“bass” because it makes a low note and because it’s made of basswood. The reed is cut from the plastic lid of a takeout soup container. The thing only makes one note – I put in some random finger holes but they make no difference! I suspect the horn is way too wide for its length– I’ll try to make a skinnier one soon.
My Fun with Coils workshop at NYC Resistor is coming up – Saturday Feb. 13th from 4-6pm. Mess around with coils to make custom instrument pickups, junkbox loudspeakers, secret transmitters, and more! You can sign up on eventbrite.
A warm-up instrument to start the month, and preparation for my upcoming fun with coils workshop. I assembled a simple magnetic field amplifier kit and used it to listen to the motor of a wind-up flashlight.
I want to say that I’ve been photoblogging now for sixteen years – but I haven’t posted photos here very much lately, thanks to the lure of flickr. Maybe I should do something about that.
January 13, 1994:
Back then, before affordable digital cameras, I used an old 8mm camcorder and a video digitizer to get pictures into the computer.
(Hey, wait, does this count? From 1993? I forgot about the Kinderegg page. That web page is old enough to get a driver’s license!)
Just like I did the last two years, I’m going to spend the month of February trying to build a new musical instrument every single day. It’s not exactly a Stradivarius factory but it’s a lot of fun and a great learning experience. I have no idea what I’m going to do on February 1, and I’m trying not to plan ahead at all, but I do plan to finish off the month by collaborating once again with the Glass Bees!
I’ll be doing my junk guitar workshop this Saturday at NYC Resistor, and I hope to do it again in a month or two! Below, video of some of the guitars we made in an earlier workshop:
In the early 80’s, Brooke W. Boering created a digital art programming language called CEEMAC, and to promote it, he distributed a demo disk for the Apple II called Fire Organ. The disk contained 30 or 40 little self-contained algorithmic animations written in CEEMAC, all with a bit of randomness so they were a bit different every time. I was fascinated with Fire Organ when I was a kid, and it’s one of the things that influenced me to get into interactive art later on.
Richard Bramante has a nice page with more information about Fire Organ, including the original “liner notes,” including recommendations for what music goes well with each visual score! Digital VJing almost 30 years ago! Boering apparently performed at the SCAN 87 digital arts conference. SCAN 87, where I met people like Laurie Spiegel and Walter Wright [pdf], was another big influence on my career– though I don’t remember seeing Boering! I attended and helped out at most of the yearly SCAN festivals until they petered out around 2002.
I was inspired a few days ago to look up Fire Organ again, and get it going on a modern computer. I found an Apple 2 emulator that runs in a browser, and an archived image of the original Fire Organ disk. So, here it is for you to try: Fire Organ! (Requires Java.) Once it loads and shows the title screen, click it and then press any letter or number key to choose a score, or use the period and comma keys for random scores.
Thanks to Mark S. Ressl for making the Apple II emulator freely available!
In the early 80’s, Brooke W. Boering created a digital art programming language called CEEMAC, and to promote it, he distributed a demo disk for the Apple II called Fire Organ. The disk contained 30 or 40 little self-contained algorithmic animations written in CEEMAC, all with a bit of randomness so they were a bit different every time. I was fascinated with Fire Organ when I was a kid, and it’s one of the things that influenced me to get into interactive art later on.