Art

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…

We have started a collaboration between between UiO and AHO, and some of the music technology students followed courses with the interaction designers at AHO this spring semester. This was a great success, and I was impressed with what came out of it. Henrik Marstrander has worked on a table interface where he can control various musical parameters, and Jon Olav Eikenes and Marie Wennesland has made a multi-touch multi-touch interface modelled after Jeff Han.

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.

{.imagelink}The installation Spatial Sounds (100dB at 100km/h) by Marnix de Nijs and Edwin van der Heide. Spatial Sounds 100 dB at 100 km/h was set up at Usine-C during the Elektrafestival. A speaker is mounted on a metallic arm, rotating around at different speeds dependent on the people in the room. Ultrasonic sensors detect the distance to people in the space and changes the sound being played as well as speed of rotation (more technical info here). Sometimes it is moving slowly, but most of the time (probably because there were always quite a lot of people in the space) it is spinning quite fast. A quite simple concept, but it was suprisingly powerful. However, considering the large forces involved, I was mostly thinking about what would happen if the arm broke with all those people around…

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.

Just went to a lecture by Sidney Fels from the Human Communication Technologies lab and MAGIC[]{#mce_editor_0_parent} at the University of British Columbia (interestingly enough located in the Forest Sciences Centre…). He was talking on the topic of intimate control of musical instruments, and presented some different projects: GloveTalkII: “a system that translates hand gestures to speech through an adaptive interface.” Iamascope: a caleidoscope like thing, where users would see themselves on a big screen, as well as controlling a simple sound synthesis. This he claimed was responsive visually, but the lack of any physcial reference made the sound control very non-expressive. Tooka: a collaborative instrument where two performers blow on either side of a tube and have to coordinate their fingerings to play scales. The direct relationship between blowing and sound output makes the instrument easy and intuitive to control, and it also allows for a quite high degree of expressiveness. He ended the presentation by describing a model for how to describe NIMEs, but I didn’t really get the main point of that part. Have to see if I can find some information in one of his papers. ...