They have a very unique sound which hasn't really been duplicated in the 25+ years since the introduction of the Commodore. I was not a Commodore kid; I grew up with a Tandy, but I wasted many happy hours at my neighbor's home playing on his C64. The plan is to stuff 1 or more of these chips into a new DIY synthesizer, most likely a Midibox SID. I'll post the build log as I get to it, although I still have to post up about my success with an ArduinoBT and a Peggy 2 lightboard.
]]>http://kineme.net/Discussion/DevelopingCompositions/QuartzComposerSnowLeopardNewPatchesandFeatures
I haven't updated to SL yet - I always wait to read the bug reports before diving in - but probably will this week. I'm curious to try out the new feedback and interaction patches.
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The last tool was the least familiar to almost everyone I spoke with at Artomatic. In short, Quartz Composer is a visual programming environment that lets you build modular video processors and synthesizers. Jack Whitsitt, a/k/a sintixerr, wrote a great introduction to the tool based around his experience using QC for his Artomatic as well, so I'll let him cover the basics if you're curious about how it works and how to install it (it's a free tool that comes with every Mac.)
Although QC is a very flexible tool when it comes to processing media and generating live output, it falls down somewhat in terms of getting data into and out of the application. I had to jump through some hoops to get something as simple as a string of text into the application, and had similar problems trying to record the application's output. Since most of the conversations I have with others who have used Quartz Composer start with This tool is great, but I wish I could do this..., I thought it'd be helpful to post a list of various resources and plugins that greatly extend the application's functionality. Some of these were essential to my Artomatic installation, and saved me hours of having to create my own solution either within QC or scripting it elsewhere.
That said, I had a blast at Artomatic. It was an amazing feeling to present in the company of serious artists and other experimenters in the technical realms. I have a number of ideas for next year, probably continuing the theme of participatory art.
As I mentioned, the purpose of my installation was to allow users to submit pictures via Twitter, see those pictures processed according to custom image filters I had written, and then see those pictures recombined with other processed images and displayed on the Artomatic wall and on Flickr. The project was partially successful. The wifi connection was so unreliable as to be useless, so I had to update the wall manually for the visualization to show recent images. Nonetheless, the Flickr uploading and the Twitter bot worked pretty much as intended, so people did get results.
I've posted some of the results in my image gallery, but here are a few results from the Artomaticmatic generator:
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As some of you know, I deliberately kept almost all of the details relating to AOM very close to my vest as until relatively recently I had no idea whether my ideas were going to be feasible or not (read: I had no idea what I was doing). So I apologize for being cryptic. Here is my testament regarding Artomatic 2009, in case anyone retains some lingering curiosity about what I've been doing with that grey wall and that LCD display. Warning: Technical details ahead. You may be bored to tears.
This is my first Artomatic, although I've been fortunate to have seen bookgrrl and sintixerr at work for the past two events. In short, I had an idea of what I was getting into when I rashly declared, "*I* could do this!" last May, although I promptly forgot all about AOM until registration time this year.
I'll be frank and state at the start that I don't consider myself an artist. I'm a mere interloper, a trespasser in the fields of the creative arts. I do like to have fun, though. Hack or not, I signed up and paid my fee, and then started thinking furiously about two months ago about what I wanted to do.
The only thing I do which verges on artistry is making meticulous 2d illustrations using a ruler and my computer to do some calculating and sketching. They have to be meticulous since I can't draw freehand.
I decided that I wanted to show these off, but they're very severe and minimal, so my initial plan was to create physical renderings in copper wire of some of my pictures. All of my stuff is 2d, and by intent made only out of slightly overlapping horizontal lines, so I thought the weird wire sculpture idea was a feasible one.
I learned an important lesson soon after: When on a deadline, don't try something you don't know. Go with what you do know! I discarded the wire idea, although there's a goofy homage to it in my wall's title lettering:;)
By this point, it's May 14th. Pressure is mounting. I'm seriously considering simply hanging pictures of pretty butterflies I saw in a London museum last summer and calling it a day. I was reflecting one afternoon on some of my line illustrations and realized that I like them in large part because they're built by enforcing a certain set of rules about how to draw a particular subject, but you don't really know what you're going to get until you actually go through the process and see what emerges. I thought then that since much of the leg work is done by a series of computer scripts that do the estimation of where to bend the lines, why couldn't I just have the computer render a rough draft of what each image should look like? And if it could do that, it could do other things, too...
