Michael Ang

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Archive for January, 2006

NIME - Principles for Designing Computer Music Controllers

Posted by mang on January 31st, 2006 filed in School

I just finished Perry Cook’s paper Principles for Designing Computer Music Controllers. The principles that really struck me were “smart instruments are often not smart” and “make a piece, not an instrument or a controller”.
A performance instrument should have a clear mapping between the performer’s gestures and the sound (or result) produced. [...]

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ITP Dance v.0001a

Posted by mang on January 30th, 2006 filed in Dance

The first blog post from the ITP/Dance collaboration is up. It has videos of the dancers improvising with video pieces that Leif and I did. Leif’s is used in Time and Hands, and mine is used in the Subway videos. We’re still very alpha at this stage, but even from this second [...]

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LEMUR update

Posted by mang on January 25th, 2006 filed in Electronics

Work is progressing well on the Xylobots (a set of robotic xylophones we’re building for a show at the National Gallery of Art). Here are two quick pics. A lot of the work is comprised of small repetitive tasks (e.g. cutting ~140 vinyl spacers, sanding them to the correct length, then deburring them). [...]

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SciViz walk

Posted by mang on January 25th, 2006 filed in School

For the first assignment in Scientific Visualization we are taking pictures around Manhattan and manually geocoding them on a map. Then we will use an existing 3D model of the city (built from satellite photos and by hand) and create a walkthrough that incorporates our pictures with the 3D model (we’re using Maya and [...]

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Spring 2006 classes

Posted by mang on January 25th, 2006 filed in School

My classes for this semester are pretty blockbuster. It’s going to be busy, busy, busy, but that’s just how I like it. Here’s what made the final cut:

Living Art with the incomparable Todd Holoubek. This is basically a combination of generative art and physical computing. And it’s taught by Todd. [...]

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Troika Ranch - 16 [R]evolutions

Posted by mang on January 24th, 2006 filed in Video

Just saw Troika Ranch’s performance of 16 [R]evolutions. Good stuff indeed. I’m kind of a dance newbie, but I definitely appreciated the interplay of dancers, video and music. The story generally traces the arc of the discovery of technology, descent into intellectualism and recovery of some of our primal nature.
There were some [...]

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ITP <-> Tisch Dance

Posted by mang on January 23rd, 2006 filed in Video

On Sunday I attended a meeting of students from ITP and the dance department that want to collaborate on a dance/video performance. The best part was when some of the ITP geeks put up their interactive video projects for the dancers to play with. I put up my vblocks project that I wrote [...]

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