WVW

I have always been quite fascinated by Foley artists, who add “natural sounds” to films, often by imitating reality through means of watermelons, coconuts, rugs, gravel…
The way they produce the sounds, together with the sync quality (they have to stage it – also do they have a score – noting, hit watermelon?) of what they do.
With digital sound editing and databases, foley seems less popular. But I do want to share this link, describing how to reproduce auditive realities with fruit and veg. Enjoy!

http://www.epicsound.com/sfx/#f

(via Make)

Somewhere in the beginning of April I was contacted by two young ladies from Montreal, Quebec, Canada. They were looking for an organisation to be able to launch their project concerning guerilla bookmarks. As I have fond memories of my “stage” in Montreal, I decided to say yes and this enabled them to come to Brussels. Next week they will set up a workshop in the Bar of Recyclart.

A synopsis:

WORKSHOP BOOKMARKS – GUERILLA ART
Date : Tuesday 13 May 2008 – Thursday 15 May 2008
Entrance : Free

Artistic guerilla action with L’Oeil dans L’Front: workshop-exhibition-action!

The Canadian collective “L’Oeil dans L’Front” from Montréal is coming to Brussels for a project about “Guerilla Art”. Together with Recyclart they are organizing a workshop about producing artistic bookmarks, which later on will be put in the books of the Brussels ‘ libraries.

This cut and paste workshop is free and open to everybody, on the 13th, 14th and 15th of May, in the bar of Recyclart, from 15h to 17h30. Bring your dose of creativity, we’ll take care of the necessary material.

The collected bookmarks will be exhibited shortly after the workshop, in the bar of Recyclart, after their brief public life and before they are spread anonymously.

If you want to participate, please send an e-mail to fabien. recker [[[ @ ]]] recyclart. be or ring 02-502 57 34.

L’Oeil dans L’Front is a collective founded by the Quebecois Elsa Charpentier and Perruche. Their intention is to gently insert art in daily life and public space. The public is invited to acknowledge and question the poetic details of daily life, by making gestures that softly alter those details. For example by eliminating the borders between spectator and actor or by instigating people to slow down or stop public life. Elsa and Peruche are introduced to Brussels by Constant vzw.

Dezelfde informatie in NL: klik hier voor de website van Recyclart.
Le même info en FR: cliquez ici pour le site de Recyclart.

My sharp eye is always on the lookout for “multimedia” applications and Linux, especially where audio is concerned. Five minutes ago I learnt about the development of Ubuntu studio, throught Boingboing.

How far will Ubuntu go? What software and hardware support will be included? And above all, will it work easily…..

They plan to release Ubuntu Studio in april.

Curious, I am!

If you work with multimedia and you are on linux, you will know that it is not always an easy marriage… Getting all the libraries, making sure that all your hardware (camera, soundcard, graphics card…) is compatible and recognized…

We have recently installed Apodio, which is Mandriva based and it seems to be working quite well! A lot of audio programmes are included, and also there is a preconfigured setup with Jack and Alsa (audio server -not so easy to set up, it basically connects your hardware to your software).

In case of doubt try it as a live cd!

(more about live cd’s on wikipedia)

Pictures and a report of the install party at Nadine here.

And remember, live cd’s do not hurt one bit!

I think you can replace the word artist by quite a lot of “jobs”.
(And do not forget that I found this philisophical note very very funny 🙂 )

I got this quote from drawn.ca, a multi-author blog devoted to illustration, art, cartooning and drawing. Its purpose is to inspire creativity by sharing links and resources. (as they say about themselves :-))
Drawn! got this image from the blog of Keri Smith, who also explains for example on her website how to be a guerrilla artist.
Or how to make a portable tree an other fun stuff…

I guess the whole economy system is built on buy more better faster newer…

But sometimes (most of the times!) it is good to reuse – rethink “old stuff”.

Very simple post, this one: Linux for older machines…
The writer Stone Lion tests all kinds of linux distributions, and he evaluates how easy they are to install and how well they work on his pentium II.

So, if you have an old computer stashed away somewhere, why not experiment and put some Linux on it!

It doesn’t hurt…
Woof!

Recently I have stumbled upon the Instructables site. It shows you how to make all kinds of stuff, from jam tarts, to bicycle trailers made from an old bin.

