2007:

Began graduate studies in the CVN at NDSU in Minard Hall.
Bought a mill and taught myself to use it.
Built a “DOF adapter” for M42-mount lenses.
Modified a DV camera for use with the adapter.
Built an Arca-Swiss compatible camera mount.
Cut my own Arca-Swiss plates.
Built a camera rotator.
Built a camera stabilizer.
Built a prototype tactile stimulator for attention research.
Built a GPS hotshoe mount.
Built a laser rack for vision research.
Built a prototype light switching system for bass drum pedals.
Built a parabolic WiFi antenna from an old heater.
Built a crude WiFi antenna from a baking pan (Pantenna!).
Machined a miniature revolver cylinder as a gift.
Wrote my first serious software program. (Results).
Developed a method to preserve difficult-to-photograph varnished architectural paintings.
Developed a site-specific installation for the Plains Art Museum.
Spent the best part of the summer with Meg Holle.
Built a dual-camera hidden camera bag.
Developed and performed an audio/video performance at the Plains Art Museum.
Interviewed for the MSUM Arts and Humanities Newsletter.
Interviewed for NDSU Magazine (thanks Laura!).
Bought a new bike and rode the hell out of it.
Modified my camera bag.
Celebrated Halloween, my favorite holiday.
Spent some time with the first woman I ever loved.
Learned my first Mandarin words.
Caught a bat in the hallway.
Created Fight Christmas With Guns!
Released the Graf Paper coloring book.
Released a collection of Soviet Movie Posters.
Released a collection of Soviet Food Advertisements.
Received 4 stitches, 2L of intravenous saline, and a $1500 bill from MeritCare.
Modified a miniature GPS receiver and:
Built a single-transistor camera-GPS interface.
Planted a garden of weeds, which subsequently reproduced.
Spent a number of evenings photographing with Mr. Fort.
Presented at the Great Plains Tech Expo.
Visited Murphy’s Surplus in El Cajon.
Fixed a PowerShot SD630 and helped a bit with porting CHDK onto it.
Wrote an NSF GRFP Application on HDR Imaging and Vision.
Helped with various translations at IATE.
Drank beer with friends.
Attended numerous conferences, including:
SIGGRAPH 2007 (San Diego).
Vision Sciences Society (Sarasota, Florida).
RADIANCE (Minneapolis).

This isn’t everything, by any means. These are the things I’ve finished, or that didn’t need finishing. Much remains ongoing.

I am satisfied with what I’ve done, but it’s crystal clear to me that I’m tool-making. By that, I mean developing the means to do things. This is a good list, but it’s a list of potential, of gearing up for more and better bigger plans than tooling. I haven’t wasted any time, and I’m not yet dead. The next step is to shift my focus from the instruments to the task at hand. 2008 will be the year of wrestling hard problems.

Be patient with me as I may not be very talkative.

In 2001, the Plains Art Museum held an exhibition called “Darker Shades of Red“, which was an exhibit of Soviet propaganda and state-sponsored social realist painting. Among the artifacts was this object, which was under glass. It is a small music box in the shape of the Sputnik satellite. In both scenarios (on the web and in the museum) the music/sound remained a mystery- described only in text. I was immediately curious about what it sounded like — what tune creaked forth from the crazed plastic base. In 2005, I got in touch with the NASM curator and asked for a recording of the Sputnik music box. If you’d like to hear what I’d been waiting to hear for three years, here ’tis:

http://danreetz.com/sputnik/Sputnikmusicbox_.mp3

The tune is “Le Internationale” and the beeps are, you guessed it, the beeps of Sputnik. Which may be the most magical implementation of a music box mechanism, ever. Even more interesting is how the tune is out of tune, so that the Sputnik notes are dead on.

Curious about what the real Sputnik sounded like?

Thank you, Cathleen S. Lewis, for taking the time to make that sound available.

I’ve long been silent in official art channels, bucking galleries for websites, museums for street art. However, an offer for an exhibition in the Plains Art Museum’s Café Muse was too good to turn down. I have a show there — “Photographs by Dan Reetz“[PDF], which is on display from today, July 2nd, until September 28th. It is all-new work, created with the Museum in mind and as subject. Using today’s technology — digital cameras, 3D modeling, and compositing tools, I’ve put the Museum in a state of distress that even the staff can’t remember.

The official description:

Photographs by Dan Reetz

July 2 - September 28

Café Muse by Mosaic Foods

Photographers like Brian Walski, Adnan Hajj, Yevgeny Khaldei and Hwang Woo-Suk have set the 21st Century standards in journalistic photography. Following their lead, ex-Museum janitor Dan Reetz presents a series of photographs that sell a story about the Museum. The former sculptor, video game artist, and current graduate student of Visual Neuroscience at NDSU, utilizes the latest digital capture and image production technology to show the Museum as no one has ever seen it.

