congratulations on membrane:deaf04

Dear Yoichiro, Harry, Delphine, Chris -- and Joel, Maria & Matthew in
mind & spirit,

Thanks to everyone who helped in one way or the other to realize
Membrane:DEAF04

Harry pulled together a creative design and installation --

The professionalism of the execution is a credit to Harry's inventive,
extensive R&D, preparations synched with Martin and the V2 production
team.

It's a credit to & Yoichiro's super work together since Ubicomp 2003
and with Chris and me in Rotterdam in the week prior to the opening.

It's a credit to Delphine's intensely expert work with Maria.

I'm delighted and very proud of the precision and the expressivity of
the calligraphic visual response. Yoichiro made really beautiful work
with his own instruments and with Delphine's Navier-Stokes external.
Again, Yoichiro resolved nasty technical challenges in order to achieve
extremely elegant results, and in the last 36 hours produced a
marvelously optimized Navier-Stokes external.

I think Membrane:Deaf04 demonstrated the viability of calligraphic
video an approach to making playable, robust fields of responsive
media.

It's the most successful so far among TML's experiments on
social-thickening, too, I think, (except for a few Tunnel parties and
open-houses ;)

Thanks to Chris' work with Joel's instrument concepts (mapped into MSP
in a heroic week), I think Membrane exhibited by far the most rich and
subtle sonic response in the hall.

(Speaking of which, Rokeby's nChant was the only other poetic piece
there, I feel, but it was hidden away in a separate room, a typically
isolated gallery setting.)

Although we suffered from atrocious noise and visual clutter, Harry
managed to site the two Membranes really well to respond to the flow of
people while avoiding some of the competing chaos. (You'll see what I
mean when we get the videos up on the web!).

I think we can harvest and re-invest some very evocative lessons,
artful and phenomenological lessons, and it's worth folding these into
future experiments. (For those of you who couldn't make this one, I'm
working on other opportunities, with Chris.) I'd like to hear what
you learned.

Take care and rest well over the Thanksgiving break,

Congratulations and thanks again!
Xin Wei

http://sponge.org • xinwei@sponge.org

Professor and Director, Topological Media Lab
Georgia Institute of Technology • Atlanta, GA 30332-0165
http://topologicalmedia.net/