I’ve been working on videos as usual, but I’ve taken a little break these past few days to do some writing. One portion of that was writing about the making of one of my fave pieces: http://art.sarahghp.com/making-01-02-21/
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Still mostly music, more synth programming than writing/recording right now, plus the livestream project and some old friends from one of the bands I was in back in the 00s tracked me down to try to get a sort of tape-trade style project going, so that’s another thing.
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We started finally putting together the meta list of documentation we’ve been working towards for a while now.
push on the patch book some more next and then a FAQ section
also playing with hydra a lot lately this hacky edge detection will be the basis for a couple fun things moving forward
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Just got the proof for Coaxial’s 6th anniversary book (which I designed) from the printer yesterday.
The book will be out by the end of March and they have a series of events (virtual and drive-in) all month long celebrating the anniversary.
Update: available now from Coaxial.
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@sean looks great! I’m actually working on my set for the 6th anniversary show curated by Vidicon. (I finally became a member of Coaxial… if any of you folk can afford to support Coaxial with a membership, please do!)
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(yesterday this thing came out, and the more I look at it, and the more I think about how it works, the more it makes me laugh. don’t ask me)
Recently we’ve been creating a videoclip (our first commission! done, still unreleased) + a short clip for a Women’s day livestreaming powered by the feminist VJ collective we’re part of + a little contribution to an “art competition” promoted by the Dutch musician Legowelt. We’ve played a lot with video feedback since we got a camcorder. We keep making live visuals over DJ sets and streaming the whole thing twice a week.
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i’ve been meaning to post an update in here. i’m always doing a bunch of different things.
recently i finished a piece called Magnetic Field Recordings, which combines images of water and cityscapes with images and sound of XY oscilloscope synthesis. here are some stills from that piece:
i used footage that i shot over the span of years, in central asia, brooklyn, chicago, and upstate new york. i am happy with how the visual aspects came out, but i’m actually more excited by how the sound came out, as it’s been a recent goal of mine to push my sound practice more. the sound combines the audio component from the XY synthesis with material that i captured from recording radio signals, which are then processed with spatial and granular synthesis software. my goal for parts of the piece was to convey a feel of “scanning” the electromagnetic environment with a directional antenna. i feel that the sound brings a lot to the piece in the way of creating a feeling of its specific space, which is a hybrid between electronic space and the natural environment. i had the idea for an audiovisual EP called “electromagnetic earth,” and this piece seems to fall within that. i don’t know yet what the final format will be, whether it will be a physical release or what. i guess i just need to see what happens.
some people might be interested in the tools and instruments that i used… for the footage i used a sony hd camcorder, and for the XY synthesis i combined phosphorm, oscilloscope graphic artist, and some utility modules in my eurorack to combine them. for the radio recordings i used a portable shortwave radio and the soma ether which is a wide band receiver. and for the software audio processing i used reaper, grm tools, and melda production suite. also i edited the video in premiere.
this piece is going to be streamed for an event tomorrow (saturday march 13) on currents.fm, along with other a/v works in a room curated by testu collective. the testu collective room is streaming from 6-9pm EST, and my piece will be shown just before 7pm. here is a link to the event: Currents Alpha
meanwhile, i’ve been playing around with some new electronic audio instruments in my spare time, and having a lot of fun. i enjoy using software to work with sound, but in the evening when i don’t want to look at the computer any more, it’s nice to be able to jam and record to cassette tape. i am going to be playing a very small show on sunday here in brooklyn, and for the first time in a while, i’ll be focusing more on performing live sound, and letting the visuals play themselves more autonomously (usually i focus more on performing the video). i also convinced people that we should have an improvisational group a/v jam session at the end of the show, so that should be chaotic and fun.
i’m not sure if anyone who would see this will be nearby, but here is the poster for that small show on sunday, which i also designed…
other than that… well, there’s a global pandemic, i’m doing all right but feeling a bit isolated. i really appreciate online communities like this one, but i’m really looking forward to being able to do things in person again with people IRL. and to be able to travel again. i hope everyone on here is doing all right too!
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Tried and failed this evening to fix a) a weird video enhancer thing I got which looks like it was built (badly) from a kit and b) my gieskes schele mixer. Both looked like they just needed a few joints reflowing, but that didn’t help 
Turned a block of RCA sockets ripped from an old DVD player into a mult just to feel like i’d actually achieved anything
Tried out the cheap CCTV splitscreen box I got ages ago and never used, will be amazing for fractal feedback once I solder up some neat, short patch cables/splitters instead of this horrible ratsnest of adaptors and scavenged phono leads 
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It’s spring cleaning time! I’m cleaning my desk of doom and despair, which involves transferring a mess to the nearest available surface (my bed!). My audio gear always winds up dominating, but I need to find more space to work on a microcontroller project and a VHS deck. I’m also trying to figure out how to mount an overhead webcam to do some demonstration videos, but it’ll probably just wind up being a boom mic stand poking out clumsily. I give myself a week before it’s just a tangled mountain of shit again
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Finally some first steps toward making the self-contained rescanning/vectorscope rig. The plan for now is to follow the simple Lofi Future conversion plan but house the line amps with the CRT (and hopefully power them from the same supply), but also include switches to select external or internal X and Y sources, so it can still be used as a stock CRT (or some weird hybrid where one axis is being driven by an external source and the other isn’t). Mount it all on a board, heat bend some scrap lucite into a protective lid to keep dust out and fatal voltages in, and make a removable hood and rail for mounting a camera and keeping out stray light and reflections for rescanning. I think the total cost should come in around $35 (mini TV set and line amps; everything else is salvage).
