alanG/\lan lives – Visualize, Design, Develop, Affect – inspired Technologist

Whats a nabble? No idea, but the website nabble.com provides a useful forum for navigating the archives of the Mediawiki-API mailing list. I usually have trouble navigating through mailing lists, but this threaded forum makes it easier to find information that otherwise would be stuck in my inbox or some other archive that I would never want to dive into. http://www.nabble.com/WikiMedia-API-f24460.html

Finalizing the piezo application for the the A.D. White House installation, “Echo”, I’m running into some useful tidbits of knowledge about piezo applications. If you need a good intro to piezo sensor applications, be sure to check out
– http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~st96p2ha/piezo.html –
The “Piezo Lab” page provides some good background info on piezos and even has procedures for a lab you can try yourself

PVDF Film, or piezo film, has interesting characteristics which make it highly useful as a transducer. The film is highly sensitive to infrared energy, making it a great sensor for quick changes in temperature. When deformed it emits a high voltage spike which can be easily measured by an oscilloscope. Additionally, the voltage output is anagalous to the frequency and degree of deformation, making the material good for detecting high-pitched sound. This leads to a wide variety of industrial applications such as a strain gauge. 

Live coding (sometimes known as interactive programming, on-the-fly programming, just in time programming) is the name given to the process of writing software in realtime as part of a performance.

In preparation for my presentation of Aurakinesis, I’ve been researching on the practice and techniques of improvisational performance with technology. The live coding label makes it sound a bit challenging…but I bet its worth all the effort I’m likely to put into it.

Live coding has been explored as a more rigorous alternative to laptop DJs who, live coders often feel, lack the charisma and pizzazz of musicians performing live. It makes up for these dynamics by introducing interactive programming, writing parts of the program while they run.

Musicians who perhaps hadn’t the time or technical background to face the steep learning curve of many music programs can now experiment with code in environments which are more musically intuitive (though still quite technical). I wonder how it works for those who are more technically inclined?

DSC_9355, originally uploaded by Zn (Zinin Alexei).

In aesthetics, the sublime (from the Latin sublimis ([looking up from] under the lintel, high, lofty, elevated, exalted)) is the quality of greatness or vast magnitude, whether physical, moral, intellectual, metaphysical or artistic. The term especially refers to a greatness with which nothing else can be compared and which is beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement or imitation. This greatness is often used when referring to nature and its vastness.

-from Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sublime_(philosophy)