steve cooley presents

We had an awesome first music and performance night at our new space on first street! Here’s a video I made of the performances we had from, in order of appearance, Dajis, Polly Moller, and Kioku.

So much change has happened for Works/San José in the last year. Along with a new physical location for the gallery, we’re continuing to modernize with a new website.  Be sure to grab our RSS feed to plug into your RSS reader page or desktop app.

Joe Miller, amongst his other accolades, is a 20 year volunteer to Works/San José. He’s sent along some thoughts on what Works is, and why Works needs your help now.

Works/San José is truly your art and performance center. Works is the only arts organization in the South Bay where our community determines the content of exhibitions and performances. This open submissions process has made Works a welcoming art center where cross-cultural exhibitions, often featuring first-time exhibitors and curators, come naturally. Works is supportive of a broad spectrum of artists and artistic endeavors, with programs for kids in arts, teen assistants and advisors, curatorial workshops, and legal and technical workshops for advancement of artistic careers.

Thirty years of community art programming hasn’t just produced a calendar of exhibitions, events, and workshops. It has fostered a community around art—where long-time patrons, casual visitors, and members of our community with concerns altogether outside the arts, can come together to experience new ideas and meet the challenge of understanding one another through artistic means.

Help bring Works home to South First Street. Works needs your help now to recuperate $30,000 used to prepare the building for exhibitions. While much has been accomplished, gallery walls, office spaces, classroom equipment, and the artist-in-residence studio all await funding for completion.

As part of the annual Music and Arts Campaign, we are presently one-third of the way to $30,000 that is needed now to make up this funding shortfall. One of our two part-time employees has taken leave, and the other is working without pay to hold Works until we can make up this gap. Closing this gap now allows Works to retain the essential Gallery Coordinator position, and will help move the organization toward the future with your stable support. Please contribute $100 or more now, but any amount will help, and there are gifts and rewards for larger amounts.

This Friday Works opens eXact-O!—the first community curator exhibition in its new home. Please come from 7pm till late to be amazed by the art, and to show your support for challenging art and performance in San José. See you soon at Works!

to donate now:
http://www.workssanjose.org/musicarts.shtml

to become a member:
http://www.workssanjose.org/membership.shtml

Technorati Tags: art, san jose, San José, works, Works/San José, workssanjose

Technorati Tags: works, Works/San José, workssanjose

We have a spectacular show lined up for New Music Night, tomorrow (july 27th, 2007) at Works/San José!
7pm - Dajis
8pm - Polly Moller
9pm - Kioku

$5 at the door, $3 for students, No one turned away for lack of funds. Please come down and experience what Works/San José is bringing to your community!

Technorati Tags: dajis, kioku, polly moller, pollymoller, san jose, works, Works/San José, workssanjose

I’ve been pushing the iPhone through it’s paces all morning, and what I’ve noticed is that when I come back to my mac, I feel like I’m using a supercomputer. And it’s not because the phone feels crippled in any way, it’s because it just feels like a mac. Only when I come back and use my mac, I feel like I’m having the same experience as my iPhone, only a lot more of it. They feel like the same experience, only in different sizes.

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Holy crap!!

Technorati Tags: fine art, second life

New Kit! USBtinyISP, a USB AVR programmer:

Summer means tank-tops, air-conditioner installation and new kits!

This kit is something I’ve wanted for a while. Its an all-through-hole USB AVR programmer for under $20, with both 6 and 10 pin cables and a jumper for powering the target board from the USB hub’s 5V power. It can also be used with SpokePOV kits to upload images and configuration (finally!)

I’ve had a bunch out there in the wild for a few weeks so I’m feeling comfy with an official release.
Check out the deets at the USBtinyISP page

A simple open-source USB AVR programmer and SPI interface. It is low cost, easy to make, works great with avrdude, is AVRStudio-compatible and tested under Windows and MacOS X. Perfect for students and beginners, or as a backup programmer.

The project is based off of the USBtiny code & design. The main improvements are: adjusting the code to allow it to act as a SpokePOV interface, adding lowlevel bitbang commands, and addition of a “USB good” LED. Other changes are new VID/PID (to make it official), removing some of the commands, and moving around the pins a bit.

