More Jamming.

Meating

Meeting Cancelled People! Apologies for any inconvenience caused!

This is a graphic logo-jammin-combo of Siliga, Tony & Janet... nicely!

The Manukau Festival of Arts printed programme is due for release by Friday 19 September, the programme will also be available online at www.MFA.org.nz - check it out to see other Festival events... you will see that MEAT & LOLLIES is the first event to open during the inaugural Manukau Festival of Arts - on Thursday 30 October!

Vinaka artists - have good weekends :)

On to it?

I'm actually resolving alot of what the submarine is going to be about even though I haven't, and won't for another week or two, actually started the thing. On my travels around the hubris of the great unwashed ( that statement includes all ethnicities, including european, if you sub - consciously took a fence... built a fence!) I also picked up some old car manuals which have some great illustrations in them. I've got other old household and engineering manuals as well so I'm thinking I'll get a bunch blown up and copied and use them as the wall paper in my ship to denote the benefits early travellers to NZ would have encountered. Back in the 50's, 60's and even into the 70's there was an attitude that was about conserving something. What it actually was I'm not sure but it seems to have been about Homeland dreams. I won't go into it here but combined, as a background, with some of Genevieves photo in colour copy and the blaring toys I think it'll all go a long way in saying, or erstwhile completely confusing, the viewers of my ship of conceptualisation.

8.52am tuesday the 9th

Up at five which seems to be normal now and did some work on some more ampy stuff.


So heres some of the toyish stuff I got on my recent organic forays. I find the toys and take them home and take the guts out then when I go back out I return that which I don't want. I disgard.
All of these modern toys run on pulsed DC which is great if you want to hit each individual set of contacts with a carbon button but I want more than that! (who would have guessed)I want to sequence them up and though I haven't tried it yet I have it on good authority that 4066's will do the job. The thing is you want a transistor type switch where the applied DC voltage to the base doesn't affect the CE junction. 4066 are cmos so they have a mosfet in them and fets, field effect transistors are voltage devices and have "a field effect" so the applied voltage on the gate (base)works the drain (collector) source (emitter) junction by its electrical field as opposed to a transistors actual physical contact. Anyways what all that means is that I can set a timer working a counter that then uses the switch blocks to turn the kiddy toys on. And the good thing about the kiddy toy digital samples they hold is that once started they keep going till they finish which means several different samples from different toys can all be going simultaneously. I wonder if I might install such a device in my submarine to denote the clamouring of possibility offered by consumerist society to the native society on the brink, or well past it as the case may be, of jumping into the melee. Interesting aside being that most of the broken toys came from Island neighbourhoods in Wiri.

I also picked up this Elka organ on my travels and have an idea theres nothing a bit of patience won't fix. Usually the power supplies go and not much else. Don't think it'll take me too long to figure it out.

Beautiful bit of kit these things. Most Italian stuff tends to be well thought out and easy to work on... if you have the proper tools. Kinda rough round the edges but such detail where it matters. Good ol' Eyeties eh!

about 11am now

Just been down to the WINZ and the electro expert was kinda telling me why what I wanna do with the TV screen won't work. The thing is that people who are told how to do things know already what they can't do. An Education often isn't so much about what you can do as what you can't do. I do have no idea what I can't do... and I want to keep it that way.

Its been inorganic time again, and blow me over, I got some absolutely fine stuff this time around. I was so lucky and am so lucky these days. Complete junk to most I suppose but I got a whole bunch of pearler stuff. The PC startup this time around has voided USB connections not already made so the photos will have to come later. Anyways, here goes my boring article about "the insiders guide to happiness"


Howdy Folks out there in C bender land.This here new online mag asked for contribs and the editor kinda steered me towards doing this even though I had other ideas. Editors and Curators huh? what are we going to do with them?

So I got back into music a few weeks ago and what that means I dug out all my old unfinished projects from a few years ago, when I last got completely fed up with electronics, and started browsing the old forums for new stuff to do. As well as that, and maybe the pre - cursor, was meeting a coupla modern dance chickies a few months back who occasionally do their thing at an experimental improvisational thing called Vitamin S, which is a weekly gig where the boys and girls turn up with assorted noise and music makers at an inner city bar and have jams. So going to a few of these and enjoying the atmosphere I thought it might be high time I dug out all the old boxes and ideas half finished for instruments and get it all going again.

