Aman Amun

53rd St. Park

I’m sure that the last thing that anyone reading this blog wants to stomach is another tirade about the need to eat right and exercise.  It would be a hypocritical message for me to offer considering my own inability to get my shit together.  Many of you know that every movement I make is coupled with a million tiny crackling sounds as my rusty gears slowly but surely grind themselves into nothingness.  I do, however, heartily believe in my father’s doctor’s message: “motion is lotion,” and consequently I feel moved by creative approaches to get the body moving.

About 6 months ago I took a trip to Miami and stumbled across what is one of the most interesting public works design projects I’ve seen.  53rd St. Park is located in North Miami Beach nestled between monolithic hotels, a glorious beachfront, and the uncomfortably busy Collins Ave.  If you are in Miami, you can  check it out here: 53rd St. Park

One side of the park features a seusical-jetsons-styled children’s playground equipped with a mini-climbing wall and some weird inside-out-slides sitting atop an astroturf slab.  This side was cool in its own ways, but I forgot to take pictures of this section, so for more info you’ll have to check it out yourself.

More innovative, in my opinion, is the  little circular trail of astroturf on the opposite side of the park.  I’ve been to parks before that have trails featuring “stations” which you can use to exercise or practice balance or whatnot as you walk along them.  This park, like those others, featured stations, but instead of rusted balance beams and cut-off tree stump stairs these stations consisted of playground-like equipment which leverages the individuals’ body weight as a counterbalance mechanism along with simple pictorial directions offering alternative exercises and the optimal number of repetitions for different weights.

By looking at the pictures you can pretty much tell what kind of exercises you would do with the equipment.  The constant breeze (and consequent view) provided by the ocean and the consistent visual aesthetic of the park make for an overall enjoyable setting.  If you’ve seen workout parks like this before or other positive public design projects please throw us a reference in the comments.

new juice

Here’s some recent press. Thanks to the writers for their eloquence and also thanks to Rachel Bailey who should have been credited on the photo in the Red and Black Article.

Flagpole: Threats and Promises

The Red and Black: Reading Day Rave Rocks Cine

Also, my brother threw together a documentary outlining what I’m all about.  Check it out:

aman amun: Revealing the Hidden from Eric McGaw on Vimeo.

exploring

I’m still fairly new to the world of video and find it hard to both focus on making and documenting my work.  As a result a lot of the work that I do occurs and disappears without representation on here, in my portfolio, and sometimes anywhere else.  I’m trying though, and accordingly, here’s my latest attempt which I threw together for my Interactive Art class.  Its a slightly cut down single take improvisation based upon a song off my (what is quickly becoming elderly) record ‘Waxing’ called ‘Exploring the Obvious.’

“the soundtrack”

Increasing the interactivity of my performance has been a growing concern of mine so I spent some time last month designing a version of my performance which can also serve as a viewer-driven installation which I figured I’d share.

The gist of the project is that the user is given the ability to draw a sequence on a sampler (most likely the munome), and then by wearing a special waistbelt their movements are translated into meaningful information which drives the playback of that sequence.  The waistbelt contains an iPod touch which I use as the network-able, rechargeable, accelerometer which tracks the movement of the participant.  I can track the length of time a waistbelt is checked out to a participant and give them a vibration to indicate that their time is up when should return it to the checkout station for the next person to use.

By distributing several of these waistbelts (each assigned to a different sound) into a space, several audience members can collaborate to form more rich and complex compositions through their own rhythmic movement.  In the soundtrack, dance begets music, not the other way around.

In order to make this piece happen I’ve also been writing an iPhone / iPod application which generates a score based upon the movements of an individual running the application in their pocket.  I’ll throw up the video I made demonstrating this in the next month or two when my video editing skills have increased a smidge.

clarifying the content

a word or two clarifying some of my intentions with the aman amun project.  if things get boring feel free to look at the pictures and move on.

i’ve attempted to make the message clear that aman amun is a conceptual project meant to reveal the hidden elements of the world and thereby reconcile the two different representations of the self.

