My bike tour through Silicon Valley is less than two weeks away. After going on a trial run this weekend I have decided that, in addition to it being a super fun ride, we’re going to leave a little earlier than originally planned because no one likes to rush. So check out the new details on the facebook invite or on the earlier post on this blog.

Photos from August have been posted to my photo blog. They include bike trips, river swimming, stars, and a super fun trip to the amazing ACRE Residency in Wisconsin.

Kyle and I are currently working on a project for the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History opening in mid-December. It will unfold over the course of three months as we hold numerous workshops about secret histories of the area. I am also working with The Plaines Project in Chicago on an upcoming show. Details about both of these projects to come.

I have an edition of 40 screen printed zines that I made this summer that I will be distributing in the coming month. They contain patterns, some drawn by hand, some by software I wrote to mimic my hand, and stars. They are 16 pages long including the cover, and look like this:

Let me know if one should make it into your hands.

Come join me as I lead a bike ride through Silicon Valley. We will look at the birth of computing and the internet, the history of LSD and hackers, traces of what used to be and what replaced it, metaphors of computing and the social spaces they emerged from, office parks and nature preserves, and the material infrastructures in the birthplace of personal computing.

The ride will be around 20-25 mostly flat miles at a slow pace with a lot of stops to look at things. There will be one beer/snack stop and a stop at the Computer History Museum. I will be printing up maps for riders and there will be some surprises! Then we’ll roll into the opening of the ZERO1 Street Festival around 6 or 7pm.

www.zero1biennial.org/nick-lally

It’s certainly not required, but it would be helpful if you could RSVP via email or on the facebook invite so I have an idea about numbers.

Friday, September 14th
noon
Menlo Park Caltrain Station
1120 Merrill St., Menlo Park 94025

//other things:
invite your friends!
please be on time
if you can’t make this one, there will be another ride on saturday:

The Saturday ride (9/15) will leave from my installation at the ZERO1 Street Festival at 11:30am sharp so we can get on the noon train from Diridon Station. I will be near South 1st Street and Williams Street: http://goo.gl/maps/V0KUG.

Fun-a-Day in the Bay opens tomorrow night at Rock, Paper, Scissors in downtown Oakland. As always, there will be a lot to see and a lot of fun things happening for Art Murmur. I’ll have a bunch of drawings on found paper.

6-9pm, 2278 Telegraph Ave, Oakland, CA.

Fun-a-Day is almost here! Pick a project, do it every day in January and show your work in a group show the following month. There are 16 shows scheduled for 2012, with more being added. See artclash.com for details on participating or starting your own show.

 
This Friday, I’m showing a new piece at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History. I wrote a program that generates audio and visuals all at once. More info about the show is up on the Museum’s event page.

I posted documentation of a bunch of projects including the sound reactive program I exhibited at GAFFTA, my Fun-a-Day art jokes, building’s trip to the flea market, a few of the many paintings I made last year, the add-art show I curated, and the surprise bike finish line.

collaboration with Kyle McKinley
custom hardware and software
presented at the 2011 Maker Faire in San Mateo, May 21-22

The UC State of the Arts just posted a video of our still building installation from the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts’ “Future Tense” conference last fall:

I’ll be hanging out on the street showing sound reactive software which gathers ambient street noise (footsteps, traffic, conversations, etc) and renders them as 3D particle systems in real time. For more info, see the GAFFTA website.

I’ve been playing with sound reactive 3-D particle systems in Processing using OpenGL. Above is one of sketches I’ve been working on (which has way too much information for online video compression formats, hence the fuzziness). Different colored particles react to different frequency bands (audio track not included here) and orbit at different radii around the center.

Kyle and I are bringing building to the Maker Faire at the San Mateo Event Center on May 21st and 22nd. We will be part of a project called “SpaceCamp” which will focus on hacking/making and creating community spaces. The space will include a bunch of groups from around the country doing exciting projects along those lines. Our project is called building: a how to which will include a lot of our previous software projects, hands-on workshops on how we made them, and, of course, some surprises.

My friend Brian just started a project called Occupation-Preoccupation, which looks great:

“The United States has over 700 military bases on foreign soil in sovereign countries, where we have no declaration of war. This project seeks to gather covers by American musicians of songs that are associated by origin with each of these places.”

This spring, I’m going to try to remember how to play music and put something together for this.

Then this summer, in addition to riding my bicycle all over the place, I’ll be teaching a class called “Hacking for Artists” at UC Santa Cruz. We’ll be making digital media art projects by hacking code together from various places. It will be something of a crash course in programming for artists who want to do crazy things with computers but who don’t want to study computer science.