Niek Hilkmann, Trimester 1, 2012

Prototyping

So Far, So Good

I will try not to waste words on idle chitchat. I believe this talk should be mainly about our prototyping lessons and how I experienced these in relation to myself and the rest of the seminar, in particular Richard Wright’s lectures. Let me start with pointing out that one of my basic motivations for joining the institute was that I did no longer want to simply perform music on a conventional music stage and produce a record every once in a while. The reason for this is that life is short, I have too much to tell and I do not seem to get my point across. So I was in search of new ways to convey my stories to an audience, through different means and in new places. Both coding and film seemed interesting places to look for this. As far as the coding part goes this ended up in the Yoshimi! HTML 5.0 Remix Experience. This is the first HTML page I ever built and it consists of a certain amount of music players playing randomly up to a certain point and resetting themselves to another certain point, thus creating some sort of randomly generated remixes of my own songs. I could try to defend this outing by relating it to the way music is currently mediated through the web and how listeners are practically able to play scrabble with soundbites. We certainly discussed texts that could generate excellent feedback on this. However, this is not what I want do right now. The longer I partook in the coding lessons the more obvious it became to me that I am not really a coder and I lack the discipline and patience for this role. When I say role I mean this in the most litteral sense; coding for me would involve some sort of role-playing and doesn’t feel natural at all. Talking about this project in the vein proposed above produces the same effect. This feeling has creeped up on me more than once during the last couple of months. Besides learning how to code I have partaken in literary conventions, started following lessons in algorithmic composition, joined three bands, thought up three other (even an orchestra), began making a documentary and | traveled without any particular reason or goal. In the end, I decided there is only one outcome to this slight identity crisis. In the next trimester I want to stop thinking about what CAN be done, for I have done this long enough. Instead I will focus on what I WANT to tell. This means no more self-generating HTML or other interactive database-projects, but storytelling with a clear emphasis on narrative. I will stop trying to make the lost visible in an abstract way and producing an object through that, like in these two attempts: Appetite For Destruction & Schatjes . I will become a storyteller.

Media

Yoshimi! HTML 5.0 Remix Experience

Additional Info

Prototyping Page
The site where the Yoshimi! HTML 5.0 Remix Experience will be posted on 12-12-2012 at 12:12

Thematic Seminar

Text

At the beginning of this week, during the assessment for the Prototyping classes to be more precise, I talked a little about my work at Piet Zwart up to now in relation to Richard Wright's lectures. His classes where presented under the name 'How To Get From Zero To One' and even though I missed the last two meetings to participate in the CD-ROM Hackaton at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, I can't help but wondering what the answer could be. This is, of course, because time is a very confusing matter and so essential for everything we've been up to during the last couple of months. I am personally pretty much obsessed with time, but only as a sort of indicator for decay and loss. It was nice to think a little bit further up in the realm of rhythm for a change, however I feel that the work I produced during thematic project was not as inspired as I would have liked it to be. Each time I felt a little stressed to produce something in line with what we talked about during the last days of seminar and I wasn't able to integrate that in a very interesting way. For instance, during the first week I produced a continuous drawing of the shade that a fence was casting on the street. I refrain from reproducing the result. However, I did make this quite literal incarnation of the sense of loss described by Richard in relation to film only providing 24 frames a second. Here you see what happens when one does this with audio. I also tried to reproduce this sense of time in objects such as my own Cd's and tapes laid bare to several instances of decay. The second week I tried to make a closed circuit with the use of a victorian oscillator, speakers and alligator clips. This was in concordance with the concept of a chain reaction and was nice to do, but it did not manage to produce anything besides itself. The third week I didn't even produce an item but instead traveled the entire Rotterdam subway route without particular meaning or thought. Just to see what would happen if I became this traveller in search of the rhythm of the city such as Richard was looking for. All in all, I think we discussed some interesting topics, but this has not yet found it's way into my own line of work.

Media

Week 1: MOVEMENT – MIMESIS - LABOUR

Schatjes
Appetite For Destruction

Week 2: CHAIN REACTION – A MACHINERY FOR NARRATIVE

Some sort of closed circuit

Week 3: RHYTHMANALYSIS

Traveling the subway

Additional Info

Thematic Seminar Page For Richard Wright
Another confusing trip

Self Directed Research

Keeping yourself busy

I joined Ben Fino-Radin's two-day CD-ROM Hackaton at the Van Abbe Museum during the 'Collecting And Presenting Born-Digital Art' conference. I also enrolled as a guest-student at the Leiden University so as to be able to follow lectures at the Royal Conservatory in subjects such as 'Sound And Space', 'Algorithmic Composition' and 'Psycho-Acoustics'.