vj krute

New rave and metric geometry

2007-10-10T12:59:00.000+01:00

I don't know. Algorithmic/3D-glitch art is the (old)new rave?

One favourite aspect of writing software and exploring new algorithms is the unexpected stuff showing up - sometimes beautiful but always very much reminding you that there is a bug somewhere in the program.
These particular ones come from a project where I use Alexandrov's theorem to produce D-Forms, a concept introduced by Tony Wills. Well.. the program isn't really finished yet, as one can see.

The LaRouche Youth movement

2007-07-24T19:09:00.001+01:00

There was a nice post with interesting links over at Cosmic Variance recently about the periodical appearance of the LaRouche Youth movement at universities, a movement that seems to have a particularly strong hold here in Germany. It reminded me about my confrontation with them last summer. Back then I didn't have any background information on the movement, so although all the warning bells of dealing with a sect (I was foolish, sorry, curious enough to give away my number and they'd call ten times a day) rang and kind of made it obvious that this was not to be taken to seriously, I wished I had some better counter arguments. Although, I'm not sure it would have mattered. Not only do they have deep crackpot insights in physics (they mention the LaRouche-Riemann(!) method), they also refuse to accept the impossibility of the doubling of the cube using compass and straight-edge. The photo was taken during an afternoon between two of their members and me in an argument about just this. I know I got pretty upset then, and it do raise some interesting questions about rationality. What to do if someone plainly refuses to acknowledge an argument? At some point I just left, and I still don't know what I could have done better. Having some info on the movement itself might have given me some arguments on a more human playing field that might have done the trick. So if you ever come across them (or more likely the other way around), take a read, and save some time by walking past them.
By the way LaRouche himself foretold the greatest economic crash since the thirties that should have happened last september, using some 3rd derivatives of some data he convieniently interpreted. By looking at the webpage I see that they seem to have forgotten about that small blunder now..

Some updates

2007-06-13T12:12:00.002+01:00

Here's what has happened lately. While stumbling around in a Kafkaesque* reality at the uni for weeks now, waiting for the paperwork of my supposed employment to go through, I've decided to take some days around weekends off, and allow me to start VJing again. Last month I took a flight back to Sweden, for Club Mezcla. (Oh, seems I forgot to blog about it.) I actually I didn't get any VJing done, since I was rather playing records at an last-minute-made dancefloor for six hours straight instead. But that was just as well, since the party turned out to be excellent. And to be honest, who needs visuals when the music is great anyway? Of course, happy dancing people attracts the police, and for sure, this time around they came too. Since my dear friends now are in court for doing something apparently (im not sure what) illegal, I won't write much here until its over, but its enough to say that they practically stormed the place, at 11am on Sunday, one hour after everyone had left and with absolutely zero complaints from neighbors or whoever could want to have called them. It is all very upsetting, I'm still upset and will have to write about it again, when all legal issues is cleared out.

Whatever.

Sitting on a roof, looking out over Berlin with friends / neighbors / room-mates on a warm summer night (although while blogging, it all temporarily escapes me), and not to forget: cocktails! (Pimms is Hammer) makes one forget rather easily. Tomorrow is friday, and there will be a car arriving with old friends from Sweden for the Midsummerparty. Please come! Moreover Dimitrios K is comin' along, so there might be a short Hotet in exile! I will be VJing two or three nights and made some new visuals that uses live video (oggpy + OSC + chuck...) that I still haven't hooked up in my OpenGL framwork (maybe tomorrow...). So I might alternate between my old 3d-generative stuff, and this new thing. There will be at least three dancefloors. Video from inside will be projected with a second projector on the outside, showing people dancing or whatever they are doing, through some beatmatched time-filter(?) directly sync'ed to Traktor or any other program that speaks MIDI clock. Everything is uploaded to the SNV repository, although it has some rather heavy dependencies (no os x video support yet...).

Lightning hits the sky, a short rainfall, and I decide sleeping on the roof will have to wait to another week after all.

Hopefully next post will be full of photos and maybe even a mixtape.