At Dashka’s invitation, I lugged a hundred plus pounds of food from Moscow to a place near Murmansk Thirty-six hours on a train, two hours of pre-dawn fogged bag-dragging, and one short collapse in a rusting bed later, I helped a group of students unload a cargo freighter’s lumber. Approved, and safe in the belly of said hulk, I listened to the motor churn and stared out a crazed plastic porthole at faraway shores.

We stopped at a waystation with a windmill, a junkyard, and a stone foundation. There were houses made from huge metal tanks, outdoor toilets, rusting boats, and burning plastic garbage piles. At the waystation we were issued Soviet coats and tea. On the water again, in a blue boat (once red), we nailed a log or loch ness something. Instead of stopping our driver throttled up and drowned the motor. Though I had my DMM and tools handy, I couldn’t bring it back to life. Later, an older, wiser driver sailor brought us from the middle of the lake to land.

We spent a week there, on the island, picking mushrooms and blackberries, working when asked and otherwise exploring, guided by GPS, intuition, and shorelines. We found tiny wild strawberries, sandblasted glass shards, remains of old houses, bear shit. We walked on ground spongy with life, on rock weathered with age, on seashores littered with jellyfish. We ate mushrooms, seaweed, berries. We sunned ourselves on the biggest black rock we could find. We slept on the floor, freezing and frying in turns. We were eaten by a thousand mosquitos, simultaneously flirting across meadows. We told our family stories over white driftwood bays and white weathered outcrops.

A mid-week crisis left me messed-up but functional; best laid plans fail spectacularly and tides tend to swell deep, drowning music machines. Headphoned silent watching gulls, cold to life on the shore and wrapped in wet felt I walked back to arms. Time passed, trip ended on kontroller’s decision to kick me off the island, a midnight sailor’s visit, and our rusty powerboat. I left paranoid and relieved, fingers black and blue with berries and effort. Boat after boat, brilliant storytelling and softly speaking English with Dashka. Already missing Katya and Koma. Talking about anime, asian food, hopes, nightmares, watching endless stalky treeshores distant. We could have been anywhere but we were there, then, happy to be alive and already moving on.

Here are some pictures. I might put up more, someday.

Files, folders, dirs, disks, piles, heaps; great yawning data mines and camera-provided context (this year, this date, this time, this number in sequence) sometimes show themselves telling; every so often a new thought, a new technique, a new programmatic approach will yield something interesting from great yawning memory.

With off-the-shelf software I’ve found a way to abuse old images into something representative; something a little more memorial. Each of the following images is a composite of three or more, comprised of all of the same subject(s), or better, completely different places and times, spanning seconds, minutes, hours, days; miles, blocks, feet, and inches. Like memory they tend to conflate, mashing faces, places, and spaces into single images.

It’s not only an average or a composite, though. Many of the images are possible because there was a corpus of pictures with similar-enough subject matter. If I took, for example, dozens of shots of a certain power substation at different times, from different perspectives, the image is wider, denser, and probably has more errors. You can read the density and width of these images as indicators of interest in a subject.

All of these photos represent a certain span of time, from 2001 until 2005; a certain singular college experience, a certain sculptural program, a certain fixation. The process of taking masses of photos, over four years, using four different cameras yielded the different color saturations, depths of field, and misaligned geometry you can see here. I won’t call this data analysis, it’s not; plenty of it is fully faked. This is how I remember things.

I’ve updated my demo reel for Spring of 2006. You can see it here-(Quicktime) (Windows Media). For everyone not familiar with this sort of thing, a demo reel is how computer artists- 3D modelers, video editors, motion graphics designers, and so on - sell themselves to employers. I’m pretty proud of this reel. And I’m confident the next one will be even better.

Dead December has come; late-year holiday jeer, slipped-up roads, smashed-up cars. But long before cars and college, holidays away from now, my brother Mike and I used to play games in the snow and on screen. Both of us January boys, we ran ’round our yellow garage, chasing Casey in waist high drifts just crusted enough to fall through. I can’t recall life before Mike or imagine life after- we’ve spent years in the back of Mom’s Chevrolet Celebrity, sharing carseats, spilled-drinks, the sick powder smell of wet-naps. We watched our dog get skunked and bathed with canned tomato juice; climbed trees and dug holes, rode trikes, then bikes, tired Mom with fights everlasting, gutted gear Dad brought home from the lab. These days, we spend most of our time honing creative practice, doing the best polygon pushing, pattern-bashing, heart-wrenching art we can. A friend slipped and loosed a name for us- the Brother Supremacy- homage, I’m sure, to our headstrong style and headlong confidence… (And probably recent synchronous haircuts, too.) We haven’t spent Halloween together in years, but I’m confident we will find time to be cowboys, commandos, pirates, drummers, and artists again. You can see what he’s doing here.

