[Photo: Anne Helmond]

Crackle-canvas is an ongoing electronics project of the Netherlands-based media artist Tom Verbruggen (aka token). This endeavour playfully challenges the conventions of artistic consumption by reimagining gallery space as an interactive musical playground rather than an arena of sullen observation. Each Crackle-canvasis a modular ‘synthesizer painting’ equipped with switches and knobs that allow rudimentary control over the sound generated by the device. While these objects can be played individually, things get considerably more interesting when they are patched together into a collaborative cacaphony. Verbruggen has developed several iterations of these devices that range from stark white minimalist surfaces to more colourful, user-friendly controllers complete with graphic prompts for novice operators. While there is an abundance of video documentation of the artist performing on arrays of these controllers, the work is most interesting when there is are participants involved – the above image from a recent exhibit in Paris speaks to the type of engagement these objects engender.

Continue reading.... Crackle Canvas [Environment, Sound]

In the redesigned Deutsche Bank headquarters in Frankfurt am Main, the BrandSpace designed to provide an insight into the bank’s history, present, business areas and its brand philosophy. The Deutsche Bank Logo by Anton Stankowski is used as a starting point for ART + COM for spatial design and is translated into three-dimensional kinect structure.

We are happy to announce that after months of hard work, and even more to come, Resonate Festival has launched it’s full site and tickets are now available for purchase.

‘Resonate’ is an initiative by “Magnetic Field B” in collaboration with CreativeApplications.Net and Dom Omladine in Belgrade. It’s core aim is to set a new standard in the arts industry by creating a new event platform for inspiration, networking, information, knowledge sharing and education. It brings together distinguished, world class artists, with an opportunity of participating in a forward-looking debate on the position of technology in art and culture. But Resonate is also much more than just a festival, expert seminar or exhibition of visual arts. It is a project broad enough to encompass areas ranging from software engineering to visual arts theory, but also to create a bridge between culturally separated segments of the artistic and intellectual scene through a comprehensive, multidisciplinary approach.

Taking place in Belgrade, Serbia from 16th – 17th March 2012, the event will give visitors an overview of current situation in the fields of music, visual arts and digital culture. Guest artists, lecturers and other participants have been chosen to represent the cutting edge of the contemporary creative industry in Europe. Interactivity is the key feature of contemporary communications and as a festival of new media, Resonate will be structured in such a way to reflect this fact on several levels. First of all, that means the interaction between audience and authors, or audience and art forms, as visitors of the festival will be active participants and will have contact with the authors through workshops, lectures, multimedia installations and the music program.

- 20 speakers from Europe, Asia and North America
- Collaborations with both national and international educational institutions
- Talks, workshops, panel discussions, performances and concerts
- Day and night programme (DJ Sets, Live Audio/Visual Performances and Concerts)
- In the heart of europe, city of history and culture – Belgrade

Featuring Nicholas Felton, Josh Nimoy, Jer Thorp, Greg J. Smith, Regine Debatty, Champagne Valentine, Niklas Roy, Benjamin Gaulon, Martial Geoffre-Rouland, Karsten Schmidt, FIELD, LAb[au], Rafaël Rozendaal, United Visual Artists, Written Images, Jürg Lehni, WARP, onedotzero and many more.

…and this is just the beginning. Yet to announce are night event details including 2 headlining acts, audio-visual performances, DJs, workshops, screenings, panels and more. You will not be disappointed!

Tickets are now on sale (Only €40.00). Book now and save 50% on the door price. Only available for few weeks and in limited numbers.

Dates: 16th – 17th March 2012
Location: Belgrade, Serbia 

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The video below, created by Lasal, shows a short part of a new installation which explores the relationship between 2 Harmonic waves in different graphical/musical ways. The piece includes 98 pair of points trigger notes depending on the collision position in the Y axis and panning depends on the X position. The phase and velocity of booth waves are synchronised to collide in a harmonic chord.

Continue reading.... Harmophon [vvvv, Sound]

Numbers, a record label originating from Glasgow, had the opportunity to showcase artists at this year’s Sonar Festival in Barcelona. The artists Redinho, Spencer, Deadboy, Jackmaster, and Lory D each had a spot in the set.