*
Me at the employee-office: So is everthing OK with the paperwork?
Woman: There is one paper missing!
Me: Still? Ok, what kind of paper? What should be in there?
Woman: I don't know
Me: What? Why didn't you tell me?
(silence)
Me: Well, I also don't know what to write in that paper.
(silence)
Woman: Nothing will happen until we have the paper here.
Me: Is there anyone I can ask?
Woman: Yes, but he is very busy.
Me: So... ehm. I will try again next week then.
(and so it goes... another week of doing.. .ehm arbeit am sonst)

Views from work

2007-05-07T15:20:00.000+01:00

Presentation of master's thesis

2007-05-06T11:17:00.000+01:00

I will do a presentation of my thesis tomorrow, tuesday. This is the first time I'm doing a presentation with a projector instead of a blackboard, so I'm spending most time dealing with the (very nice) beamer class for . Feel free to come by and have a listen! From the seminar page:

=== DFG Research Group "Polyhedral Surfaces" ===

Tuesday, 08.05.07, at 16:15 in MA 850

Kristoffer Josefsson (TU Berlin)

The four vertex theorem for polygons

Abstract:
We look at a discrete notion of curvature for polygons in the plane, inspired by the correspondence of curvature and the radius of osculating circles in the smooth case. A purely geometric proof shows that under mild extra conditions, every simple closed polygon has two local minima and two local maxima of its curvature function.

Web-page of the seminar:
http://www.math.tu-berlin.de/geometrie/ps/seminar.shtml

Expensive partying

2007-04-18T12:10:00.001+01:00

Instead of taking some time off during the weekends, the police in Berlin do their best to stop people from having fun, party and/or enjoy nature in outdoor activities in other than traditional ways. In what seems to be a kind of anti-freedom to roam principle, I've met dozens of police men/women disrupting some completely excellent parties. Although it sure makes amusing photos, I don't even want to think about how much it costs the taxpayers, but maybe the police themselves deduct it from their training-camp costs in preparation for 1st of May.
The only rational explanation could be that, since it's actually forbidden for right-wing extremists to excercise their democratic right to make demonstrations, the police actually have the right to clear any collection (>3) of people in public spaces, unless they have permission to be there! But there's better ways to fight.. well I'm actually not sure about that. At least its more fun!

Everything bad brings some good with it though! After being escorted away, we made a spontaneous house-party, where the music blasted through a single broken 15" speaker, and made people dance like crazy.

Homage to Björn Dahlberg

2007-03-29T19:11:00.000+01:00

I'm finally finished with my master's thesis. It's examines a "proper" notion of curvature for polygons, for which the four vertex theorem holds. It all started two years ago, when I got interested in solving the Frenet equations for space curves. In particular, to find necessary and sufficient conditions on pair of periodic functions to be curvature and torsion of a closed space curve. Now for a plane curve, these conditions are

But for space curves, this is an open problem. My initial idea was to try to prove the converse of the four vertex theorem on the sphere, use integral formulas for curvature in terms of torsion for spherical curves, to try to prove a converse four flattening theorem for space curves, where the four flattening is a natural generalization of the four vertex theorem for space curves. But it turned out to be harder than I thought, and remains on my todo-list so to speak.
A year passed, doing discrete differential geometry under a Marie Curie scholarship at TU-Berlin. Suddenly I needed a degree, and I decided to take up the four vertex theorem again, as a subject for my thesis. Inspired by the motto of doing "intelligent" discretizations of "classical" concepts, I took on the discrete four vertex theorem.

An interesting side note is that not only did Björn Dahlberg, who worked at my university in Gothenburg and died suddenly ten years ago, prove the full converse four vertex theorem. He also proved the strongest four vertex theorem for polygons! And both these works were published posthumously (and are just now starting to get attention).

Note, a version of the thesis more suitable for making a booklet is available here.

Growing art

2007-03-16T15:30:00.000+01:00

Although Transmediale didn't really deliver in my opinion, there was still enough there to make up an excuse to go to the real thing. Roman Kirschner's Roots was intriguing to watch:It reminded me alot about Andy Lomas's complex pictures and movies, powered by a Diffusion-limited aggregation algorithm: Something that obiously inspired other artists aswell:
Alas, new media art can only go so far. Nature is always one step a head.

Jodorowsky vs. Barney

2007-02-15T00:44:00.000+01:00

Watching The Holy Mountain the other night, I suddenly realized I've seen this before. But in the future: The Cremaster cycle. So trying to fit in ambition somewhere between this and this, but beeing at least as far fetched, I give you this thursday night analysis.

The love for plastic goo is clearly represented by both directors:

The Good-Year woman holding the ballons reminds me of this Jesus like character holding two bundles of ballons, one red, the other blue:

But one has to remind oneself about the fact that inside each respective blimp, there is a woman playing around with either blue or white grapes, that from a distance looks just like ballons.