You can build this design using the schematic and firmware, or buy a kit from the Adafruit webshop. Having a full kit available solves the “chicken & egg” problem of purchasing or building a USB programmer that then needs a programmer of some sort to ‘kick start’. (See USBasp, AVRdoper, USBprog)

All the firmware code is distributed under the GPL, the hardware design layout files are CC 2.5 Attrib./Share-alike

Lada Ada has released her AVR programmer box! Sweet!

Technorati Tags: ladyada, avr

We wanted to let you all know about the Summer Solstice
Marathon on KZSU Stanford.

It starts tonight at Midnight(Thursday AM) and goes
till Thursday Midnight(Friday AM). It’s 24 hours of
non stop commercial free dance music brought to you by
DJ’s who could donate their time for the cause.

To tune in goto…

90.1FM or www.kzsu.org (click on beating heart)

iTunes users can go under the Public radio stations
and find KZSU.

Feel free to come down and hang out and say hi to
everyone. You can call us at the station anytime
during the marathon at 650.723.9010.

Starts Wednesday night Midnight(Thurs AM)

12:00am - 2:00am Christopher (el otro mundo)
2:00am - 3:30am Podge (simmer recordings)
3:30am - 5:00am Pablo Picasso (unidy)
5:00am - 6:30am Tamotsu (myspace.com/djtamotsu)
6:30am - 8:00am John Barnes (kzsu resident)
8:00am - 9:30am Derek Scott (dobox recordings)
9:30am - 11:00am Justin Hale (myspace.com/djjustinhale)
11:00am - 12:30pm JC (kzsu resident)
12:30pm - 2:00pm Paul Leath (el otro mundo)
2:00pm - 3:30pm Stevian (electronic generation)
3:30pm - 5:00pm Arturo Garces (organic)
5:00pm - 6:30pm Holt (kzsu resident)
6:30pm - 8:00pm Gabe Black (tangible recordings)
8:00pm - 10:00pm Bones (myspace.com/britishbones)
10:00pm - 12:00am Carlos (pangea)

We all hope that you can tune in!

Modern Device has a *really* sweet electronics kit for $15 that has most of the Arduino functionality at about half the price. What’s even better is that it’s about 1/3 smaller than the arduino board. Also, it now has 6 pulse width modulators due to it using an upgraded version of the microcontroller chip than the older one I had. What’s really fantastic is that this kit goes together really easily, and if you buy 10 of them, the price drops to $10 a piece… ! And it’s still an arduino! So the programming environment is cross platform and open source… just like the hardware!

So, you know me, I timelapsed me soldering it together.

Now, I’m almost completely lame at soldering, and it took me an hour to put together. If I had a bit more practice, I bet I could get that time down considerably.

Technorati Tags: arduino

ok, so… yeah, I have three pictures of me at Works/San José in the San Jose Mercury News, and a nice big photo of the piece I painted for the works member show in the Silicon Valley Metro… both hit the news stands within 3 days of each other.

San Jose mercury news, sunday june 3, 2007:

Silicon Valley Metro, may 30-june 5, 2007 (high res PDF)


woohoo!

Technorati Tags: San José, sanjose, stevecooley, works, Works/San José, workssanjose

I’ve barely had enough time after the spectacular Maker Faire to follow up on a request from Peter at CDM for more info on the screen I brought to the Chips + fish + music event in the city.

So, some history… Last year I got the crazy idea to build a projector from scratch, using an LCD screen and a 400 watt bulb. This isn’t really anything new or innovative, I used the tried and proven designs from Lumen Lab to achieve the results I had originally planned for. After the projector was built, I needed a screen to project onto. I’d already spent waaaay too much money on the project as a whole, so I needed a screen solution that would be:

• cheap cheap cheap to build
• easy to locate materials, or reuse stuff I already had
• free standing and structurally stable
• knock-down construction so I could assemble and disassemble it as my needs required.
• big when assembled
• compact when disassembled
• reusable for other purposes (more on this later)

So, with these goals in mind, here’s the solution I came up with:

materials and approximate costs:

