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"The School of Noise runs workshops for young people and adults encouraging the exploration of noise, sound and music. Our aim is to provide creative and imaginative activities using sound in accessible, fun and educational ways.
Using a wide variety of analogue and digital equipment our activities include; sculpting sounds using small modular synthesisers, composing original experimental sound art, circuit bending, field recording, coding and programming, building cardboard record players, conducting orchestras of fruit and vegetables, creating and recording Foley sounds, preparing pianos, soundwalks, learning about acoustic ecology plus more."
Brilliant.
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"In their wisdom Sega had connected the console’s power board to the console with six wibbly-wobbly pins and made the disc tray’s lid switch from wishes. Dummying data to the edge of the CD was the least you could do for the asthmatic old dear’s clunking and whining laser." Wonderful piece from Five Players on Dreamcast piracy – and how the pirate community kept life in an undersupported piece of magic.
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Jonathan Blow's game prototypes; some interesting stuff here, especially in the READMEs.
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"Please don’t believe any of this. Go instead to the data and have a look for yourself." Which is, for this audience, a very good way of putting it.
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Yes it is. Jolly good, and the music will drive you crackers.
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Um. An "artwork/game/digital poem/world of scribbles" from Jason Nelson. Stop trying to "get it".
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"My Favorite Book Covers of 2008" Some I'd seen before; some I'd not. Some very beautiful things here.
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"I come from a software background, as well as an artsy-fartsy one. I want to see games as art, but they’re also supposed to work as logically-constructed bodies of code. And in a lot of cases, reviewers need to see them as software rather than as art. Here’s why…" I think Steve has some good points here, but I'm not totally swung yet; after all, games might _be_ software, but do we _experience_ them as software? I'm not sure that we do, and that's why we respond to them in the manner we do.
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"The ultimate resource in grid systems."
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Pretty much spot on. Especially when it comes to GRIMDARK PIRATE COMICS.
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"Does the road to ludonarrative unity really lead us where we want to go? Is the destination reachable? Is it possible to embrace a design aesthetic that takes us in another direction that could be just as fruitful, if not more so? Okay that was three questions, but it's my blog so I get to ask as many as I want. Now if I could only answer them." This is going to be interesting when I come to write about Far Cry 2.
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"a poster-sized calendar with a bubble to pop every day". Yes please!
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"If I had but one backdrop to use for portraiture I would choose a simple roll of white seamless paper. With one roll of paper you can create many options. For the rest of the week I’m going to break it down for you. We are going to look at getting it to pop to pure white, making it various shades of grey, getting it to go black, gelling it to any color in the rainbow, and doing very easy and quick changes in post production to further the visual options available to us when using such a simple background." Fantastic tutorial.
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"Moon Stories, a collection of my latest three experiments, got selected to be presented at the Tokyo Game Show during the Sense of Wonder Night, the japanese version of the Experimental Gameplay Sessions." Beautiful, notably "I wish I were the Moon"
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"In a strange way then, the designer of a video game is himself present as an entity within the work: as the "computer"– the sum of the mechanics with which the player interacts." Fantastic piece from Steve Gaynor, which touches on some notions of the death of the designer – namely, that the designer *is* inherently present in games; they embody themselves in mechanics, and games that downplay logical mechanics that players can reverse-engineer do themselves a disservice.
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I don't normally link to XKCD, simply because it would become repetitive… but "Height" is really lovely.
Water Walk
17 May 2007
John Cage performs his composition “Water Walk” on popular 1960s US TV show “I’ve Got A Secret”. As music, it actually works well; as performance, it works even better. There’s something almost surreal about putting a figure like Cage on light entertainment show, but it makes me wonder if anyone would do something like this nowadays. Via Nicky, via boingboing.