dobe has quietly released Director 11 (though the quiet may come from lack of public interest more than any lack of effort on Adobe’s part). This is fine. Nice even. That Director, the program on which I cut my multimedia teeth as it were, has finally, after a four year hiatus from updates (which normally occurred every eighteen months) should finally be brought up to date. Truth is, I doubt I’ll acquire it. There are some 130 announced bug fixes, which is a tiny number from my experience, and no apparent new capabilities – just a few compatibility and UI enhancements. I’ll stick with Flash (something I never thought I’d say) and other multimedia applications like Cycling 74’s MAX/MSP & Jitter or javascript/­php/­html/­css. But at least I can post my old Shockwave files (I hope) so they can play on Intel Macs (see my “Shockwave, A Lament” khlog entry).

When you look for Director 11 at Adobe, you’ll find a classic orphaned software product. They don’t even include an updated icon for the product, which clearly positions it in their marketing strategy – which is to say there is no positioning at all. So, while my old files will now play on my new machine, I hold little hope for the future of one of the greatest multi­media tools of its (now past) time…

he Khazar have a new addition to the family! We have adopted a beautiful 9-month old kitten whom we have named “Eyekon.” If you check his picture out on the left, you can see why we gave him that referential moniker. The poor little tyke was likely struck with FHV at or near birth, and it has left his left eye a bit cloudy – but he’s OK in all other aspects and is a very affectionate and vivacious little rascal.

We were down to a one cat household after eleven years with three cats we raised from the same litter after foster-caring for a rescued litter of six. One is still around, sweet little Caviar; named for her nearly black and very luxurious fur coat. The other two litter mates passed away this year (2008); Champagne, a blond tabby, and Expresso, a black male twin to his sister Caviar. Cats need companionship, we believe, so we were determined to get another cat to keep Caviar company. We’ll see how it goes…

s a hard-core animation fan, I find it hard to believe that I have never seen the first feature-length animated film until now. The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926), by Lotte Reiniger, preceded Walt Disney’s Snow White by eleven years, and may well be one of the most remarkable animated films I have ever seen. Unlike most animated films which use hand-drawn animation (or these days, computer-drawn), The Adventures of Prince Achmed is done entirely with silhouette animation using manipulated cutouts between a light-source and the animation camera.

It is gorgeous! Each frame of the film is a wonder to behold. The intricacies of the cutouts are astonishing, especially the lacy costumes of the female characters Dinarsade (Achmed’s sister) and Pari Banu (The beautiful ruler of the land of Wak Wak and Achmed’s beloved). The tale is taken from the One Thousand and One Nights – the fantastic collection of stories collected over thousands of years and consolidated into the frame story of Sheherazade and King Shahryar. The Adventures of Prince Achmed includes some of One Thousand and One Nights greatest characters: The Caliph of Baghdad, Prince Achmed, Princess Dinarsade, Pari Banu, Aladdin, The African Sorcerer, The Witch of the Fiery Mountain and even the Emperor of China.

Many of the effects in the film were completely without precedent. I can’t tell how some of them were done, but photographs of the animation stand (which uses multiple planes of glass, long before Disney’s patented camera of 1933) show sand being manipulated on the bottom plane of the camera. Apparently soap was used as well, along with thin slices of wax whose transecting pieces created a cloud of swirls that look like animated paper-marbling. Jaw-dropping amazing – I couldn’t figure out how that particular effect was done until I ran across a reference to Oskar Fishinger (the great experimental filmmaker) making a wax-slicing machine for the film here .

See it if you can! Netflix has it in their library, or it can be purchased from Amazon.

There is an excellent article and collection of images at the Animation Archive.

There is a very complete set of notes on the production of the restored version of the film by Milestone Films here.

just got back from my first College Art Association Conference held in Dallas Texas. As someone entering the field of academics and teaching, it was well worth the time, money and effort to attend. I managed to see several people I knew, both from UCSC and from my previous life as a multimedia developer at Macromedia. Like most conferences, it was a series of sessions with folks presenting on topics in which they had some considerable expertise.

One of my favorites was on Cognitive Science and Aesthetics – all about how our brains are wired for pleasure, particularly through sight. One of the most important events for me was meeting with and getting to know the members of the New Media Caucus. I've been a member on the periphery for a few years, but it was good to have the opportunity to get more involved. I've volunteered to take over the web site, newmediacaucus.org, and will be taking it to what we like to call “next level.”

