Art and Creativity

In an interview, Trond Lossius discusses his take on sound art. He mentions how he treats video as an advanced spotlight, giving the eyes something to look at while listening to the sound: Video kommer jeg mest til å bruke som avanserte lyskilder. Tanken er at de skal invitere publikum til å bevege seg rundt i rommet, og dermed også utforske hvordan lyden varierer i rommet. Bevegelsene, teksturene og fargene i videoene kan gi øyet noe å hvile på og samtidig invitere til koblinger til hvilke kvaliteter lyden har. ...

Just back from the 1st Nordic Music Technology Conference organized by NTNU in connection with Trondheim MatchMaking organized by TEKS. This is the follow-up conference from Musikkteknologidagene which I organized in Oslo last year as an attempt to gather people working within the field. Ola Nordahl has posted some nice pictures from the Opening day, where Paul Lansky held a great keynote about his compositions (check out his music page for examples of his work). I gave a presentation on challenges and possible solutions in the study of musical body movements. ...

Myron is the cross-platform, cross-language, open source, video capture and computer vision plugin. One core C object gets cross-compiled as a handful of high level language “wrapper” libraries. The wrapper for Java and Processing is called JMyron. The wrapper for Macromedia Director is called WebCamXtra. The aim of the project is to keep computer vision free and easy for the new media education and arts community. I will have to look into whether it is be possible to use this with Max/MSP/Jitter.

I found (via Trond’s blog) the funny story Unhappy Hour about a group of people getting stuck with a jukebox playing Brian Eno’s Thursday Afternoon. I bought the DVD not too long ago, and it has become one my favourites. Eno writes in the liner notes: These pieces represent a response to what is presently the most interesting challenge of video: how does one make something that can be seen again and again in the way that a record can be listened to repeatedly? I feel that video makers have generally addressed this issue with very little success: their work has been conceived within the aesthetic frame of cinema and television (an aesthetic that presupposes a very limited number of viewings) but then packaged and presented in a format the clearly intends multiple viewings, the tape or disc. ...

{#image241}The Khronos Projector by Alvaro Cassinelli is an interactive-art installation allowing people to explore pre-recorded movie content in an entirely new way. […] The goal of the Khronos Projector is to go beyond these forms of exclusive temporal control, by giving the user an entirely new dimension to play with: by touching the projection screen, the user is able to send parts of the image forward or backwards in time. By actually touching a deformable projection screen, shaking it or curling it, separate “islands of time” as well as “temporal waves” are created within the visible frame. This is done by interactively reshaping a two-dimensional spatio-temporal surface that “cuts” the spatio-temporal volume of data generated by a movie.

Still trying to get through all my notes from Resonances… Of the many installations at NIME 06, I found three of them particularly interesting: {#image227}Musical Loom by Kingsley Ng was based around an old loom standing in a dark room (or rather a “tent” built between the entrances to the toilets…). It was possible to “play” the loom and sounds and images would appear. The technical setup was built with a combination of infrared cameras and ultrasound sensors, and using EyesWeb for control. {#image228}16:9 by Daniel Teige & Martin Rumori was a large wall with 64 small speakers. The user could control sounds around the surface with a wireless touchscreen. A quite simple idea, but it worked very well! Seule avec loup by N+N Corsino was a big audiovisual installation down in the basement of Centre Pompidou. What I found most fascinating was a 10 meter wall of electrostatical speakers projecting sound using wavefield synthesis. The additional surround speakers added more directivity to the sounds, but the shear size of this wavefield setup made it possible to really hear how great this sound propagation technique is. Sensors in the floor should have made it possible to control the position of the viewer in space, but I didn’t really get this part…

Doug pointed me to Deep Listening: Deep Listening is a philosophy and practice developed by Pauline Oliveros that distinguishes the difference between the involuntary nature of hearing and the voluntary selective nature of listening. The result of the practice cultivates appreciation of sounds on a heightened level, expanding the potential for connection and interaction with one’s environment, technology and performance with others in music and related arts.

{#image172}A memorable show during the Elektrafestival was the Laser Sound Performance by Edwin van der Heide. He used two lasers and (I think) motorized mirrors and filters to create laser patterns on the wall and in the smoke filling the space. The sound was mostly sine tones, sawtooths and various types of noise at an extremely loud level (even with ear plugs). Not really sure how he did it, but there was a really tight synch between the movement of the lasers and the sounds.

Nils showed me this nice picture site called DesignKlicks from Spiegel Online. It is this 3d-picture space where you can move around and look at similar pictures. Unfortunately it is based on keyword descriptions and not on picture content. I really look forward to the day we get picture (and also music and video) browsers like this working on media content itself.

There are some simple gif animations that start playing when you hover over some of the images on björk’s MEDÚLLA web page. Nowadays, with lots of flash graphics everywhere, you rarely see such low-quality gifs anymore. However, for some reason I really found these small gifs appealing. Reminds me about David Crawford’s Stop Motion Studies.