I decided that it would be fun to have an Artomatic-'matic' of sorts that would produce new pictures based on input from users. As a start, I decided that it could make approximations of my line pictures. Adding parts to make more effects is easy, and I could add them after AOM launched. In addition, I thought it would be interesting to make some kind of presentation out of any replies Artomaticmatic receives that *aren't* links to images, e.g. a random word or message from a user. In the short term, I had to make a few decisions about presentation, how to get pictures to and from artomaticmatic, and how to create some kind of lasting record of the exchange.
My initial plan was to use email to exchange pictures. I figured that visitors could email a picture from their phone or desktop, and a new picture would be produced and emailed back after an interval of, say, five to ten minutes from a free email account. After some experimentation I realized that programming interfaces to Gmail and Yahoo are either nonexistent (Gmail) or onerous and difficult to use (Yahoo), and that any free mail service would probably flag all of my pictures as spam anyways. So I decided on the next most widely-known free service that supported simple message and picture exchange, and that was Twitter. Twitter, mercifully, has a very simple to use programming interface. That ease of use is deceptive, however...
I rushed ahead and set up basic scripts to retrieve Twitter replies ('@artomaticmatic <text>'), and then hit the next big roadblock. Everything sent over Twitter is converted into a 'short URL', i.e., even if you sent a direct link to a picture (i.e., 'http://www.myserver.com/mypicture.jpg'), it gets converted into something like 'http://bit.ly/hk98s'. That's just from the Twitter web interface. Sending a picture from an iPhone client like Twitteriffic uses the Yfrog service to send pictures, and some clients use Twitpic. Neither of those services link directly to the picture; instead, you get a page back that has the picture embedded in a webpage. So... I had to update everything to find out from the link what site was hosting my picture, follow the various redirects to the page, and then scrape the actual link to the picture out of the web page.
Testing begins. You can send a link to Artomaticmatic (now a Twitter account supported by an unholy mess of Python scripts) and it will retrieve your picture, and occasionally even post an update about what its doing. Around this point, I start running into the well-publicized but thinly-documented usage limitations of the Twitter API (the programming interface.)
Anyone can talk to Twitter through a program of their own. It's encouraged. However, you have a hard limit of 100 'requests' you can send an hour. Downloading the last 20 replies you've been sent counts as a request towards that limit, for example, and other actions can contribute to it as well. It's fine if you're making a request once a minute, as artomaticmatic does, to pull down the latest replies, but bad if you carelessly fail to notice that you left the tweeting function active overnight when testing a new script and you wake up to discover that your bot has been tweeting its own name over and over since 11pm the following night, and that mysteriously and without warning, Twitter is no longer letting you post or retrieve ANYTHING through any interface to the service. The saying 'Measure twice, cut once' is applicable in these kinds of situations, if you are smart enough (unlike me) to heed it.
Eventually, Artomaticmatic starts talking again and I resolve to be more circumspect in my Twitter requests. The next hurdle is finding a place for pictures to live. Artomatic is a long event and I don't want to just discard pictures I create or that users send to me.
The first choice, Flickr, turns out to be a good one. Flickr, like most of Yahoo's services (excepting Mail) is tremendously easy to interact with. The only shortcoming is that it seems to want me to manually verify that my script is allowed to access my account (artomaticmatic) every day or so, and will hold up new uploads until I do so. Meh. Flickr does some cool understated stuff like update your picture's tags and description with info pulled from IPTC tags embedded in the image, so I just had my scripts add a bunch of stock IPTC info to each new picture and then let Flickr sort out the descriptions.
So now I have pictures coming in from tweets, pictures being uploaded to Flickr, and my bot is announcing new pictures every few minutes. Great. I still have 64 square feet of wall to cover. I decide to print large format copies of my illustrations, some instructions, and a wall-mounted LCD to display the whole online shebang:;)
I originally thought it would be AWESOME to have laser-etched 'prints' of the line drawings on acrylic or some affordable metal, but it turns out that most local laser etch places won't return your emails or refuse to do so in an acceptable (i.e., seven day) timeframe. I still think etched designs on aluminum or steel are badass, so don't be surprised if later this year I start posting about how I decided that owning a laser etcher is more important than a mortgage on a first home, and am willing to etch your Macbooks, coffee mugs, etc. for a reasonable rate.
Instead, my friend Joel Traylor (his wall is across from mine) was generous enough to rent me the use of his wide-format printer for a few images. I had to figure out the trial version of Illustrator quick-like so I could vectorize everything so the images could be sized up to arbitrary dimensions. My vector skills are rough and it shows in the prints, but I hope that by next year I'll do a better job of tracing.
