"Dogs" exhibition opening in Leiden + new video / dvd

sound course + exhibition at the Royal Art College in The Hague

The rest of the month flew by, with me learning Audacity: a fantastic crossplatform open source sound editing programme, which you also control by programming or by moving knobs or sliders.

Have I raved enough about this yet? Have a listen: my Big Ben remix is made in this.
I also spent the month, gradually clearing out some boxes from our recent move, did a bit of freelance webwork for the HBB site and some reading for the Paragone courses on image + text and the contemporary festivals in Europe courses.

Birthday of the Bab and a walk in a forest

20th October
We drove two and half hours eastward to Ab's family home in a forest, where Toroa, Tama, Tahirih and I created a short mediation of music and slide projections in the living room.

This link has a little information about who the Bab was on a website that I will finish oneday.

And this link: What is a Bahai, is a short intro
(ook in het Nederlands).







Then some of us went for a walk in the forest and we took some photos of Toroa with his namesake, Ab. We used to see Ab a lot in the days we lived in a tiny summer house in rural Limburg.

16th October :: on gaming + augmented reality :: Amsterdam

On October 16th I attended a seminar titled Games as tools. The first lecture by Friedrich Kirschner (www.zeitbrand.de/) who showed his Moviesandbox application for modifying characters and setting inside the Unreal Tournament engine. It was the first time I'd seen a mod that I thought went a bit more than showing off the programmer's skills. In his case, he had developed something so non-programmers could use this. (see: moviesandbox.com)

Above: Friedrich Kirschner at the Cinekid Games as Tools Seminar. This image shows how he dipped objects in milk to make a 3D (displacement) scan. He has instructions for how you can use this Milkscanner application for use in 3D environments here.

The next speaker was Daniel van Gils who showed an interactive project he developed for the VPRO (Dutch public broadcasting corporation with a focus on culture + art) children's programme Villapark.
There's a review about this event on the University of Amsterdam Masters of Media blog. The seminar was the kick-off for the 4 day Games-in-crossmedia workshop.

I went to another lecture a day later, given by New Zealander Julian Oliver where he showed his augmented reality box, Levelhead. Basically: a webcam interpretes patterns on a face of a cube and c++ converts these into a 3D image of a rooms, doorways and stairs which a figure can move about in. You navigate the figure's walking movement by moving the cube in front of the webcam.

festival link of the week: Cinekid annual festival in Amsterdam of interactive installations, films, lectures, etc: