Transitory Homes Exhibition in Brasilia

Transitory Homes – “About invisible cities, or how to be alone, when accompanied.”

This came in the mail, it looked good, they have no website. Maybe you need another reason to visit Brazil? Jetsetters check it out! Excellent work around the theme of homeless life – in a museum by Oscar Niemeyer! Runs through February 11th.

Curated by Nicola Goretti, info ( a t ) grupoag.net

…

Originally from core77.com's design blog
reBlogged by michael on Jan 4, 2008, 2:09PM

Warning sounded over ‘flirting robots’ | Beyond Binary – A blog by Ina Fried – CNET News.com

Sean Hanna

Sean Hanna is an interesting architect/engineer whose work I’ve been meaning to cover for some time. He was awarded a American Institute of Architects Student Gold Medal and went on to work on algorithmic & parametric design aspects of major construction projects with architects including Foster and Partners and sculptor Antony Gormley. His research is mainly in developing computational methods for dealing with complex systems in architecture, and in structural optimisation and rapid prototyping technology. I’ve selected a couple of his projects to give a sample of his work but check out his website for more details. His work is part of the currently running “Capture & Context” exhibition I posted on early this week.

BODY / SPACE / FRAME

Sean role in the BODY / SPACE / FRAME by artist Antony Gormley was in the creation of methods for generating a body formally and constructing a geometry appropriate for and structurally constructing the 25 metre high sculpture. Built out of an open steel lattice in the shape of a crouching figure, it was sited on the end of an 800 metre polder and faced outward from the coast of the Zuiderzee, Holland.

PAN_07 CHAIR

Optimised cellular structure in collaboration with Timothy Schreiber

Based on an analogy with the highly efficient cellular structure of living wood or bone, which adapts to its environment as it grows, the chair’s interior is comprised of a fine lattice that minimises weight while maximising strength. The design method combines principles of evolution and artificial intelligence to create a material that responds to its environment by growing denser in the areas required to best withstand the external forces applied when the chair is in use.

Sean’s website

Originally from Interactive Architecture dot Org by Ruairi
reBlogged by michael on Dec 6, 2007, 4:46PM

The Legendary 6 hour Breakout Hackathon

game mod from steph thirion on Vimeo.

I’ve just spent a couple of weeks at Visualizar helping out with conceptual and technical development of projects.

In the first couple of days a few people mentioned a video one of the artist’s at the workshop had made. Ben Fry said “you have to see it” and pointed at Steph Thirion.

Ben was right. The video documents a 6hr workshop run by Steph in a Postgraduate Diploma in Graphic Design course at Elisava, Barcelona, in March this year and it is very special.

The workshop concept was simple: take an existing Breakout-like game (made by Steph in Processing), give it to the students and encourage them to simply change numbers and alter code statements until it either breaks or does something interesting.

The result is surprising: as though Breakout has been freed from a need to make sense and is dreaming of its own pure potential.. A warm homage to the game if ever there was one.

Here’s that video.

To quote the project page.

Game Mod was a six hour long workshop with the objective of showing the participants that it is not required to understand code to experiment and play with it.

Although they had no experience in coding, the task of each participant was to make a mod (modified version) of a game built in Processing.

Great stuff, testimony that creative programming can result from an open-minded, truly intuitive manipulation of code.

Grab the original game source-code here, and have a hack at it yourself. The source for the mods you see in the video can be downloaded here. If you come up with something you think’s interesting, let us know.

Check in on Steph’s site for updates on his new project, Cascade on Wheels, made during the Visualizar workshop. If you’re in the Madrid area, come and see it at the exhibition at Medialab Prado itself (28.11.07 – 28.12.07)

Fine work Steph and students. This is going into the archives. [blogged by Julian on SelectParks]

Originally from Networked Music Review by jo
reBlogged by michael on Dec 7, 2007, 4:29PM

. : Hogar Collection : .

All material in the Artforum
Archive is protected by copyright. Permission
to reprint any article from the Artforum archive
must be obtained from Artforum
Magazine.

Lost in Translation: Sound in the Discourse
of Synaesthesia

Author: Christoph Cox
Issue: October 2005

In the late 1940s, radio engineer-turned-composer
Pierre Schaeffer celebrated a defining property
of audio recording and radio transmission: the
ability to separate sounds from their visible
sources. This affirmation cut against the grain
of modern thought, for no lesser cultural critics
than Martin Heidegger, Theodor Adorno, and Max
Horkheimer had assailed these technologies for
dulling our auditory sensibility. Schaeffer, however,
argued that records and radio triumphantly subvert
the hegemony of vision to make possible the experience
of “sound as such.” In doing so, Schaeffer continued,
they revive a neglected form of listening he termed
“acousmatic,” in deference to the ancient akousmatikoi,
disciples of Pythagoras who were made to listen
to their master’s voice while he was hidden behind
a curtain. (1)

Schaeffer’s position remains
a significant one within the practice of sound
art today. Indeed, any sound art worthy of the
name affirms something of this effort to restore
to sound its ontological and aesthetic value.
(Such insistence on the autonomy of sound and
its acousmatic experience is manifested most dramatically
now in the work of Spanish composer and sound
artist Francisco López, who performs behind a
shroud, urges his listeners to don blindfolds,
and delivers sonic abstractions that thwart recognition
of the environmental sounds from which they are
generated.) Yet for the most part, contemporary
sound artists and their curators have been interested
in negotiating the visual, rather than
rejecting it wholesale. In fact, the very
tension of such negotiation is what animates this
uncertain art form operating between music and
visual art, medium specificity and a postmedium
condition.

This provocative ambiguity becomes
particularly evident as one compares institutional
presentations of sound art since its coming to
prominence in the late 1990s. Exhibitions such
as “Volume: Bed of Sound” (P.S. 1 Contemporary
Art Center, New York, 2000), “Rooms for Listening”
(CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San
Francisco, 2000), “BitStreams” (Whitney Museum
of American Art, New York, 2001), and the 2002
Whitney Biennial, for example, implicitly adopted
Schaeffer’s paradigm, providing banks of headphones
or darkened rooms for the acousmatic delivery
of audio. A contrary approach was taken in last
year’s “Treble” exhibition at SculptureCenter
in New York, which foregrounded the use of sound
as a tool to link media from drawing to sculpture.

But, a third strategy, surely
the most widespread and significant, has come
to prominence in a spate of recent shows presenting
sound under the banner of “synaesthesia,” an aesthetic
appropriation of the neurological condition in
which stimulation of one sensory modality triggers
involuntary sensation in another. Sound artists
and curators have long flirted with the “synaesthesia”
idea. However, this engagement has lately emerged—problematically,
it must be said—as the dominant mode of
conceiving conjunctions between the sonic and
the visual. At least five exhibitions have been
organized under this rubric within the past year:
the largely overlapping blockbusters “Visual Music”
(Hirshhorn, Washington, DC/moca, Los Angeles)
and “Sons & Lumières” (Centre Pompidou,
Paris), which reconsidered the history of modernism
as a story of crossovers between sight and sound;
then three smaller shows assembling new work in
this vein, “Synaesthesia: A Neuro-Aesthetics Exhibition,”
mounted at London’s Institute for Contemporary
Arts last fall, and “What Sound Does a Color Make?”
and “Crossed Circuits,” held
in New York this past summer at Eyebeam and the
Hogar Collection, respectively.

What are we to make of this new
fascination with synaesthesia? And what are the
stakes for the very conception of sound art? To
answer, it’s worth noting that the art world’s
attraction to sensory cross-wirings is in fact
part of a more general cultural formation. In
contemporary science, for example, freak occurrences
of colored hearing or tactile smell—dismissed
as fakery for much of the twentieth century—have
suddenly become the subjects of a booming industry
in the fields of cognitive psychology and neurology.
Developments in contemporary technology also promote
the idea of synaesthesia. Brain-imaging technologies
used to explore the phenomenon are, paradoxically
enough, themselves synaesthetic in their psychedelic
visual representation of nonvisual sensory phenomena.
This quality points to the more general fact that
digital technologies offer, if not a union
of the senses, then something akin: the intertranslatability
of media, the ability to render sound as image,
and vice versa. As Friedrich Kittler, who has
written extensively on communication technology,
puts it: “The general digitization of channels
and information erases the differences among individual
media. . . . Inside the computers themselves everything
becomes a number: quantity without image, sound,
or voice. And once optical fiber networks turn
formerly distinct data flows into a standardized
series of digitized numbers, any medium can be
translated into any other.” (2)

Finally, the new discourse on
synaesthesia must be considered against the background
of a broad revaluation of the senses and their
traditional hierarchy—particularly the modern
supremacy of vision over audition, sight over
sound. Since the 1960s, theorists from Marshall
McLuhan and Walter Ong to Jacques Attali and Thomas
Docherty have forecast this sort of revolution
in the sensorium. And while skeptics have treated
these claims as purely speculative or merely wishful,
there is growing empirical evidence for them.
Witness, for example, the recent profusion of
historical and anthropological scholarship—collected
in volumes such as Hearing History: A Reader
and Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening,
and Modernity (both 2004)—that takes
its evidence not primarily from sight, but from
sound. (3)

