Pacification Maribor (MARŠ)

We (Wanda & Nova deViator) didn’t quite know what to expect when we were packing things up for this Maribor gig. The last (and the first) time we played in Maribor, it was at a small low-profile venue called Stolp_3. It was (and still is) run by single guy, who purposefully keeps it without much advertising not wanting to grow, not wanting to be in the spotlight, just throwing gig here and there and hang out with people. Many locals from Maribor don’t even know about Stolp 3.

Anyway, Gustaf/Pekarna is whole different story – as we’ve been told, it’s pretty hard to have a decent crowd at the venue, but believe it or not, the crowd was quite in decent numbers – far from empty, but not too crowded. The event was a three-day-long 24th anniversary of Maribor’s Radio Študent – MARŠ and we played on the second day – Friday.

During our drive we remembered that we played our first duet performance “Une façon d’aimer” in Gustaf for the last time. Will the last Pacification performance be also the last time at this venue? Most probably not, since there’s a long way till autumn: in November we plan to premiere our next project which would include album and a performance/concert. So until then, it’s doubtful we wouldn’t play another gig with Pacification.

We shared the stage with Karmakoma from Krško – a trio that played an interesting blend of  post-rock electronics with funk gusto – think of old Faith No More, LCD Sound System, The Prodigy and hints of Death from Above 1979. While their sound guy was no perfection (vocal suffered the most) the music was full of energy, solid structures and wit. We exchanged CDs and other merch and the next day I was blown away by quality of their record – Imagination & Mechanical Metamorphoses – have a listen and support.

The reception of our gig was very very positive, organizer also told us, that we were impatiently expected in Maribor by some fans. Everyone seemed very satisfied, we could have played a second bis/encore, if we would have anything prepared for it.

A Club Called Rhonda, sex-positive, queer-friendly, multiethnic

Both of them felt there was a need in LA for what Granic calls, “a safe place for the deviants, a place where gay and straight nightlife wasn’t so compartmentalized but instead encouraged to mingle.” For Alexander, ACCR is neither a gay club nor a straight club nor even a bisexual club, but rather, “all that and more; it’s a place where you can go to shed those labels and break down those walls in the interest of having a good time.” There’s a real effort to make a mess of neat sexual identities and create something more fluid. “Everybody is an opportunity,” Alexander says.

This isn’t to say that there weren’t challenges in creating an event where partygoers can feel comfortable playing with their sexual identities. “We’ve had to deal with some issues regarding gender and sexuality in the club before,” says Alexander. “When you go into a new venue and start working with a new security team, there always has to be a very clear conversation about the fact that anything goes. There is no dress code, no judgment and absolutely no violence allowed.”

— Gregory Alexander and Loren Granic on A Club Called Rhonda that has been going strong in Los Angeles since about 2008, functioning as a sex-positive, queer-friendly, multiethnic monthly event devoted to what its organizers call “polysexual hard partying.” via RA: An alternate history of sexuality in club culture.

Kim Boekbinder: Money Sells

An article from medium.com – https://medium.com/artists-on-the-internet/8a57c5cf3fdb – brings about some really good quotes:

 Why pay for art at all? Because we can.

As more artists are honest about what it takes to make their art we learn that we, the crowd, are what makes more art possible. [Internet enables] a more honest way for crowd and artist to engage without a middle agent blocking access and demanding payment.

The internet has given us all the opportunity to be engaged in the creation of new art and new knowledge without the need to be corporations, advertisers, religions, or governments.

Every choice we make, every action we take, every thing we pay for actively builds the world around us.

When we choose what amount to pay we are actively valuing the art and our own time. When we back a crowdfunding project we are using our money to do more than buy an object, we are using our money to create something new in the world.

When you pay for my music, you pay for it with your time, a little bit of your life. And since my art is my time, our exchange is one of life for life.

It’s not just up to artists to become better business people — for some that just won’t ever happen. It’s time for us — fans, supporters, listeners, readers, lovers of art, culture, knowledge — to step up.

The internet has given us a way to pay attention to the art, knowledge, culture, and science that may not be sexy enough for the media because it isn’t making any money.

People who think that artists should just make sellable art or learn how to run a business, people who believe in a magical meritocracy where money and value are perfectly balanced and measured out by an invisible guiding hand to those who deserve it, will continue to live in a world filled with art, surviving on the cultural welfare of those of us who do support art.

Your money is your time. Your money is your choice. Your money is a tool you use to make the world around you.

What world do you want to live in?

Continue reading →

What if, Prague

What if performance was made with mobility in mind. So it was possible to put most of the scenography in one big box, one simple costume on a hanger and therefore on Saturday we could travel with a car up over Austria and Czech republic to Prague without any difficulties. Despite warnings of possible helicopter rescue action from snow by worried parents the trip was easy and lazy drive into the heart of central-eastern Europe.

