i arrived yesterday in full heat, 40 degrees celsium on the road, crazy me. immediately brought laptop and other boxes into the arthouse, wd8 - not the hotel!, and pluging in cym's hercules webcam to be able to set it up as soon as possible to stream/upload for aether9 performance. it took me 10 minutes to realise i need a driver called ov51x which i didn't have, but debian's modules assistant saved me: "m-a a-i ov51x-jpeg-source" did everything in first go, replug and my pd patch 'AetherOne' was able to show me, show me, show me.
we were in the 'atrium', (hof?) in the middle of the wd8 arthouse. although the house is quite 'shabby' and somewhat structuraly maybe even dangerous, it's architecture somewhat reminds me, most probably by coincidence, of roman villas, you know, with the garden in the middle and walkabout, for those healthy romans walking in shade and thinking or composing poems, tragic dramas or just doing politics. if one day this wd8 would be rebuilt, it should have this structure, maybe have the inner walls transparent or open so different workshops, labs etc, see eachother. it was very hot, i was sweating, especially when i drank cold water. it now reminds me of the mexican house in plovdiv in 2001.
the problem was, in the performance, however, that png pictures are too big. so after the performance i did some research until the dark, and found out that png always does a lossless compression and that means no compression really. because it's a indexed type of picture (i think), like a gif, one thing one can do is reducing the number of colors, where a simple commmandline program comes in pngquant", which quantizes the picture, even so, to the point of 1bit (2 colors) picture, and suddenly i arrive at something i was looking for in pdp to be able to make this lovely dotty pixelated non-ordered "floyd-steinberg diffusion dithering" (oh another science-based story suitable for research and a/v projects!) so this reduces a png from 150k to 20kbytes. which should be good for next aether9.
![[img]](pics/90d.png)
![[img]](pics/90-fs8.png)
in the night, cym offered to cook, but i ended up cutting the onions, por, adding tomato, peteršilj, pepper, salt, basil, and two eggs and pasta, and we ate outside, drank some beer (which in this heat functions how it should function), and discussed what should we do: sound installation seems to be a great thing to work on and just explore the ideas with virtual recnstruction of wd8 but no necessarily code a complete replica of it.
cooking feels easier than before. i mean just the cutting of veggies is - or can be - such a nice meditative process.
today i slept in, so, late getting up, coffee and discussion in the kitchen about the connection that such an 'art center' have with the rest of the village, how important it is and what kind of forms this communication can have, how sometimes you need peace and not villagers to work, but how impossible is to survive with total isolation.
i think this connection is very important, the geo-awareness, despite or respite the globalisation, 'everything is accessible from everywhere' kind of times.
i'll try to work on sound installation that uses old slow hardware from a local computer shop, is interactive, is meshed with a very old cubbard, has four speakers, one or two microphones, recordings of us, people talking, moving, recordings of silent rooms, spaces of wd8, animals, working processes, reflecting, translating the place, looking at the poetics, listening in and reaching out.
