We had a great year of events, with a big push focused on getting the Overlap Salon rolling ahead strong.
Big props to Barry Threw and Vlad Spears for directing these salon events, and all of the core crew at Overlap for helping to grow this new offering.

We have a lot on the horizon from 2010, with new Listen/Vision ideas, more Overlap Salon events, and other special projects in San Francisco and beyond. If you want to be considered for an Overlap event, please reach out and send links to you work to - demos@overlap.org .

2009 was a great year, and there is so much more to keep building in 2010. Together we’re creating a solid platform for experimentation.

Merry Maxmas! We’re patching up some seasonal cheer and tidings of extra hot laptops at the Overlap Salon finale for 02009. Come ring the synthesized bells with us at Gray Area Foundation for the Arts.

When - Tuesday, 15 December, 02009, 7:00pm - 9:00pm
Where - Gray Area Foundation for the Arts @ 55 Taylor Street, San Francisco, CA 94102

It is the season for giving, especially of toys! And the elves at Cycling and Ableton have some magical new toys just leaving the workbench. We have three sessions on Max that will instantly turn your sleigh-bells into self-composing, self-aware, music-making devices.

Vlad Spears
3 Things You Can Do With Max For Live

Musician, Max/MSP gangsta and Overlap Salon co-organizer Vlad Spears will present on working with Max For Live, the real-time programming environment from Cycling ‘74 and Ableton. Vlad developed and commercially released the Daevl.Plugs, a popular suite of Pluggo plug-ins he’s currently porting to Max For Live. Most of his workflow is on the move into this new world: a slew of custom Monome and Manta applications and many Max tools for algorithmic and chaotic composition. Vlad’s been waiting to press the edit button for a long, long time.

Adam Murray
A Processing Object for Max

Adam Murray is a musician and programmer who created the fantastic ajm.objects, a collection of Max/MSP externals and abstractions including ajm.ruby, a Ruby programming environment right in Max. Adam’s now finishing work on another bridge object for Cycling ‘74 that will merge two worlds, neither of which will ever be the same again. Processing, meet Max. Max, meet Processing. Adam will give us a sneak peak at the upcoming Processing object for Max, which provides tighter integration between Processing, Max/MSP/Jitter and yes, Max For Live.

Elise Baldwin
Using Max in Performance, Design and Installation

Elise Baldwin’s work revolves around themes of collective memory, as well as intersections between the natural world and the technological. She has performed recently at the New York Electronic Arts Festival, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, Edgetone Music Festival, E.S.P. Media Lounge, and the National Queer Arts Festival. She’ll be discussing her use of Max in performance, sound design and installations, focusing on her 4 December work with Kadet Kuhne at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts: Holding Patterns & Collective Memories.

We’ll have cookies shaped like decorated trees and many varieties of snow-white milk to go with.

Join us for 02009’s final night of modern sound and vision! Sign up on the Facebook event or RSVP to connect@overlap.org

About the Salon:
The Overlap Salon is a regular meetup devoted to sharing code, ideas and projects built with the media toolkit Max/MSP/Jitter from Cycling ‘74 and Ableton’s electronic music performance application, Live. Our salons are a mix of performances, presentations and ad-hoc discussion, dependent upon the ideas and issues brought to the table. Everyone is welcome regardless of skill level.

For further information, or if you would like to join the storied ranks of Salon presenters, please connect@overlap.org

SF Cinematheque and Overlap.org Present :
Holding Patterns & Collective Memories: Elise Baldwin & Kadet Kuhne at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

Drawing from each artist’s extensive work in installation and music composition, the live audio/video performances of Elise Baldwin and Kadet Kuhne create unique cinematic experiences through the application of real-time compositional techniques. With an interest in the transmitted electronic signal (via sensors, circuitry and neurons), Kuhne uses the medium to explore themes of communication, control and confinement in her works “Fight or Flight” and “Infinite Delay”. Equally engaged with innovative technology, Elise Baldwin’s works — Theatre of Plants and The Body Farm — consider the relationships between the natural world and the evolution of technology and themes of collective memory and history. Also screening: And the Sun Flowers by Mary Helena Clark and Paradise Falls, New Mexico by Christina Battle. (Steve Polta)