We got settled into a Duncan centre residential appartment. Duncan centre conservatory is currently the only state school in the Czech Republic systematically orientated towards education in a sphere of contemporary stage dance and dance theatre. Despite a long drive behind us we drove to the center of Prague, to the amazing Alfred ve dvoře venue – well, it’s a theatre built in a courtyard – virtually, where we met with Motus program director (umělecký ředitel) Ewan McLaren. He turned out to be a witty and communicative canadian (are all canadians communicative? well, as a program director, you should be I guess), a pleasure to be his guest. We left our scenography and costumes there, met with technicians and drank a obligatory beer (non-alcoholic for me) and drove back.

Sunday was a setting up day, and we worked from 9 am. Despite the simplicity of lights it took quite some hours to cover the white wash of the stage under the supervision of our light-maister Urška Vohar. In the meantime I prepared all the sound (using Pure Data patches, SuperCollider code and a track in Renoise).

It was a pleasure to setup everything (or most of it) one day before. So much less stress! However M. was pretty nervous as she was doing the show almost completely in English for the first time (and this is after the solo was made in Slovene and later done completely in French in Marseille)! However U. and myself had a classical but harmless teasing – M. imagined it resembles a kindergarten situation – and so it made nervousness much more endurable.

The show next day went smooth, pretty much without glitches. I used a different configuration of speakers – using two of them behind the audience, which created a better – more confusing – spatial image, at times. Software was obeying perfectly and without a hiccup. I only wish I would find time to optimize everything into one SuperCollider patch (instead of two PureData patches, two SuperCollider patches and a Renoise track. There was almost full hall, many young people (students from Duncan centre) and some other people. The reception seemed very positive. The after-show feedback again included somebody telling of shedding tears here and there during the show (as in Marseille), and that’s quite  heart-warming!

In the meantime news from Slovenia reached us, that everything is covered in ice and that trees and electrical grid is getting broken. 10.000 people without electricity, roads closed, schools’ off and so on.

After the show U. and myself got everything into a box in about an hour. We left Prague next day in early afternoon, after we bough some beer for ‘families’ at home. The drive was not that difficult – easy traffic, weather was mostly easy – but it was long and we were all tired. It also seems like I’ve more and more difficulties driving at night (night-vision). We stopped in Brno for a tea, sat down with Adam and Dora for a really quick catch-up. We arrived to Ljubljana at 1 in the morning.

This touring included slightly more hours of actually being in the city (although we didn’t see anything much from Prague), making few contacts, getting the feel of coffee places, however I would love to have more time, more interaction, more zero-time, more socializing with local artists. I guess there’s never enough of that.

Misconceptions About Communism (and Capitalism)

The US’s particular brand of capitalism required exterminating a continent’s worth of indigenous people and enslaving millions of kidnapped Africans. And all the capitalist industry was only possible because white women, considered the property of their fathers and husbands, were performing the invisible tasks of child-rearing and housework, without remuneration. Three cheers for free exchange.

[…]

It should be intuitive that capitalism, which glorifies rapid growth amidst ruthless competition, would produce great acts of violence and deprivation, but somehow its defenders are convinced that it is always and everywhere a force for righteousness and liberation. Let them try to convince the tens of millions of people who die of malnutrition every year because the free market is incapable of engineering a situation in which less than half of the world’s food is thrown away.

[…]

…most of the greatest art under capitalism has always come from people who are oppressed and alienated (see: the blues, jazz, rock & roll, and hip-hop). Then, thanks to capitalism, it is homogenized, marketed, and milked for all its value by the “entrepreneurs” sitting at the top of the heap, stroking their satiated flanks in admiration of themselves for getting everyone beneath them to believe that we are free.

via 7 Huge Misconceptions About Communism (and Capitalism) | Alternet.

some simple programming advice

I found the following at Kevin Element’s website. This article was written by Robert Hodgin, an interactive artist and media guru, after presenting at the EYEO Conference in 2011. You can find Robert’s site at www.flight404.com, or www.roberthodgin.com

Iterate

Your first attempt at anything is likely going to suck. Let’s face it, most of us are not phenoms. In fact, I cannot think of a single person I have met in my 38+ years who was able to excel at something shortly after trying it for the first time. We all need practice, and lots of it, for everything we try. From learning to talk and walk, to learning to play an instrument, to learning to drive, to learning how to be a social creature… it all takes practice.

Want to know how to get better at something? Do it over and over. And over and over and over.

However, it cannot just be mindless repetition. There are two additional factors that need to come into play. You need to also do the following:

1) Correct. You should work on fixing the things that didn’t go right with the previous iteration. Make a list of the things you want to address. Tackle the big items when you have a clear head and a nice block of time. Otherwise, pick off the smaller ones. However, don’t get overzealous with your corrections. If you happen to mutate your project into something interesting but unintended, save this mutation so you don’t overwrite it. I have lost some nice bug-made oddities because I was too concerned with fixing errors.