Adam Rodgers, co-founder of Numbers and Remote-Location approached Thomas Traum, Adam Finlay and myself to create live visuals for the show.

We compared a number of technologies and frameworks– OpenFrameworks, Cinder, Unity3D, Cocos2d, WebGL, Processing, and good ol’ Flash. Doing something in 3D was a priority, and since we only had a 2-3 week timeline, the decision really came down to what would be the fastest to develop.

Continue reading.... Visuals for Sonar Festival + VDMX to Unity3D [Tutorials]

Parhelia by Paul Prudence is a real-time A-V performance piece where sample based mechanical sounds are used orchestrate a family of concentric forms in space. The vvvv scenes suggest the workings of a imaginary machine where its component parts, or ‘gears’ interact with one an another triggering corresponding sounds.

Parhelia uses direct translation of sound to visual material via OSC and MIDI data transmission. Sound design and composition is done in Ableton Live which runs along side VVVV. MIDI & OSC data is sent from Ableton Live’s time-line and processed in VVVV to choreograph the animation in real-time. A midi device is used to control aspects and behaviour of each of the forms during a performance ensuring the each performance is unique. A variety of field recordings, including samples of mechanical devices, form the basis of the sound design.

Continue reading.... Parhelia [vvvv]

The Saatchi & Saatchi New Directors’ Showcase is one of the highlights of the Cannes Lions Festival, and has become one of the most popular events during Cannes week. Again this year, it took place in The Grand Auditorium, with overspill into the Debussy. Saatchi & Saatchi senior creative team Jonathan Santana & Xander Smith came up with the initial concept for this year’s showcase – ‘Hello Future’, a dark, retro futuristic setting with a ‘HAL’-like host. Juliette Larthe – an independent producer (formerly of Warp Films) pulled a creative team together: Marshmallow Laser Feast (Memo Akten, Robin McNicholas, Barney Steel), Aaron Meyers, Jamie Lidell, Clark, Mark Titchner, Gary Card.

The (MLF) directed the visual performance, created all the graphics for the ‘HAL’ character, the titles, and various other ‘interludes’ (such as a special hypnosis moment). The team worked closely with Aaron Meyers who developed the kinect performance software for Jamie Lidell’s section, and the stage + lighting + sound designers to pull together the overall look and feel.

The graphics app used was made in Cinder and there are 3 stage computers each with a Kinect running an OpenNI-based openFrameworks application that sends information over OSC. The software was controlled live with controls mapped to an Oxygen8 midi keyboard and a few little controls on an iPad running Mrmr.

The process of creating images was very analogue utilising found objects such as a step ladder, a couple of broom sticks, rear projection perspex, large metal bowl, bin bags, gaffer tape and glass prisms. These were then filmed with a handheld pointgrey dragonfly2, sending this live feed into a laptop running modul8, playing with a few midi sliders and knobs to deform and affect the image in realtime and project onto perspex, and then film that back with Canon 5D. The show was run using the new VDMX to play content on the 14x8m rear screen, and the side ‘banana’ screens.

Behind the scenes video and images coming soon…

canneslions.com/saatchinewdirectors

UPDATE 01/09/2011 – Making of video added. See below.

[AntiVJ's Simon Geilfus and Murcof at A/Visions 2 / photo: basic_sounds]

Having just completed its twelfth run, Montreal’s MUTEK festival continues to cultivate the the substantial niche it has carved out for itself on the global media arts circuit. In addition to a storied history of showcasing emerging and established electronic musicians of all stripes, MUTEK has also acted as an r&d lab for exploring the possibilities of integrated audiovisual performance. In 2005, a programming stream dedicated to presenting bleeding edge collaborations between musicians and visual designers entitled A/Visions was brought into the fold to showcase innovative projects like artificiel’s cubing and Marc Leclair & Gabriel Coutu-Dumont’s 5mm. A/Visions has matured so rapidly that by 2008 this supplementary programming was consistently eclipsing ‘big room’ headliners and—at least as many MUTEK regulars were concerned—functioning as the locus of innovation within the yearly gathering. The 2009 and 2010 AV performance programming upped the ante even more and the expectations for both experimentation and production design were very high going into the this year’s edition of the proceedings. This post presents an overview of and reflection on material featured at A/Visions two weeks ago in Montreal.

