Which Light

Beginnings in Open Kinect

kawandeep — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 16:11:25 +0000

Yesterday I went to the Boston stop for the Kinect Accelerator Tour at Microsoft. I got one of the new Kinect for Windows. It reminds me when I got my first Arduino. Currently going through the process of installing everything to get it working.

young magic – sparkly

kawandeep — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 22:29:17 +0000

Lighthouse

kawandeep — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 06:14:43 +0000

In a collaboration of New American Public Art and goodgood, I designed, built, and installed an interactive public art piece on the Rose Kennedy Greenway alongside Karen, Ben, Dan, Mattie, and Namita.

The piece consists of three analog projectors, a sculptural housing, and an LED video animation. The opening reception was on January 12th, 2012, and featured modern dancer Yuka Takahashi.

We took the opportunity to introduce a work of interactivity to a public space in Boston, exploring themes of play and creativity, while unifying the work with the goals of the Greenway and the Boston Harbor Islands.

Photos by Matthew Shanley.

Support for the materials for the work was provided by the Rose Kennedy Greenway. The Harbor Islands graciously provided the pavilion and the LED screens, which were integrated with the assistance of Boston Cyberarts and the Pavilion.

The work shows from January 2012 to mid March 2012, and is a block from the Aquarium T stop.

See associated posts with Lighthouse, including coverage by the Boston Dig, and a press release.

Performing at the Sensate Workshop

kawandeep — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 16:45:00 +0000

I will be performing at the Sensate workshop tonight at MIT.

click for PDF flyer

Joey and I met with Julia and Tom of Sensate, and Ben of goodgood a few times in the past weeks to plan out the workshop details. It’ll be a fun event, with live music (PC//MM) and people remixing sensate work with Zeega. The facebook event link is here,

Sensate will be holding a workshop on January 27th at MIT—come by and see what we’re all about! Suited for scholars, artists, and scientists who are interested in new modes of publication, presentation, and multimedia scholarship. Stop in anytime between 4 and 7pm. This workshop will feature live music by Plastic Color Math Magic and demonstrations of the new interactive documentary platform, Zeega. We invite participants to build their own multimedia projects using Zeega and explore the future of interactive art and online multimedia publishing with the Sensate journal crew.

This event is free and open to the public.

The Sensate Workshop is from 4-7 tonight at room 144 and 148 on the MIT campus.

Also I really love the logo Ben made for PC//MM (plastic color math magic). You can see it on the bottom right corner of the flyer. Its kind of hilarious. I’ve blown it up here:

And here is a video Sensate made to be projected during the event.

learning to love espresso at Voltage

kawandeep — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 04:12:00 +0000

A couple months ago I wanted to get into espresso. Like a shot of it in a tiny cup. To understand it. I love coffee, and I love finding great coffee places in Cambridge. But I couldn’t really get into it. Probably a lot of factors, the most important being I hadn’t cultivated the language for it yet.

The past few weeks I’ve been talking coffee with a barrista at Voltage in Kendall, and he’s been telling me about the process of tasting, then reading or hearing a description, then tasting again to look for flavors. This is how I began to understand nuances in beers. So far I’ve been exploring that in pour overs.

Today I tried their new reanimator espresso by barismo which was launched a week back. I asked what I should look for. Taste it first. So I did. And wasn’t sure what to say.

Then I heard some taste descriptors- lemon, fig newtons, lime, and others. I tasted again, this time with the tip of my tongue. Okay, now I’m starting to find flavors.

The way to taste espresso is this. You take a sip, a loud sip, the louder the better. It aerates, and spreads around your mouth. From a single sip, over time tastes reveal themselves. And through the duration of the cup certain tastes become more discernable. My favorite was the final taste in my mouth at the end, it remained for about half an hour and it was delightful. I kept thinking anise, but it wasn’t- it was closer to the fig newton taste. And that lime descriptor crept in.

And now I understand it. Now I can explore espresso and enjoy it, and it feels really good.

Why is it so important to me? I think to an extent I love music, art, writing, and poetry as a means to understand others and myself. To develop stronger sensory vocabularies to make sense of things, to create narratives for meaning. In this case the creative object is the espresso.

Ondes Martenot

kawandeep — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 03:44:14 +0000

I’m excited to hear that Jonny Greenwood composed the soundtrack for the film adaptation of Norwegian Wood. I soon learned that he is one of the few in the world proficient in the ondes martenot, one of the oldest electronic musical instruments.

Here is a clip that describes the history and details of performing the ondes martenot.

Lighthouse, from the reception

kawandeep — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 14:29:41 +0000

Photo by the Greenway, at the Waterline bar.

