Another great PD/GEM resource...

Ye Olde Gem Manual

What we played with in class: making a gemwin and gemlist, controlling the pitch of a sawtooth oscillator with motion detection.

another way of having more accurate blob detection without using [pix_background], which can't be kept out of the gem window....

Steina readings

      I liked how both of these readings were so specifically focused on one person. Steina just seemed so innovative. When society was experimenting with sound and video, etc., Steina just seemed to come upon the same elements in a whole new perspective.
     The first reading was really nice, it talked a lot about Steina, her history and her goal and direction as an artist. It wasn't like a complete biography though either, unless it was a biography of the art she produced. It talked more about the different innovations in her work and how those came about or led to new ideas.
    The second paper wasn't necessarily about Steina herself but it talked a lot about her. She was such an influential artist, her work pushing the limits of video and sound, questioning their relationship between each other.

Steina and Jackie Hatfield

Both of the readings as well as watching the film Violin Power, explained the order of the history of Expanded Cinema more completely as a still evolving art. Film, then Electronic,then Digital. And yet each medium combines with each other or continues to experiment with ever changing digital means to continue to create something new. I especially liked Jackie Hatfield's explanation--" that artists were free-flowing individuals experimenting with different kinds of media,and more often than not were working with-and expanding both technologies". ( video and film ). -that's what Steina was doing while her husband was busy creating and programming the waveform--talk about mixing old and new!  As a couple they seem more "present day kind of artists"...combining art and technology--with old and new experiments--rather than more history..
The electronic part is still a bit over my head but I am interested.- Interested especially in how it relates to a new kind of music...technology's music making itself is very much like Steina's cameras "seeing" for themselves. Cool.

PD tutorials: Click HERE List of GEM/pd objects + tutorials: Click HERE

Steina Respons.

Its hard enough to come up with ways to artistically rework ways to use a camera in a non conventional way today, let alone doing the same thing with the heavier and bulkier cameras back on the 70s. Thats what really impress me about Staina's work, coming up with work way aged of her time that even now by todays standards we find it as a creative art piece. The fact that she did this with the technological limitation of her time as well just makes it all the more inspiring.

Line describes a cone

this installation is awesome, and it's inspired by Line describing a cone. I'd like to do something like this for my second project, check out this video, but turn the speakers down, it is quite abrasive
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXx8qnt4MYg