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News

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/

Categories
News

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!

Categories
Inspirations

“Something that stimulates the music in the measure.”

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

Categories
Inspirations

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?

Categories
News

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!

Categories
News

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!

1:24 scale models of a makeshift skatepark in the upper levels of the Memphis Pyramid.
Categories
Projects

The Changes You Made May Not Be Saved

I have a show up at the Robert and Frances Fullerton Museum of Art (RAFFMA) through December 3, 2022. The show is called “The Changes You Made May Not Be Saved.” Come check it out!

Reproductions of 39 flyers distributed by OMSA (One Many Some All) across the neighborhood. Engineering diagrams likely reviewed by the group are projected on top.
Reproductions of 39 flyers distributed by OMSA (One Many Some All) across the neighborhood. Engineering diagrams likely reviewed by the group are projected on top.
The Memphis Pyramid is placed on top of a map of downtown Memphis, Wolf River Harbor, and the Mississippi River.
Photos from the RAFFMA at CSU, San Bernardino
The Changes You Made May Not Be Saved An interactive installation for imagining and igniting collectivities A single photograph. A hand-drawn map. A collage on the front of a missing notebook. A pyramid. A space program. A raid. From 1991 to 1994, a small group in Memphis, Tennessee, united under the name OMSA (Orange Mound Space Agency) to establish an anarcho-collectivist counterpoint to the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). A single photograph seems to be the only physical evidence of OMSA’s (One More Sexy Anarchist) mission control center located on the top levels of The Pyramid, a neglected sports and entertainment arena on the bank of the Mississippi River. The photo depicts a collage pasted onto the cover of a composition notebook with the sentence “I think the changes worked!” handwritten in black marker. A small hand-drawn map illustrates the back of the photograph, perhaps describing the notebook's hiding place inside The Pyramid. The Memphis Police Department raided the group in 1994, demolishing their living quarters, cultural center, and communications infrastructure inside the Pyramid. After the raid, members scattered across the U.S. Mid-South and Midwest. There is no evidence of OMSA’s (Our Memphian Stubbornness and Assiduity) scientific endeavors or accomplishments. The notebook captured in the photograph has not been found. What information can be salvaged about OMSA (Okay. Meanwhile, Stop Asking.) from Rob Ray’s interactive installation imagining the long-ago-dissolved group’s creative and scientific endeavors inside the Memphis Pyramid? How might OMSA’s (Our Maybe Secret Advantage) vision for space exploration shine through in Ray’s scale model of the collective’s Pyramid facility? Ray extracts what is known and postulates full-scale displays of their communications systems using augmented reality overlays, speculative promotional materials, and pirate radio listening stations. Ray’s world-building and interviews with activists, artists, and engineers create pyramidal histories whose pixels and atoms converge, heat, crystalize, collapse, explode and scatter.
Promotional card for "The Changes You Made May Not Be Saved."
RAFFMA Exhibit Details (Tennis legend Althea Gibson appears in this collage)
Categories
Work In Progress

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.

Categories
Work In Progress

Setting Up Unity AR Foundation 5.0 pre in Unity 2021 LTS

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.

Categories
Inspirations

Ettore Sottsass

I connected with Ettore Sottsass‘s designs through his work within the Memphis Group. I have yet to find an interview where he didn’t seem one-half asleep and one-half distracted. This makes me like him even more.