Peter was a late addition to the First Friday event at Works/San Jose for september 2007. He did a music set and then did visuals for us for the rest of the night. He wrote to let me know of his upcoming gig:
Hi All,
I’m participating in the Illuminated Corridor on Wednesday evening at 7:16pm, near 8th and Folsom in SF. We’re filling the walls of the Prelinger library with projections from their archives, and filling your ears (and the neighborhood fm radio spectrum) with sound. (more…)
We wanted to let you all know about the Summer Solstice
Marathon on KZSU Stanford.
It starts tonight at Midnight(Thursday AM) and goes
till Thursday Midnight(Friday AM). It’s 24 hours of
non stop commercial free dance music brought to you by
DJ’s who could donate their time for the cause.
We are sad to announce that Juan Antonio Arguelles Ruis (well known in the VST developer community as “Arguru”) has passed away after a car accident on June 3rd. Our condolences to his family, friends and loved ones. He was truly a great asset to the VST and music software community, and he will definitely be missed.
Maker Faire 2007 was a blast! Steve and I had a great time not only seeing all the great projects and crafts other people were showing, but also sharing our project with those who were interested…and many folks were. We had a workbench right next to Cycling 74 (makers of Max/MSP/Jitter) and the OpenSound Control (OSC) master himself, Adrian Freed. This was a good thing for several reasons. For one thing, it allowed us to pick the brain of Mr. Freed a little bit about OSC since that was the protocol we were using to communicate between Processing and Pure Data (Pd). It also allowed people interested in Max/MSP/Jitter but couldn’t afford it see that Pd is a great alternative. Many of them didn’t even realize Pd existed, so exposing it to them was a bonus as well.
We did have a few challenges though. Lots of kids came up to our workbench expecting our keyboard controller to do something when the keys were pressed. Unfortunately, we had only mapped 5 of the 8 knobs to actual events….we didn’t do anything with the pads or keys. So Sunday morning, we quickly figured out how to make them trigger a splash of color and shapes in Processing along with the other visual elements triggered by the Pd patch. Another issue we ran into was the unforeseen power of the Tesla coils right across the way. On Sunday they crippled the wireless router we were using to send data between computers, so we had to resort to using wired connections to the router. Not ideal, but it got us through. But hey….we can’t deny the Tesla coils looked really freakin’ cool.
Other than that, the only thing I wish was that we had more time away from our workbench so we could take in all the fun stuff. Oh well…we still had a great time, and can’t wait for it to come around next year. But there is a possibility we’ll be in Austin, Texas for the October Maker Faire. We’ll keep you posted.
As stated on my other blogs, I’ve joined the board of directors of Works/San José, and for some reason they’ve put me in charge of organizing music and performance. Muahahaha!!
So! I will shortly be putting you lucky San Jose Bay area electronic musicians into one of the most awesome art galleries on first street, downtown san jose, for a one night performance.
Points if you’re using something like Live to create a nu-j mix. EXTRA points if you are creating music in realtime using things like Reason, Pure Data, . EXTRA EXTRA points if you’re creating realtime visuals along with your music.
Generally, I’d prefer to put up south bay area musicians, but I’m open to ANYone from the peninsula, east bay, or San Francisco who wants to come down and do something awesome for us.
DJs — please apply. We probably have *more* opportunities for you because we usually want music at all our public events, not just the specific music performance nights.
Email me at steve at somejunkwelike dot com with a subject of “performing at works san jose”, with a link to your performance that’s posted up somewhere on this great big interweb for me to listen to.
When I started getting involved in the arts community here in San Jose, I realized that I already know a thing or two about curating. DJs innately curate music. While the skills are probably in different parts of the brain, there’s got to be some overlap between auditory curation and visual curation. Good curators take individual pieces of art and say “hey, these go together. Check it out.” DJs do exactly the same thing. In fact, both of them are usually looking for their next venue, too. Both would love to get paid to do it, but deep down, they’d probably do it for free because they’re passionate about their ideology and process.
In fact, both of them are usually looking for their next venue, too. Both would love to get paid to do it, but deep down, they’d probably do it for free because they’re passionate about their ideology and process.