Michael Ang

LEMUR will unveil its latest creation, the Tubular XyloBot, at the Grand Opening Party of 3-Legged Dog’s new Art & Technology Center in downtown Manhattan. The Tubular XyloBot will be featured in an interactive installation in the main corridor of the Center and tailored to this unique space. Please come down and play the bot!

Friday, Sept. 22
5pm until Late
FREE!
3LD Art and Technology Center
80 Greenwich St.
(b/w Rector and Edgar)

http://www.3leggeddog.org/opening_party.html
212.645.0374

Live Performances, multimedia installations, and music presented by:
Aldo Perez
Collapsible Giraffe
DJ Burchan
Electronic Music Foundation
Harvestworks
League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots
Troika Ranch
Radio Hole
MIXtv
3 Legged Dog
…and much more!

The installation I worked on over the summer at Sona Research has opened in the Seeing Gallery at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. No photos/videos as of yet, but there should be some soon. The piece allows visitors to interact with an artistic video simulation of water at three different scales. You use your shadow to influence the projected water with forces appropriate to each physical scale. In the first scene water flows down from a shower head and pools around your feet. In the second scene you can interact with a single water drop. In the third scene you can interact with a flowing clusters of water molecules. The molecular simulation is inspired by recent research at Stanford that suggests that water molecules may briefly arrange themselves in rings or chains (also see the further scientific debate).

Update: Pictures on Flickr

I’m back in New York City at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. I’m really excited about this term and some of the projects I have in mind. Look for work that builds on the ideas of Blue Flower (interconnected “living” electronic systems in an electronic ecology), my work at Eyebeam (computational sculpture) and Sona Research (interactive video installation). Also my collaboration with dancers from the NYU Dance Department continues and several members of the collaboration are taking the Recapturing Life motion capture class so no doubt interesting things will result. Add to that teaching at the LEMURplex and it’s going to be a busy semester!

The descriptions and schedule for fall classes at the LEMURplex are now available. I’m teaching Electronics for Poets which is an introduction to electronics and circuit design.

Long Format Classes (three sessions)

Mondays, September 25, October 2 & October 16, 6:30-9:30 pm
INTRO TO JITTER
Cycling ‘74 Jitter

Tuesdays, September 26, October 3 & October 10, 6:30-9:30 pm
INTRO TO MAX
A Multifaceted, Multimedia Approach

Wednesdays, September 27, October 4 & October 11, 6:30-9:30 pm
ELECTRONICS FOR POETS
Basic Circuitry for Arts & Multimedia

Thursdays, September 28, October 5 & October 12, 6:30-9:30 pm
DSP FOR DUMMIES
Audio Processing in MSP

Wow… summer went fast. Here’s a laundry list of what I was up to.

• Interned at the Eyebeam OpenLab working with the 3D printer and developing a toolchain for 3D printing from Processing. See my Eyebeam tag for more.
• Worked at Sona Research with Scott Snibbe on an interactive video installation. Fantastic working environment with a really good mix of engineering, art, and business. Scott is really pulling it off without comprimising on his artistic vision.
• Showed Blue Flower at the Sony Wonder Tech Lab in New York (while I was in SF!) Many thanks to Suzan for doing the legwork and last minute debugging after it got damaged in shipping from SF to NYC.
• Showed Dance Loop and Inverse Parasol at the CMR Open Studios.
• DJ’ed on Black Rock Desert over July 4th.
• DJ’ed at the Friends ‘n Family 10 year anniversary campout.
• Surfed at some of my favourite spots in NorCal. Kitesurfed at 3rd Avenue and finally managed to go upwind.

(Wow… I’m behind on the blogging thing.)

There was way too much to see since the conference/symposium/festival was so ambitious, with events happening at many different venues. After the fact I was sorry to have missed the Interactive Cinema series that was curated by Michael Lew among others.

Of that small slice of projects I encountered, here’s what stood out:

• The SRL show was great. See my SRL show review.
• Karaoke Ice was one of my favourites. Reminded me of a Burning Man art car with higher production values and a slightly more cohesive vision (of robot squirrels and ice pops).
• Playas: Homeland Mirage which uses a game engine to recreate the town of Playas, New Mexico which was bought by the Department of Homeland Security and turned into a training camp.
• Four movie screens with corresponding chairs tracking heartbeats (sorry, forget the actual name). I liked the idea of showing a narrative from several perspectives in a non-linear way. I still have no idea how the heartbeats influenced the movies, but the way the screens were set up so you couldn’t see all at once was great.
• Winner of the “best mapping” award goes to Gorbet Design for their P2P lightboard installation. Basically there is a marquee with 125 lights and a corresponding panel across the street with 125 ordinary light switches. Each switch is mapped directly to the corresponding light. People got it intuitively and the fun came from writing different words or making different designs. In the South Hall there were several projects where to me the mapping between the input or interaction and the output could have been stronger. In general I think simpler is better — have the depth in your piece come from interaction using simple controls/gestures.
• Skatesonic by Cobi Van Tonder augmented skateboards with microphones and sensors to create different sounds. The installation was really impressive, with some ramps and a little half-pipe. The sounds I liked best were the ones that were the uneffected microphone sound from the skateboards. Cobi had an impressive Max/MSP patch driving the whole thing. I was tempted to try it out, but I prefer my boardsports in the water (which is much softer than the ground, given suitably low velocities).
• Digital Kakejiku was a fantastic set of projections on City Hall. They took up the entire space, inside and out, and were really beautiful. The patterns changed slowly enough that if you stared and tried to see them change, you could barely perceive it. But after looking away for a few minutes you would look back and have the whole scene transformed. People sat there for tens of minutes at a time and it created an interesting social space when otherwise it would have been empty of people. My favourite moment was when the roving laptop band (about 5 people with shopping carts, battery, video projector and inflatable screen) started setting up and the (presumably) Japanese duo inside City Hall looked out with a kind of “huh?” expression and started conferring with each other. Once the laptop/vj band was set up and rocking out, they went down, had a peek over the shoulders of the band (who, like many laptop performers, seemed completely oblivious to the outside world) then just smiled, hung out, and walked away.