Tag Archives: performance

Synthesize, Improvise and Otherwise — Saturday, June 8

on Saturday, June 8th — Lee Todd Lacks, Tom Swafford and i will appear at Matt Samolis‘ ‘Synthesize, Improvise and Otherwise,‘ a new and interdisciplinary performance works events out at Nave Gallery in Somerville

Check out more info up on The Book, aight?

we’ll perform a new composition of Lee Todd’s written in A flat minor with relative wholetone flourishes and micropolyrhythmic, purposely dissonant percussive undertone accompaniment with a slightly woody taste wildly reminiscent of 1984 or so aptly entitled ‘Ghost Mall’ — you won’t want to miss it — i’m serious — well, okay, i really have no idea who you are right now, right? the technology i used to put this blogpost together can’t really dynamically detect who might be reading this post in the moment and then, based upon your innermost desires and personal likes or dislikes in music then assess whether you might or might not want to miss it, this ‘Synthesize, Improvise and Otherwise’ that Matt Samolis is putting on out at that wickid cool Nave Gallery in the general Somerville districts of Massachusetts and all, but, hey, i have the write to pretend and play and let’s pretend for just a second that WordPress allowed for that post-humanic, überCreepy and simulated predictive functionality, okay?

woah

yeah

that’d be, like, kind of simultaneously amazing, this kind of stuff we dream up and invite, but also a little bit annoying and probably a little bit broken

like

it might not get it EXACTLY right, right?

but we’d kind of ignore the fact that it’d be a little ‘off,’ right? like we normally do — and we’d probably think, like, woah — oh my gawd, that’s pretty fucking awesome — who the hell dreamt this cool, new innovative trick up? how’d they implement that? was there some sort of direct emotional sensor that somehow reached out via webcam into my retina to pull out my wants, needs and personal tastes in music and performance art?

probably not

i bet it’d just be kind of random, but we’d believe there’d be this wonderfully creative and epically smart algorithm of pure genius behind it all — that somehow data answers every question we have and that any tiny miraculous event can be somehow utterly dewonderfied through scientific conjecture and fully quantifiable proof of anything seemingly magical, real or exciting

hey

i’d go out to this ‘Synthesize, Improvise and Otherwise’ — ‘sGonna be off da hook ‘n shit

i can tell it is

probably the best way you can spend your Saturday night { unless, of course, you’re going out to that competing Mobius event happening on the verySame night — jeez! }

a perfect world

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we all know its not a perfect world out there, right?

none of us are, like, THAT delusional

but, what if we all just pretended we live in a perfect world and we began to treat each other a little better? that couldn’t really HURT anybody really, now, could it? in fact, it might be kind of cool and awesome in some strange and cool way

here’s a f’rinstance for ya

what if instead of having a continuous stream of bad things to say about people, what if we only said generally positive things? doesn’t it just feel good to receive a compliment? it feels even better to give a compliment to someone — even if you get nothing in return { and you should never even expect anything in return, right? then you might be complimenting someone for the entirely wrong reason } it just feels good — it feels good to know you’re recognizing the incredible awesomeness around us all, that you’re appreciating life, and that you’re appreciating the people in life that make all of this so worthwhile and fun and happy and alive

bad things are going to happen no matter what

its inevitable, its just the nature of every time-based medium

and life is a time-based medium, so hold on, here it comes ;]

i mean, we can all be honest, too — no need to walk around like an imbecile or something, and its certainly okay to have an opinion about someone or something, but try and back it up in some way with some real reason why you’re feeling so down about these things — just a little bit of research can go a long way, and it will also give us all a little bit more insight into your thinking process and why you’re judging in the first place

if you have a point to make with these observations, with your researched and clarified opinions that veer toward the negative side of life, then good for you — and maybe even good for the world

but realize, at least, just how vulnerable we all are — and especially you as the judge and jury expressing these opinions, especially if you’re expressing them in a very public place like on a blog or on Facebook or at church

unless you’re working at the Lynn District Court or something, too, remember that the Judge also receives some judgment from the social community within which they lay comment — and even THAT judge, the courtly official presiding, will ultimately receive judgment — after all, its not an entirely efficient process — the pay looks real nice and there’s no reason to be efficient if you’re getting paid by your hourly input as never ever reflected by the actual quality of those then quantified hours

but that’s beside the point

let’s all try a little experiment

let’s pretend

what if we lived in a perfect world? what would we say to each other? how would we behave?