Electroacoustic composer Alain Thibault and visual designer Yan Breuleux have been working together as Purform for almost 15 years. For MUTEK the duo presented White Box, a project dedicated to exploring “new forms of generating A/V compositions in real time.” As evidenced by the teaser video above, the performance leveraged a massive three screen projection surface as a canvas for exploring dense monochromatic meshes and emergent moiré patterns. Characterized by coarse granular synthesis and dynamic, clinical pattern studies, the set was undeniably polished – perhaps pristine to a fault. Compared to the subsequent rumbling bass-scapes of Emptyset and the cataclysmic improvised mayhem that Mika Vainio cooked up in the darkness, White Box offered a glimpse into a stark formalist universe that could only emerge from such a longstanding collaboration.

Within about 45 seconds of beginning their performance at the SAT the British duo Sculpture had already confirmed their status as the wildcard artists at MUTEK 2011. Sound artist Dan Hayhurst and animator Reuben Sutherland specialize in crafting dense, plunderphonic soundscapes complimented by live video of custom-made zoetropic picture discs. Their performance married reel-to-reel tomfoolery with turntable centric digital video that was projected onto a horseshoe-shaped configuration of screens lining the perimeter of the space. This arrangement was intentionally overwhelming and many audience members were visibly dazed by the combination of Hayhurst scrubbing through his tape loop inventory and Sutherland’s reconfiguration of the wheels of steel as a psychedelic movie machine. The set was a gloriously orchestrated cacophony – media archeology for the MIDI controller set and a refreshing reminder that a virtuosic back-to-basics approach to animation is capable of trumping any graphics library.

Fernando Corona (aka Murcof) and Simon Geilfus of AntiVJ have been collaborating for approximately two years and the duo presented the fruits of their (iterative) labour at the second A/Visions event. The embed above really does not do this work justice and the creative partnership essentially ‘builds a universe’ around Murcof’s brooding, orchestral LP Cosmos and some more recent material. AntiVJ’s Joanie Lemercier and Nicolas Boritch describe the work as “being rooted in a 2009 residency in Bristol” where the artists had the time to build an “emergent” performance workflow “from the ground up”. Riffing on the geometries and organizational logic of cosmology, biological systems and the scattershot luminosity of a dense weave of light rays, the set was captivating and deservedly received a thunderous response. It should also be noted that AntiVJ developed a thoughtful solution to the perennial “where do we put the performers?” problem by projecting the video on a semi-transparent mesh scrim that hung in front of Corona and Geilfus, downplaying their visual presence and also creating the illusion that the animation is floating in space rather than dancing across a “standard white screen”. One particularly riveting sequence played out as if the audience were drifting through a 3D field of detritus that pulsated in sync with Corona’s drones, the shading of this ‘space junk’ was incredible and justifies comparisons to some of Lebbeus Woods’ wilder moments.

A veteran of the inaugural MUTEK lineup, Seth Horvitz is amongst a handful of artists including Atom Heart and Carsten Nicolai whose experimental practices have remained important references to the evolution of the festival over the last decade. Horvitz recently completed his MFA at Mills College and essentially presented his thesis research Eight Studies for Automatic Piano on intensely programmed scores for the Yamaha DC7 Mark III Disklavier. In perhaps the best moment of theatre of the entire festival, a besuited Horvitz began his performance by strolling across stage to turn on his piano and then disappeared into the shadows, not to be seen again. The work presents kind of a piano endgame that tested the perception of the audience while—given the scope of MUTEK—offering a timely examination of precision and ‘programming’.

An excerpt from the ‘listener’s guide’ (PDF) for the LP release of the project on LINE where Horvitz discusses the notion of hand-made algorithms:

“I have been told that my music is algorithmic, although I don’t really think of it that way. I don’t use any math other than simple addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. I copy something (often a repeating figure), paste it next to itself, and then change it a little. Then I do it again and again, changing it by the same amount each time, and listening all the while. If it doesn’t sound good, I might start over. Or I might copy half of all the copies and put them somewhere else, change that a little, then repeat the process again and again… I avoid using equations, because I never want the music to get too far away from my ear.”

