Opening night for the Fall Undergraduate Exhibition was a huge success. My sources tell me that there was a record breaking attendance, weighing in at just under 3,000 people. If you came, then it was great seeing you. If you missed it, the show will run through November 22, 11:00 am - 6:00 pm, Tuesday-Saturday.

I’m taking the infamous Hardware Hacking class with Nicholas Collins, author of the book Handmade Electronic Music. So far, we’ve gone over speakers, radios, tape players, and circuit bending. Last week we made simple oscillators out of hex schmidtt triggers.

The class is a blast. I commented to Robb Drinkwater the other day that I now want to take a part everything and listen to what it does. He gave me a nod, a nod which he has probably given to numerous past students who have taken the class. Probably a lot of other people as well because before it was even a class Nic was doing workshops on the subject…

in the USA and Europe, including at The Watershed (Bristol, UK), University of East Anglia (Norwich, UK), Sonic Arts Research Centre (Belfast, UK), BENT 2004 (NYC), STEIM (Amsterdam), x-med-k (Brussels), Mills College (Oakland, CA), California Institute of the Arts (Valencia, CA), Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst (Zurich), Harvestworks (NYC), T-U-B-E (München), and the Central Conservatory of Music (Beijing).

Mark your day planners everybody. I just got an email from school:

There have been many exciting changes in exhibitions this past summer. Gallery 2 and Project Space has moved from the west loop to a fabulous new campus facility on the 7th floor of the Sullivan Center, and the gallery name has changed from “Gallery 2 and Project Space” to “Sullivan Galleries”.

November 7: Public reception, 7:00 - 10:00 pm
November 8-22: Exhibition open to the public, 11:00 am - 6:00 pm,
Tuesday-Saturday

Approaching graduation, I find myself thinking about my years at art school and the things I’ve learned there.

We had this assignment in my first ever class at SAIC. It was a reading that basically said (at least, this is my memory of it 4 years later) just because it’s art that doesn’t mean it’s good. Looking back it was the perfect article for a first year class—welcome to art school you young punks. It’s a perspective I now take for granted. At the time, however, I remember it coming as a bit of a blow. It certainly went against a lot of what I thought of artmaking at the time.

The reading was “frivolity and unction” from Dave Hickey’s book Air Guitar.

Will’s Meekly was a radio program I hosted that ran for 25 weeks. The show was created from a love for beatboxing and good production. It was broadcasted live online via Free Radio SAIC and operated on a annual budget of zero dollars. Although no longer with us, Will’s Meekly had a good run. Thanks everyone for supporting! There may be some ‘never before seen’ content lying around that would be appropriate to publish on starschreck.

After hosting the show for a while it began to morph into something unexpected. Finding quality tunes each week, after I had already played everything that I had initially intended to, began to require more resources. The show survived with the help of recommendation services (like Pandora and Amazon), intersecting playlists (iTunes, Download.com, UGHH.com, etc.), and user recommendation and feedback.

Ultimately it came to a point where I realized that internet radio sucks so the show went off the air. There was, however, a lot of good research and strategies that came out of it.

It turns out that a lot of commercial music is available online for free. It has now become even more of a standard part of marketing. Singles are available on artist websites and also on sites specifically devoted to that purpose. If you are interested in some of these sites check out: download.com, better propaganda, and epitonic. For a lengthy and complete discussion of this topic visit Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads.