Aman Amun

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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:

read more…

The Big Apple

Greetings team.  Here’s an update on my happenings for the summer:

I’ve taken down Matter of Fact’s free download status on Bandcamp and Last.fm to be included in a reverbnation-microsoft promotional thing.  You can still download it free on their myspace page here:

http://www.myspace.com/windows?homepage=amanamun

I’m spending the summer working as a “digital media technologist” for Frog Design up here in New York.  So far its been a good opportunity to boost my visualization and coding skills.  Its also been an intense crash course in Python which has helped me a bit with the rewrite I’ve been doing of the Munome.  I have a show booked up here for late July at a nifty little place called Monkey Town.  I’m exited to be able to debut the Munome re-write up here in NYC where there’s a pretty active community of people who are interested in interactive art and music.  If you know any folks up here who might enjoy please pass the word along.

I’m also in pre-production for a new record I’m currently referring to as ‘Lorica‘ which describes a body armor which is designed to look like the human form.  I’m keeping things loose for now and am hoping to tie the ideas together using some of my new performance tools and in some ways blur the practice of performance with composition (which really isn’t that novel of an approach).  Muchas smoochas!

Scapegoating Demonstration II

I uploaded some footage taken of my performance at the ‘Touch My Project’ Interactive Art show at the University of Georgia here.  Thanks again to everyone who made it out, it was fun to finally have all the pieces in place.  I’m hoping to do some more official documentation highlighting the new features of the munome sometime in the future, so peel those eyes.

Also feel free check out Scapegoating Demonstration I.

Dont Miss

Just some of the latest juice.  Thanks Flagpole!

“Aman Amun: Brian McGaw, AKA Aman Amun, might be something of a prodigy. Although I haven’t seen his work yet,  the glow in his eyes when he talks about his musical endeavors is invigorating, and his elaborate plans have impressed me more than any press release that’s come across my desk. As a student of interactive new media, he has been able to use his major as an outlet for his experimentations. So it’s fitting that his first live performance is part of an interactive exit show at the Lamar Dodd School of Art. McGaw has basically hand-crafted a new interface for triggering and manipulating sounds. What you’ll see on Friday is  McGaw singing and playing guitar with two screens behind him. One huge screen will feature the usual sorts of visual stimulation moving in conjunction with the music, while the smaller screen actually serves as an interactive instrument that McGaw has programmed to trigger, manipulate and record samples. In order to interact with this screen, he has designed a glove (sounds a little like the pre-Wii NES Power Glove) with LED lights embedded in each finger tip. The glove, combined with Wiimote Whiteboard technology and a program he wrote for his computer, will

be used to build each song. The circular nature of his work is fascinating: the music will make visuals and interacting with those visuals will make music. I cannot wait to see how this all comes together. I’ve had a glimpse of this kind of technology online, but it’s thrilling to know a student right here in town is on the cutting edge of electronic music. “If you go see someone like Daft Punk,” says McGaw,” you have no idea what they’re doing - pushing buttons in that huge pyramid of equipment. What I am trying to do is take something that’s normally hidden and show it to the audience in a way that’s aesthetically pleasing.” Many of the tracks will be based around tunes from his record Waxing, which you can download at www.amanamun.com. The showcase itself is called “Touch My Project” and it starts at 7 p.m. with Aman Amun going on stage around 9 p.m. This is a free event! (Lamar Doodd School of Art Room S150, Friday 1) “