I thought about display options. Basically, there are two choices: physical display (e.g., LCD or CRT monitor) and projector. Jack (sintixerr/jwhittsitt) was already doing an awesome live visualization with a projector, so I felt I needed something different. I bought a cheap wall mount for my desktop monitor. Next, I needed software to present the images in an attractive fashion. I've been singing the praises of Quartz Composer (http://developer.apple.com/graphicsimaging/quartz/quartzcomposer.html), a *FREE* tool that comes with every Mac (it's in the Developer tools on your OS X cd). It's great for presenting and mangling images and video, although getting non-trivial amounts of text into it is a chore. I had a hell of time figuring out how to get it to understand the different RSS feeds Twitter and Flickr use, but once done it worked reliably.
So I have this cool tool to show pictures and words, but unfortunately it's dependent on a Mac to run. The computing ecosystem in my home contains a desktop PC, a Macbook Pro (my preciousss), and a netbook (i.e., a really cheap laptop). Only the Macbook Pro runs OS X, and no way in hell was I going to tie it to the side of a public wall for two months while Artomatic ran. So, I did a little research, and figured out that if I followed a long series of obscure instructions, prayed hard and sacrificed a live goat, I might be able to get a usable copy of OS X running on the Hewlett-Packard netbook. "Chiclet", my affectionately-named netbook, went under the knife, and awoke several hours later as a largely-usable miniature Mac laptop:;)
My post-op laptop seemed to run well. A nasty collection of AppleScripts and shell scripts ensured that it would go to sleep at the end of each night, awaken on mornings when AOM was open, and would do nothing but run (and hide) some image scripts and present the Quartz Composer visualization full-screen on bootup. Provisions were made so that I could log into it from another laptop on the network and update its software, if need be.
By this point, it was basically within the last 72 hours to install at AOM. I had painted my wall, but that was it. I hustled. I built an enclosure out of aluminum strips for the laptop. I bought one of those crazy security meshes like Jack has. I waited until a script would crash, trapped the error, and then started it again and hoped that Twitter wouldn't fall down. I was ready.
I know, I know. Everyone advises first-timers to NOT BE THAT GUY who shows up on one of the last two nights of installation, gallon of paint and drill in hand, and tries to build his whole wall in 30 minutes before being escorted gently but firmly off the premises by volunteers. I was nearly that guy, but I got everything installed! There was only one problem... Chiclet died. Specifically, the hard drive died. Whether it was a result of overheating next to all of those light atop the wall, or from the cognitive dissonance that must have occurred in its tiny single-core CPU when it realized it was running OS X on a *Hewlett-Packard*, Chiclet committed seppuku high above my AOM installation and refused to reboot. Being resourceful, I had a backup install of OS X that ran off a flash drive, but it wasn't fast enough to run the presentation software and other scripts. In a word, I was screwed.
The next day, I decided that I was tired of being crafty and solved the problem through brute force. Where Chiclet once labored, a Mac Mini now reposes. I should have realized that a laptop that cost less than my monthly sushi outlay was probably not the workhorse machine I needed to run 24x7 crunching numbers, but the lesson is learned and Chiclet is now resting comfortably in hospice.
The day before Artomatic is spent cobbling together a few additional image scripts (not everybody is going to want to get back some weirdo line art in exchange for their tweet), endlessly tweeting random images @artomaticmatic to gauge results, and meditating on the Wikipedia article about Buddhism (I'm not a Buddhist but they seem to have a lock on inner peace and that's what I needed, damnit).
Finally - Opening night! Everything goes swimmingly except for the wifi connection, which is saturated and thus preventing nearly any updates to get in or out of my exhibit. So a fair amount of the evening is spent explaining what would be happening if the exhibit could talk to my server which is doing all of the heavy lifting at my home. Nonetheless, opening night was amazing. My impression after several years of AOM attendance as a bystander is that this is the best year I've seen yet - there really was a surfeit of spectacular exhibits.
I checked today and Artomaticmatic seems to be running fine. Please feed it pictures and words. I updated the visualization to correct an annoying bug and to occasionally show video from the attached webcam. Send me questions and comments, especially if you see anything truly amiss. There is a Flickr photostream at http://www.flickr.com/photos/38532053@N03/ which contains all of the images produced so far. I keep all of the originals, too. I'll be adding more scripts this week to expand the variety of effects, so soon there will be more user vs. user collages and combinations, and a few that combine images and text.
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Final note: Since this post, Artomaticmatic underwent some major changes, mostly related to the fact that the unreliable wifi connection completely scuppered the live aspect of the installation. I'll probably post the original, web-enabled composition in another entry.
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