Revised 11/11/2013
Dearest Marie
I have arrived safely in New York City, a city I have heard so much about but not really visited since earlier in the century. These notes will record some of my impressions and now that I have given into Satan and bought a digital camera, some pictures as well eventually.
Your idea of buying a cheap notebook worked great, mostly. Windows 8 can be tamed it turns out, Microsoft is its own worst enemy. The keyboard can be used but the mousepad is so big on the palm rest that if you indeed use it as a rest you mess with the touchpad and your mouse goes to hell and gone.
I checked into NYU and Perlin arranged for me to have a badge! I did not have the heart to tell him that I still had my old one from 2000. They want me to return it when done, fat chance. The 12th floor looks very very similar to the way I remembered it. I feel bad bothering people when I need something. Ken has an interesting vision and we will see where it all goes. I know from experience that in academia, things are complicated and may not be what they seem. Danger everywhere!
I did notice that Chris Bregler when he did motion capture did not use the basic ballerina / stripper approach of so many of his peers, but went straight for an Olympic diving champion. I applaud his taste in exploiting women and plan to complement him on this the next time I see him
I found Tom Brigham, and he is doing better than I expected. His subterranean basement appears at first to be a junk room, but when you go further in you see there is order in the madness. He thinks this is camoflage, but I think its just bad marketing. He has to convince people he is not a flake, and presenting his office/workshop as a pile of junk to the casual observer is the wrong approach.
Speer took me around on Saturday and we got in Chelsea, the MET and some music. The man is a dynamo of energy, the prototypical uber-new-yorker. If I had stayed with him on Sunday instead of doing who knows what I would have seen the apparaitions of the virgin mary as photographed by the fabulous Veronica Leueken. The Church does not believe these are true visions of the Virgin, then what are they?
These are her predictions as recorded in her ecstatic visions. See link below. Note that in 1977 under Revolutions she predicts the 3 W as a sign of the end times. 3W could mean 3 wars, or could it mean she predicted the WWW (world wide web) as a sign of the coming collapse of civilization?
http://www.roses.org/prophecy/seqevnt.htm
But now I must get out of Arlene's shelter for the poor here on Broome street and face the cold hard world and go to NYU and play with all the great stuff that Perlin has collected.
PS The MET was wonderful but the Rome exhibit was very underwhelming.
I miss you greatly and look forward to returning to our little Rancho in Siberia.
Your devoted Dimitri.
Showing posts with label Tom Brigham. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tom Brigham. Show all posts
Monday, November 4, 2013
Tuesday, May 7, 2013
A More Personal and Analog Approach to Computer Art
Those of us who worked to create a new
art form(s) with computers have been gratified by some of the
progress in the creation of computer generated art. But we must also
acknowledge that the process of exploration has been uneven, with
some areas going from triumph to triumph, and others lying neglected
and underappreciated. Sure, it is easy to be enthusiastic about
vast expense paid to create impossibly stupid movies with computers
which are sequels to impossibly stupid movies that make a half a
billion dollars. Indeed, how could we not celebrate them as clearly
they are the very highest form of art that our society could aspire
to. And this is shown in the most sincere way we prove these
things: by success at generating commerce. Without commerce, some
would say, there is no real art.
It is easy to celebrate a film and a
director who publically dismisses as irrelevant the technologists and
artists who made his lead character of his film, in this case a
tiger. A director who laughs at them in their misery and
impoverishment. It is the fate of these so-called digital artists to
suffer as they are worthless scum and anyone can be hired off the
street and be trained to do their job. In fact governments spend
hundreds of millions of dollars to impoverish and destroy their
places of employment so that they may have the glamour of computer
animation facilities in their own country. That is only natural and
correct. (1)
Since we must acknowledge that doing
computer animation as it was traditionally performed is a failure in this
country, with a few exceptions, it is time I think to reexamine our
roots and look at other forms of expression with computers. For
example, a friend of mine, Tom Brigham, sent me an interesting
youtube video of an unknown artist (unknown to me) doing an art
experiment by applying the power of a neon sign transformer to a
former LCD television. Thus the artist experiments with the
interface between the analog represented by the voltage
from the transformer, with the digital, as represented by the cracked LCD display,
in unexpected and creative ways.
All potential practitioners of this process are reminded to be very careful with those high voltage logic probes.
Although the final work is not a
success, the process demonstrated by the artist clearly has potential
and I hope that many will also experiment with creating new art in
this way. Of course, I hope they are very careful with the power
transformers, and avoid death by electrocution, which would be unpleasant.
LCD TV vs Neon Sign Transformer
Ed Systems on Youtube
________________________________________
1. Examples of such countries include
Canada, the UK, Taiwan, the People's Republic of China and New
Zealand.
modified 12/5/2013
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