2) Improve. You should research the field to try and learn things to add to future iterations. This means looking at what people have already done and also what people are trying to do. Staying on top of advancements in your field of interest is definitely worth the effort. Unfortunately, this may mean you find yourself looking over SIGGRAPH white papers or University theses that are over your head. This is fine. Don’t get too caught up with not understanding what is written. Just look at the pictures if that is all you can manage. The important thing is to continually expose yourself to information about your interests.

Collaborate

I don’t know how many of you played D&D as a kid (or as an adult… no judgement here) but I will speak now as if all of you have. When you roll up a new character, unless you cheat it is highly unlikely you will create a demigod. You might have a 18 here or a 16 there, but you will never ever roll up a character with an 18 for every attribute. Ideally you will have one high attribute, perhaps an 18 strength. With an 18 strength, you would make a fantastic fighter. So off into battle you go.

But life, fantasy or not, is never easy. Your first run-in with a couple filthy thieves results in a gash across your chest and you drop half your hit points and suddenly you start to suffer the reality of the situation. You need healing abilities. So what do you do? Well, you don’t go running to the library to start a multi-year process to learn how to cast a healing spell. Instead, you find a cleric who has an 18 wisdom but happens to suck at fighting and you join forces. Now, you are much more powerful than the sum of your respective skills.

And the beauty of this setup is that nobody feels like they are being taken for granted. The fighter has an intense appreciation for the healing abilities of his new cleric friend, and the cleric is thrilled to have found someone that can fight off the horrible monsters that lurk out in the wilds. So if you are a fighter, find yourself a cleric friend. If you are a cleric, track down some muscle for hire. Because if you don’t, you will live a limited life and never get to see what is on the other side of the dark forests at the base of Mount Craggyspire. Or whatever.

I have spent much of my coding career learning how to manipulate particles and figuring out how to make OpenGL make things pretty. But I suck at many other aspects of coding. Which is why the projects involving collaboration ended up being the most successful. The visualizers I have made with Andrew Bell, and the Planetary iPad app which I am currently developing with Bloom… those projects have meant the most to me and I am damn certain I would not have been able to make them on my own.

Baby Steps

I went through a talk I gave in 2004 and saw a slide that, though a bit harsh, still represents the best advice I can give to young idealistic coders. It said, in bright red on white, TAKE TINY STEPS OR FAIL!!! and the FAIL!!! bit was flashing on and off for emphasis.

A problem I suffer (and hopefully it isn’t just me) is that I see something awesome someone else made and it gets my mind churning and I start thinking “I can totally do a 3D terrain simulation with physics, CLoD implementation, and realtime weather effects” so I dive right into XCode and start making my Globe class and the Weather class and on and on and before you know it, I feel extremely overwhelmed which usually has me running for the remote so I can watch science documentaries in an attempt to distract my bruised ego. Knowing exactly what you want to make can often be the largest barrier in your creative journey.

My advice in this situation is to take some time to break the problem up into bite size pieces. Work on little prototypes. Explore each tiny concept and eventually, start to put them together. If you are too focused on the gap between what you envision and what you currently have, you will likely lose faith.

Plus, if you have a bunch of well-understood bite size pieces, it will make it much easier to combine them into bigger projects. But if you start in with building a big project, it is much more difficult to pull out the pieces you want to repurpose later.

Take a walk or a shower

This may not work for everyone but it has been very useful to me. If I am stuck, either creatively or programmatically, I go for a walk. Or if it is late in the evening, I will take a hot shower. Something about those two activities really helps me clear away the mental fog and helps me to focus on the issues at hand. I have cleared many a hurdle just by putting on my headphones, slipping on some shoes, and going for a walk through the neighborhoods of San Francisco. This doesn’t mean walking over to the neighborhood bar for a drink. Walk while mulling over the problem at hand and head home when you have an idea of what to try next.

I realize what I am writing here is nothing new. We have all heard these points made by many. They have reached rockstar cliché status. But this doesn’t mean it isn’t worthwhile to be reminded every now and again.

Ira Glass on creativity: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BI23U7U2aUY

avconv: replace audio

How to easily replace (faulty/wrong) audio in an video file without re-encoding the whole video? Using “copy” codec for video and -map option to use new audio:

Make greed, hoarding and consumerism uncool

We live in a poorly educated society which idealized the famous, powerful and wealthy. A ruthless and cut-throat culture which perceives kindness and compassion as weaknesses instead of virtues. Start changing that and youll see the billionaires ostracized and shamed, instead of revered in the covers of magazines. Make greed, hoarding and consumerism uncool. Exalt compassion and kindness and slowly our cultural attitudes, as well our social, political and industry leaders will start to look a lot different.

via 4 Beware of Images.

you can sit there a long time

The advice I like to give to young artists, or really anybody, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work.

All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens.

via Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work | A Photo Editor.