EDIT: I’ll probably move the composite input on the back and the picture controls on the side to some kind of off-board panel at some point.
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It’s hard to argue with spring weather. Doing battle against the ceaseless forces of crippling depression, I’m finally made it out to my garage again. Project #1 is to organize my various messes and make things workable again. In the before times, I used to have another table out here and run monthly “electronics days” for my friends. That’s cancelled for the foreseeable future, but as people get vaccinated I wanna start sharing my space with a friend or two at a time.
Random WIP I found while cleaning up: A C64 in perma-repair; an Archer Video Enhancer on a breadboard; a bunch of 40106 oscillators halfassedly wired to VGA test board; many synth diy things in various states of adaptation for 5U; A pile of LCDs out of various crap that I bought the wrong LVDS adaptor for; A shortwave coax loop antenna I need to rebuild. Certainly more shit I was breadboarding that I haven’t found yet
Here’s a video of the VGA thing I was working on A YEAR AGO, APPARENTLY
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curious what you use the antenna for, do you listen to shortwave radio?
Yeah! I like getting international broadcast stations, mostly from Asian countries and Cuba lately. I also like capturing numbers stations/utility stations/generally weird noises for music. Since I live in a noisy metro area, it’s always kind of a crapshoot. Passive loop antennas with a lot of AM broadcast filtering seem to do the best for me here. My current antenna is just a wire loop taped to a wall. I use an Airspy HF+ SDR, which makes some of the digital modes easier to decode too.
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awesome ! i love surfing the waves as well 
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Currently going through a TON of stuff that i’ve done for live sets/music videos/whatever, grabbing screencaps, and doing a limited run of a ‘photobook’
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Someone said “be the change you want to see” and I want to see the Internet go back to looking like this.
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Not really a huge change but I’ve got the frame for the CRT mostly done (it would be a lot faster if I weren’t using hand tools for everything but the drilling), and temporarily mounted it on some scrap so once I have money for the parts I can start modding it.
Also adjusted the focus, which was set really soft from the factory. The line between too soft and nasty vertical banding is absurd on this thing, but I think I got it to a point where it looks good on everything but solid colors, where there’s still a bit of banding.
The nice thing about it is as tiny and cheap a TV as it was, it has a flat crt! Also, there’s not much info on this model but what I did see online was people complaining that it had about a 20% overscan set from the factory, but this one seems OK. So that’s good.
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Quick rescan test. No light control or anything, just a 15 year old DSLR on a stack of books.
3trinsRGB+1c → spectral_mesh → auto_waaave → Sony FXE100 (color adjustments only) → CRT
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Really awesome. I found a FXE-100 locally I’ll probably be picking up this weekend, so any ideas on how to best use it would be helpful. Pretty crazy that it can control 3 VHS recorders simultaneously, I think I’ll mostly be doing mixing/fx/feedback to Start.
Also, what is your impression of spectral mesh? I’ve been reading up a lot on the vector rescanning Facebook page but don’t really want to get an oscilloscope. Is it really performable with the nanokontrol 2?
Also curious how you’re creating the sense of depth or room shape in this one?
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I’ve never once used the editing side of the XE-100. I really like the keyer, the overall ergonomics of it, and the way the monitor out works - that’s basically one of my main feedback outputs in my whole setup, and I can use the monitor select buttons to feed back from different points in the FXE-100’s signal path.
If you put it in luma key mode it’s usually pretty easy to dial the high and low clip knobs to get it so that source B kind of traces a thin line along edges in source A.
As far as hints, if you go into the setup menu you can set the range of the color correct joystick, so you’ll want to make sure that’s up all the way.
I got the 3d effect kind of by accident. I’ve been feeding patterns frm the 3trins through spectal_mesh a lot for a month or two, but this time I rotated in in Spectral Mesh (which gave me the floor part of the cube) and then in auto_waave I keyed out the black background and set the Z transform so that the feedback made trails climb up from the edges. So the floor part is the output of spectral_mesh and the walls are feedback inside auto_waaave.
Ordered some of the TDA2030A amp boards recommended on the LoFi Future site, so I should have it set up to do vector stuff in a week or two. You get 5 or 6 boards for $12 which is nice since I’m hoping to draw power for them from the TV set main board, but its wall wart is 13.5v and the amps are rated for 9-12v. I’m guessing it’s probably regulated down to 12v on the main board somewhere and if it’s not it will probably still be OK to run the amps a little hot, but it’s nice to know I have spares so if I burn them up and have to build a little board to supply them I won’t have to wait for more to show up.
I find Andrei’s stuff is all really well thought out. I don’t really use spectral mesh for the mesh modes that much though, as it turns out - I mostly use it for distorting and resizing/moving incoming video signals, especially in a feedback loop. Most of the time all I really touch is the displace, global X/Y and zoom controls.
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