Image Retouching: A Critical Approach for Media Arts EducatorsI developed the following course unit on image tampering, retouching and manipulation for my Introduction to the Electronic Media Studio (EMS1) class at Carnegie Mellon. The semester course is intended for first-year students with little or no computer experience, and serves the purpose of introducing students to [...]

As an occasional emissary for new-media arts, I increasingly find myself pointing out how some of today’s most commonplace and widely-appreciated technologies were initially conceived and prototyped, years ago, by new-media artists. In some instances, we can pick out the unmistakable signature of a single person’s original artistic idea, released into the world decades ahead [...]

Below are some resources about the “Chinese Painting Village” phenomenon, such as Dafen or Wushipu in Shenzhen, which employ about 10,000 artists and produce more than 60% of the world’s oil paintings. The information below may be ‘of interest’ to arts educators and/or students, particularly those studying painting. I am grateful to Clement Valla for [...]

“When a violinist plays, which is incidental: the arm movement or the bow sound? Try arm movement only.” — Yoko Ono, ‘To the Wesleyan People’, 1966. [I'm grateful to Dawn Weleski for finding this quote].

The BBC orchestras have been getting an unusual and highly conceptual workout of late. I have been mulling over the contrast [...]

I’m grateful to Stewart Butterfield for making me aware of this quote by John Adams, which I here repost from his Sylloge blog, for the purposes of my own reference and safekeeping:
I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and [...]

Criteria for a Music School Head Search.
In early 2006, our School of Music was about to conduct a Head Search. Although my appointment at Carnegie Mellon University is in the School of Art, and not within the School of Music, I was nonetheless concerned for the outcome of the search, and so I drafted the [...]

/*
Processing (http://www.processing.org, v.1.0.1) Java program for
Approximating a circular arc with a cubic Bezier curve.
Reasonably accurate for angles up to a quarter-circle or so.
The solution is taken from this PDF by Richard DeVeneza:
http://www.tinaja.com/glib/bezcirc2.pdf
linked from this excellent site by Don Lancaster:
http://www.tinaja.com/cubic01.asp
Note: written for clarity; not optimized!
*/
 
void [...]

This afternoon, I created three tiny Processing programs to serve as educational tools for exploring different relationships between video and time: time-lapse recording, stop-motion animation, and slit-scan imaging. These programs were created for students in my new course, “Interactive Technologies for Live Performance”, which I’m teaching this spring in collaboration with Matt Gray from [...]