Synthesis

Garrett, Connor, Pete, as well as Ozzie, Prashanth, Varsha: 

The iStage is waking up and growing more expressive exponentially thanks to a LOT of work by a very special crew of people.

As strongly as possible I am urging everyone here in or near the Synthesis core dev group  to fully learn and use the TML codebase rather than hack your own solutions for any particular “demo".  This learning, more than the particular installation, is the most valuable point of the TML+ Synthesis workshops.   ( This regards Synthesis research projects, not class or personal projects. )

For the core research projects — such as building ECM (experiential climate model kit) to stage iMonsoon using Ozone in iStage —  do not hack your own special case solutions.  Newbie media artists make too many special case demos that only work once.  We cannot beat MIT Media Lab at that game, nor will we gain any respect from our research colleagues doing that.

Now that you’re growing beyond your classroom training, a bit of advice for how researchers gain leverage in the real world:  Use prior generations' best works and give them credit.  Given the toolkits that are out there, it is powerful to think that any realtime audio-video instrument or effect that you imagine coding up probably already has been done before. Not only is there probably a patch that does what you want  already in the (extended) Ozone codebase or the wider world of OSC-enabled apps, but there is well-crafted ensemble of utilities that fit well together to achieve not only that function but also a whole spectrum of rich effects that fit in a rich way.

At least please come talk with me before you go down a path that takes more than a couple of days to complete, and I’ll let you know if your sin’s original as Tom Lehrer used to say.  If not, I’ll see if I can point you to the archive.  This is not a general offer, only specially for core dev folks, so please take advantage of this offer.  :)

Re. strategic learning (intellectual capacity building as Chris and I would say): for example, 

It would be great if Garrett could learn to exploit ambisonic spatialization code to create his own atmospheric movement.  (Is Mike K could be a source of knowledge about ambisonics? )   

And it would be great for Connor to learn to exploit Michael Fortin's particle systems by (1) driving them with radically different force fields e.g. from sound field, and from optical flow and (2) do some chemistry : interspecies reaction like combustion or epoxy phase changes dependent on  relative densities.  (Dehlia Hannah also had this idea of phase change.)

"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” — Isaac Newton (1676)

Looking forward to working with you!