In Which Several Bizarre Things are Discovered

In Digital Art we broke up into East and West groups. Appropriately I was in West with Adam-owns-your-face-at-everything, and with Chris mediating and falling ever towards madness with his pantomiming. If I get to work with Adam I would be ecstatic, mainly because he seems to be interested in representing data in completely inscrutable but aesthetically pleasing ways. I just want to make physical widgets to live in the ASH lobby, things that would be both baffling and engaging. Most of all it must be things. Things that would filter the data out of the air like coral filtering food particles out of the ocean current. It is all well and good to program, but the world behind the glass cannot be touched, no matter how detailed your modeling.

Adam and Max want to make something completely ridiculous with the controllers for Rock Band. I guess it would be something like Anti-Rock Band, in which instead of being rewarded for playing the right notes you would be rewarded for not... for making as much sound as you want. They would reprogram the controllers to play back different sounds, and to complicate things further, in true digital art style, the buttons would also control a visualizer and a light show. Through our long and convoluted discussion of music we learned that Chris plays music by tapping on different bits of his car, that Ratatat is really just a programmer and a guitarist, and that John is the least practical-minded of any of us, even with Adam. His idea really had nothing to do with music (so that was a bad transition), but he wanted to do something that would represent and record frames of animation in a different way. His example was a group which laid down thousands of frames on a road and then drove over them in a truck equipped with a video camera. That idea was awesome. His involved something I could not visualize involving glass tubes, slices and shooting things through the tube. Mostly it just sounded dangerous.

If we had unlimited resources, no doubt would we come up with the most hilariously convoluted and overly complicated projects ever.