Up at 11:00. Spent the morning working on correspondence and digitizing performance footage. The early evening was spent getting up to speed on OpenTZT for the evenings VJ Workshop. With the majority of students on the Windows platform (7 of our 9 students) we needed to adjust our Mac-centric course outline. OpenTZT, being a free (as in beer) VJ program seemed like a good candidate. In addition to being free, it is pretty full featured. Took me a while to hunt down the documentation. Got up to speed pretty quickly. Wasn't able to find the keyboard layout jpeg that I had when I first picked up the program. Found it just after Michael had burned all of the CDs to give to the students.
Headed down to the Kumquat to get everything set up. Midway there, Michael remembered that he had forgotten something at the house. I carried on alone and got the projector and our makeshift screen set up. Started out talking about the student section of the Artificial Eyes website. All of the students were set up with a login and a page to present their work with. Moved into introducing OpenTZT. The projector we had access to had a maximum output of 800x600, so it was a little difficult to make out all the parts of the interface for the program. After my introduction, I turned the computer around for the students to try their hand with the program. Several of them jumped right in and picked it up fairly quickly. Attempted to move on to a brief introduction to Touch, but the adjustments I had made to the screen resolution for OpenTZT made Touch sluggish and unresponsive. Michael introduced modul8 while I got my computer sorted out. Had another hands-on with modul8 on my Powerbook. Afterwards, I demoed Touch. All of the students seemed curious about it. Gökçe was particularly impressed.
Ayşegül, Asaf and Sema getting their hands on OpenTZT. Ayşegül, Sema and Gökçe playing with modul8 and Ozan looking on.
While the hands-on of OpenTZT was going on Michael got into a discussion with Elvan, one of the new students about bringing outside food and drink into the classrooms. This was something that Yeşim forbade and over the eight years that she had been running classes had not compromised on. Elvan and Burcu would not take no for an answer and would not back down.
After the demos, the class discussion turned to what the group would call itself for the performance at Indigo and what the students were going to do as a project. Michael teased Gökçe a bit when she said that a friend had sent an email to us for her but neglected to include an attachment with the message. Elvan got incensed and a tense face-off ensued with Michael apologizing for offending Elvan and Elvan snapping back at him. The last half-hour of the class was a rather unpleasantly tense affair.
Another of the students, Ozan, had bought a firewire drive in the States only to find that it did not work when it arrived with a friend. I agreed to take a look at it. Spent part of the late evening tearing apart the enclosure and hooking up bits of it with bits from another firewire drive to determine that the controller card in Ozan's drive was at fault.
Tried to get the rest of the students added to the website, but the Internet connection was being extremely intermittent and I called it quits after a frustrating hour of trying to get stuff uploaded.
Headed down to the Kumquat to get everything set up. Midway there, Michael remembered that he had forgotten something at the house. I carried on alone and got the projector and our makeshift screen set up. Started out talking about the student section of the Artificial Eyes website. All of the students were set up with a login and a page to present their work with. Moved into introducing OpenTZT. The projector we had access to had a maximum output of 800x600, so it was a little difficult to make out all the parts of the interface for the program. After my introduction, I turned the computer around for the students to try their hand with the program. Several of them jumped right in and picked it up fairly quickly. Attempted to move on to a brief introduction to Touch, but the adjustments I had made to the screen resolution for OpenTZT made Touch sluggish and unresponsive. Michael introduced modul8 while I got my computer sorted out. Had another hands-on with modul8 on my Powerbook. Afterwards, I demoed Touch. All of the students seemed curious about it. Gökçe was particularly impressed.
Ayşegül, Asaf and Sema getting their hands on OpenTZT. Ayşegül, Sema and Gökçe playing with modul8 and Ozan looking on.
While the hands-on of OpenTZT was going on Michael got into a discussion with Elvan, one of the new students about bringing outside food and drink into the classrooms. This was something that Yeşim forbade and over the eight years that she had been running classes had not compromised on. Elvan and Burcu would not take no for an answer and would not back down.
After the demos, the class discussion turned to what the group would call itself for the performance at Indigo and what the students were going to do as a project. Michael teased Gökçe a bit when she said that a friend had sent an email to us for her but neglected to include an attachment with the message. Elvan got incensed and a tense face-off ensued with Michael apologizing for offending Elvan and Elvan snapping back at him. The last half-hour of the class was a rather unpleasantly tense affair.
Another of the students, Ozan, had bought a firewire drive in the States only to find that it did not work when it arrived with a friend. I agreed to take a look at it. Spent part of the late evening tearing apart the enclosure and hooking up bits of it with bits from another firewire drive to determine that the controller card in Ozan's drive was at fault.
Tried to get the rest of the students added to the website, but the Internet connection was being extremely intermittent and I called it quits after a frustrating hour of trying to get stuff uploaded.
Leave a comment