try acting like we live in a perfect world and that people act and behave certain ways for good reasons

it might make us all a little less critical of our brothers and sisters

and then we might just concentrate on good things, good people, good feelings, and all the stuff that makes life fun and exciting

i’m gonna try it

let’s see what happens

a box full of music, rose petals and seaShells

last night i found a box in the basement, a treasure

as much as Marco and i buckled under the legal pressures brought on by our contractual relationship to XeXeX | OBLiViON back in the ’90s and stopped recording our beware the haberdash material on carefully planned, sequential schedule — we did move forward in our secret underground recording studio to capture that haberdash magic on tape to create a veritable bucketful of bootleggy sounds

only select tracks made it to any official releases over the years, however, as litigation got rather nasty and we both chose to focus on the positive experience of making music over fighting against ‘The Man’ every step of the way to merely preserve this rather eclectic and strange post-deathmen project we both still treasure to this day

so here you have it — the visually-designed artifactual remains of the overarching master gameplan for every pre-Sewingbox beware the haberdash release as envisioned and begun back in the late 1990s / early 2000s

Pecha Kucha Night Boston ::: Tuesday, April 24th

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i am sooOOooOOo delighted to say i will be presenting at next week’s Pecha Kucha Night Boston 26 at Club OBERON in that interesting betweenSpace nestled up in the Harvard Square / Central Square taint of Cambridge — ‘sGonna be good

the line-up looks pretty amazing, hope you can all come out

my presentation out at Pecha Kucha #26 follows one thread from my thesis work out at DMI — the talk i started to prepare in frenetic anticipation of getting accepted to speak out at The 2012 UX Conference this year has now morphed into a subtly different conversation — my proposal to present on ‘Why I Am a User Experience Designer’ at the UXC, after not being accepted to the conference, follows a newer, more clearly articulated permutation of my persona performance work as i report back to the audience out at Pecha Kucha #26 with ‘The 2012 Human eXperience Report

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anyhow, i think that’s enough of a teaser for now — i hope this itty bitty blurb is enough to entice you out to an evening of rapidfire 20×20 talks on eclectic, topical and timely subject matter from an interesting mix of professionals from various verticals and philosophies in the Greater Boston Area — its bound to be an interesting evening, an entertaining and intellectual night of sharing all the latest thought and energy — i hope to see you there ;]

i was lucky enough last night to find a bit of processing code on an open wetware site ‘out there’ after hours + hours of research into latent + emotive telepathic communication using the arduino … a bit more difficult to find than some of the open source code that so many gracious folks share out on sites like instructables + dorkbots, but still well-worth the challenge

after really digging into the code a bit, hooking my arduino up to the MacBook Pro, uploading the program to the nifty little microprocessor that could + quick insertion of the psychotronic implants using carefully sterilized common sewing needles, Carol + i were able to transfer thoughts + feelings back + forth from across the room in relative real-time … pretty amazing stuff … we gave each other some simple commands, making each other reach up or down, turn around, wink … anything to quickly + visually confirm to each other that our digitally implemented experiment in clairvoyance was actually working

at a certain point i left the house + took a drive down to the local Friendly’s … walking up to the ice cream take-out counter, i tried tuning into Carol’s mind frequencies + quite confidently placed our order, waited the 15 to 20 minutes or so, + made the drive back home … at this point i can report back that our testing resulted in a bit of a miss due to the distance when applied to our synthetic telepathy … i got the entire order almost right, i just forgot to order the extra nuts + chocolate jimmies on Carol’s Jim Dandy … a minor faux pas, i know … but still enough to get me delving back into what code snippets i can further research online