Yesterday everyone but me left STEIM, as the orientation was over. I got a computer, keyboards, and other gear from Nico and set up shop in Studio 2. It was a lovely sunny autumn afternoon, so after taking leave of the others, I walked to the Museum van Loon, right around the corner from me, which is an 18th century mansion on Kaisersgracht. Hanging there are portraits of the van Loons, the earliest dating back to 1616. They are in pristine condition (probably around 20 of them) and would be proud acquisitions of the Rijksmuseum if they could get their hands on them. Quite lovely. Then I walked around the canal to foam, a photography gallery and publishing house. There were two exhibits on, both really great. One was of the photos of a Russian, Alexander Gronsky. We had just been talking about abandoned cities in the world (google this and what you find is astounding), and one of the two series of photos by Gronsky was of Russian landscapes in places where the population density is less than 1 person per 20 sq. kilometers. These large photos were quite carefully balanced in composition, mainly white (snow) with striking bits of color that focused the eye and played like notes on a piano score. Each photo had a strong narrative element to it as well. He's won a big award for his photos from foam, and it is easy to see why. The second exhibit was photos and a film by Johan van der Keuken. He'd worked in a format I have been thinking about a bit, that of the pictorial narrative: a series of photos from the same event from different points of view, sort of like a film with a very very slow frame rate, but edited with close-ups and from different angles. He has one very famous photo, called "île Saint-Louis" (1958) that was meta-documented in one room, but it was a good enough photo to deserve that one room to itself. After a send-off dinner at Café de Jaren with Josh, I went back to the studio for the night, working on a setup for live looping, making music and writing Max patches and experimenting with LiSa looping software. I decided to really start very basic with LiSa, a good decision. While talking with Josh at dinner, I vowed to do an internet performance every two weeks at some time TBA, using whatever advances I'd made in a personal improv performance setup. While working on the beginnings of this idea, I ran into lots of difficulties, but some interesting accidents happened at the same time. One such accident is that I had created an 8-track simple looping patch in Max/MSP, and each track is successively triggered automatically by loud bursts of sound. Well, during the improv session, I inadvertently was making loud enough sounds to step through the tracks quite quickly at sort of random times, which started this ever-evolving loop of short sounds—evolving because the recording kept cycling around the track count and recording what it heard. Unfortunately this resulted in the end in a terrible feedback loop. But this is an interesting idea to be able to be switched on/off for a loop bed. I also decided that one way of playing through looping live sample track that might distinguish me from others is the way I play it on the synth keyboard, making musical tones from the sample tracks as well as noise/loops. The type of samples taken is something to delve into, as words have their own distinctive character while playing back, as opposed to tones. This is worth experimenting with, using poetry and stories and observations, yet spoken/sung in a specific way?