Friday, June 16, 2006
“If I had a scanner…” I’d scan in some of the sheets of paper I’ve filled with little scribbles of information about the glorified (multilayered?) slideshow I’ve been working on for next week’s gig. Sheets and sheets of covered with little numbers, not quite as obsessive as Adolf Wolfli of course, but lots of nutty equations; Amy tells me it is a good thing I have some background in mathematics.
Stella had to be at school early today so I had an early start too. Began it by putting the “final” touches on the poems and organizing all the material I want in the database. Burned a cd-rom (about 600mb) for Keh Siong, who came over to the office to discuss the project after lunch; we had a good meeting. What I want to do with this version of it is pretty basic; it’ll be, at least to start, an offline work. I’m taking care of the linear index part, basic design, and credits; he is apparently writing a java applet that will do the randomizing, which apparently is not too difficult as he is planning to write and test it all in the next week. I was interested to learn that java handles audio in its own way, so no need to have a media device open up to play sounds. One issue that did come up had to do with text formatting. The Malaysia poems have extensive formatting, some of which gets slightly “lost” when the text is transforms to ascii. Since the spacing and line break are not damaged too badly, it is not a major problem—the words just look different than they do in Word. I’ll be interested to see what the images and texts look like after being handled by the applet, and in general am really glad the thing seems to be finally getting off the ground.
Because I thought there would be a tech meeting today about the performance I had both laptops up in the office. Though the meeting was put off until Monday, it was good I had both computers while sorting through the images and figuring out what to do with them. To that end I made a list of each image and its contents (the number is down to 534 as a final tally), and began to figure out how many images each poem needs, etc. The number of images (presented for 5 seconds each) nearly perfectly coincides with the length of the soundtrack (45 minutes for the second set Malaysian poems), so what I’ve decided to do (at least for now) is project all of the images in the same order but in radically different sizes on adjacent screens. We’ll take a look at this idea on Monday. Meanwhile I’m about halfway through connecting each image to a poem. Once I finish doing this I will, over the weekend, rename the images (some for the second time) as numbers so as to get them in a reasonable sequence. It is an interesting exercise: some of the images correspond directly to the poems, but there are dozens of pictures that do not precisely fit in, so what I have to “read” the images in a non-literal way, and figure out a way to get them to (at least loosely) work thematically. This, along with doing some work to publicize Wednesday’s show—in addition to various other weekend activities— is going to keep me busy until Monday…
Stella had to be at school early today so I had an early start too. Began it by putting the “final” touches on the poems and organizing all the material I want in the database. Burned a cd-rom (about 600mb) for Keh Siong, who came over to the office to discuss the project after lunch; we had a good meeting. What I want to do with this version of it is pretty basic; it’ll be, at least to start, an offline work. I’m taking care of the linear index part, basic design, and credits; he is apparently writing a java applet that will do the randomizing, which apparently is not too difficult as he is planning to write and test it all in the next week. I was interested to learn that java handles audio in its own way, so no need to have a media device open up to play sounds. One issue that did come up had to do with text formatting. The Malaysia poems have extensive formatting, some of which gets slightly “lost” when the text is transforms to ascii. Since the spacing and line break are not damaged too badly, it is not a major problem—the words just look different than they do in Word. I’ll be interested to see what the images and texts look like after being handled by the applet, and in general am really glad the thing seems to be finally getting off the ground.
Because I thought there would be a tech meeting today about the performance I had both laptops up in the office. Though the meeting was put off until Monday, it was good I had both computers while sorting through the images and figuring out what to do with them. To that end I made a list of each image and its contents (the number is down to 534 as a final tally), and began to figure out how many images each poem needs, etc. The number of images (presented for 5 seconds each) nearly perfectly coincides with the length of the soundtrack (45 minutes for the second set Malaysian poems), so what I’ve decided to do (at least for now) is project all of the images in the same order but in radically different sizes on adjacent screens. We’ll take a look at this idea on Monday. Meanwhile I’m about halfway through connecting each image to a poem. Once I finish doing this I will, over the weekend, rename the images (some for the second time) as numbers so as to get them in a reasonable sequence. It is an interesting exercise: some of the images correspond directly to the poems, but there are dozens of pictures that do not precisely fit in, so what I have to “read” the images in a non-literal way, and figure out a way to get them to (at least loosely) work thematically. This, along with doing some work to publicize Wednesday’s show—in addition to various other weekend activities— is going to keep me busy until Monday…
# posted by chris funkhouser @ 6:48 AM 