Lighthouse opening covered in the Boston Dig

kawandeep — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 05:37:30 +0000

The Boston Dig wrote up an article on the opening for Lighthouse. They got a pic of us with the screen part of the piece:

Lighthouse is an interactive public art piece on the Rose Kennedy Greenway. It is up for the next three months. Pictured here are the collaborators for the piece: Matthew Shanley, Karen Stein, Dan Sternof Beyer, Ben Gaydos and I. Namita Dharia also helped design and build the piece, but is currently researching in India. We also had a dancer, Yuka Takahashi, which was incredible.

A quick exercise web scraping with javascript and bash in bandcamp

kawandeep — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 06:33:23 +0000

Here is a quick exercise to explore web scraping in bash on Bandcamp. We’ll get our hands dirty with some simple console and bash scripting. This is written in January 2012, so things may change between now and when you read this.

example album page

If you take a look at the source on Bandcamp, you notice that all of the music data is located in a Javascript variable. On your browser there should be a ‘view-source’ option. In Chrome on the mac it is command-option-u.

Notice that in the comment Bandcamp includes information on their terms of service and their stance on applications that pull music off the site. You should probably read those and remember this is only meant as an exercise. Looking at the FAQ I imagine they would be okay with this tutorial. (Otherwise, if not okay, message me and I’ll take this down.)

So open up your web console. I’m using Chrome, so it is command-option-i. You can then explore the object TralbumData. You can retrieve the track information with TralbumData['trackinfo'].

We’re going to pull the titles and the files.

First get the titles. You can use `console.log(str) ` to get things printed onto the console. We’ll write a loop over all of the objects and print out the ‘title’ value for each.

for (i in TralbumData['trackinfo']){console.log(TralbumData['trackinfo'][i]['title']);}

Now copy that and paste it in a txt file called titles.

Then we need to get the URLs for the files. We can use the same loop, replacing ‘title’ with ‘file’

for (i in TralbumData['trackinfo']){console.log(TralbumData['trackinfo'][i]['file']);}

That will give you a list of URLs. Put that in a file called playlist. Now in Bash we’ll download the file at each URL to the appropriate title.mp3 file. It took some googling to figure this out since I don’t normally do any bash scripting beyond simple command line tools. Open up Terminal. First we’ll create an array called name and put each line of titles to an entry in name. In doing this we also have the change the Internal Field Separator. This is so that when we loop over cat titles we’ll get a new item for each line, rather than for each word. You can do that with this command:

IFS=’
‘

The second quote is on a new line define the IFS as newlines (IFS=’\n’ doesn’t work [source]). And then run the loop to fill the names array.

j=0;for i in `cat titles`; do names[$j]=$i; j=$(expr $j + 1); done

names contains the track titles. To get the value out for index 0, you’d use ${name[0]}. We’ll use that for the output file name. This time we’ll loop over the entries in playlist and use wget to download the file at each url.

j=0;for i in `cat playlist`; do wget -O ${names[$j]}\.mp3 $i; j=$(expr $j + 1); done

The -O command line switch for wget specifies that the following argument will be the name of the output file.

Public Art Opening: Lighthouse on the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway

kawandeep — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 04:18:56 +0000

For the last few months I have designed and built a public art piece as a collaboration between goodgood and New American Public Art. The opening will be this Thursday from 6-8pm at the location of the piece. It’s by the Aquarium T stop. The piece is an accomplishment in the direction of introducing interactive art experiences in the public space.

Press Release:

LIGHTHOUSE : An interactive analogue projection installation.

goodgood Design in collaboration with New American Public Art presents LIGHTHOUSE, located at the Boston Harbor Island Alliance pavilion on the Rose Kennedy Greenway.

The opening ceremony begins at 6pm on Thursday, January 12th. It will include a brief presentations by the artists and by Nancy Brennan, Executive Director of the Rose Kennedy Greenway Conservancy, as well as a 15 minute dance performance by Yuka Takahashi that showcases the interactive quality of the piece. Sel de la Terre will be serving free warm beverages. Everyone is invited to an after party at Waterline Bar in the Marriott-Long Wharf hotel.

The installation uses three overlapping analogue projections to create a simple interactive light scape. The work’s form and materials echo the flow of the existing architecture and allude to old canvas ship sales and whale bones. These forms are reflected in the projected images as well as the generative animations shown on the 2 large video screens.

goodgood is a design studio based in Boston’s Fort Point. They specialize in custom design solutions for businesses and the private sector. With a strong focus on community, public art is also a passion for the goodgood team. They have collaborated with the Rose Kennedy Greenway in past years.

New American Public Art is a collaborative of artists, programers, engineers and community groups with the goal of developing interactive, responsive, and beautiful public art.