Friday, December 4, 7:30PM
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
701 Mission Street, San Francisco

Tickets: members: $6 / non-members: $10
Advanced tickets: 415-978-ARTS

Over at my blog, I posted up the slides and a quick recap of my travels to Melbourne. Of course, most notable for this blog is the kick-off of the Overlap Salon Melbourne.

A big thanks to Simon Hampson for setting up the event, and always doing what he does, which is symbiosis great! He set the event at the fabulous Loop Bar in downtown Melbourne. After about 10 people showed up, Simon started off by discussing what Overlap is, the evolution of Symbiosis and how he wants to see Overlap Melbourne move with the Salon and eventually doing Listen/Vision events in the future.

Then, I did my presentation thing (you can see my slides here), talked about my background, Fabricatorz, Vision Forum and the Laoban Speaker Workshop. I also updated the Overlap slidedeck, so that others in Overlap can use it to build future presentations.

Josh Batty gave my favorite presentation of the night by showing off his wonderful max patches, and talking in general about his direction as an artist, and how he hopes to grow the scene in Melbourne through the Overlap Salon Melbourne (You can see my photos of him speaking here).

We ended the night after some constructive discussion, a few pints, and then onto eating the most amazing noodle soup I’ve ever had at a nearby venue.

Hats off once more to Simon and Josh for great event. I look forward to seeing how the Overlap Salon Melbourne grows. If you want to start an Overlap Salon in your city, start contributing to Overlap.org, drop us a line, and lets overlap.

Following on the heels of last week’s successful Overlap Salon in Berkeley, come and be a part of the inception of Overlap events in Australia with the first Overlap Salon Melbourne!

Loop, 6-8.30pm
23 Meyers Pl, Melbourne VIC 3000, (03) 9654 0500

Overlap.org is an online platform for experimental media releases and events. Overlap releases experimental music and videos, produces unique events, and provides a free blog to share your media with others.

Make your way down to Loop to hear Overlap’s Simon Hampson and Jon Phillips speak about the Overlap vision of artistic publishing online, linking online and offline communities, and Jon’s Laoban Speaker Workshop, part of the Vision Forum Melbourne set of art shows and interventions.

This is the launch pad for Melbourne’s very own Overlap Salon Melbourne, focusing on MAX/MSP users, with a very special MAX patch presentation by Josh Batty. You can read a recap about the last Overlap Salon in San Francisco.

Come down for drinks from 6pm. The presentation/workshop will run from 6.30-8.30pm.

About the presenters

Simon Hampson produces Symbiosis on Overlap, a weekly podcast featuring a wide mix of sound textures and experimentation. He is an expert in bridging online and offline communities, and providing marketing platforms for niche interests. Simon is based in Melbourne and is the main point of contact for Overlap events in Australia/Asia.

http://www.symbiosis.com.au/
http://www.myspace.com/symbiosisradio/

Jon Phillips is an artist and developer living in San Francisco and Beijing while growing Fabricatorz.com and “new” media projects. His notable involvements include Open Source and Free Culture movements, Inkscape, Open Clip Art Library, and building community + bizdev for Creative Commons.

http://www.rejon.org/

Jon is in Melbourne to speak and run a workshop at the Vision Forum Melbourne about his project Fabricatorz & his work on the Laoban Soundsystem project with Matt Hope and others:

http://rejon.org/wiki/IDEA_20090606_Laoban_Speaker_Workshop
http://fabricatorz.com/laoban

Melbourne artist Josh Batty operates Buffer Music Production, rocks a mean Live set and concocts a sharp Max patch. He also has music technology teaching and presentation skills in plenty and is interested in creating a community for Max/Live users in Melbourne.

http://www.buffermusicproduction.com/
http://www.myspace.com/bufferstroker

For more information

Overlap

The last Overlap Salon, hosted by the Berkeley Center for New Media, was a resounding success. We had a fantastic turnout during this East Bay edition of the Overlap Salon, and plan to hold more bold, cutting-edge, innovative synergies of new media social networking 3.0 there in the future.