There were many panels on new media, and I was pointed to a number of interesting sites and intrigued by several developments in the Virtual World – enough to start poking around in Second Life. Look for my avatar soon, known as Khazar Noyes.

Here are a few of the sites/things I was turned on to:

Dallas

The conference was in Dallas. What can I say about Dallas. While there is a vibrant art scene there (there was a great evening of wandering around to galleries spread around town), the Adam's Mark Hotel, where the conference was located, was in the middle of downtown. I have never seen a modern city so bereft of people. Tall apparently empty office buildings dominated the view, and – to my complete astonishment – there wasn't a Starbucks to be found anywhere! Mind you, I'm no fan of the giant coffee corporation, but it's the first office district I've ever seen without one on every corner.

had the pleasure earlier this month (1/17/08) to present a 90-minute lecture on using sound in Flash at the invitation of my fellow UCSC MFA graduate, Synthia Payne. She’s teaching a class in music on the World Wide Web there (Music 80R). I had a great time – it’s good to be in front of a class again. Flash isn’t the most intuitive application for working with sound, certain quirks like setting linkages on imported sound before you can control them, and an ambiguous use of the word “Stream” can trip up beginners. Rules about preloading sounds can be confusing as well. If you don’t have a program­ming back­ground it’s tough to wrap one’s head around sound in Flash (or to take advantage of some of its more advanced capabilities). From reviewing the class blog after my lecture, it seems I man­ag­ed to be helpful (if anyone who was there feels differently, please let me know on the blog or by email).

I posted my examples and notes for the lecture here, and I’ll be back towards the end of the quarter to answer questions and help resolve issues. I’m looking forward to it.

t the end of last year I had the pleasure of seeing two fantastic, inspiring and – to me – perspective changing exhibits at the Modern Art and the Asian Art Museums here in San Francisco. It was really invigorating to see them both within a few days of each other.

At the Modern was Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination. Cornell is a huge influence on me, and I’ve always sought out his work wherever I’ve traveled and in any temporary exhibitions. He, of course, does boxes with glass fronts and little assemblages inside. Several of my pieces have been given a sort of aesthetic permission by his ground-breaking work. The idea that you can build a self-contained world that both invites the viewer in and also locks them out is a core aesthetic principle for me. His work was influenced by the Surrealists, and its oneiric qualities are highly compelling as a source of narrative to the pieces. I purchased a great little book at the museum bookstore that dream notes from his journals. He had 30,000 pages of journals, and around 500 pages contain dreams. This book has one hundred and fifty, ranging from brief shorthands like:

To longer expansive, detailed narratives. Length wasn’t particularly relevant to Cornell, a single image object could as significant as an entire narrative.  A favorite:

My dream notes tend to be more narrative, and are particularly detailed with how I got from one place to another and geographic details. I’m inspired by his use of limited imagery in this sense. It was a massive show, by the way – more than 200 works – with more boxes in one place than I have seen accumulatively in my life up until now. If you didn’t see it, it’s at the Smithsonian until February 19th, 2007.

At the Asian Art Museum was Hiroshi Sugimoto’s History of History. A self-curated one-person show which included several reliquaries – a particular interest of mine. Especially interesting were a series of four glass walled cubes about 12 inches on a side. Lit from an interior LCD panel in the roof of the cube and showing a series of small fossils, unfortunately not in the catalog.

I was not familiar with Mr. Sugimoto’s work before, but those cubes really took me by surprise, as I’m working on a series of reliquaries in glass walled cubes myself. It’s striking that sometimes you see an idea of your own carried out by another artist. What Jung would call Synchronistic – “temporary coincident occurrences of acausal events,” or the uncanny coincidence between your creative life and someone else’s. This show is gone from San Francisco too, but there’s a good interactive online catalog here.

o goes the way of all things multimedia. When building this site, I discovered, much to my distress but not to my surprise, that Adobe/Macromedia has not up­dat­ed the Shockwave Player for Intel-based macs. Once again, another era of my body of work in technology has been made obsolete so no one can experience it as it was originally designed. Makes it hard to put together a portfolio…