These are some of my favourites:
—-> cablebone
(although I wonder if you do not create an electromagnetic field when you roll the cable like that…)

—-> a treehouse
Now i only need to find some great trees.

I have no idea what this is: Electromagnetic Actuator, but instructables shows you how to make it!

And this is one for mrthe

hihihi

v(^o^)

gogogo instructables!

d=(^o^)=b

This afternoon I’m presenting the project Cuisine Interne Keuken again.
It is a project about the living conditions of what we call a precarious worker (somebody whose work situation is not stable, or who has to have several work identities).
It is a project started in 2004 at Jonctions/Verbindingen 7, a yearly festival around art, technology and ethics organised by Constantvzw.
We were curious about the living conditions of the people we invited for the festival, so we decided to interview them, in a very structured way. We made a questionnaire in a big brainstorm with about 20 people.
I will go over the questions with you.
The next process was gathering all this information. We chose for audio, a relatively cheap mobile way of working. Also archiving and processing compressed audio is not so serverspace absorbing.
Then, stage 3: putting all these answers online in a structured way.

First of all we chose to compress the audio in .ogg, an open source compression format, actually better than .mp3, especially for voice (we did some blind tests with Radioswap).
Then Nicolas Maleve from Constant made the database, all the time keeping in mind the audio aspect. So, we decided to edit all this audio – a lot of work – and name the audiofiles in a specific way.
I will give an example.

There is an interview made with harrisson.
The edited question 01 will be called q01_harrisson.ogg
Question 2: q02_harrisson.ogg
(underscores because servers can have problems with space)
If he answers question 10 and 11 at the same time, we named the file q10_q11_harrisson.ogg.

So, the audio is edited, uploaded to the server -> we go to the database, and we link up the audio, with the information about this interviewee.
Because we gave the files the prefixes q01_ and q02_ etc etc the database can automatically link them to the right audiofile.

This database, but now the public side of it.
-> the database generates playlists -> m3u
-> some problems arose -> files have to be long enough
-> mac users and ogg playlists are not an easy marriage -> so we will next year make a mp3 mirror site, and some maintenance. Vlc can be an option too, but is not extremely straight forward – but it does work…
-> this project also got sidetracked, in a sense that it travelled for example to City of Women in Ljubljana-> there, instead of showing a play or singing a song, we interviewed almost all the invited people of the festival, which made this a very special interventions.
In Ljubljana, we also changed question 16 pictures of your workspace to a drawing of your workspace.- > General Picture gallery -> Drawings
-> During Jonctions 8 we also built a no-budget installation with the idea of Cuisine Interne Keuken behind it. There is a weblog and a picture gallery documenting this.
-> Johannes Taelman constructed a Pure Data patch, which automatically records, names and edits the questions on a computer. You record the sound by pressing the space bar, and you go to the next question pressing enter. The only thing left to do is enter somebackground information and you have to upload it to the server….

Now, between all that browsing, programming, e-mailing, talking, phoning, thinking, the brain has to eat. And why not take this literally…
For some years I have been using the bcc food site as a source of inspiration for cooking with what I have left in my fridge (I think Benoît gave me the idea).

But now… Their website has really put the cherry on the pie…

Find a recipe!

Example: you only have some pumpkin in your fridge and you want to cook a fast vegetarian course with it.
Enter pumpkin, tick the quick and vegetarian squares, and Bob’s your uncle!
Then, you can choose the cuisine (Indian, Japanese..), other ingredients, the preparation method…

And, also, you might be frightened by the fact that some English people want to advise you food – when I lived on the British Isles, I mostly cooked myself, because the food was… (fill in for yourself).

Don’t be frightened, but do brush up your knowledge of the names of veggies and stuff in english.
Quite a good dictionary: Lookwayup.

Auntie beeb also has a good glossary to find the weird stuff.
And, in case of, what ??? is this: google images makes you find the right vegetable…

I hope…
Get out your best kitchen gear and feel inspired… (And get vitamines)

http://www.epanorama.net/ is a web site, which is dedicated to offer information on electronics found from the web.

It has a lot of Linkslinkslinkslinkslinkslinkslinks

Circuits, schedules, plugs, connectors, hardware……………