A Bio-Alarm Clock in my iPhone!

I highly recommend this little app for .99cents, if you have an iPhone (3 or 4), an iPod touch, or an iPad (1 or 2). You load the app, set the alarm, and put it on the mattress next to you face down without turning your device off. It maps your sleep cycles all night. In the morning it generates a lovely little graph for you. It is one of the best selling apps in the world, and it is not hard to see why.

Not only that, but it is an alarm clock that will gently wake you when you are in your lightest sleep phase in the half hour time period you set for the alarm.

You can learn a a lot about your sleep habits, and perhaps how to improve them so that you wake feeling refreshed, and ready for the day.

I've only used it twice, and have included my graphs too, at the end of this article.

Quoted from Sleep Cycle's website: http://www.sleepcycle.com/

Have you ever woken up feeling completely wrecked when the alarm clock goes off, despite the fact that you have slept "enough" hours? When this happens you have probably been awakened during a deep sleep phase, and your whole day can turn into one long zombie marathon.

Other days you spring out of bed with a smile on your face, feeling completely rested even though you shouldn't. As the alarm clock goes off, chance seems to play a big role in how your day will become. But does it really have to be that way? This is where the Sleep Cycle alarm clock application comes into play.

During the night you go from light sleep to deep sleep, occasionally entering into a dream state which is called REM-sleep. These are things that your normal alarm clock does not care about, and will go off at the set time regardless of whether you are in a light sleep phase or in the deepest sleep. However, since you move differently in bed during the different phases, the Sleep Cycle alarm clock is able to use the accelerometer in your iPhone to monitor your movement and determine which sleep phase you are in. Sleep Cycle then uses a 30 minute alarm window that ends at your set alarm time and wakes you in your lightest sleep phase. 

"This isn't really something new. These so called bio-alarm clocks have been around for years and work very well, but they usually come with a hefty $200 price tag. I realized that the iPhone has all the components needed, and decided to make an alarm clock that works exactly the same, but sell it for a dollar or two instead."Maciek Drejak, the programmer behind the application, says. 

Example 1: a typical sleep graph

Example 2: more irregular sleep with a period of being awake or nearly awake at 6am

The second example has a bit more irregular sleep. The user did probably not sleep as well as in example 1. In this example the user's partner got up at 6am. This is clearly seen - the user was awake or nearly awake at around 6am when her or his partner got up. 


My graphs from two recent nights.



I was blown away because that day I did, indeed, wake at 7am, but as I didn't need to get up, drifted back off for awhile. My sleep hit some deeper phases but nothing like the "normal sleep graph."




Happy to see at least one dip into "Deep Sleep." This sleep was after 3 churning, sleepless nights, and I was exhausted, and, for me, slept very well. 

                              

Language is the cage through which I express my passion

Yay! HP has finally provided an OS X Lion driver for my printer scanner! I re-worked one of the ink drawings/paintings in my Moleskine sketchbook tonight.

"LANGUAGE IS THE CAGE THROUGH WHICH I EXPRESS MY PASSION" - detail - 21cm x 29cm, 8" x 11.5", 2011, India and acrylic ink, gel pen, oil paint on Moleskine Folio Sketchbook A4 prepared with a base of acrylic matte medium. Prints available too!

I like the detail best. While I love Blogger's new lightbox, sometimes I'd like to show you a large image, so click on these linked words to see the detail in full screen-size. You can also buy the detail at Fine Art America - a single card for $6.50, or a print starting at $22.00 USD. Lots of options!

Below the first draft, and the second. I think it's finished, but... could give better definition to her arms and hands, make the line a little more lyrical; on the other hand, she is marionette-like. She is meant to impart a feeling of contained, and what easier way to convey that imprisonedness, in language, in form than with hands and feet that are as if sewn? The feet are hanging almost, puppet-like, and the hands as if sewn into the lines of the painting - yet there is a regal quality to her, I think of her as a doll who has echoes of a Spanish dancer, proud, beautiful. Her head, neck and torso have an inner frame, perhaps wood, over which the costume is affixed; the arms and legs are stuffed cloth. The way such dolls are. She wears a corset and only half of a skirt of black lace. Despite the contraints, she dances in the painting, the passion broiling in the red, firing her.

A man who calls himself Papytroll Michel (on Facebook) wrote: "Merveilleuse ta ballerine ensanglantée au visage dépecé.Très puissant.Très bon partage clair/obscur. Encore, encore d'autres :) Supernatural your ballerina stained with blood with the dismembered face. Very powerful. Very good clear / dark division(sharing). Still, still the others:)" 

I thanked him for his insightful comment that is like poetry, and '...I don't know where these paintings come from, even I have to try to understand them, and your comments help me to see deeper in their meanings... rarely do I set out to draw or paint something specific... rather... to discover what is there.'

