Forgery League

Lots of good conversations at Open Everything today. The Toronto event took place today at the Centre for Social Innovation, a community space and incubator for social entrepreneurs, and further events around the world are scheduled for the rest of this year.

It’s all about the concept of “openness” - as in open source software, as in open models of government (check out Melbourne’s city planning wiki), as in the growing movement for open science.

Among other things:

• Dr Sara Scharf spoke about modern nomenclature in biology (you know - kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species) and how it came about through a process akin to open source today. I want to find out more about these parallel, failed attempts that tried to create unique names by encoding all distinguishing features of a species in the name itself, but I haven’t found anything online yet.
• Marsha Cummings is working on a documentary about Station 20 West, a community health and social services centre in Saskatoon, which includes a co-op grocery store in a neighbourhood where the last commercial grocery stores have pulled out.
• Jane Farrow spoke about Jane’s Walk, a day of self-organized neighbourhood walking tours in honour of the late Jane Jacobs. Held in May, the event has spread to other cities across Canada, and is starting to spread to the US as well.
• Mark Kuznicki told us about Metronauts, a unique experiment in civic engagement being carried out by Metrolinx, our fledgeling regional transit authority.
• Dan, one of the denizens of the Centre for Social Innovation, introduced us to the Open Salad Club. We’ve got a lunch club at my office, where several people take turns making lunch, but somehow the idea of preparing a big dish, even if it’s only every couple of weeks, seems a bit intimidating to me. But bringing in two ingredients for salad? Easy.

Perhaps most interesting of all was hearing from David Patrick about how he, a filmmaker by trade, happened to found the Linuxcaffe - to my knowledge, the world’s first “open source” coffee shop. Everything’s open - from the recipes to the software that runs the till. And naturally, there are open stage nights, not to mention DJ nights featuring Creative Commons-licensed music. But, I thought, what about a really open stage?

Some hastily scribbled notes: Collaborations of all sorts would be encouraged. Performers could share words and music, free for others to jam on, revise and rework. Recordings would be available online to listen to and remix, and on-line contributions could feed back into the open stage. There would be show and tell time for homemade musical instruments and other gear (not coincidentally, Richard Bishop has installed one of his wonderful basses in a lamppost just outside the Caffe). I’m not sure yet what structure, or how much structure, would be needed to get such an event to work well and flow. Just something to experiment with. Stay tuned…

Dorkbot Toronto, the local chapter of the network of “people doing strange things with electricity”, has a new slate of presentations, and last night was the first.

Patricia Rodriguez presented some of her video work using all sorts of cameras - film, video, digital - and taking advantage of each one’s unique features and most interesting ways of failing.

Cary Peppermint and Christine Nadir’s work is about breaking down the perceived borders between nature and the human-made world, using electronic media installations in unexpected places. Wild Information Network, a solar-powered streaming audio server installed deep in the woods of the Catskills, plays sound pieces submitted by various artists, all with the notion of humans broadcasting to the broader environment, or vice versa. It and other pieces are catalogued on their site: EcoArtTech.net.

Stan Krzyzanowski showed his time-lapse work, ranging from handheld still camera shots, to mesmerizing animations created from successive sections of wood and other materials (notably vegetables and marbled cheese), to his recent projects involving cones from various sorts of tree. Pine cones, see, open up as they dry and fold closed again if you get them wet. And when sped up, the waving of a big pine cone’s scales takes on an eerie, almost animal aspect.

It’s beautiful stuff. Interval is a rather huge archive of all his experiments - click some of the “special sets” on the lower right. Most of the best stuff is on the “Favorites” page.

The sessions are held at InterAccess, a gallery at Queen and Ossington devoted to electronic media art. They offer a very cool series of workshops on topics like microcontroller programming, introductory electronics, pinhole photography, and hacking your bike to turn it into a mobile piece of sound art. I’m hoping to attend the ones on Pure Data and creating “resilient outdoor works”.

When Adobe unveiled their newly designed array of “two letter” application icons, I was among the skeptics. All programs are now represented by a coloured box reminiscent of an element in the periodic table. Many argue that this makes them indistinguishable from one another - even more so for anyone with a degree of colour-blindness (doubtless this is less common among the design pros that make up Adobe’s core audience, but still).