Both beginning and experienced Max users attended (actually the largest concentration of experienced Maxers I’ve seen in the Bay since Expo ‘74), and our presentations did a good job of catering to all experience levels. Salon co-organizer Vlad Spears presented his new patch Wyvern, which uses the Monome and number patterns to sequence complex melodies. We discussed a lot of different data input and sequencing possibilities, including Numbers Stations.

Your humble author followed up with a run though of the poly~ object in Max. We started out with a very brief Max explanation for new users, which is the type of beginners educational content that we plan to be making a formal part of every Salon as we continue. After pulling everyone out of the wood of worldliness, I went through several patches showing both traditional uses of poly~ (to manage synthesizer polyphony) and less common ones such as filling arrays of audio and video buffers and changing out modular patches during runtime.

Poly~ Example Patches are the patches I showed at the event, consisting of some cleaned standard Max examples and a dynamic buffer patch.

After, we had an update on some new externals using Bonjour networking that are being developed by veteran Salon presenter Matt Ridenour. One of our ongoing projects at the Salon is to create a kind of performance framework where data and audio can easily be shared among several performers to create an ad-hoc Overlap Orchestra. In upcoming meetings we will be exploring this concept more, and encourage anyone interested to come share their ideas.

We look forward to our Salon next month, which we are planning to be an off the hook Max/Live explosion. Stay tuned to Overlap.org to get details on the event.

See more pictures from the last Salon on our Flickr page.

The next Overlap.org Max/MSP/Jitter/Live Salon is coming, and it’s an East Bay Edition!

When - September 2nd, 02009, 7:00pm - 9:00pm
Where - 340 Moffitt Library
We’re hosted this month by the Berkeley Center for New Media - More location details on Moffitt Library are available.

Overlap’s Max/MSP/Jitter/Live Salon is a multi-faceted beast: artist performances with custom software, technology demonstrations by makers on the cutting edge, classroom sessions for beginner/intermediate users and hack labs for exploring far down the Max/MSP/Jitter/Live rabbit-hole.

Last month we focused on three outstanding technology and code presentations. This month, we’re digging into patches from Salon organizers Barry Threw and Vlad Spears, both longtime Max/MSP users who develop commercial applications, interactive performance spaces and installation systems.

Max/MSP/Jitter classroom session: The use of [poly~] is often seen as a black art. Barry Threw will school us on [poly~]’s use and creative misuse, with an eye toward its function as both a performance tool for polyphonic multiplication of voices and as a strategy for distributing processor load across CPU cores in heavy-hitter patches.

Max/MSP/Jitter/Live presentation: We’ll be checking out Wyvern, a new midi arpquencing patch for the Monome by Vlad Spears. Using arbitrary strings of digits, such as those transmitted by Numbers Stations, beautifully complex but repeatable sequences can be generated and intuitively performed with in ways just barely under control.

Community discussion: This month we’re guiding a topic for future work - the creation of a networked performance environment. After the presentations, we’ll be generating ideas and discussing how best to build a patch framework in Max/MSP/Jitter and Live for networked, real-time audio and video collaboration. We’re gathering a solid core of ideas and people that will allow future Overlap Salons to incorporate musical sessions as part of the format: an Overlap Orchestra. This is the beginning of a community build effort we plan to grow and distribute. Now is the time to get involved!

Sign up on the Facebook event page or RSVP to info@overlap.org.  We’re comfortable with large crowds, but RSVP counts help us provide enough snacks!