                              

FRIDAY VIDEO/FILM POEM: 'Of Stars and People' by Ruah Edelstein

Ruah Edelstein's films exude an innocence and a child-like joy. Her animation is among my favourite. When I need to find blessing, I return to Ruah's films.

For the Solstice/Hanukkah/Christmas festive season, I present one of her Oah and Harlam Episodes: Of Stars and People.

In Of Stars and People, we find Oah falling through the skies downwards. Snow falls as Oah falls, turning in the sky. A male voice (Dylan Forman) narrates for Oah, and a female voice (Ruah herself) for Harlam. When Harlam appears, he seems to emerge from the landscape itself, and he is but a shadow over it. His eyes are deep, and compassionate. He turns, and we watch a white gull glide in the distance while the female narrator tells us Harlam 'was laughing.' Different levels of the landscape move differently in the animation. An outer sky seems to come with us as we draw back from the wide angle view of the scenic ocean with its mountains in the distance. 'Harlam was laughing at Oah. ' Then Oah is rising from a field of green with round white circles all about, rubbing herself off, having landed. Dandelion fluff billows a little like the snow we saw earlier. She is in a field of dandelions. 'But when a star falls, one must make a wish.' Oah blows a dandelion seed head, and "Made a wish for Harlam, instead.' The dandelion seeds fly out like little white trees, or snowflakes, or stars. 'Oah made a kind wish.' Both narrators speak the same words. Harlam is making a kind wish too. It is a giving message, and I love it.

Yoon Lee's music is perfect (he plays the guitar, kalimba and kayagum; with Molly McLaughlin on flute; and Kassandra Kocoshis on percussion), and if you browse Ruah's blog, you'll find more on his work, as well as a film, Summary, that they collaborated on. (A photo of Yoon scoring the music for Of Stars and People.)

Of Stars and People (2011) from Ruah Edelstein.

One more episode to the series! At first glance the stories about two weirdoes Oah and Harlam may appear as senseless. But when there is an overflow of senselessness, then appears deep philosophy.

These stories are not just shorts that I wrote, they are a worldview, answers to some questions of reality, grotesque simplicity of which seems to be surreal. In this project bits of life situations, thoughts, and actions are applied to animation, music, and a spoken word. There is a need to write fairytales for grownups, to write almost impossible stories, because when we seriously begin to talk about important and intimate things in life, most of us cannot take it.

Original music scored by Yoon Lee involves a rare use of instruments such as kalimba and kayagum (Korean zither).

Ruah's work has a deceptive simplicity, not only in the poetry, which is fairytale-like, but in the animation itself.

The figures have a transparency as they move over a background which appears through them. In her blog we learn, "I used oil paints for all the layers in the background, which was very fun to work with, while seeing how the paints interconnect after being layered digitally on screen." Before she reaches the stage of digitalizing, there is the rush of ideas, and storyboarding.

To the right you will see images of her work flow for the film featured today (if you click on the image, you'll go to her blog post). In the first image, simple, raw sketches of ideas as they emerge from her imagination. She writes, "This is one of my most favourite stages, where visuals are coming out for the first time to being without any restrictions, a very intuitive and spontaneous process to allow all sorts of visualizing ideas to come up." She says, be "loose," "minimilist," while "touching only on the keys of the story." Then comes the storyboard, which she keeps nearby her working area "at all times," shows to "friends and colleagues," and "thinks about over and over." She follows it closely when making the film.

Already we are beginning to suspect a master at work here. Browsing Ruah Edelstein's website, we find she is, indeed, an accomplished artist - in fact, the sale of her art enabled her to move from Europe to California where she is currently working on an MFA in animation at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). Before being drawn to animation, she was an actress, and also directed. Originally from Lithuania, where she grew up while her country was still part of the USSR, her Bio tells us, that, at age 10 she was accepted in to "a renowned School of Fine Arts in Klaipeda, her hometown at the coast of the Baltic sea." Most recently, she had an Oah and Harlam film in the Chelyabinsk No-Festival of Video Art and Animation in 2010; Of Giants, was selected for the Animex Awards in Feb 2011, held in the UK; and she presented Oah and Harlam episodes in San Diego at a NOW conference for authors and critics of contemporary, innovative literature in Oct 2011. Expect to see this lady's work regularly on the festival circuits when she hits her stride. Her films, with their whimsical, fairytale-like stories and characters, and their deeper philosophies giving a profundity to her work, are outstanding.

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This is my last article of 2011; FRIDAY VIDPOFILM will return January 6, 2012. Warmest season's greetings to everyone!