion (at 2 today) paralleling the discussions of "temporal textures"

Terry Tao is one of the most lucid communicative mathematicians of his generation.   A key point for our purposes, I think, is the more general set up in which, instead of varying a metric g{t} with respect to the parameter "t" (putative time), one varies the base manifold as well.  M becomes M(t).  So a flow on a Riemannian manifold becomes a flow on a differentiable family of Riemannian manifolds: 


 Of course all the technical difficulty is in exactly how to vary through a family of manifolds, with potentially even changing topology.  Tao treats the RIcci flow, which has become a pillar of mathematics in the past 20 years, including Perelman's settling of the Poincare Conjecture.   


But in the spirit of a "small mammals in the age of large reptiles" strategy*, let me suggest a reversal of point of view, and read time from the evolutionary process.   I draw attention to two points that Tao makes in the passage quoted below.

We enrich the notion of time by the notion of the flow of time itself, modelled by the "time vector field" 

(1) The manifold developing topology goes hand in hand with the time vector field developing singularities.  Think of chocolate flowing down a donut held vertically.

(2) The "time vector field which obeys the transversality condition "   gives a more precise generalization of the "directionality" of time, but this is only the beginning of the journey...

I would like to see if this can be illuminated by Adrian's discussion of lensing.

Xin Wei
(* Mammals and reptiles do not refer to mathematicians but to the unnamed ;)


"The one drawback of the above simple approach is that it forces the topology of the underlying manifold M to stay constant. A more general approach is to view each d-dimensional manifold M(t) as a slice of a d+1-dimensional “spacetime” manifold (possibly with boundary or singularities). This spacetime is (usually) equipped with a time coordinate , as well as a time vector field which obeys the transversality condition . The level sets of the time coordinate t then determine the sets M(t), which (assuming non-degeneracy of t) are smooth d-dimensional manifolds which collectively have a tangent bundle which is a d-dimensional subbundle of the d+1-dimensional tangent bundle of . The metrics g(t) can then be viewed collectively as a section of . The analogue of the time derivative is then the Lie derivative . One can then define other Riemannian structures (e.g. Levi-Civita connections, curvatures, etc.) and differentiate those in a similar manner.

The former approach is of course a special case of the latter, in which for some time interval with the obvious time coordinate and time vector field. The advantage of the latter approach is that it can be extended (with some technicalities) into situations in which the topology changes (though this may cause the time coordinate to become degenerate at some point, thus forcing the time vector field to develop a singularity). This leads to concepts such as generalised Ricci flow, which we will not discuss here, though it is an important part of the definition of Ricci flow with surgery (see Chapters 3.8 and 14 of Morgan-Tian’s book for details)."



Ozone Jan 12 (context for OSC Discovery)

Hi OSC service discovery guys,

On 2010-12-24, at 4:22 AM, Sha Xin Wei wrote:

Dear Ozoners and media choreographers:

I propose we dedicate most of the Jan 12 Wed TML meeting for a discussion of the 2010-2011 Ozone system.   End-users -- artist / experimentalist composers -- are welcome and vital, but this discussion will run at the level of experts and system developers   We should allocate 5:15 - 7:00 for this.

I'd like to set the creative and research context so we can all prioritize the development effort appropriately to the lab's needs.
...

On 2010-12-23, at 4:48 PM, <adrian@adrianfreed.com> <adrian@adrianfreed.com> wrote:


(By calibrating I'll mean *making small adjustments** of an instrument's
parameters for contingent conditions of performance site and event*.)


I'm not sure what you mean to suggest here. What are you imagining we would
"incorporate" these techniques into, libmapper itself?
Calibration is an interesting problem deserving of more attention. Note
that the hipper devices store calibration information in the device
(e.g. wiimote, nunchuck).
This makes the calibrated device portable. Of course some calibration is
associated with the location (e.g. lighting, AGC, white balance, etc.
for video) other
with a paricular person. My experience is that the date
management/configuration issues are harder than the calibration signal
processing.


______________________________________________________________________________
Sha Xin Wei, Ph.D.
Canada Research Chair • Associate Professor • Design and Computation Arts • Concordia University
Director, Topological Media Lab • topologicalmedialab.net/  •  http://flavors.me/shaxinwei
______________________________________________________________________________


Ozone & Einsteins Dream workshops in 2011

Here is my current list of potential and proposed opportunities to do workshops related to Ozone & Einsteins Dream in 2011.
Some are fundable.
I will be working on funding these...depending on who can accomplish what.

March (during intersession break) UC Berkeley
1 or 2 members of Ozone team demo Lisa Wymore's lab
Meyer Sound work

March 5 - April 30 Bain St Michel, Montreal

April 15-23 Berkeley Dance Productions 8, Berkeley
  Workshop in Lisa Wymore's lab ?
Maybe only media techniques

May 1-8 Hexagram, Montreal ??
Michael Montanaro & visitors Lisa Wymore (UC Berkeley) and Sheldon Smith (Mills College) ?

August 1-10 Hawaii
SECT Seminar in Experimental Critical Theory
technoscientific knowledge production and urban experience in Asia

Xin Wei

poor theory

Dear TMLabbers,

By the Critical Theory Institute (2008)

This can inform the TML's experimental work.
Thanks to Kavita Philip.
See also "phenomenological method".
Xin Wei

______________________________________________________________________________
Sha Xin Wei, Ph.D.
Canada Research Chair • Associate Professor • Design and Computation Arts • Concordia University
Director, Topological Media Lab • topologicalmedialab.net/  •  http://flavors.me/shaxinwei
______________________________________________________________________________

Edward S. Casey "On Not Putting Too Fine an Edge on Things" philosopher, talk Oct 15

Dear Colleagues and Students,

Prof. Ed Casey is one of the most respected living philosophers in N. America, and reputed to be a most energizing speaker.   This promises to be one of the livelier talks of the year, and motivation for a topological approach to things, perhaps.   Do tell your friends, and come to the top floor of the Hexagram space in the EV building at Concordia.

Philosophy Colloquium Talk
Co-sponsored by the Canada Research Chair in New Media,                                                                              and Topological Media Lab

Edward S. Casey
Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Stony Brook University

Friday, Oct 15, 4-6 pm, EV 11.705, 1515 St. Catherine W., corner of Guy

"On Not Putting Too Fine an Edge on Things"

Abstract:

Philosophers, taking their lead from natural and social scientists, pride themselves on achieving clarity and exactitude. This aim is indisputably valid and has been indisputable to the accomplishment of many of the enduring achievements in philosophy – for instance, Descartes’s Principles of Philosophy, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Peirce’s semiotics, Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica. At the same time, the virtues of vagueness have been increasingly pursued ever since William James (inspired by certain strains in Peirce himself) proclaimed “the value of the vague” in his Principles of Psychology (1890). Since then, others have followed suite, however diversely: notably Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Timothy Williamson. In this talk, I consider the merits of the vague in philosophy by a concerted exploration of the edges of things and topics: those extremities where the exact gives place to the less than precisely designatable and discussable. I maintain that, far from being a defect or lack, the very imprecision has positive values of its own to which we should attend more closely.