The first thing Poodus did was put my mom in the hospital… the lastest addition to the Brother Supremacy, born on a cold day, bringing sunlight and new life to tired arms and eyes. He spent years standing up to me and Mike and forging his own in a space already full of cruel and confident boys, developing thoughts, interests, and a calm patience that Mike and I never had. Like us, but better, he’s a many-talented, terribly flexible learner bent on realizing a vision, employing guitars, cameras, skateboards, and HTML in an effort to educate, communicate, and express.

Any mention of brothers and lifelong friends would be raw without Seth and Noah, first-class brains and best friends, might-as-well-be brothers who influenced me as much as I hope I did them. Contact is sparse- every few weeks or months we exchange thoughts and feelings. But once in a while we get to burn blazes into the night and tell stories of the lives we’ve spent since I stopped staying at their house every day.

Reading this, don’t get me wrong - the point is not nostalgia - it’s not about canning up any moment, it’s about the ongoing. See you in the future.

October is one of my favorite months- deadening December and January with its burned-red withering, silences of early morning, scarved crowds in evening. The landscape opens up again, fallen leaves covering the ground and not my sky. I can’t wait for the cold outside. Some of you may remember how last year’s October ended in personal freedom and emotional upheaval; while this year is not nearly so dramatic, it’s just as powerful.

If you hadn’t heard already, I’m on my way to Russia. I’ll be departing Fargo mid-December. Life is going to change a lot in the near near future and I may never come back, by choice or by accident. If I haven’t seen you in years, get in touch with me, if possible, and if not, by chance or by death, I miss you. We should catch up. I’ve emailed some of you, asked around for some of your numbers — hoping to catch a glimpse of where you’ve gone while I’ve been getting ready to go. Of course, I won’t have a lot of time, and I may not have the same free days that you do, so… long.

I spend as much time alone as possible. Most of my happiness comes from self-satisfaction and creative activity, whether art, music, or cooking. Instead of buying some new bauble or babbling with friends, celebrate how alone you are. Take an afternoon with the window cracked, bread in the oven, and some coffee or tea with honey. Read something that takes all the concentration you’re not sparing on sipping, savoring. Love yourself and know you’re the only one who can do that for as long as you live.

June and July have been wonderful, the summer is half over and there is no reason for concern. After several people asked, I’ve decided not to play any shows in Fargo ever again. I’ll consider shows in other towns, but around here, it’s just not worth it.

Work at NDSU has been wonderful.

The projects I mentioned before are still underway, still on their way. Unfortunately, moving in and catching up takes more time than I anticipate, every time. The new place is beautiful; I love it. It’s old and gorgeous, terazzo and concrete walls. Best of all, there’s no way to get in touch with me, no buzzer, no doorbell. The doors are locked and the blinds pulled.

I hope you’re doing well, wherever you’re at and whatever you’re doing. If you feel like going for a late-night walk and taking pictures, or perhaps working on some project or similar activity, feel free to call. Don’t be surprised if I’m not available to go to the bar or go for passive entertainment. Do send me an email.

Take some time and check out hannah’s website. Well worth a look.

Dan

Lots of new developments around here, but most are background operations that you don’t need to see. Three new projects going online shortly; expect them by the end of June. The wait you’ve been waiting (assuming you’ve been by) will be worth it.

I’ll be moving into a new apartment again at the end of this month, so trying to get together/call/whatever around that time is not a good idea. I simply won’t have time or energy to do much else. I’m quite excited about the new place; hopefully it will end up being the last place I live here in Fargo. And though I’ve said that a few times, it’s ultimately clear to me that Fargo is not my future. I can’t spend much longer than another year here. I’ll spam everyone with my new address when I’ve gone and moved in.

Finally, I’ve started working with some guitar sounds from Doz M., and some cello sounds from Nate H. I’m quite excited about these new musical developments; the next set of tracks is going to be quite wonderful. As far as the existing album goes, demos are being sent out. Unfortunately almost none of the people who received advance copies of the album bothered to mail back their favorite tracks, so I had to make the demo without their help. Special thanks to the few that did get back- and curse the sloth of those who didn’t.