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Chris List (aka CList) explains the GCD, or graphical compression/distortion unit he is working on for Reaktor 5, Native Instruments' user-designable software synth. Chris was a somewhat impromptu featured guest speaker at the Reaktor clinic at Sam Ash music in midtown, earlier today. He is one of the most prolific and ingenious of NI's "citizen designers"--i.e., people who contribute instruments to the shared user library and participate in Native Instrument forums but don't work for the company. I found out about his talk on the forum. In the photo, he is explaining how Reaktor's new "core" technology is allowing him to design a less CPU-intensive interface involving, among other things, the use of Bézier curves to plot sounds on an x-y grid. The underlying math of the GCD, applied at the core level, is way beyond me but the effect grabs the ear, and List explains it so clearly it almost sounds easy to make.
Also, thanks to Chris and the NI representative for answering my simple question about how to get samples out of Reaktor into other programs. You can save the individual .aiff files from Sampler/Properties/Sample Map Editor (located a few levels down inside the individual instrument) to a folder on your hard drive, or save the entire map and open it in Kontakt 2, which converts Reaktor sample maps. Awesome! I just converted the Limelight samples and can play around with them now outside Reaktor.
I originally posted this on February 16, 2004. It has been deleted and I am moving it here for...reasons bloggers will understand. The comments to the post have been moved to the comments to this post.
Oh--just noticed the art is for the people link, parked over on the left side of this page, has changed its content somewhat.
Shoutbacks--Thanks for the shouts this week from:
Tim at Travelers Diagram, whose lists of books spotted on New York subways I always enjoy, along with the other diverse and entertaining finds on his weblog, such as this story about war criminal Henry Kissinger reading about his own outrageously advanced pot belly in the New York Post. Congratulations on your wedding, Tim!
paul at dataisnature, who talked about my molecule-cum-product-box installations (been thinking about doing more of them). I look forward to perusing his archives and looking at more pieces like this one, speaking of fanciful molecular forms.
Rob Myers for his post on Swarm (but there's no scanning or retouching in that work--just printing and overprinting, and cutting with an X-acto). In this interview he talks about his admiration for the conceptualist outfit Art & Language and his fondness for remixing others' work. Yet the pieces in his San Jose series and the Smileys series are quite joyful and individualistic, not just an illustration of theory--or perhaps it would be more accurate to say they're their own semiotic theory in a tangible, pleasurable form. Examples from "San Jose" are below--he thinks it's his "weakest work" because it's not directly influenced by anyone else, but maybe he's just being modest or ironic. I would describe these as biomorphic tags done corporate logo style, and would like to see them in a show with Ryan McGinness and Anton Vidokle, who have also done hard-edged logo-like imagery. They're really nice:
Posting (also email) has been crimped this weekend due to a surprise outage by Comcast Cable Co. They made a long-planned switch to a new, company-owned server and told everyone about it but their customers. 48 hours with no service and they can't send an email? I was so angry I decided to switch to another cable co-- oh, right, there is no other cable company. DSL is also not available on my block, due, I'm assuming, to the rotting phone lines Verizon has been planning to fix for about 10 years. A repairman told me a few months back that in last corporate reshuffle, a several-million-dollar figure allotted for infrastructure repairs, which the company elected to postpone, exactly equaled the executive bonuses that changed hands at the closing--and hey, I believe it!
I expect a big shitstorm of self-congratulatory hype from Comcast once they get their new internet pipes in place. The fact is their content is the worst, lowest common denominator cheese. Whenever I check my webmail, their front page always has the latest celebrity news, pictures of two-headed kittens, and verbatim press releases from the White House saying how well things are going in Iraq.
"Fly by the Pool" [mp3 removed]
Abe Linkoln--full size with sound here.