Art

We presented the installation Strings On-Line at NIME 2020. It was supposed to be a physical installation at the conference to be held in Birmingham, UK. Due to the corona crisis, the conference went online, and we decided to redesign the proposed physical installation into an online installation instead. The installation ran continuously from 21-25 July last year, and hundreds of people “came by” to interact with it. I finally got around to edit a short (1-minute) video promo of the installation:...

Open Science is on everyone’s lips these days. But why don’t we use the term Open Research more? This is a question I have been asking regularly after I was named Norwegian representative in EUA’s Expert Group on Science 2.0 / Open Sciencecommittee earlier this year. For those who don’t know, the European University Association (EUA) represents more than 800 universities and national rectors’ conferences in 48 European countries. It is thus a very interesting organization when it comes to influencing the European higher education and research environment....

From 2007 to 2011 I had a part-time research position at the Norwegian Academy of Music in a project called New Instruments for Musical Exploration, and with the acronym NIME. This project was also the reason why I ended up organising the NIME conference in Oslo in 2011. The NIME project focused on creating an environment for musical innovation at the Norwegian Academy of Music, through exploring the design of new physical and electronic instruments....

Yesterday, I posted a blog entry on my TimeLapser application, and how it was used to document the working process of the making of the sculpture Hommage til kaffeselskapene by my mother. The final timelapse video looks like this: Now I have run this timelapse video through my VideoAnalysis application, to see what types of analysis material can come out of such a video. The average image displays a “summary” of the entire video recording, somehow similar to an “open shutter” in traditional photography....

Video artist Lavasir Nordrum hast just posted the third of four short movies created together with the Sverm group. The first short movie was titled Micromovements, and the second was titled Microsounds. This month’s short movie is called Excitation, and is focused on the first half of an even or action. This will be followed by a short movie called Resonance to be released on 1 January.

For the last couple of years I have been involved in an artistic research project called Sverm, in which we investigate the artistic potential of bodily micromovements and microsound. We are currently working towards a series of intimate lab performances in the end of November. As a side-project to the performances, we are also working with video artist Lavasir Nordrum, on the making of four short videos documenting the four main parts of the project: micromovement, microsound, excitation, resonance....

I spent my flight to Montreal (which became much longer than I expected when I was rescheduled through Chicago) reading Trond Lossius’ report for the Fellowship in the arts program. He addresses a number of interesting topics: Commenting on the necessity for carrying out research for instead of on art, he discusses the concept of “art as code”: It is not only a question of developing tools. [..] Programming code becomes a meta-medium, and creating the program is creating the art work....

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 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?...