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Beeswax – Alamo South Lamar, October 9th

Posted by October 2, 2009

tilly2_hires

It’s difficult to communicate to people what makes a movie worthwhile, because it is very rarely a sum of its list of ingredients. More often than not, it’s some indescribable spark of life and authenticity that sets it apart from a million other attempts at the same story. All I can say is that I know them when I see them, and Beeswax is one of those ‘alive’ movies, that you sort of walk into and feel instantly that the characters living in it are real. You get a sense of all sorts of unspoken details of their lives and corners of their world that are just barely suggested, where another less capable movie would bludgeon you with exposition and crude manipulation and leave you in a house made out of cardboard.

I’m excited that anyone in this country is still able to make a film like this, one that is quiet and full of life and will last on the strength of its texture and mood while a million prefab cookie-cutter hollywood ‘products’ go marching into obsolescence as soon as their same-faced replacement comes along. In Andrew’s films you always get the sense that you peeked into someone’s life, and that one day the film will become a sort of artifact that preserves that life like a chunk of amber.

Even if you already saw the movie while it was on its festival run, please come show your support as it screens here in Austin on the 9th, and in other parts of Texas on these dates:

OPENING OCTOBER 9
Austin
Alamo South Lamar
1120 S. Lamar

Andrew Bujalski (w/ whichever local castmembers he can muster) Q&A on Friday evening!
[but the movie keeps showing all week--none of this "sorry I missed your screening, dude" crap, there are many multiple screenings]

OPENING OCTOBER 9
Houston
Angelika Houston
Bayou Place
510 Texas St. (@ Smith St.)

*Tilly Hatcher* in person! And Andrew Bujalski too, Q&A on Saturday evening Oct 10!
[but the movie keeps showing all week]

The Beeswax website

ITP Spring Show 2009

Posted by May 12, 2009

ITP Spring Show 2009 from Winslow Porter on Vimeo.

Make Magazine: ITP Spring Show 2009 Pictures

Why is there no modern graphics and interactions programming class/meetup in Austin?

Posted by March 24, 2009

Here’s a list of things that I want to study in some sort of semi-structured group in Austin, but can’t:

Why can’t I? Because this tech-centric oasis of creativity is stuck in the stone ages when it comes to hybrid art and technology programs. The University of Texas at Austin is still lugging around ACTLab, and art/tech incubator that still busies itself with a lot of completely outmoded Mondo 2000 bullshit 1993 raver theorizing, and Austin Dorkbot, which as far as I can tell is primarily made up of a few actual techies and a lot of random burning man aficionados who’s idea of the co-mingling of art and technology is making bikinis out of old circuit boards.

Why is this stuff all important? Because for the first time in a long time, the game industry is being cracked open by micropayment download services on major consoles- WiiWare on Nintendo, Xbox arcade, the iPhone App store – and we are preparing for what is going to be a torrent of “one crazy guy in his basement with a vision” games that are going to mutate our expectations of interactive media and usher in a new era of art and entertainment. There are a ton of new technologies that allow artists to begin to design interactions and play with logic and active narrative as they would with paint or video, but the tech scene in Austin seems to be very focused on traditional roles of technology. We have a lot traditional computer science nerds and traditional game programmers, a lot of musicians dicking around in protools and ableton live, a lot of traditional web designers, and a lot of ‘artists’ who would never lower themselves to have to actually learn a ‘technical’ skill. Very very rarely in this town do I meet hands on, full experience designers who are building the kind of art that is becoming very common in the major cities and abroad. The kind of stuff we see at the Royal College of Art or CalArts, Carnagie Mellon or NYU.

Is there anyone else in town that is as frustrated about this stuff as I am? Is there some secret resource that I am missing out on? I really feel like this is the direction I want my ‘career’ to go in, but I am not going to move at this point in my life.

Processing Radiolaria creator

Posted by December 25, 2008

Radiolaria study, originally uploaded by flight404.

Robert of Flight404 is building a radiolarian generator in Processing that evokes the famous lithographs of Ernst Haeckel:
all manner of distractions – Blog Archive – Radiolaria creator, pt. 1

Huzzah for ‘Learning Processing’

Posted by October 10, 2008

Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions. It is used by students, artists, designers, researchers, and hobbyists for learning, prototyping, and production. It is created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook and professional production tool. Processing is an alternative to proprietary software tools in the same domain.

Processing is one of those things I’ve been putting off learning for years. I’m constantly reading and talking about it, I’m always cataloguing the different projects I could be using it in, but like Quartz Composer, I’ve never been able to make great strides actually learning it. I’ve never really thought that I could learn a “real” programming language, and that I would be confined to scripting and markup languages and traditional non-interactive video for the stuff I make.

I’m really excited this week because I’ve been working my way through Daniel Shiffman’s book Learning Processing, and for the first time it’s actually sticking. I’m reaching that level of engagement with the material that tells me I am in it for the long haul.

I’m only on my second day of reading and today I made this little etch-a-sketch widget (Bloggger won’t let me embed Java :/ )

And I didn’t just parrot the code either, I took one of the exercises, understood what was going on, and was able to modify it as I saw fit. It doesn’t look impressive, but it’s a big step for me. I’ll post more interesting bits about it as I get deeper in the book. In the meantime, check out some incredible art that people have made using the language.

IPhone Apps: Brian Eno’s Bloom Raises the Bar for Musical iPhone Apps

Posted by October 9, 2008

Unlike most music-creation apps, it doesn’t take an existing musical instrument and cram it awkwardly into the iPhone’s interface. Instead, it creates a completely new ‘instrument’ designed specifically for the iPhone. Essentially, you’re provided with a colored screen and a quiet drone. As you tap the screen in various places, different tones play depending on where you tapped. They then loop, creating a unique piece of music on the fly, one that changes gradually on its own once you stop tapping.

You can also just let it create music on its own, coming up with a new, unique piece every time you run it. It’s also beautiful, with the tones appearing as colored spots that slowly fade. It’s as satisfying to actively play with as it is to let do its own thing.

Link

DIVYA SRINIVASAN, Fist Clench

Posted by September 7, 2008

My friend Divya has added a new section to her art site Pupae for daily work.
“Fist Clench“

BEAUTIFUL DECAY – Anthology interview, Michael Berryhill

Posted by August 26, 2008


Link

Silver Pines – Forces (SR) | Austin Sound

Posted by June 27, 2008

I’m finishing up a short (kind of rushed) video for Steve Brudniak’s Noumenon presentation on the 28th and then I’m moving on to a music video for the wonderful San Marcos band Silver Pines.

Here’s an Austin Sound review of their album, Forces.

probertson: Kings of Power 4 Billion %

Posted by March 24, 2008

This will be boingboing’ed and digg’ed to death in about five seconds, but Paul Robertson (Pirate Baby’s Cabana Battle Street Fight) just finished his new sprite-animation movie Kings of Power 4 Billion % and suffice to say, he’s taken it to the next level. If you’ve ever admired the animation and attention to detail in side scrolling games like Metal Slug, but wondered what would happen if you fed one of the artists responsible angel-dust stuffed hoho’s for a week locked in a clockwork-orange-style room that crammed uncut pop-culture down their brainhole 24/7, now you have your answer. Even if you aren’t a geek, this is stunning stuff.


Link
Link to Torrent
Thanks Rodney!

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