Friday, June 29, 2007

Sound Economy

Stanley Ruiz has constructed a sonification of the Philippines' GDP. The information is interpreted by Stanley and mentally transcoded into (or imagined as) hand gestures, which are then transcoded into midi notes within Max/MSP. These notes are treated as control signals for audio and video output.

Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Wind as Light

Direct transcoding via an array of custom electromechanical devices with the wind to light project.

Steps to Telepathy

George Dvorsky makes a connection between Chuck Jorgenson's recent work on sub-vocal speech recognition and previous work on cochlear implants: they share input and output forms, but have inverse mapping directions.

Saturday, June 16, 2007

Tim Knowles

Influenced by Roman Singer's extended definition of sculpture (e.g.: invoking time in pieces like "Helicopter with a Blue Spray Can"), Time Knowles unifies his work with ideas about chance and process. They are also involve transcoding physical movement visually: using drawing devices to transcribe the acceleration of a car, the movement of a tree branch, or the wind's effect on a balloon.

Wednesday, June 13, 2007

Weird Converter

"How many Shaquille O'Neals in a giraffe's neck?" Approximately 1.24. Weird Converter transcodes nonstandard measurement units.

Saturday, June 09, 2007

Scrambler Drawings

Rosemarie Fiore's Scrambler Drawings transcode position over time is into a permanent visual form. Gas generators and buckets of paint are connected to the chairs of a carnival ride, turning the machine into a giant plotter.

Thursday, June 07, 2007

Scratching Video and Audio

Hand gestures transcoded as time by Cut Chemist, expanding turntablism into simultaneous video and audio manipulation.

Monday, June 04, 2007

Wiimote DJ/VJing

Daito Manabe and Satoshi Horii have written a patch for transcoding wiimote gestures into visual and audio control signals simultaneously.

Romanticizing Necessity

Supposedly both Nietzsche and Seraphim Rose wrote by candlelight (and Nietzsche with a retinal infection). Yet other philosophers have written in daylight, and still others have not needed to write at all.

We're encouraged when we hear stories about overcoming adversity, but romanticizing those journeys can lead to an unnecessary desire for their means(and a lack of appreciation for their ends). Not everyone needs candlelight to understand themselves.

Saturday, June 02, 2007

Visualizing Music

Anita Lillie's project Visualizing Music transcodes audio signals into a 12-pitch chromatic scale. Volume/intensity are mapped to brightness and color to timbral properties (similar sounds are colored similarly).