After some consideration, though, I don’t think it’ll be any worse than before. I mostly use Photoshop and Illustrator, and I’ve confused the two on occasion because, no matter how different the imagery, they’ve been designed to look like they’re part of an integrated brand identity, which means they feel similar. I think part of my brain saw the “PS7 eye” and “AI10 Venus” and lumped them together under the heading “face”; ditto the “pretty pastel nature imagery” from CS2 (actually tinted x-ray photos). Maybe “Ai” and “Ps” will be a better compromise.

Of course, I’ll have to get used to the colours. I’m not much of a kinaesthete, but “Ai” is clearly bright red as far as I’m concerned… unfortunately, red is the traditional brand colour for Flash. And by rights “ID” (InDesign) ought to be gold or brown. At least they were sensible enough to make “Ps” blue!

But we’ll see, won’t we… It may well be that CS3-style icons work well for some people, and pictorial icons for others. I’d like to see some hard evidence one way or another.

Anyway. A few weeks ago, I was shopping and stopped dead in my tracks when I saw a display of colour-coded two-letter packages for, of all things, organic pasta. Red/K for kamut, green/S for spelt, beige/G for durum (grano duro), brown/I for whole wheat (integrale). I can’t find any other images of their new packaging on the web - not even on Felicetti’s site - and I presume it’s a very recent redesign. Was idea-stealin’ involved, or is it just coincidence?

It’s been weeks. You’d think I might be posting about our new office, or some cool projects we’ve been doing, but no.

I just ran across this video and immediately thought “Gosh, it’s like a Japanese version of Look Around You!” (Add to list: parallels between Japan and the UK.) Learn here about sushi, courtesy of the Rahmens:

And now to bed. There will be photos and things soon.

After a few weeks of non-stop construction at the new office, and every other kind of work at the old office, Sean and I took a sanity-mending holiday-in-town this weekend. I realized not long ago that these days we mostly see each other at work these days - I mean, at least we do get to see one another during the day, which I’m grateful for, but we’re seldom at our best.

Among other things, we caught up on some movie watching. Highlights: part one of a PBS series from the ‘80s about Joseph Campbell, which Sean’s mom sent him as a birthday present. Also Triplets of Belleville, which was loopy fun. I could have done without the, uh, frog scenes, but I’ll forgive those for the scenes of crazy old ladies (the Kickass Granny is one of my personal favorite archetypes) playing music on very do-it-yourself instruments…

Saturday dinner was at the Pomegranate, a lovely Persian restaurant on College St, and the food was beyond wonderful. I’m getting shivers just thinking about it. Really.

Sunday afternoon we trooped back to our office-to-be to do more drywalling and mudding. It’s turned out to be one hell of a project, this. But it’s going to rock.

And this evening J and I did some more planning for our upcoming CD, and tried out some new arrangement ideas. And I got back on the Song-a-day wagon:

Signals (1’13”)

I had iTunes pick out some tracks at random for inspiration. One was basically a bunch of random beeping by the BBC Radiophonic workshop, similar to what ended up in today’s song, and also echoed in the “signals” theme in the lyrics. The other was a folky tune by a friend of mine. The resulting song is rather similar to “Margins”, another Song-a-day from this past summer… they’d graft very neatly together.

Neat project: Freqtric, a system that senses body contact and uses it to trigger MIDI drums (and presumably other instruments).

I don’t know if this is part of the device, or future plans for it, but I’d love to see a version that senses which two people have made contact - imagine a dance piece choreographed around a system like that! Ideally it’d be wireless, but that would kind of defeat the skin-resistance effect the Freqtric project uses. Maybe something using conductive gloves…

Taste of the Danforth was this weekend. Utter madness. One mile of Danforth closed while hundreds of thousands of people mill about lining up for cheap food and free samples. We caught a few minutes of music from a Cuban band, which caught my ear because I’ve been working on a new arrangement for “Catch-22”, our ostensibly Latin number. Sat up into the wee hours last night hammering out a bassline for it. It’s gonna groove.

Also, this week has been awesome for jamming. Found a very cool bunch of folks who are into free-form living room music-making. Very excited!

Also, my latest score from Active: DPDT switches, for the making of stomp boxes.

Also, I salvaged the caster “tree” from a dead swivel chair and a busted coat rack from the office, for the making of percussion stands.

I’ve rediscovered my true packrat nature. I’d been denying it for some years - partly I was paring things down, partly I was influenced by my SO’s firm belief in chucking things that don’t get used, partly it was because we move house every year or two. But now my packratting has purpose. I actually am building things with the junk I collect. Castoff things are an opportunity.