Another reason for this is that Mum is out of the country and I can move into the house, from my self sufficient sheds full of stuff out in the backyard, and spread out a bit. You know, chemicals around the sink and soldering irons on the coffee table. Not to mention drilling enclosures in front of the fireplace.

So I'm a few weeks in and just getting into my stride, made and finished a heap of boxes (thats what I call my electronic FX stuff) and a few ground up instruments that work and have gigged them all successfully. Choice Bro, as the natives here in the ghetto used to say, what shall I do next when outta the blue the Tone God, an admin at DIY stompboxes, announces that this months competition is all out noise makers.

This fits with me real good 'cause one of my boxes was Tim Escobedo's synth stick, with mods, and I'd got interested in making drum machines, well I made one and was doing the sequencer for it when the comp was announced.

Why are those two relevant? Number one is they are both oscillation devices. Tim's synth stick is a ribbon controller device for a simple oscillator made from C-mos chips while the drum machines rely on something called a ringing oscillator which relies on a pulse voltage to get it going then dies down quite smartly. And oscillators are the requirement numero uno for making noises.

Now don't get me wrong. I don't know crap about all this stuff and all the insider appelations I've used above are what I picked up while I made the devices above. I'm good at building stuff, I mean straight forward nuts and bolts kinda stuff, and though most of it is for my own evil purposes( I'm an artist by day and nefarious noise making genius by night) I can follow a plan and a schematic is basically a plan. So what I do, with my limited but growing knowledge of the arcane and esoteric discipline that is electronics, is I hang out at various forums and look for schematics I can just about understand. This is how I learn. I love being able to make things I have hardly any idea about before I start but at the end I kinda understand whats been happening.

To me this is what circuit bending is all about, not following a diagram and following the rules so you can do a bunch of weird shit at parties and impress your friends (dinner party art?), nope, it's about leaping off ledges without prior knowledge and learning about hitting the ground on the way down! It's like Alannis says "you learn"

So the step by step guide to "the insiders guide to happiness" is all that is above and what comes below, which is how the thing was actually made, nuts and bolts as it were, will, if followed to the letter, give you your own version of " the insiders guide to how to copy something"

Nah, don't listen to me, I'm just tryin' to get a point accross and now that I have I'll drop the emotional baggage and get on with the real show.
Step one:

This is the schematic to the thing I built. I got the two main noise maker circuits from the archive pages at Experimentalists Anonymous. They were in the noise maker section and I chose them because they are a little bit beyond what I understand or they continue a line of enquiry that I'm following.

This little scemo is suspiciously similar to the old fuzzbox as well as the drum machine from an ol' Indian book that I recently did.Oh, and it's really easy to put together and modify. Some of the transistors are old school and hard to find but a look in the books and I found modern substitutes easy. So the schemo is basically stock except I've added the inductors accross the two last collector resistors 'cause in my ringing oscillators for the drum machines these were there to build up a white noise injection and then have it fade. I don't know the theory in proper terminology but they kinda store the Ac signal then let is go so whatever is signal starts out soft, builds then fades. It was used with a click and some white noise from an avalanched transistor, white noise maker, to give a cymbal type sound and so I stuck them in here to see what would happen. The other thing I did was see the feedback path, from the collector of Q4 back to the collector of Q2, with the 100k resitor, and apply a bunch of stuff, the diode chains, which is often done in the venerable fuzzbox circuits. I have no idea what thats going to do either but I have an inkling it won't blow up. Actually I have no idea whats going to happen and thats a good thing... isn't it?

I also found this at EA and it looks like any garden variety opamp oscillator, well the opamps at the bottom do ( the top ones are buffers), except theres that fet sitting between the buffers and those diodes sitting between the oscillator opamps and I have no idea what they are going to do and I've always wondered what sample and hold means so now I get a chance.

