With the summer-time, a working-time on my new audio-visual piece, Interface Fractures III, begun. It is now almost confirmed that the date of premiere showing at Slovenian Cinemateque (Slovenska Kinoteka) is most probably 15/september. Since the plan was that we spend some quality sun&salt time at Croatian coast I brough some machinery with me to vacation. It’s always fun to work in the summer heat!
Anyway, with this next episode in the series I want to upgrade technically a “little bit”, so I acquired a better graphic card (Nvidia GTX960) and a multi-touch screen monitor with fullHD 1080p resolution. Adding also a 120GB SSD drive I needed to reinstall operating system (UbuntuStudio 14.4.1), separately compiled drivers for Nvidia and the rest worked pretty much out of the box (after some apt-get-ing). Multi-touch is application-dependent and my idea (for many years now) is to write custom interfaces for live sound/music/noise and visual composition and improvisation.
More technicalities: I compiled Processing and SuperCollider, tried a multi-touch library in Processing (SMT) but it didn’t work. Filed an issue at their GitHub and went on with a version of SuperCollider that supports multi-touch (I was kindly pushed in the right direction by Scott Cazan, who added MT support to his own branch of SC on GitHub). After some basic testing I wrote a simple granulator with a GUI. I also tested a very basic idea of TABs-like interface. In Processing I’ve whet my appetite with an excercise that focused on off-screen rendering and blending two images together.
After succesfull creation of these basic interfaces what happened was an arresting brainstorming on all different possibilities with a GUI. The difficulty lies in bringing high-flying ideas down to earth and strike some limits. In the meantime I finally finished a book on music and perception (Music and The Mind, Anthony Storr), read some of writings by Wim Wenders (On Film: Essays and Conversations) and started Audio-Vision by Michel Chion (very dissapointed by its/his superficiality!).
I’m very clueless on how to handle content/themes on one side and aesthetics/form on the other. There are ideas (of a silicone for example – as an enabler of technical revolution and important influence on cosmetic/pornographic industry), but which direction to take, how to translate thoughts and ideas into audio-visual language. I feel there’s still so much to do. While I have a plan how to connect SuperCollider, Processing and Renoise, and there are vague ideas on musical and sonic content, how it will all come together is beyond me at the moment.
But as Stephen King (and many other writers too) said: the novel is written one word at the time.
