Five long years, hundreds of hours, thousands of dollars, and millions of mouse-clicks have gone into the making of You Are Not Dead, A Guide to Modern Living. This album of electronic music is a joint effort between myself and writer Meg Holle, plus piecewise contributions from a half-dozen highly talented artists times the latest in absurdly powerful audio manipulation software. The album consists of twelve audio tracks and one wickedly written, heavily illustrated guidebook.

You Are Not Dead: A Guide to Modern living is available now, free:

http://www.fakeproject.com/you_are_not_dead/

Please tell everyone who might enjoy it.

Your comments are requested and appreciated.
Daniel Reetz

PS. Some pages may be changing a little; pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. Any problems with the site, let me know.
PPS. Don’t miss my upcoming all-ages show at the Aquarium in Fargo, April 7th, 7pm.
PPXS. Torrents of very-high-quality MP3s will be posted late Monday night, but not before.

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.

Some updates around the site — check the front page, for example.

The most obvious updates were aesthetic, but the most important updates were making the content around here more easily accessible. No wading through entries to browse pictures, posters, or projects — it’s all there on the front page.

For now, later.

One of the problems with current DV cameras is the lack of Depth of Field (DOF). Put very simply, if you want to have a foreground object in focus, and a background blurred, you need a large sensor and a large aperture, neither of which are available on a tiny video camera. Of course, there is a hack, and that hack is to make a 35mm lens adapter.

For lenses, I chose to use the “M42″ mount, which allows me to use some lenses that I acquired while in Russia. To make the thing work, you use the 35mm lens as it was intended to be used — projecting onto a piece of film, or in this case, ground glass. Actually, in my design, I used a diffusing film from an LCD monitor instead of ground glass, but the effect is the same. Finally, you tape the image of the projection using your small sensor and aperture, and get a much more pleasing image.

For the moment, this is just a set of three images of the device. As time permits, I may write up a tutorial and a discussion of LCD film technology.

Don’t miss my show at the Plains Art Museum. Thanks to everyone who has gone, and especially to those who have provided feedback.

The Soviets had a long and productive run with film, producing hundreds of movies, some absolutely stunning. While in Russia, I had the opportunity to copy a large number of posters, as well as fifty or more films.

I had intended to mark each poster with an English translation/transliteration, IMDB reference, and the name of the poster artist where available, but while I am studying Visual Neuroscience the likelihood of this work actually getting done is extremely low. My time is spoken for.

As such, I feel it is a better idea to release the un-annotated collection of Soviet movie posters to the public now. Enjoy, and if you’d like to work with me to annotate the posters, I would be very glad to hear from you.

Daniel Reetz, in collusion with the Fakeproject Corporation of America,
presents a selection of Soviet Movie posters from 1921-1973.

After long deliberation, downloadation, and backup-ation, I’ve gone and deleted the contents of fakeproject.com from the server. There’s a lot of organization and re-structuring happening behind the scenes, and leaving the content of old up there for all was inhibiting progress. Over time, I’ll make archives of everything that was ever up available; the problems come from inconsistent coding and poor file management- tons of dead links, broken images, pages leading nowhere. Hardly a professional front.

The new fakeproject.com will be back soon, with news on new tunes, new projects, and stuff to download.

I’ve had the pleasure of perusing the spoils spring cleaning week in Fargo this week- most notably, I acquired a Towa T-1000 copy machine. It’s got a blue toner cart in it, and a sheet feeder. After spending some time fixing a bad solenoid (the ferrite rod had rusted to the shell) I got the machine running. It will come in very handy when producing the limited run of my forthcoming album, You Are Not Dead: A Guide To Modern Living. There will be a limited, hand-produced run to give to people who helped with the album; after that, there will be no giveaways or sales, as I’m going to be shopping the demo around.

Today, when riding bike to work, I spotted a pulse-monitor monitor. You know, with the little green graph that jumps when you hear the beeping of your own heart. It had a little printer attached to the bottom too, with a bit of ticker tape sticking out. I’m not sure if it was there to reproduce the graph, or to pump out receipts…