This year I was fortunate to have the opportunity to contribute to the performance schedule of ASU's conference about art, science, and the future. This is the second year that Emerge has happened at ASU, with the final night being a culminating festival of performance and art. In the Fall of 2012 I worked with a group of artists to put together a proposal for creating a performance in Neeb Plaza on ASU's campus. This courtyard that sits nestled between Neeb hall, the Art building, and Design houses a new student generated installation called X-Space each year. Looking to solicite the creation of new works, the Herberger institute put out a call for artists interested in organizing a performance that occurs in X-Space. Called X-Act, applicants were asked to consider hw they would use the space and engage the campus. Early in January my team found out that we our proposal, Commons, was selected. One of the stipulations of the grant was that we would have a showing during the final showcase of Emerge. With this news in mind, our team started the process of creating the installation we had proposed.

Last semester Boyd Branch offered a class called the Theatre of Science that was aimed at exploring how we represent science in various modes expression. Boyd especially wanted to call attention to the complexity of addressing issues about how todays research science might be applied in future consumable products. As a part of this process his class helped to craft two potential performance scenarios based on our discussion, readings, and findings. One of these was Neuro, the bar of the future. Take a cue from today's obsession with mixology (also called bartending), we aimed to imagine a future where the drinks your ordered weren't just booze filled fun-times, but something a little more insipidly inspiring. What if you could order a drink that made you a better person? What if you could order a drink that helped you erase your human frailties? Are you too greedy, have specialty cocktail of neuro-chemicals and vitamins to help make you generous. Too loving or giving, have something to toughen you up a little so you're not so easily taken advantage of.

Today I spent a chunk of the afternoon making GIFs at the ASU School of Art Festival. I really made about 31 GIFs ranging in size from 5 frames to early 20. All in all it was a great event, made even more fun by the act of making something fun and silly in the process. It's amazing to me how fun it is to make really simple and silly animation.

I can't get enough of these Delicious Max Tutorials. In today's episode Sam walks us through a little bit of exploratory play with matrices, mesh blending, and geometry.

This week I was gutsy, I did two MaxMSP tutorials. I know, brave. Sam's tutorials on YouTube continue to be a fascinating way to learn Max, as well as yielding some interesting projects. This second installment this week is about building a vocoder. The audio effect now common place is still incredibly rewarding, especially when running through a mic rather than using a recorded sample. There is a strange pleasure in getting to hear the immediate effects of this on your voice, which is further compounded by the ability to add multiple ksliders (keyboards) to the mix. Below is the tutorial I followed along with yesterday, and a resulting bit of fun that I had as a byproduct.

Another MaxMSP tutorial from dude837 today in the afternoon. Today I the step sequencer in the video below. This seems like slow going, and maybe a little strange since I keep jumping around in this set of tutorials. This is a rough ride.

Twenty six of my thirty one years have, in some way, involved performance: from community musicals where I performed along side my mother, to gravity-defying circus performance for the Christopher Reeves foundation. I have also worked purposefully to provide educational access for populations that have not traditionally been able to engage with the arts. In this respect it was my work for an educational outreach program in rural New Hampshire and Vermont that had a deeply resonant impact on my view of the power of arts in education. Over the course of a five year period working for Keene State College's Upward Bound Program I was a residential director, teacher, advisor, counselor, college-coach, and facilitator. As I transitioned to another position at Keene State my role changed from supporting potential students to supporting college faculty and staff. In my role as Rich Media Specialist for Keene State's Center for Engagement, Learning, and Teaching I worked as an instructional designer, blackboard administrator, media maker, researcher, and faculty collaborator. While working full time in higher education, I also continued to develop as a performer through an ongoing circus training regimen. In thinking about graduate school I saw that I had been shaped by those three distinct forces: performance based art, technology, and a passion for teaching. I came to ASU to create a life where those three forces might co-exist in a meaningful and transformative program of study. In fact, that's what I've found at ASU. In my first year I will have participated in, or contributed to (as performer, media creator, or system designer) eleven Phoenix-area productions while also having served as instructor or TA to over 350 students. My introduction to ASU has been, to say it mildly, a whirlwind of exposure to new ideas, methods, and opportunities to collaborate or participate. Especially interesting to me has been the opportunity to engage other artists in a critical dialogue about the impact, consequences, and outcomes of including digital media in live performance.

Programming is often about solving problems, sometimes problems that you didn't know that you actually had to deal with. This past week the Media Installations course that I'm taking spent some time discussion issues of synchronicity between computers for installations, especially in a situation where the latency of wired or wireless connections creates a problem. When 88 computers all need to be "listening" in order to know when to start playback, how can you solve that problem?

One of the effects that I've used in two productions now is where lines appear to draw-in over time in a video. This effect is fairly easy to generate in After Effects, and I wanted to take a quick moment to detail how it actually works.

One of the on-going semester projects that I've committed to is regular (read weekly) online MAX tutorials. I'm currently enrolled in a course that's focused on Media Installations, and while I have taken a semester of programming learning Processing I'm not proficient enough to rely on Processing for creating interactive programs. The Media Installations course has a heavy MAX component to it, but we don't have much direct instruction in class about how to actually using Cycling 74's software. Given this reality, I've leaning on the web to help me learn MAX.