I moved to Dorset in October 2007, and my son Douglas arrived in November. Things have been a little busy since then… but through meeting various folk along the way, it seemed a good idea to arrange some sort of gathering of local people involved in making web sites and the like. Thus dorsetdigital.co.uk was born… There’s a little applet which plays some digital myopic fun, created to make this months header graphic. The aim is to have a new header for each month, and given that it’s March 21st and the site has only just gone online, if nothing comes through I’ve something up my sleeves.
vjsuals for bela
Published January 20th, 2008 in art, graphics, installation, music, synaesthesia and theatre. 0 CommentsI made a decision to put various bits of my art-y code online, and to see what happens. The first project up in my public code repository was written for some visuals i ‘played’ live for my friend the cellist Bela Emerson.
Finally something up at http://www.soundwear.co.uk. A project i’ve been working on a fair while with Simon Thorogood, and that will gradually get more developed over time (as is the way). The general idea is to use sound as part of the fashion design process, by asking visitors to make colour and shape choices while listening to selected pieces of music.
The initial version lets the user pick a range of colours, but isn’t yet saving to a database.
Today, a small snatch of my ‘cello playing in the National Physical Laboratory reverberation chamber, made it to the radio waves of Radio 4’s Today programme!
Today Programme Gallery of the recording session
Sarah Angliss, Mike Blow, Colin Uttley and I are going back into the National Physical Laboratory today to video our playing, this video will be online sometime over the weekend. Please email [me at stephendwolff dot com] if you’d like to be sent a link to this, once we’ve posted it.
While browsing the other day, I came across this unusual search engine. I especially liked the search by tapping!
The night before Senster
Published September 27th, 2006 in art, graphics, music and theatre. 0 CommentsTo view this content, you need to install Java from java.com
Source code: Forest_Web Branch Interpolate Lsystem Rule RuleSet Tree Turtle
Built with Processing
So, click the applet (if you can see it!) and then try hitting 1, 2, 3, 4, b, <, >, UP, DOWN, LEFT or RIGHT, and anything else you can think of, you never know…
It’s the night before the show, and as usual (it seems with this show), it’s all still a bit of a blur, and anything could happen! It’s technically a very complicated show - switching between computers and bits of software every five minutes on all sorts of different cues. Max Patches being affected by sound input triggering stuff happening in Processing, with video coming in, powerpoint slides being played, quicktime movies accompanied by resampled ancient synths in Logic. Kind of what we (as Sarah said tonight) have been dreaming of doing for yonks, but now it’s actually happening, we’re realising quite how much work is involved. Brilliant fun nonetheless, and it can only get better!
Now for the Forest. A bit of history with this one. I have been 
working for ages on some Flash L-Systems (Lindenmayer systems) as part of some visuals (visual jockey - not video) for my friend Bela. She’s a cellist, and so am i, and on a whim i ended up accompanying her on a German tour with some of my graphics.
With Senster, we were looking at possible programmatic 
(and ‘generative’) elements to include in the show, and my L-System work cropped up. But, these particular L-Systems are random, and not very plant like (the original point of the generative system, imitating plant growth). I struggled for a bit to make mine more tree like, then in a bit of a rush found some code on the internet from mr (or ms) blprnt.com. While beautiful and a nifty bit of code, it wasn’t quite in keeping with darker intentions for the show, so did a bit of hacking to reduce things to black and white, and make a whole forest out of it. For the Senster shows in May 2006 (in Brighton festival), everything seemed quite slow during parts of the growing process. This has been ironed out now, in September 2006, and i added some volume influence to branch thickness.
i just found an example which goes from the other end - to make music with genetic algorithms (GAs)
http://www.synesthete.org/ contains lots of interesting info about synaesthesia, including some tests to find out whether or not you have the condition , where some of your senses get mixed up (consistently).
I’ve long been fascinated with composers who apparently see (or saw) colours for musical chords - such as Messaien or Scriabin - and after completing my Evolutionary & Adaptive Systems MSc found that synaesthesia also offers cognitive science researchers a valuable difference from the norm with which to understand how our senses work.
