Consumed!

What a couple of weeks!

I've had the opportunity to attend or speak at three different events in the last two weeks. It started off with a performance by Noisefold (David Stout and Cory Metcalf) at the Gates Planetarium (at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science). Fantastic waves of sound, beautiful transitions and eye-popping graphics. It was really good to see a live cinema show that showed taste as well as technology. These guys kick it out...

A few days later, it was the CommuniKey Festival of Digital Arts and Electronic Music in Boulder. I did an introduction of Max for Live that was really well received, and got a chance to sit in on a few other people's work. The weekend was messed up by the incredible storms we had: 48" at my house (in the mountains). I couldn't get home that evening, so I stayed with Mike Metlay - who promptly wired me up for a WonderVU live performance on stillstream.com. This was one of our best sessions yet, and I hope to make the performance available for download Real Soon Now.

After spending the next few days digging out the family, I buzzed out to San Francisco for Cycling '74's Expo74. This was simply an overwhelming experience. 120 people all buzzing with Max-Love, and I got to do the second presentation of the first day. This introduced me to a lot of people, and made for a very social interaction with people. I also got a really nice reintroduction to Jitter shaders by Mr. Shader (Andrew Benson), and saw a ton of amazing work by other Max users. Also, during the Science Fair portion, I ended up getting sucked into the job of helping to show off Jeff Snyder's Manta device. I'll tell you what I told them - it is simply the best control device I've ever used as an instrument. It doesn't require active touches (like a Monome), but still has enought texture to be instrument-like (unlike, say, a Lemur). Brad Garton was showing off his Eddie Van Halen-like Manta/Max combo, while I did my little autoharp emulation. Eddie vs. Melonie - guess who won.

I'm exhausted, and anxious to get back to the mountains so my boys can jump on my chest for a while. But I'm buzzing with energy right now.

[ddg]