That Was The Week That Was — August 11th 2019

My new print — Manifesto for Myself — arrived on the Tuesday from Harvey Lloyd Screens and looked fantastic. It's an A5 two colour screen print version of the poster that originally came with Notes to Myself. After going on sale on the Wednesday I'm happy to say it's been finding its way around the world including Sweden, USA, Germany, Belgium, the UK and many more places. I love sending nice things to people in the mail.

At one point I found myself on the Soundsmith site looking at a replacement stylus for my Beogram 1700, which I bought from ebay a few years ago now. Everything still sounds good, but I feel it could probably benefit from a new cartridge. Anyway, in the process of pricing these up I came across a lovely talk from one of the founders of Soundsmith, Peter Ledermann. Even if you're not into vinyl it's worth a moment of your time as he talks about the amazing process of sound and sound processing. I also picked up a new turntable platter mat from Origin Live and have to say it's made a real difference to the sound coming out of my Beovox 1000s. Highly recommended.

More work was done on my latest client project, wrangling with the data to create the imagery in Houdini. Lots of learnings this week on light masks and rendering. I find rendering out in the OpenEXR format gives the best quality images, which I then adjust in Affinity Photo after applying the mask. Masks in Affinity Photo are a little different in Photoshop, in that with EXRs you have to rasterize the alpha layer into a mask and then with that layer selected and above the RGB image choose "Mask to below" which then applies the alpha mask to the image.

The Season of Media Arts is a city-wide exhibition in Karlsruhe, Germany, in which my Art of Cybersecurity work is being displayed, not in a gallery but on trams. Which is a first for me.