nicer… less painterly.
A few people and myself felt that there needed to be obvious computer involvement, the other piccy looked way too human-made.

Another post, another (re)launch…

With a strange feeling of positive disbelief I’m happy to finally reveal now some of the fruits of one of my most intense labours (of love nonetheless) of the past couple of years: Yesterday Stanza officially re-launched the Soundtoys website which has undergone a complete rebuilt during nightshifts and the wee morning hours over the past 10 months and now hopefully is more present-and-future-proof than any previous iteration. So firstly major thanks to Stanza and Gill (for patience, trust and making it all happen in the first place) and all other people involved…

The brief for the new site was simple enough: Provide a mechanism for commissioned artists to produce alternative ways to navigate, browse and experience the site, which is more suitable and closer to the heart and essence of the Soundtoys collection, yet open to be extended. This was early February of last year. I was starting to really enjoy my High induced by having used del.icio.us for almost half year and having just spent a few months researching and hacking on some Semantic Web related tech. There it was, the chance to work with a unique database of content waiting to be re-utilized. Wild ideas were spinning around my head: Social networks of artists, visualization ideas, interfaces becoming audio visual pieces of art themselves, browsing the current approx. 300 artworks conceptual, or by platform, location, media type, shifting contexts, clean URIs, RSS feeds, tagging, content aggregation & syndication - the full Web2.005 monty!

However, in order to provide maximum flexibility for extending the database in future, a lot of thought went into the structural planning of the new site. My original plan was to employ a RDF storage instead of a classic relational database. RDF keeps on getting a lot of bad mouthing from various people, yet after having followed the discussion for the past 2 years I am more and more feeling comfortable in thinking its simplicity and benefits are widely misunderstood outside the RDF fan club, IMHO wrongly so. RDF is encoding knowledge (data relationships) rather than pure (hierarchical/tree) data as XML does. Yet, like any other technology, in order to successfully work with RDF and flesh out an initial “design” for a data store one also requires a set of swiss-army-knife-like tools and frame of mind, none of which I had quite available when I embarked on this project. On top of that there still is a substantially bigger amount of such tools available for working with XML (plus the format is socially more acceptable, at least amongst non-techie artists). So I soon felt the immediate benefits outweigh RDF’s superior longterm flexibility and decided to go with a standard PHP5+MySQL approach using my own framework and XML as pivot point of the entire site by exposing the majority of the database via an XML API, documented here. (One year on the situation might already have looked different)…

Almost all pages on the new site are created by transforming the API data via XSLT into various target formats (currently only XHTML, JavaScript and Atom for feeds). Every artist, every soundtoy, news item, journal entry or tag has its own unique and easy to remember URI which is mapped to its respective record(s) in the database:

soundtoys.net/api/artists/toxi (API) » soundtoys.net/artists/toxi (XHTML) » soundtoys.net/feeds/artists/toxi (Atom)

This API is now open for everyone to use and we encourage you to play around with the available data. If you have special requests for certain types of data you want adding we’ll try to accomodate those too (provided it’s justified, manageable and not too labour intense). Stanza is even offering hard ca$h for two upcoming commissions, so hurry to get your proposals in pronto!

Ever since I started using del.icio.us I’ve also been addicted to data feeds to at least make an attempt (and give me the illusion) of staying on top of interesting things/sites and people (and their interests), the logical progression to subscribing to endless email newsletters. I think it’s still safe to say we all collectively haven’t fully understood the potential and use case scenarios of data feeds, but it sure had to be a feature of the new Soundtoys site too (and as that not just for copy-cat purposes!). So currently you can subscribe to all news and artists, with tags and web links coming soon. You can even subscribe to the entire artist section via the blogroll (OPML formatted) of all available artist feeds, careful though, there’re quite a few (260+)!

Speaking of tags, these have become the other main improvement and are used as driving force to re-arrange the collection thematically as well as being the required machanism to browse context sensitive or allow us to add new bits of metadata to content in future (e.g. adding geo or exhibition tags). FWIW tags on Soundtoys are NOT a wide folksonomy (just like on Flickr, only the author can set them [so far]). However, tags can be combined in different ways to narrow or broaden the current context (explained on site).

Altogether it was a fantastic project to learn a vast amount of new skills, technologies, metaphors and standards, some of which have directly to do with my previous posts about code re-use and which I’m still continuing to expound on (more quietly this time in the background…

Enjoy the show!

got a “show” coming up and wanted to create a new look… something more painterly… less computery.

