Hey Kids,
It has been a million years since my last post here. Back then I was finishing the last elements of my thesis, my final presentation to be exact.
I’m happy to say I graduated with big honours! Kickass! Awesome!

Since then, a lot of stuff has happened, but informing you about that is not the point of this post. I wanted to show you the last little thing I did with some mates and students from my (now old) school. Sometime ago I was part of a special workshop at Kunstencentrum België (Hasselt) about circuit-bending led by Jethro and Micha Volders.

We (Wout Standaert, Danny Leen, Tom Luyten, Peter Briers, Ruud Denivel, Olivier Berger and me) were given the task to develop some visuals for the The Vermin Twins show at the end of the workshop.

We used the little-scale tutorial on VGA hacking to generate super-glitchy super-realtime-visuals with an Arduino based on the live audio from the gig that was played in the evening.

It was great fun, a cool project and awesome people to work with. You can read more about it on Wout’s or Micha’s Blogs Also, check out the video Olivier made, it’s attached below.

Love,
Jim

Hey Kids!
So, how have you been, you ask? Well, unknown yet beloved reader – I’ve been better. I have just lost the favourite part of my life. Friends tell me that "sometimes things just end", and that you can’t do anything about that. Well, sometimes things just downright SUCK BALLS, and you wish they where different, but they are not. Stuff is as beautifull as it can be hard sometimes, and that’s true too. And it’s one of the hardest things I know.

I feel like I’m living in a bubble these days – and I am – this is one of the first days I actually came out of my room. It’s a bright sunny day, and I feel strangely disconnected from it all. Music keeps me sane these days. "The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place" by Explosions In The Sky and "As If to Nothing" by Craig Armstrong are playing right now on my iPod. Also, the first album by Burial. Can’t wait for the third one to come out. Not the most fitting music for one of the first sunny days of the year, but bright sunny days are not the kind of days that would fit my mood now anyway.

So – schoolwork then. The show must go on, right. That’s the only stuff i have to concentrate on now, so I better go make my thesis a succes. The last weeks – or months maybe – I was in a very non-productive mood. Partially because of this relationship-crap, but also because making this kind of thesis is very hard for me. I get crushed under the fear of fucking it all up, and I have a hard time dealing with it all – sometimes (or several times a day) I’m just convinced I will never make it – and that’s not the best mood to get work done. It’s a downward sprial sometimes.

But – I’ve been trying to get out of it. As long as i keep going i surely have to end up somewhere in the end. So the next post will be a big status update on my thesis ideas. Before i can get to that though – it seemed like a good plan to list all my other finished projects here. So brace yourselves for it – here they come.

Factory Instrument (Launch)

So – after building it an testing it, we had to go install this on location. It took us a while and the software written by some other group members wasn’t really up to the most stable level ever, but in the end it turned out good anyway. It was really nice, working on a real location, for real people and appearing in the newspaper with our project afterwards. This is one of my favourite projects I have done so far I think. The fact that Wout and me just picked out our craziest idea and started building it AND succeeded (at least as far as I’m concerned) made working in the darkness in an empty wet factory building until two o’ clock in the night all worth it. Also, we had Peter (my stepdad) to cover our back with his awesome "getting-it-done-and-not-despairing-skills". Yeah. It was good. The video is in Dutch, by the way, or at least some Limburgian variant of of it.
On with the show i say!

Noise Pong

Noise Pong is a project produced by Wout "Blobkat" Standaert and me. We continued on the "lets-try-something-that-seems-really-fun-and-get-it-done". Our teachers where all ok and supportive of our idea of a music game without a real purpose or aim. Noise Pong was inspired by awesome stuff like United Game Artists’ Rez and Toshio Iwai’s Electroplankton.
It is a tangible interface to make music with and it uses the reacTIVision framework, Processing (Visuals) and Ableton Live (Sound). What you see in the movie is actually what would be underneath the real table surface you are manipulating.
We plan to continue developing this thing if possible. And, if luck is on our side, we might get to do a performance with two of these tables at once.

Residual Self Image

DSC_0837
Sofie In Residual Self Image

One of two "Mirror Installations" I helped to develop in close succesion. This one captures the face of the person that is sitting in front of the mirror, and then projects it onto the next person who visits the installation.
This creates an eerie blend of two different faces, who eachother in the mirror.
This installation was created in a very short time for a workshop in "De Brakke Grond". This was another one of my more "real" projects, and it was a good experience.

Firefly

Photoshop Composition
Firefly Title Page

Firefly is a quick-and-dirty concept (not built – yet) for an interactive/immersive room.
It recreates a technologic version of the classic Will-O-The-Wisp stories of uncatchable lights that lure you deeper into the forest all the time.
It was meant to be able to be built easy, quick and cheap. And powered by Arduino. I hope to produce this one some day.

I Think I Broke Myself

This is the other "mirror" installation piece. It’s is an interactive / immersive installation for one room.
The installation resembles a mirror and gives a poetic expression to an idea about yourself in relationship to your self image: When you get to close to it – it shatters.
This was a group project and it was made possible by using just one camera, a projector, Arduino and a tool called Isadora. Video above was shot and edited by Roger. This is an important project for me – especially in relationship to my thesis – but we’ll get back to that later.

So far, for now,
All my love to all of you
(and you know who you are)

X
Jim

A Blog, completely written in English! This will be quite a short post. Just to indicate what I’ve been upto lately. Lets pick up where I left of with the last post: the end of the schoolyear.

So I finished my internship at “CREW” & my studies at “C-MD Year Three” with success last June. After that I went on a trip with my girlfriend – we traveled all trough Europe by train. Sweating together in small spaces (25 Hour rides!) for one month with occasional periods of hunger, tiredness or severely sore feet is a good relationship test. We came out fine. It was awesome. Trains Rule!

After this trip I started working for CREW again. I made their new website-to-be. There’s no content in it now – but soon there will be. For the first time, I used Drupal as the framework for my backend. It turned out simple but good, I think. It was there in a minimal amount of time. I learned a lot from it. Also, it made me miss the end of summer. Bummer. Last Friday I also went to their HQ in Brussels to shoot a series of pictures which will hopefully become the base for a poster for their new production.

And now we’re here: the start of (if all goes well) my last year of “Communication and Multimedia-Design”. I’m still trying to wrap my head around my master thesis proposal, while at the same time figuring out solutions to problems posed in my current modules: “Public Space” and “myStory”. More about that later.

So that’s that.
Take Care Kids,
Jim