Now below that is Tim's oscillators using the schmidt triggers and you know, without thinking about it, that anything with such evocative words like schmidts trigger has gotten do neat stuff but I've been writing for an hour already and I gotta go do other stuff so this ends part one and part two will be soon. In that one I'll go into Tim's place of treasure on the net and explain the summing of all the various things and, therein, how signal goes in, through and out. I might add, quickly, that though it's all built it didn't actually work when finally finished. Thats not unusual though but it looks good enough to eat so I'll get around to it soon.

Next part will also feature a picture of the finished article. The reason you've been reading through all this guff. Be Good! Sean K.

This and that: Mon the 9th in the mornin'.

I suppose I should start out by saying that this post may be an excuse as to why I can't be at the next meeting this coming saturday. The first meeting when we actually have to come up with goods and I won't be there. Why?, why not!


No really, theres a bunch of stuff going on and I don't think I'll be able to spare the time. No 1 is that the day after is the last day for the Objective sculpture cum Manukau's answer to sophistication competition. But who am I to question the value of a comp that every year has a different name and a wider scope. So everybody knows about my unending gripe that Manukau should spend more effort on its own artists than trying to look, to the rest of the country, like they are. Beside the point - which is? Oh, so I'm going to be busting my tail to get stuff finished for it and won't be at the meeting.

I don't really have to bust my ass because I have enough stuff in reserve to enter a few bits and hardly raise a sweat, but I can't do it that way, thats too easy and wouldn't have me treading that infernal line between ultimate disaster and world resounding success!

I've got a chair out at Monterey I'll put in it. I think I've got a photo of it on facebook.
You'll have to go to the page to see it.
And I've got a table that I'll put a new top on. A wooden top with engineering bits carved in and backfilled with resin.



Okay, just spent time cutting and pasting the html 'cause these sites always stuff it up, anyways, you'd think these two would be enough but no I've got something else in mind that needs to be built from the ground up and involves a coffee machine and a old black and white TV. You see, I found this thing on the net, in an electronics forum, where you can circuit bend an old TV where the vertical and horizontal hold voltages are on the cathode ray tube. It makes it into something like an oscilloscope and the plan is to have the coffee machine set up with an extra temperature switch on the body that turns on, closes, at 70 degrees celsius, which is the switch to turn on a bunch of 555 timer IC's wired to do the star trek alarm signal. This signal is played as audio but it's also hooked up to the TV so the signal starts playing on the screen. But the TV itself has been on, idling away at the wall voltage through a transformer and a coupla resistors to drop the voltage right down.

Why bother? The thing you gotta understand, or just stand around with your mouth hanging open and a vacant look in your eyes, is that this thing will be DANGEROUS! High voltage, the flyback transformers ( which is actually more like a choke coil) feeding the anode in the TV is at about 1000V or 1kV and running at about 50 - 100mA which is 50 - 100 Watts (and given the High voltage it'll easily get into the heart region and the current will stop it) and a boiler... all of it together in an open frame with only cursory attempts at making it safe. Why again? Because I want to be the first to put real dangerous stuff in a Manukau art exhibition.

Actually it won't be dangerous at all. Possibly dangerous, it'll certainly look dangerous, but really just dangerous if somebody whos really stupid does something really stupid like throw water at it when its turned on.

Meanwhile the deadline for an exhibition at Uxbridge about cars is two weeks after that so as soon as the bits are dropped off at Nathan it'll be home to start painting. As usual, last minute and all that, I'll be just adapting a new style that suits my own, and taking a very big leaf outta this guys book.

So your thinking that thats enough to keep any man busy but theres also the fact that Mum's back from Canada next tuesday, which means I have to build some cabinets at home before she gets back and tidy up the house, and write an article for an online magazine about circuit bending. They want me to write about something I made last week for my weekly music things at the Vitamin S at the Wine Cellar.

So I actually started this post because I was going to use it to write the article so the guy in Canada, from Toronto (theres a reason for that too)could preview it but I haven't even started yet and I have to go right now to the WINZ office and report so I'll get into it when I get back. All in all, that time of the year, so I may not be there on saturday folks, oh, maybe I'll drop in with Gene's sculpture which she came over and did yesterday. Who knows?

ITS ME STUFFS MATE....