I also just checked it out of the library.
I’m on Cool Tools!
I was on Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools podcast! (link in bio to the YouTube video and podcast link)! I share some tools I use to force creativity into my life. Kevin also shares a rad art project.
This is a great reminder for me to “just go for it” more often. I convinced myself I didn’t have anything to share for five months before finally applying to be on the show.
You can also check out the audio-only player and subscribe to the podcast over on Kevin’s website: https://kk.org/cooltools/rob-ray-artist/
Making Problems to Solve
My dear friend and collaborator Taylor Hokanson and I were guests on David Bauer‘s “Making Problems to Solve” podcast. It was really excellent spending time with Dave and talking about learning, teaching, making things, inspirations, and all the different communities we participate in. Check out the episode! A huge thank you to Dave for having us on. Podcast hosting is a massive amount of work!
WNYC’s “On the Media” skeezes me out a bit, but I’m excited that Micah Loewinger and Dan Charnas share the deep genius of Prince Paul and De La Soul’s creativity, the beauty of sampling and the evil that is copyright law in “The Case for Legalizing Sampling.” In this episode, Dan unfurls the awesomeness of De La Soul’s The Magic Number.
“It’s based on a sample of Schoolhouse Rock, and then they’re getting it to talk to Johnny Cash which is talking to Eddie Murphy in this track… and that really is the moment that cracks open this idea of how you can use this music to talk to culture, to talk to the future, to speak to the present.”
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/case-legalizing-sampling-on-the-media
Thanks to Marc Weidenbaum‘s This Week in Sound for pointing me to the On the Media podcast episode.
R.I.P. Trugoy the Dove
Which Bill Orcut Album Are You?
The last three Bill Orcutt releases could be a pop psychology poll. (stated with 100% enthusiasm for Bill’s creativity.)
Please purchase one or more of Bill’s sonic wonders over at his Fake Estates label.
Which Bill Orcutt Album Are You?
A little 10 minute talk
I know you’ve been searching the internet for a 10-minute talk about my work, speculative design, design fictions, speculative histories, anarchist collectives, pirate radio, collective ideation frameworks, and teaching. *does the math…* That’s aboooouuuut 75 seconds per topic. Ha!
Woop! I Did an Artist Talk at the RAFFMA!
Hi! I gave an artist talk at the RAFFMA on Thursday, October 13th, 2022. Please check it out! Adventures in pirate radio, augmented reality, cassette tapes, and 3D printing!
The Changes You Made May Not Be Saved
Here are some photographs from my show titled “The Changes You Made May Not Be Saved.” exhibited at the Robert and Frances Fullerton Museum of Art (RAFFMA) from September – December 3, 2022.
Robbing the Gradle
It seems inevitable that you will run into either a Gradle or Java error when trying to build an AR or VR application.
The latest incantation 🪄 of this problem 🚨 for me is a missing Gradle installation in Unity 2021.3.6f1.
A version of Gradle is typically found in Unity’s Tools directory. The path to this Tools directory should be
/Applications/Unity/Hub/Editor/<Your Unity Version>/PlaybackEngines/AndroidPlayer/
but it isn’t there.
I had 2021.3.5f1 installed, so I copied /Applications/Unity/Hub/Editor/2021.3.5f1/PlaybackEngines/AndroidPlayer/Tools
over to
/Applications/Unity/Hub/Editor/2021.3.6f1/PlaybackEngines/AndroidPlayer/
and all seems good.
There’s more conversation about the issue over at this answers.unity.com thread.
The fastest path to get going in Augmented Reality is using Unity’s AR Foundation which acts as a…. “gateway” of sorts to Google’s ARCore and Apple’s ARKit.
I want to use the simulation features of AR Foundation 5 (which is currently in pre-release) while remaining on Unity 2021 LTS. It is currently a bit challenging to do this. Typically to do this you would set up your Unity Package Manager to include Pre-release packages and this gets you access to the new scary and probably unstable stuff. But when I did this in Unity 2021, I still only got AR Foundation 4.2.3 packages ( cue the * sad trombone * 📯). There are two ways to get around this.
The first way is to go into your Unity project’s ../Packages/manifest.json
file and add this line.
"com.unity.xr.arfoundation": "5.0.0-pre.12"
This will automatically go get the 5.0-pre.12 packages and you are good to go. Shout out to Dilmer Valecillos for mentioning this in the comments of his Unity AR Foundation Simulation Tools Are Here! video.
The second way to get the 5.0-pre.12 packages (plus a lot of cool samples) is to clone Unity’s AR Foundation Samples github repo. You will then open up this repo in your Unity Hub. Unity Hub will bark at you saying:
“This project was made in a different editor version. To open this project, please install or switch to Unity 2022.”
But you will have the option to choose another Editor version and you can pick your 2021 LTS installation. You will get a couple of “Are you really really sure?”-type messages. I said “yes” and so far I’m good.
Check inside ../Assets/Scenes/ARFoundationMenu
for the Menu.unity
file. This will launch a pushbutton grid-style menu with all the samples available. Note: Some buttons will be disabled based on your build platform. For example, Object tracking is not available on Android.