The Murder City Devils came through on Sunday on their West Coast reunion tour. I can’t express how much this band, both musically and as people, have affected my life. To have them back, and bringing so many people together, has been amazing. I started out taking pictures at their earliest shows (I know that some of my first rolls of film are of them before their first album came out). Below are some more pictures from the show, and the entire set is here.

Read the rest of this entry »

I should have posted this earlier, but part of the reason things have been so quiet on the blog front is that I have been working on some new work for a show that is up this week. I am really happy with the work up, and the show in general. If you are in SF, you should check it out!

Love in the Age of Craigslist
2.8.09 – 2.14.09
Diego Rivera Gallery
800 Chestnut Street
San Francisco, CA

 

I was working on updating/fine tuning my glitch program for an upcoming show, and the above image was one of the test iterations.  I wasn’t planning on making final images with it, but was pleasantly surprised by this.

Waiting for a flight out

Some shots from my trip back home to Seattle.  More after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

Seattle from Ian on Vimeo.

I’m back from my holiday trip to Seattle.  Here is a video that I shot while I was there, with a new video camera that I got.  I can’t embed an HD version, which my new camera shoots in, so go here to see the HD version.

I wrote a new Processing sketch today (I love the inspiration that time off affords) that takes color information from each pixel in an image, and uses that to create sound. I extracted the red, blue, green, hue, saturation and brightness of each pixel, and created a sine wave for each value. Together, they create interesting harmonies, a sort of audible version of my last project.

There are two versions that I am sharing. The first is the original version, that uses Supercollider to generate the sound. Since it does so, I can’t post it on the web, but the sound is much better. You can download the package here. The second uses a Processing friendly, and web friendly, library, Minim, which doesn’t sound as good (I can’t get rid of the pops and clicks when doing sine waves for some reason), but I allows me to post the sketch on the web, which I have here. Enjoy!

Update: By the way, it sounds much better on speaker set-ups with subwoofers, as there are some really low frequencies that would come out distorted on smaller, laptop speakers.

For one of my classes, I wrote a Processing sketch that does an web image search for keywords from the class, such as “California Ideology”, “canon”, “code”, “commons”, “mass culture”,”media”, “privacy”, “public good”,”reductionism”,”representative”,”retro-futurism”,”secrecy” and “sousveillance”. It then takes takes the images, and weaves the pixels together, sort of like a tapestry. The code is here.

“The profit motive, when it is the sole basis of an economic system, encourages a cutthroat competition and selfish ambition that inspires men to be more concerned about making a living than making a life.”

-Martin Luther King, Jr.

Ran across this article, and it peaked my interest.

“…locative and mobile media and how they relate to urban culture and questions of identity…“MySpace urbanism” – the condition of cities saturated with media networks, where physical space is intersected with layers of personalised, spatial orientation.”

Reminds me of Debord, the Situationists and their exploration of psychogeographies.

Read it all here.

The Things That Exist from Beautiful/Decay Magazine on Vimeo.

Freelance video created by Something In The Universe for the SCION Installation 5 Art Tour.

Video by: Fei Liu, Donnie Luu, Ricky Jonsson
Audio: Chris Devlin of Spankrock