• four “2×2″ studs, these are about 8 feet long, and cost about $2 each.
• four shelf brackets for the feet, 2 on each side. This cost can very widely, but maybe call it $4 each. This is even debatable.. you could just just whatever 90 degree brackets you have lying around. Or just run 2 or 3 screws into the bottom on the side legs into the feet and skip the brackets altogether. I ended up using two shelf brackets and two 90 degree steel brackets.
• length of PVC pipe. It’s cheap, easy to work with, and light.. sort of. - $8ish
• a little bit of hardboard for the u shaped holding things for the PVC - $free - $5 for a quarter sheet
• Various woodscrews, 8-32 machine screws, washers, and wingnuts, maybe $5 total in hardware
• a canvas tarp. I got mine from home depot along with the rest of the materials, and it has a nasty sewn seam across the middle of it. Not ideal, but again, I’d spent a bunch on everything else, so I decided I could live with a seam in my canvas screen. $10-ish
• finally, I used acrylic gesso on the tarp for two reasons. One is to fill the small gaps in the woven fabric, and two was to make the natural tan canvas closer to a white color. You could go completely bonkers on finding the right combination of primer, base coat, and reflective additives to cover your screen.. I just went with gesso. I had a bucket of it sitting right in my garage already. $optional

These construction details are more intended to be a guide than strict instructions. In fact the only major things I remember about the design decisions I made were that I’d have it be 6 feet tall, which would leave me a 2 foot long foot from an 8 foot tall 2″x2″ board. Also, I decided that I’d make the crossbar widths as big as I could to get the biggest 16:9 ration screen out of the 2×2x8 boards. So, if I have a 4 foot tall side from the top to the cross bar, that puts my width at like 7 feet 2 inches or something like that. Oh well. You get the idea. 16:9 good.

I had an extra length of PVC with a little room to spare, so I came up with the u shaped brackets to hold onto the PVC pipe off the back side of the top. It works really well, but you could probably achieve the same results with a couple of cloth straps looped and screwed into the top of the side pieces… in fact, I may end up changing it to that kind of system so that I don’t have to worry about the special shapes I cut out of hardboard breaking in transit to or from a gig. I just grabbed the edge of the tarp and screwed it into the PVC pipe with some short self tapping screws. Doesn’t have to be insanely secure, just enough to make sure it doesn’t rip apart and fall off the frame.

Lastly, I decided that I’d so with half-lap construction and use 8-32 bolts, washers, and wingnuts so that I could assemble and disassemble the frame easily and quickly. It’s all very cheap hardware, again, stuff I already had lying around. There’s very little on this design that’s “hardcoded” together, so it does break down to a small, if long, space.

Here are some more photos:

This is a detail photo of the foot construction:

Half lap joinery, at the crossbar:

8-32 bolts, big washers, and wingnuts on one of the top corners:

Here’s the canvas rolled up on the PVC and sitting in the u-shaped cradle brackets I made for this purpose:

Here it is, torn down and strapped together with some cloth straps I sewed together and used with some quick-disconnect clips. It’s leaning up against my garage door, so you may identify some of the door’s anatomical things in the photo…

and finally, here’s a rendered image of what it looks approximately like from the front when you have the screen extended to near the floor in “4:3-ish mode”… 16:9 mode can be achieved by only extending the canvas down to the crossbar.

And of course since I’m showing you 3d renders from Sketchup, you can grab the models from the 3d warehouse:
Exploded construction view and assembled view.

So far I’ve used the screen a lot at home in my garage, and taken it to a few gigs, and it’s done very well. Hopefully the design will inspire you to make a version to suit your needs. Let me know if you found this useful.

Technorati Tags: diy, LCD, make, maker faire 2007, makerfaire, makerfaire2007, projector, screen, sketchup, stevecooley

James asked me if I twitter, to which I said “no I don’t, not yet.” Now I do. I love the documentation page titled Make It Stop:Turning Off Text Message Notifications.

Twitter: Microblogging. With Optional OMGWTF Phone Bills.

You can tie in quicksilver to twitter for even-faster-status-updatey-goodness, too. Pretty cool!

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Oh boy. Time to start building some processing and quartz composer clips to crank out some interesting textures to import to Second Life for the new sculpted prim feature.

Technorati Tags: processing, processing.org, quartz composer, second life