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MMXXIV: Turpentine and tea
New directions in printmaking and AI tooling. Art trips to Oslo, Barcelona, and Istanbul. An exciting last-minute group show. New sounds for old synths.
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Skulls: composing music with computer vision and a custom YOLO5 AI model
A few years ago, I built a primitive computer vision music player (Oracle) using analog video and a basic threshold detector with an Arduino. Since then, outboard AI vision modules have gotten much more specialized and powerful. I decided to try an advanced build of Oracle using the new Grove Vision AI Module V2.
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MMXXIII: Beyond Berlin
This year was filled with travel around Europe and also back to the USA. I had a new job and a stable place to live. Trips to Stockholm and London brought me in contact with the international art world. A trip to Auschwitz was humbling and yielded insights into the human experience of that era.
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MMXXII: Berlin
Last February, I moved to Berlin, Germany to connect with the global art world and explore new ideas in technology and art. It has been challenging, surprising, and fulfilling.
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MMXXI: art in the age of COVID
Making art in the pandemic age requires new perspectives on context, value, and presentation. I had to deal with these challenges just like every other artist this year. I was already producing work that occupied a hybrid online and physical space. But, the new context relied much heavier on virtual space. I handled that for […]
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I trained a GPT-2 language model to generate art reviews and asked it to review my art show
The language of art reviews can be enigmatic, dense, and obtuse. It can also be complete bullshit.
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MMXX: signals, sounds, sights
A look back at 2020 for Lucidbeaming
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Fine-tuning a GPT-2 language model and generating text with a Flask web app
I recently published a book of computer generated photographs and wanted to also generate the introductory text for it. I looked around for an online text generator that lived up to the AI hype, but they were mostly academic or limited demos. I also wanted a tool that would yield language specific to art and culture. It didn’t exist, so I built it.
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Hard Music in Hard Times
Pulverize craniums boldly. Celebrate the resonance of the real and serenade the suffering. Let go of irony and cleverness. Record nothing. Play for your plants and animals. Liberate your intent from ego.
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MMXIX: time, noise, light
A look back at the year in art for Lucidbeaming. Interactive sculpture, experimental video, sound art, and new photography in 2019.
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MMXVIII: the year in review
It’s been a prolific year for Lucidbeaming: multimedia art by Joshua Curry. Beginning with a new art studio and finishing up with a host of Winter projects. The main theme has been expansion. I took my music and found ways to incorporate performance and sculptural elements. The video work has been scaled up to building […]
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Running Fluidsynth on a Raspberry PI Zero W
For this particular project, I ended up using a Raspberry Pi Zero W for its size and versatility. Besides running Fluidsynth, it also serves up a Node.js webapp over wifi for changing instruments. It’s controllable by any basic USB MIDI keyboard and runs on a mid-sized USB battery pack for around 6 hours. Pretty good for such a tiny footprint and it costs around $12.
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Embers: a breath powered interactive installation celebrating collaboration
It started with incendiary memories: looking at a fading bonfire with friends at the end of a good day, stoking the fire in a pot belly stove, and watching Haitian women cooking chicken over a bed of coals. I wanted to build something with modern technology that evoked these visceral feelings and associations. This is the story of that project.
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Setting up a Raspberry Pi 3 to run ZynAddSubFX in a headless configuration
The goal of this particular box was to have the Linux soft-synth ZynAddSubFX running headless on a battery powered and untethered Raspberry Pi, controllable by a simple MIDI keyboard and an instrument switcher on my phone.
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PLUDD: Noise sample pack released as free download
This is a free sample pack of noise and glitch audio files sourced from malfunctioning guitar pedal software. The files are sonically rich, normalized stereo, 96khz and 44.1khz, and somewhat optimized for looping.