At last, the scene from the Gellert Baths wherein I tend to remember (also half-naked women by the way) forming the pattern of the Cremaster logo. Not all unlike this bath then, from the Holy Mountain. Unfortunately I couldn't find any good pictures of this scene from Cremaster V:

In fact the common link between Barney and Jodorowski seems to be Kenneth Anger. Haven't seen any films by him though.
Everything is available for download at the excellent Greylodge
The Holy Mountain
The Cremaster Cycle

Hindemith for beginners

2007-01-24T10:49:00.000+01:00

I've been a fan of Paul Hindemith since high school, but heard Sonatas for Viola and Piano for the first time, by finding this excellent recording. It makes a perfect starting point for exploring because of its rather more conventional use of tonalities.
It's a heavy download, and it's in lossless APE format which means you'll need something like Cog to listen to it on OS X.

python + opengl = vj tools

2007-01-23T23:13:00.000+01:00

All source code for my VJing can be checked out with subversion. Just type this in your favourite terminal:

svn checkout http://vjkrute.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ vjkrute

Otherwise you can just click here to browse it.
Please note that this is a first release. It may or may not be cleaned up in the future.

A turning point in minimal

2007-01-23T21:13:00.000+01:00

Now a lot can be said (and has been) about Ricardo Villalobo's 37 minute rather monstrous Fizheuer Zieheuer but one thing is certain: it is a milestone that will be looked upon as a turning point in retrospect. Lookout for more >30 mins droning following this year. And at 8am sundaymornings, I for one, surely won't mind. It is all about those hypnotizing, almost non-moving movements that gets you mind going and legs trying to run along with you.
Take a listen here, sorry for not finding a better source. That one got pauses in it.

Btw, check out the original while your at it.

Correlations - again

2007-01-23T18:54:00.000+01:00

Since we've had some hosting problems now and then, we've uploaded or (almost two years old now) animation to the ever permanent Google Videos. A hi-resolution version is still available at the website.

MySpace art?

2007-01-23T01:06:00.000+01:00

Early ouput from a MySpace to graph thingy I'm working on in Python. When I have a good dataset, will experiment with spatial projections in at least one more dimension.

A minimal christmas

2006-12-24T22:47:00.000+01:00

This is a small christmas present. Poorly mastered, recorded live. Note the interesting symmetry on this one. I actually had to cut the ending because of a screwup. My solution was to mirror the song at a specific cut, and to my surprise it turned out to be completely symmetric! That is you can not hear which direction is beeing played. We're talking invariance under the cyclic group C₂.
Enjoy!

01 christmas kaleidoscope,mp3

Some tracks

2006-08-10T23:34:00.000+01:00

Bleeps and bad breath with almost-on-time beats.

01 back1.mp3
02 back3.mp3
03 back2.mp3

Installation sounds

2006-08-05T23:42:00.000+01:00

These are some sounds created for Johanna Nordin's installation, Spring 2005.
The emphasis was on creating a dense, present sound for a closed claustrophobic space, emphasizing the illusion of pressure upon the viewer.

All files are made using reaktor/pd.

final version

draft_a
draft_b
draft_c
draft_d
draft_e

Yes.

2006-08-03T15:28:00.000+01:00

There will once again be Hotet, the 18th of august.

For the curious

2006-07-20T15:28:00.000+01:00

One corrupted harddisk later, enjoy some very preliminary _new_ (and poorly encoded) material: test3.swf, test5.swf.

Application followup

2006-06-20T15:28:00.000+01:00

So the application for c|art|media @ Valand went well, and I might accept to study for a MFA for a couple of years if I can manage to get a compromise going between me living between Berlin and Gothenburg.

Hotet again

2006-06-10T15:27:00.000+01:00

Another great all-nighter with Hotet @ Nef. Premiere of freshly made custom VJ-software, will put up photos soon.

Application

2006-04-17T15:26:00.000+01:00

My application is finished (in swedish).

Berlin

2006-04-14T15:27:00.000+01:00

So I kind of moved to Berlin. I'll be working in the Polyhedral Surfaces research group under a Marie Curie PhD scholarship. Looking forward to be some part of the large VJ scene aswell. Other than that look forward to Hotet as usual, on the 9th of June.

New gig

2006-03-27T16:24:00.000+01:00

Will feature at The Eye the 31'st of march.

First show in a while

2006-03-10T16:23:00.000+01:00

Premiered Hotet, the first night at idealfestivalen.

Site's up

2006-01-21T16:19:00.000+01:00