“a man” is the most straightforwards label you can pin on a person whereby attributing worth, potential, and responsibility.  i use it to describe the external part of the self, however that external self will vary in each person’s “model” of the world.  by that i mean that the sequential actions, visual representations, and the contextual contents of these things revealed to one individual (as filtered through their own qualities) by another will vary, so different individuals will view “a man” differently.

amun represents the hidden elements of that man, the internal ebb and flow of ideas and emotions which allow that very man to wear his label.  a man will pick and choose which of his internal content see’s the light of day, but man’s inability to successfully and completely externally represent this inner content as well as the complete uncertainty and irrationality that it generally consists of, allows the two parts of the person to continue to persist as seperate entities.

in this project i seek to take steps to reconcile the two within myself; to represent the most relevant and honest emotions and ideas that develop beneath my surface as clearly and aesthetically as possible.
this conceptual dedication means everything to me as a performer.  it expects more of me than what a simple performance with an acoustic guitar and a microphone can deliver.  but performance art is dangerous territory for an artist with main-stream aspirations and an obscure message.  i refuse to sit back and let what i do sqeeze itself into small box to be popped out at the turn of a crank.  i’m not content to let it devolve into a novelty show demonstrating my research or a musical performance spinkled with magic tricks.  niether do i want it to come across as pulpit for my rantings or, contrastingly, a performance-void VIP box to watch you dance from.  what i want is to create a moment.

i want to create a moment that is emotionally and conceptually meaninful to every person that takes part in it, a moment where the message of collapsing boundaries and the collective desire to do so becomes present and understood.  if any of you have any ideas or suggestions as to how i can clearly and uniqely manifest these goals into reality, feel free to shoot me an email.

The Broken One

The units leds light up and a quiet fan starts.  I had read reviews of Psystar’s pre-built hackintosh before which said that they had loud fans. I had assumed that they would have changed their fans after all those reviews and I was right.  One point for me.

I have my monitor plugged in and it bursts to life with the Psystar logo followed by a pretty standard bootloader.  After the bootloader a bluish screen appears and beneath a silver Apple logo the “I’m loading circles” spin for 20 seconds or so and stop.  I just wait and stare at the screen.  I’m actually really exited at this point because I forked over good money for this and it’s really important that I have it by my show next week.

But nothing happens.

I seriously gave it way too much time.  Each minute was counted by another crossed appendage until I didn’t have any left.  I eventually resigned tot he sad truth.  It had frozen on its first boot.

Keep in mind that I bought this computer because its’ spec made my tiny white show-crashing machine look like a tiny white show-crashing beeper.  Its terabyte hard drive, its 10 usb ports, and its counter-strike nerd rated graphics card all convinced me that my days of instability were at an end.  I guess I didn’t realize that I was in for one last hump before an infinite dry spell. Eternal humplessness?

Needless to say, after that everything went wrong.  After a lot of struggle I succeeded in booting OS X and managed to check the configuration of the machine.  The processor upgrade which i paid for ($350) wasn’t there!  I decided that the freeze on the first boot and the issues on startup were just part of a bad out-of-the-box experience (no directions) and I expected to get the money back for the hardware upgrade which I had paid for but didn’t receive, and so I opened Safari.

First thing on my big list of software to download and install was Eclipse.  I’ve mentioned it on here before, its pretty much just a glorified text editor that I can use to write code for my projects.  I started the download and then my phone rang, I turned away from the computer and answered the call.  When the call was over I turned back to the computer and attempted to move the mouse.  I say attempted because the mouse didn’t move or wiggle or blink or do anything.  I attempted to tab over to a different window to test the keyboard and failed at that as well.  I attempted to stare down the download bar only to encounter the same kind of stagnancy.  It was frozen again.

I’m going to get Psystar to take their brick back and in return give me back my money. I’ve learned a valuable lesson through this whole experience which is thus:  with shortcuts come shortcuts.

And so, my future, my present:

This is my new Brain.  It has 2 processors, 2 graphics cards, and, when my audio interface is plugged in, 2 soundcards.  Things officially just got beefy.

[ edit: ]

I contacted Psystar to have the computer replaced and they offered to fix it and have it back to me by tomorrow.  I seriously doubt that it would work like that, but its irrelevant whether it would or not because since I had time constraints and they botched my order I was forced to buy another computer.  They then told me that I would have to pay a 25% restocking fee as I had agreed to in their terms of service.  They then sent me an RMA form which I filled out and sent to them only to get another email saying thus (and i paste):

“Please disregard the last email sent as the return form was generated incorrectly.  Please keep in mind that your computer is still covered under its 3 year warranty and can be sent back for repaired.”