The above video demonstrates how the dense melodies literally wash over the keyboard while the projections offer a rudimentary visualization of the complexity of these pattern studies. Eight Studies for Automatic Piano was a treat to experience live, and there was something quite amazing about watching a precisely calibrated automaton work its magic in a concert hall setting.

The above smattering of teaser videos clearly doesn’t do A/Visions 2011 justice but these taste tests certainly verify the innovation and diversity of the work programmed this year. For the sake of brevity this review did not touch on Tristan Perich’s surprisingly moving rendition of 1-Bit Symphony, a severe prop-driven performance piece by Women With Kitchen Appliances and an atmospheric meditation on macro photography by Comaduster – these projects are all worth looking into.

Stepping back from A/Visions and considering the larger events at MUTEK, it is clear that the interplay of sound and image is becoming increasingly important to the direction of the festival; this year the spotlight shone on Richie Hawtin’s LED cage (produced by Ali Demirel and the wizards at Derivative) and Amon Tobin showed up for his gig at Metropolis at the helm of a cubist megalith (it was hardly the Mothership, but I suppose it would do in a pinch). I greatly prefer the focus and discipline of the work I’ve described above, but one can’t help but note that audience expectations and visual literacy are evolving rapidly. While my mind is still buzzing from this abundance of stimuli, I’m already starting to catch myself wondering what next year will yield.

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About the Author: Greg J. Smith a Toronto-based designer and researcher with interests in media theory and digital culture. Extending from a background in architecture, his research considers how contemporary information paradigms affect representational and spatial systems. Greg is a designer at Mission Specialist, blogs at Serial Consign and is a managing editor of the digital arts publication Vague Terrain. He currently teaches courses on information visualization, technology and urbanism in the CCIT program (University of Toronto – Mississauga/Sheridan College).

Commissioned by the poet Sabrina Mahfouz for her solo show Dry Ice (Showed 20th – 23rd April 2011, at the New Wimbledon Theatre, London), “So.. I was at a party last night” is a collaboration between Andrea Cuius and Roland Ellis.

Conversations and interactions form the stimulus for this reactive light installation. Each point of light has a character and together they form a dynamic canopy complementing the frequencies and amplitudes of a performance. The naturally smooth dimming of the tungsten lends well to the classic aesthetic given to the canopy. The glass of the lamps is of various forms, from the classic bulb to large spheres, cones and tubes; each with its own intricate filament glowing inside. When extinguished the glass is speckled with reflections of light from around the canopy.

Installation includes 30 tungsten lamps with intricate filaments that are suspended above the performer. A microphone captures the audio, which is analysed real time using Cinder producing the canopy’s illuminating reactions.

Project Page here and here

See also Hyundai i40 Reveal /by Hi-ReS! and @nanikawa #openFrameworks …

Jonathan by Sam Kronick is an interactive ‘non-game‘ that explores the culture and urban form of a typical American suburban landscape by creating a never-ending generative sprawl of lawns, cul-de-sacs and single-family homes.

It takes its name and inspiration from the real-life neighborhood of Jonathan, Minnesota, where in the late 1960′s an ambitious “new town” was planned for an eventual population of 50,000. Jonathan asks not how we can build a community, but how, once built, will we maintain it? The player in Jonathan takes on the role of a typical suburban maintenance worker–a lawn mower–as he or she navigates a never-ending software-generated sprawl of lawns, cul-de-sacs, and excessively gabled single-family homes. More of a tool to explore this familiar-but-strange territory than a full-blown “video game,” Jonathan generates a nonlinear storyline as the player encounters video vignettes of the banality, the innocence, the boredom, and the restrained aggression of life in the suburbs as documented by its residents and posted on YouTube.

Sam is a B.S. in architecture and visual arts graduate from MIT, class of 2010, currently pursuing Master of Fine Arts in the Department of Visual Arts at University of California San Diego.

More interesting work by Sam @ newuntitledpage.com