Summer Summer Summer Summer!

The weather's finally becoming more reliably agreeable and I'm in high spirits! Quit my job at The Price Center in order to take a Program Associate position at the Community Music Center of Boston. From what I gather, it'll be just like what I do at CCTV, except I'll be paid to be there. And I'll still have time to intern at CCTV on Fridays, and teach my Web Design class, which is such a joy! I'm excited.


(The whiteboard in my "classroom"... That's Professor Harlo to you!)

This new schedule is super accommodating, and will allow me to continue working on my "extra curriculars" without requiring me to wake up at 6 o'clock in the morning to travel to Newton. So, I'll have tons of time to work on upcoming projects...

What should those projects be, though? Share.tv has now wrapped for good (I'm logging and capturing the final episode as I type this...) and I want to move on to something more curated and controlled. Also, something with a shorter format that includes both audio and video. Finally, the one qualm I had with Share.tv was that I didn't get much of an opportunity to perform and showcase any of my own work. (Which is to be expected, being the producer/media manager/PR hypeman/booking agent/etc.) With that in mind, I've been working on a couple of things all in their nascent stages that I'll be pursuing over the coming warmer months...

1. A new TV show, obviously! I totally loved working on Share.tv, and I can't wait to do something again! This time, a lot less improvised noise and a lot more video, but hopefully, the new show will grant me the opportunity to work with some of the amazing people that came out in support of Share.tv. I'm open to suggestions. What do you all think?



2. Collage! I love collage. I do it all day everyday (mostly). I also have found a great library in processing that can address video and images through MIDI, and in testing it out, I have been able to actually paint images across the screen with my keyboard, using velocity or pitch to tweak certain parameters (alpha, size, x & y, mostly). So, the natural next step for me is to make performative musical collage— I've been wanting to make some video for some of the new tracks I've been working on for some time now, anyway.



3. Susan Eisenberg, a poet I've done work for in the past, is gearing up for an installation commissioned by Brandeis University. The installation commemorates the 30th anniversary of Eisenberg's seminal work of non-fiction, We'll Call You If We Need You, a testimony to women in the "trades" (electrical, construction, etc.) and the huge amount of BS they had to put up with in the 70's and 80's as lone women in the field. Anyhoos, she asked me to help with the sound design for that project, which is a huge honor. Let you know how that goes...



4. GRE's. Shit.

Yellow Drum Machine!

Last night, we did Share.tv episode 4 with Calliope Quartet, which was awesome. Ricardo, the percussionist, actually played his face: he kept rubbing a mic across his stubble to make these crackly noises. It was so cool!

Also, I finished my feature on the Yellow Drum Machine by Frits Lyneborg from letsmakerobots.com. It turned out pretty well, I think.



I'm currently uploading the full episode onto Blip.tv. Usually, uploading an hour-long vid to the internet is a pain in the ass because it takes so long. But now that I've got my Asus Eee PC (I named it Mylo), I can at least do that same task at the bar across the street from the station!

Cheers!

Skype interviews are kind of fun!

Dashed home on my temperamental moped this morning to do a phone interview with Frits L. from Let's Make Robots, a robotics guru from Denmark whose adorable little Yellow Drum Machine robot has been making the rounds on the interwebs. Yellow Drum Machine (YDM) is a tiny, Johnny 5-looking rover programmed to seek out sturdy standing surfaces, roll over to them, tap out a little beat on the surface, and sample and remix himself on the fly. If you haven't seen the vid of this little guy, you should check it out:



John, one of our audio guys on the Share.tv crew, pointed us to the video and I immediately contacted Frits for an interview. He was so good to oblige! We talked for awhile about the nuts and bolts of hobby robotics, then got into the more philosophical issues concerning the subtle differences that separate robots from coffee machines. I'll be editing this feature all week, and it should be part of next week's episode of Share.tv.

Stay tuned!