The 30 day creative challenge.

Rebirth is still my favorite software synthesizer of all time. When it came out in the 1997 it was the first really spot-on modeled softsynth, using "circuit modeling" rather than actual sampling to create the sounds. It faithfully duplicated the sound and operation of the Roland TB303 bass line synth and the Roland TR808/TR909 rhythm boxes which were the trademark sounds of Acid and much coveted and hard to find devices. Propellerhead, the company that made it, went on to focus on Reason, a super cool, ever evolving virtual synth studio and Rebirth was retired in 2005, never able to work on OSX. Until they made it an iPhone app this past April!! This was the first app I bought when I got the iPhone last month and I'm really happy to have this software to play with again. It's a little tricky on the small screen but like all things Propellerhead, it's been redesigned in a way that is both smart and intuitive. This little track represents about an hour of noodling - I don't know that I'd call it a song but it's nice a tweaky and distorted. Richie Hawtin's not dead, he just smells funny. And check out that go-go swing!

JR Hexatone is an interesting iPhone music app developed by Admino and Jordan Rudess, the keyboard player from Dream Theater. It has an unusual programming interface ; I've really enjoying fooling around with for the last few days. It also has a controllable randomness function - you can make things very likely to occur, less likely to occur or never occur, which is a cool function for building in variations. This is just a collection of drum & bass-esque loops but maybe I'll find something to do with them later this week. Clicking on the image will take you to the files playable in MP3 format, plus a zipped collections of all files 44.1KHz/16bit Waves and MP3s if you want.

I took a picture of a pile of pine cones the other day. I used the phone app Mill Color to see if I could make it look like a cyanotype. Mill Color is a pretty cool free app by The Mill, a big tv and movie visual effects company .

I found an old Heinz Pickle whistle in a box of junk and put a 2GB flash drive inside. This is actually the third flash drive I've modified in a new case-- the other two you'll on my projects page.

There's a great site called Five Second Films [my favorite so far is this one which was tweeted yesterday by Scott McCloud -- watch it a few times to get the full genius -- it gets funnier every time I watch it.] Anyway, I thought I'd try a 5 second stop motion animation using my phone's camera. 183 stills sequenced in iMovie later, it was 7 seconds.
End of Week Two.

Context Free is a program that renders images from written instructions. There was an article about it in MAKE a while back and I started playing with it. I haven't done enough to get past the basics - I can make patterns that make shapes but I can't control it enough to, say, force it to make something specific, like a tree or a snowflake.

I first saw a hexaflexagon back when I was 10. I went to a Saturday "advanced" class every week, what would now be called "gifted" (though it's worth pointing out I was only gifted for two years in California - once I moved to Pennsylvania I was average again). One of the sections was a math class and one day the teacher showed us triflexagons and hexaflexagons. I've carried one page of a two page mimeographed instruction sheet around for 38 years, having only the first page that dealt with cutting the pieces, not the page dealing with the assembly. I never thought to look on the internet (duh) and today the Makeblog had an entry for a puzzle cube that linked to a bunch of pages on flexagons. Yay! There's an entire universe of these things, which is super cool to find after all these years. Anyway, I finally got the instructions to assemble one and made a little video showing how it works. The six faces are marked with symbols so you can see them when they come up. Click the photo to see it in action.

Well, I held off for nine days before falling back on sound. It seems sort of like a cheat since this is the medium I normally work in but I guess I make the rules here and nothing says it has to be a creative project outside of my yard. This is a remix of a track off the How To Destroy Angels EP. Tracked and mixed in Logic and using the iPhone apps Samplitude and Bloom for sound sources, the only elements from the actual song are the vocals and the [bitcrushed and step-filtered] guitar. Click the image to hear the file.

This is my tribute to Noah Scalin of Skull-a-day, who made a skull every day for a year. Great stuff and inspiring. [In a super odd bit of karma, when I just checked his site to get the url for the link in the last sentence, I discovered he started his year on June 4 and had in fact just proposed that today be Skull Appreciation Day. Weird.]

I started making cyanotypes (aka sun-prints) a couple years ago. It seemed like a good art project for my daughter and I to do together; I ended up really loving it and got serious enough to start coating my own paper. One of the the earliest forms of photography, it uses ferric ammonium citrate and potassium ferricyanide in a water solution to coat paper. This "film" is then exposed to ultraviolet light (typically the sun) which triggers the reaction. The process is magical and the deep Prussian blue images are beautiful and mysterious. There are other cyanotypes I've made here.

Early last summer I started a 100 Demons book, inspired by Lynda Barry's project of the same name. The idea is to create a work that contains representations of 100 demons that haunt you, with the hope they will be exorcized by the creation of the work. The first 20 or so were easy; I'm up to #42.