So, not only did they not send me a computer with the specifications that I ordered, send me a computer that is pretty much incessantly frozen, waste a bunch of my time waiting for, messing with, and returning their computer, and screw up the return form, but they charged me $600 for the whole experience.  Moral of the story.  I’m a naive idiot for going against everyone else’s advice, don’t buy Psystar.

The Open One

So I decided it was time for an upgrade.

To be frank, my last show (up in New York) was nothing short of a technical catastrophe.  I had 30 minutes to set up an entire live recording and sound processing setup, a projection interface, and a lighting rig, a task which took me more than 3 hours including calibration and testing for my first show in Athens.  I ended up having to abandon my projection interface and lighting because of certai

n issues relating to the venue’s projecters.  I successfully set everything up in time but didn’t have time to calibrate and test everything.  In short, this caused some instability which resulted in, among other issues, ableton live crashing.  Twice.

After the second one I was about ready to admit defeat until someone in the audience suggested I just play the rest of the set Acoustic.  I’m not sure why it hadn’t occurred to me before.  Almost all the songs start out t

hat way and get most of their practice in that format.  In the end I developed a healthy appreciation for the fact that everything went wrong.  Its impossible that more could go wrong than that and everything still turned out alright.

So like any persistent soul who is unwilling to admit defeat in the face of self-inflicted adversity, I trekked on

and started drawing up plans for how to solve some of the inherent problems to the complexity of what I do.  Step 1, get a new brain.

Some might suggest it a stupid move to get a non-apple computer running OSX.  Others would suggest it was a stupid move to buy a Hackintosh rather build my own.  I wouldn’t necessarily disagree with either of you, but I definitely don’t have the time to build a rack mount Hackintosh that I can be sure will work, and I definitely don’t have the cash to buy the equivalent rack mount mac (which would set me back roughly $2000 more).  And so I threw down pretty much all the gold I mined at Frog Design this summer and bought the best and cheapest machine that runs OS X that I could.  My new brain.

I’m could spare you the bloody details, but I won’t.  I bet there are a couple people out there who might be curious about what my purchase experience was like and how the machine stands up to my standards.  So here we go:

1. It took roughly 2 weeks (15 days actually) from my order to when it arrived at my parents house.  I forgot that they had to build it custom for me so I called them sometime in the middle and they were friendly and told me it was in testing.

2. The packaging itself was alright, but the out of the box experience itself was terrible.  All they really provide is a document with five pages stapled together.  Its badly printed in black and white on basic printing paper and labeled  “Setting Up Your Open/OpenPro Computer.”  Considering that the machine I bought was their “Rackmount Open(7)” model, the attached pages with basic labeled pictures of their Open Computer were pretty much irrelevant.  The last page “Connecting Your Computer” is full of relevant information, but it hardly touches on the big questions which I had about where to start.  I assumed that OS X was already installed and so I booted the machine up.

More coming in another entry….

More Spinning Blobs…

Here’s a random animation I created while at Frog. To view the first in the series of blob-animations I did check out the disco version on my myspace page.

Tools used: python, vtk, adobe illustrator, flash

La Vida Loquisima

Thanks to everyone who made it out to the Monkeytown show. I appreciate everyone’s patience as I slowly iron out all the technicalities that make my show both unique and prone to disaster. I can promise that as time progresses, and I get more chances to hone my performance, things will solidify. In lieu of this observation I’ve decided to book some shows for this express purpose. I’ll be doing several smaller shows in Athens over the new few months preceded by a bigger one at the 40 watt opening for Boombox.  Keep an eye on my myspace page for dates.

Pre-production on Lorica is going swimmingly. As you may or may not know, despite the fact that a lot of my music eventually evolves into electronically refined and textured tunes, it almost always starts out with a core song written with acoustic instruments. Right now I have the scaffolding of 7 or 8 of those, and I’m getting ancy to push into the next phase of recording. I’ve made a commitment to myself to do more documentation, so I’ll be making an effort to keep you folk in the loop with some sound and video samples of that process.

Nerding Out

At Frog I’ve been working on a Processing project which has become fairly involved. I decided to use the Java library xStream and discovered that the “inner classes” situation presented by Processing caused problems with this. Despite there being possible solutions to this within the Processing IDE, I decided to push my dev environment over to Eclipse. It wasn’t too bad, but I had to do some searching to help tie up all the loose ends. I figured I’d post my process to save anyone else who is doing this some time. This is the first of entries that I’ve made of this kind, so feel free to drop a comment if things aren’t clear:

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