Whiter than a Hatfield Family Reunion

[Editor’s note: This post (including the above title) was written by mradcliffe immediately following a day spent with project ruori. It is unedited and uncensored, and is presented to the reader as a demonstration of the deleterious effects of association with said collective.]

It was brought to my attention a couple of weeks ago that I would be “performing” with project ruori at PURE. I wouldn’t say “brought to my attention.” More like “forced upon my sleepy eyes as I sat entrapped away from my own home.” I had only planned on seeing Phung before he left, but poor logistics and fate led me to PURE.

"An interesting musical opportunity...

…is in your near future.”
    – fortune cookie from tonight’s dinner.

Near indeed.

The fortune I discovered in my wallet yesterday – “We are here to create / not merely survive” – was inspiring. This one was just scary.

We have a little over a week before we’re performing in Boston

Metasacrifice for Art

To the ruoriJews reading this: Shanah Tovah, and I hope you had a meaningful fast. To everyone else: Happy Monday.

My Yom Kippur was very hectic – I compressed this year’s atonement into a few hours this morning. Then for the afternoon, I headed over to the softpixel/ruori megalab to convert snack foods into mental energy and mental energy into a set of chaotic probability-driven sonatas for three theremin-like light-sensing instruments we’re almost done building.

So I guess I sacrificed my sacrifice for my art.

Purity! Contagion! Acrylic Glass!

It’s been about three weeks since we heard that we will be going to Boston to do a performance and installation at PURE.

Our proposal included an acrylic glass plinko machine (a la The Price is Right) and three hanging fabric cocoons. There will be a performer in each cocoon and a fourth performer dropping ping pong balls into the plinko machine. As the balls come out the three holes in the bottom of the machine, they will trigger the performers to change an ongoing soundscape in some way. Eventually, the person dropping the ping pong balls will replace himself with an automated device, the automated device will run out of balls, and the performers in the cocoons will leave behind the soundscape controllers for the audience to play with.

More New Quartz Composer Patches

This is the second release of the Kineme Quartz Composer Plugins.

New this time:

  • MIDI Global In Note :: This patch observes a specified MIDI Note number on a specified MIDI Channel, and outputs the Velocity and a boolean Gate signal.
  • MIDI Global Out Note :: This patch, when Gate is rising true, outputs a MIDI note-on message on a specified MIDI Channel with the specified Velocity. When Gate is falling false, a MIDI note-off message is sent.
  • Image With Composition :: This patch loads a Quartz Composer Composition (.qtz) file and renders it to an Image. (This is intended to replace functionality that was removed with the Mac OS X 10.4.7 update, as described by Roger Bolton and David Wolf.)
  • File Type :: This patch provides the Uniform Type Identifier (UTI) of the specified file. For example, if the path to a QuickTime movie is specified, File Type outputs “com.apple.quicktime-movie”.
This release is only compatible with Tiger (10.4).
Please see kineme.net for Leopard-compatible patches.

Get them here: http://softpixel.com/~smokris/widgets/quartzComposer/kinemePlugins/


Steve Mokris is a developer at Kosada, Inc.

Private Patch Settings

Some further string-hunting in the Quartz Composer framework has revealed an interesting value:

QCShowPrivatePatchSettings

It looks like Quartz Composer is reading a value with this key from the global user defaults repository.

In fact, enabling it by bringing up Terminal and typing

defaults write -g QCShowPrivatePatchSettings 1

causes Quartz Composer to present some additional options for well-known patches.