Building things from materials at hand - it’s a trait I inherited from my parents, and I think the whole attitude is one of their greatest gifts to me. Almost every piece of furniture we had was either a hand-me-down, bought used, or home-made. We just didn’t buy new things unless we really needed them.

• For much of my childhood, our couch in the living room consisted of sleeping bags laid on top of foam on a bed of old wooden microscope boxes (which were all filled with old books, or tools, or five-pound chunks of rock with embedded fossils).
• We had a little tractor/riding mower - that was bought new. But my dad built the trailer for it by sticking a box made of pegboard on top of an old lawn mower frame.
• Mum sewed stuffed toys, including a whole basket of vegetables and a completely awesome dragon. Most of my toys were homemade too.

Of course, this filtered through to me - I’ve mentioned the surplus walkman before. On the music-making front, I made use of: kitchen utensils; cassette tape loops; weird instruments my parents had collected, like a psaltery, a manjolin, an ocarina; an early PC speech synthesizer fed through a disembowelled toy spring reverb; sound effects records spun slow, fast, and backwards; an electric guitar with its signal crammed through a Commodore monitor and my mum’s walkman speakers (I toasted them, along with many other devices); and a practice chanter for learning the bagpipes. These all showed up in the recordings of the Spastic Attack Dogs (a grand high school band name if ever there was one) - who reunited after university, learned to actually play, and became Flickershow.

After I moved out, I snagged an old wooden door from Mum and Dad’s place, propped it up on a pair of cabinets, and used it as a desk. It worked well except for the layers of peeling paint on it, which got worse due to me spilling water on it and frequently using it for drum practice. When my BF and I moved into our first apartment together in Toronto, I decided it was time to strip the paint off it. It turned out there was a layer of milk paint on it that wouldn’t budge, so we gave up, sanded the bugger to a splotchy, hideous, but smooth finish, and got new legs for it at Ikea. I still get ribbed about the “Eli and his *&#$ door” incident, but it’s big enough for two monitors, a synthesizer keyboard, a printer and a mixer, and I never see the surface of it anyway.

So of course I was delighted to discover ReadyMade, which is a magazine aimed square at people like me. Looks very cool - I even tried to subscribe, but their online subscription system broke in several ways and I got fed up. Will have to let them know.

So here’s my ongoing list of electronics projects, in rough order of difficulty:

• An expression pedal (based around a fader rather than a rotary pot) - the electronics are bonehead simple; it’s the woodworking to make the rocker that’s the tricky bit. Starting with locating our hand saw.
• A box with a simple photocell circuit for use an an expression-pedal input. Controlling something like the FilterQueen will require a more complex thing with a transistor or two, but I ain’t ready for that yet.
• A ribbon controller. (All praise the late John Simonton.)
• A simple fuzzbox circuit or two, snagged off the web (there’s loads of DIY stompbox circuits out there).
• And way down the road: a “fretless” electronic instrument that feeds a signal from a piezo pickup through an analog-delay comb filter with the feedback turned way up, creating a ringing tone. The delay rate, and thus the pitch, is determined by a ribbon controller. I’m picturing two or three of these stacked together to resemble a very nerdy guitar. Left hand fingers notes on the ribbon-controller strings; right hand thumps and taps and scrapes a set of pads in which the piezo pickups are embedded. There’s another control for damping/feedback, but I don’t know how that’s handled yet. Lots of learning to go before I tackle that… but it’s one I’ve had in mind for a long while.

Incensed enough at the headline in today’s Globe (about Stephen Harper’s government seeking easements to the Kyoto accord, because, you know, it’s just so dang tough!) that I wrote a letter. Took far too long, mostly because I kept second-guessing myself every step of the way - I think I have to do this more often so it comes more naturally. And I dunno that it’ll do anything, not with Harper in and an Ayn Rand fan as federal environment minister (Christ, she’s chairing the UN Convention on Climate Change meeting next week), but I said my piece, and got it out of my system for a bit.

Meanwhile, here’s a worthy climate-aware project: The Eat Local Challenge. I do my best to buy food from Ontario, but it’s not always easy, especially in winter. When it comes to vegetables, there’s not a whole lot of choice in our supermarkets, it seems - sometimes it’s Mexican imports or nothin’. Hmm… maybe I should be writing to Loblaws and IGA next. And going to farmers’ markets too.

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