So it’s back to the lab again…
After taking a week to really rethink the way my prototype works, I started solidifying the innards a bit better. I’d wanted to add motion, beef up the structure, possibly make it bigger, and do a while pile of other things, but realistically I’ll have to call it quits on building for now. I took the bugger apart to solder the previously free-running wires down to perfboards (mostly just so they’d stop jumping out of place), heat shrunk the cables, and generally made it a bit sturdier.
Mini lil’ cut-up boards:
I’ve also now decided to shift my focus for Metaforms to this project, and the two are tying in quite well. Dana had some fantastic feedback about design, shape and material choices, the latter of which is probably the foremost in my mind at the moment. Today in class she suggested checking out ladies’ pantyhose as well, which I’ll do (and likely sketch out the clerk while I’m at it. Again.). I’ve also picked up a few books at Dana’s suggestions, including Iannis Xenakis’ Art-Science: Alloys and Spaces Speak, Are You Listening? Experiencing Aural Architecture. Hopefully that’ll inform this whole process a bit better.
Also, had a great chat with Jamie yesterday about concept and the programming side of it all, which left me with a lot of good ideas. I’m still tweaking/tinkering/mutillating the patch a bit, trying to clean it up, add more relevant controls/sounds, and shape it into more of a timeline/performance. Here’s where that stands for now:
It’s clearly still a bit of a mess, but most activity is now kept in sub-patchers, so that’s cleaning it up. Jamie had brilliant suggetsions for using mute~ to keep my CPU load down and rate detection to jump to new parts of the patch, both of which I’m now in the middle of implementing. I’m also having issues getting a proper reverb working, but I’ve got TapTools installed now, and that should help a bit.
The next two big challenges are (A) for the performance, to get a proper performance plan/score done, and (B) for the form itself, finalize the external setup of the prototype. Given that this is a short week, I’m hoping to have the whole thing back together by Thanksgiving and tweak the patch during the weekend.
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