Steve Cooley Fine Art

Dear Mr. Ryoji Ikeda:

Derek and I saw C^4I at the California Theatre. While I can appreciate your pieces as conceptual existential statements, I wonder if it was necessary to run your exhibit at over 85DB? Is that the major feature of these two pieces? Would your art still be art to you if it weren’t hurting the audience? I know you had some cool data driven visuals and audio, but the volume was loud enough to distract me from all other contemplation and comprehension of your works… it seemed to defeat the purpose for me.

I’ll overlook your attempt to make me deaf this time. If you try to repeat this kind of dangerous shit again in the future, I’ll be storming the theatre with a big box of 30DB foam ear plugs so that everyone can at least have the opportunity to experience your art without needing a hearing aide the next day.

Now that my ears have stopped bleeding and are starting to scab over, I recognize your provocation and accept your challenge. A battle of style, ok? See you in san jose in two years… Bring something other than something painfully loud; I will.

Love,
-steve cooley

P.S. California theatre, you’re not off the hook. I’ll be talking to you in person.

Technorati Tags: 01, ryoji ikeda, san jose, zero one san jose, zero1, zeroone

Hey, Jono says that Google Sketch Up for the Mac is out!

I’ve created and uploaded a model of the workbench I’ve made 3 times for my workshop at home to the 3d warehouse. Download and create your own workbench today… for cheap!

Oh, yeah, here are the links to the 3 movies I made while making said workbenches.

http://homepage.mac.com/djcatnip/iMovieTheater24.html

http://homepage.mac.com/djcatnip/iMovieTheater18.html

http://homepage.mac.com/djcatnip/iMovieTheater27.html

Saturday night crossfader:

The live visual show on Saturday was a nice event, I was relatively happy since VisionFactory worked pretty well in its networked configuration. Though, controlling several parameters with only a mouse and a keyboard at the same time was quite painful and not really that intuitive. I really missed a midi input controller here. Hopefully, I had plugged some music responsive scenes and a webcam focusing of my friend Sevenfive performing live, so that the whole thing was enough reactive to the sound and to the context.
Here are three videos shot during the show :

Webcam 3D Pixels+Grid effect (.mov, ~6Mo)

Hey, is that my webcam 3d pixel code? What is vision factory? The term is too generic for google to turn up anything meaningful.

Someone on the processing board posted a link to NodeBox for mac os x. It’s a smaller subset of what processing does, and runs on Python. There are some interesting things that it does well. It has built in quicktime and PDF export support. It can import illustrator files natively… so, those two things make it interesting. Being able to programmatically create semirandom vector artwork is definitely cool. I’m not sure I’m going to drop everything and move in this direction, but it’s worth checking out. Check out the gallery of projects.. some interesting things there, for sure. from the website:

• Designed for Mac OS X – NodeBox is designed for Mac OS X Panther and Tiger.
• Open Source Software – NodeBox is free open-source software and comes bundled with its source code. Developers can extend NodeBox or improve it.
• Python Powered – In NodeBox, you design with programming code, with language. NodeBox uses Python programming code which is easy to understand even for non-programmers.
• Illustrator Import – NodeBox integrates effortlessly with various document formats. In NodeBox, you can include your vector images from Illustrator.
• PDF Export – The visual output you create in NodeBox exports to a PDF-document. You can automatically export multiple PDF-documents from the same script, and control the layout of each page individually.
• Quicktime Export – Aside from PDF-documents you can create animation in NodeBox as well. Animations can be exported to the popular Quicktime-format that can be displayed on web pages.

19601
Hey, I just posted photos I got from Jono Kane and the East Bay Express of my exhibit at the Chabot Space and Science Center in Oakland California from May 26, 2006. I had a great time, I learned a lot about my systems setup. I learned what to bring next time, what not to bring. All in all, I’d say it was a huge success, relative to this being my first exhibit of just my work (as opposed to with my wife), and showing the new new work at that. Chachi Jones played a super nice set after Ukulele Apocalypse did their thing. I didn’t get a chance to see much of their performace, I was manning the stations during their set. It seemed like a cool idea… Ziggy Startdust.. cover band.. in drag… and full makeup … on ukuleles. It made for an interesting crowd

Anyway, I had a lot of people take a look at the 3d pixelator and say some nice things, so that was cool. I was running various other processing apps on the other machine, including some 4 hour old code that arguably needed a bit more time to bake before showing. So, now I have that. I’ll be going back to do it all over again on June 23, 2006, so look for photos here, or come on out if you can.

this is an illustration I’m working on for Dobox Recordings… hopefully they’ll use it. If not, I had a blast building this in <a href=”http://sketchup.com”>Sketch Up</a>.

More iterations here

Technorati Tags: cat, animation

boy, this is what I feel like lately..

Technorati Tags: gifraffiti

Sometimes I like to go do some fun things with my imagery in Second Life. I’d tried tiling my paintings over a 2×2 grid of 10 meter boxes all lined up perfectly to each other to create a 20×20 meter grid (4 boxes). It’s fairly easy to tile an image over this. Today I wanted to see if I could upsize that to 40×40 meter grid, or sixteen boxes. I think for various reasons, my math didn’t quite add up the way I thought it would in comparison to the uploaded images, so I ended up with a slight repeat at the top and right edges of my grid. I figured the easiest way to get around this is to build a frame around the grid.

Here’s a close up of the first painting in the 16 box grid. you can just make out the 2×2 1 meter box grid next to it on the right. The second photo is two paintings next to each other. In the upper left corner of the frame on the palm tree photo, you can see me sitting down. It’s fun to think about a painting this big you get right up on it and look up…. wow. it makes your virtual neck hurt.