I reckon this is about as far away from Unreal as you can get (not that i hate unreal or anything, i love it!)

this is pretty much just the same old code, with some 3D’y drawing stuff… simple (a little too simple), but effective none the less!

As some of you already know, I’m exhibiting some pieces at EvoMUSART, the 4th European Workshop on Evolutionary Music and Art.

 I checked out the website today, and they’ve updated with a list of the papers that will be presented. It sounds like pretty fascinating stuff. Here’s a short list… go and check out the site for the full scoop:

• Continuous-Time Recurrent Neural Networks for Generative and Interactive Musical Performance 
• Supervised genetic search for parameter selection in painterly rendering 
• Robot Paintings Evolved using Simulated Robots 
• MovieGene: Evolutionary Video Production based on Genetic Algorithms and Cinematic Properties
  

I’ve recently developped a tag system for www.ekosystem.org, a friend’s website which deals with street-art/graffiti scene. Browsing of the database was largely improved, it’s now possible to navigate thanks to a page system. The site has been living online for about 6 years now and is daily updated with fresh and colorful photos sent from various places around the world.
Here is a small selection of mixed artists appearing on the above screenshot (top-left to bottom-right) : La mano / Barcelona (Spain), Captain Rouget / Agen (France), Pez / Barcelona, Jace, Eko and Phil Poule, Miss Van / Toulouse (France) and Supakitch.

I’ve recently developped a tag system for www.ekosystem.org, a friend’s website which deals with street-art/graffiti scene. Browsing of the database was largely improved, it’s now possible to navigate thanks to a page system. The site has been living online for about 6 years now and is daily updated with fresh and colorful photos sent from various places around the world.
Here is a small selection of mixed artists appearing on the above screenshot (top-left to bottom-right) : La mano / Barcelona (Spain), Captain Rouget / Agen (France), Pez / Barcelona, Jace, Eko and Phil Poule, Miss Van / Toulouse (France) and Supakitch.

Screenshot of a real-time generated tree, whose growth is audio controlled and constrained to a sphere.
This animation was created as a plugin for Vision Factory. The tree structure and rendering were developped by Mike, while I focused on writing the sound-analysis stuff. It was time for big improvements too in the root of the application itself, I added a mechanism that allows to give a c++ class some UI editable properties. This feature is very useful for example for live tweaking scene parameters which are coupled to an user interface.
This project was developped in collaboration with Hudson-Powell studio. 3D models were intended to be exported, then redesigned with 3D/2D software packages to be finally printed on booklets for a London-based company.

Video link

Screenshot of a real-time generated tree, whose growth is audio controlled and constrained to a sphere.
This animation was created as a plugin for Vision Factory. The tree structure and rendering were developped by Mike, while I focused on writing the sound-analysis stuff. It was time for big improvements too in the root of the application itself, I added a mechanism that allows to give a c++ class some UI editable properties. This feature is very useful for example for live tweaking scene parameters which are coupled to an user interface.
This project was developped in collaboration with Hudson-Powell studio. 3D models were intended to be exported, then redesigned with 3D/2D software packages to be finally printed on booklets for a London-based company.

Video link

This is specially targeted at the people at processingblogs:

Herraizsoto, the interactive agency I work for, is seeking for an interactive supersamurai, with proven experience in everything from mobile to physical computing, installation art to that which is to be named. He (or she) will take charge of the R&D department.

Here is the job oportunity:

wanted

Head of R+D
Someone passionate about new technologies, art and communication, capable of investigating, creating and coordinating installations, mobile applications, new web applications, or even something that nobody knows exists yet.

Several years of proven experience in programming Java (processing-flavored or not), Flash and other languages
Experience in other technologies such as mobiles, installations (computer vision tools, MaxMSP), electronics, etc.
Previous experience in an interactive advertising agency is desirable but not essential.
You will be working alongside a multidisciplinary team.
You will be reporting to the executive creative director of the agency.
Good working knowledge of English is essential. The agency will not be responsible for finding accommodation but may be able to offer assistance.

Timescale: urgent but not desperate!

We are based in a nice office with nice people in the sunny beautiful barcelona… so if you feel like coming or you want to know more, send an email to wanted { at } herraizsoto.com with your work and they’ll consider your profile.

Also if you want, you can drop me a line to jesus {_at_} jesusgollonet.com and I’ll be glad to help you.