Just playing around with creating a generative music program. You can find the tutorial I’m following here.
Hindered Minds with too much time: Fun with Jitter
June 9th, 2009 . Uncategorized . No Comments »I’ve been learning max/msp/jitter over the past little while, running through the demo and finally buying the full version while my student discount still remained.
Above is a small patch I am making in Max/MSP/Jitter’s live patcher, essentially the programming environment. It’s just something I’ve been putting together over the past bit to learn some of the functions and routing issues, especially in jitter. The colour swatch at the top is used, for amusement’s sake, to control the brightness, contrast, and saturation of an image matrix mixed together from two video inputs. These inputs are Warner Brother’s The Rabbit of Seville and the Muppet’s fabled Mah Nah Mah Nah (doo doo, doo doo doo).
Before these inputs are mixed together though, they’re run through the scissor and glue objects, which cut the video matrix up into component parts (scissor) and then reassembles the matrix accordingly (glue). I’m using the Router object to take the individual components and rearrange them randomly. You can see the small subroutine running the random numbers in the upper right hand corner. I’m adding further chaos to the mix through the colour swatch by having a randomly assigned saturation value assigned to the colours at times randomly determined within one second to zero millisecond intervals.
On top of all this crazy stuff, I’m running the signal through the jit.coerce object, which (as I understand it) is basically taking the individual packets of information contained within the matrix and rewriting the headers so that their output is different. So where the original matrix data is char 4 (character strings, 4 planes of information), I can basically rewrite it to anything I damn well please. I understand this part a bit less well, but it has a neat effect and is glitching the merry hell out of my video.
The image above is the end result. I may post a video of the recording in the future, if I end up making this purely educational exercise something useful.
Brief: Email Invented Today - Google Wave
May 28th, 2009 . Brief . No Comments »As I work towards putting a portfolio together and writing some stuff for this site, it’s natural to keep up with the information and projects of those around you, especially those who lead the field you’re interested in. Matt Cutts, Google’s webspam leader and SEO-ish extraordinaire, has been discussing the new Google product, Google Wave and pointing his followers (all twenty four thousand of them) towards various news media related to it. I suspect that I will be writing about Google Wave in the future, as well, but for now I am going to focus on the underlying concepts behind Google Wave that make it interesting: path redefinition and a step back from technology through technology.
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My First Semiotic Analysis: A look at the Information Privacy Commissioner
May 14th, 2009 . Writ . No Comments »January 1st, 2009 marked the twenty-first anniversary of the IPC in Ontario, and during this time an incredibly rich discourse has developed for the facilitation of privacy provincially, nationally, and abroad. The Information Privacy Commissioner of Ontario (Hereafter referred to as the IPC), Ann Cavoukian, is in a unique position to speak for both the citizens she represents and the government which of necessity employs her. Through a semiotic analysis of a selection of personal-privacy oriented discussion papers released by the IPC over the past three years, I argue that the IPC defines its role in respects to three stakeholders: private citizen-consumer, private business-consumer, and public service-provider. In order to facilitate these three stakeholders, the IPC organizes its discourse around four principals: “Privacy by Design,” Privacy is Good for Business, “positive-sum” Privacy conception, and finally, the notion of immanent threat. These organizational principals created a dialogue with each of the stakeholders, and I argue that this dialogue permits the IPC both a high degree of relevance and effectiveness in defining contemporary guidelines and regulation for information privacy policy.
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Path Dependence: Readings and Response
April 26th, 2009 . Writ . 1 Comment »Since the early days of my political science degree, a very intense reluctance towards the use of counterfactuals was embedded deep within my increasingly cynical heart (I’m still mostly described as “Bubbly and oddly infatuated with unicorns” though). Through and through the notion that “history matters” is forwarded, both in the important political readings and throughout my academic career, but through this cluster of articles, I have one of my first experiences with the idea of “generative” history. Likewise, for the past year the idea of path dependence has been one of increasing interest for me. Pointedly, the oft-referenced phenomenon of the QWERTY keyboard is one that comes to my mind as often as it does that of Thelen and Pierson.
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