Truth Among The Cats

I was reading the description of a kickstarter project recently that sounds like it came straight out of one of the papers we read at the beginning of the semester that talked about using constraints to bolster creativity:

“This project came about as an experiment in filmmaking using restrictions as a driving force in the creative process.  The idea was to make a micro-budget project on the road using only the means available through the internet.  The actors, crew, and interior locations were all found on Craigslist and Airbnb.  The story had been talked about before but was mostly written in a bar in Berlin over a 3 day period.”

 

The project itself is pretty ridiculous (but kind of awesome). It’s a documentary following a former lolcat caption writer who traveled to Berlin to try to find the answers to life and the universe. Or, in their words: “This is a story of a man’s hopeless quest for truth among the cats.”

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/grandchildren/the-internet-0

 

 

Study about imitation and originality in art

A neuro-science approach to the problem. The results are not surprising. The study takes Rembrandt’s art, and modern viewers’ evaluations, as a case in point.

“The first thing the researchers discovered is that there was no detectable difference in the response of visual areas to Rembrandt and “school of Rembrandt” works of art.

The findings support the idea that when people make aesthetic judgements, they are subject to a variety of influences. Not all of these are immediately articulated. Indeed, some may be inaccessible to direct introspection but their presence might be revealed by brain imaging. It suggests that different regions of the brain interact together when a complex judgment is formed, rather than there being a single area of the brain that deals with aesthetic judgements.”

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/12/how-does-the-brain-perceive-art/

Interesting revelations about brainstorming

Brainstorming has always been considered as a creativity enhancing tactic by most . This link explains how this might not really be the case. (An extract from an interesting book about the topic).

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/01/30/120130fa_fact_lehrer

Some 8bit music

This is one of several experimental tracks I composed by sampling raw 8-bit sound from an old 1989 gameboy. there is a program called Little Sound DJ (flashed on a gameboy cartridge so limited by the gameboy UI capabilities..) which allows you to synthesize and customize waveforms and arrange them on a sequencer at a chosen tempo. I sampled 11 different melodic/rhythmic elements of up to 4 beats length, and exported it to Logic for editing/organizing and mixing. I chose to apply some effects (mainly delays and reverb) to make it less ‘mario’ sounding and maybe more appealing or communicative to some listeners. I highly privileged rhythm to other musical parameters as the bank of samples isn’t large (so the piece is very repetitive!) and the timbres inherently poor. The purpose of adding effects and focusing on rhythm and repeated patterns was to compose a piece that bridges chip music to some ‘higher level’ of modern electronic music (techno/electro/club…). That ‘bridging’ transition is also scaled to the chronological progression of the composition itself as the piece evolves from highly sparse/experimental to highly dense/defined with various moments of rhythmic tension and release, generally from one phase to another.

Souvenir of the beginning

I was cleanning my room and a just found it.