The emergence of sound art as
a prominent practice is aligned with this more
general revaluation of the senses and, particularly,
of hearing. And the curatorial and artistic interest
in synaesthesia is surely a strategy for dealing
with this emergence of auditory culture. Thus
far, this strategy has been complex and ambivalent.
On the one hand, the synaesthesia paradigm recognizes
and invites sound as an aesthetic element; on
the other, the paradigm still privileges the old
order, conceiving sound under the hegemony of
the visual and thwarting the development of a
genuine sound art.

Consider the example of “Visual
Music,” which was not so much a historical as
a genealogical effort to disclose the modernist
lineages of current sound-art practice and synaesthesia
discourse. The exhibition was subtitled “Synaesthesia
in Art and Music Since 1900″; yet, true to its
main title, it clearly favored the image. (In
contrast, “Sons & Lumières” only tangentially
flirted with synaesthesia, rightly subsuming it
within a more expansive examination of sound-image
relationships in the multimedia art of the twentieth
century.) From the “musical” canvases of Wassily
Kandinsky and Franti?sek Kupka to the musically
inspired but silent projections of Thomas Wilfred
and Leo Villareal, “Visual Music” almost solely
presented one-way translations from sound into
sight. One may reasonably ask why the curators
did not complement these selections with sound-centered
classics such as Walter Ruttman’s film-without-images
Weekend, 1930; Luc Ferrari’s Presque
rien (Almost Nothing), 1970, a sonic portrait
of dawn in a Dalmatian fishing village; Derek
Jarman’s monochrome film, Blue, 1993; or
a Janet Cardiff audio walk. Or why the exhibitions
“Crossed Circuits” and “What
Sound Does a Color Make?” similarly centered on
the image, focusing attention on screens, photographs,
and drawings that occluded sound by standing in
for it, much in the same way that the mute but
visible score came, within modernity, to circulate
as the musical work itself.

However lamentable, this imbalance
of media and sensation is true to the neurological
experience of synaesthesia. This condition (and
the aesthetic analogy to it) may hold out the
ideal of sensuous plenitude and cross-mixing;
yet by far its most common expression is the unidirectional
visual experience of sound. (Sound provoked by
sight is extremely rare. (4) In the aesthetic
domain, even when generated to enhance aural experience—for
example, the ’60s light shows featured in “Visual
Music” or, today, the iTunes Visualizer—the
visual is almost never a mere supplement to the
auditory. As film theorist Christian Metz points
out, our syntax and entrenched sensual hierarchy
hold us in thrall to a metaphysics according to
which sight and touch signify being and presence,
while sound—spatially vague, materially
elusive, and temporally ephemeral—signifies
absence and can only have the status of a secondary
“attribute” in relation to a primary visual and
tactile “substance.” (5) Cinema might in principle
be a synaesthetic art, an intersensorial conjunction
of sound and image. In practice, however, cinematic
sound is almost invariably subservient to the
image. So too is it with synaesthetic art more
generally. Indeed, the dominance of the visual
in synaesthetic art corresponds with the prevailing
idea that sound-in-itself is unnatural or inadequate,
in need of an anchor in the visible.

This situation was already evident
in early experiments with the visualization of
sound, most prominently those of Ernst Chladni,
an important but, until recently, neglected figure.
In 1787, Chladni drew a violin bow along the edge
of a metal plate covered with a thin layer of
sand. The vibrating plate bounced the granules
into symmetrical forms: stars, waves, grids, and
labyrinths. Chladni’s demonstration made visible
and palpable the hitherto elusive and fleeting
materiality of sound. Napoleon was so impressed
that he put Chladni on his payroll. Friedrich
Nietzsche was also intrigued; but he warned of
a potential misapprehension of Chladni’s results:
“One can imagine a man who is totally deaf and
has never had a sensation of sound,” he wrote.
“Perhaps such a person will gaze with astonishment
at Chladni’s sound figures; perhaps he will discover
their causes in the vibrations of the string and
will now swear that he must know what men mean
by ‘sound.’” (6) Wary of the attempt to
reduce sound to sight, Nietzsche insists that
the visual and the auditory constitute separate
spheres and that the relationship between the
two can only ever be a matter of translation or
metaphor (in the etymological sense of “carrying
over”) that bears the traces of an unassimilated
remainder. For Nietzsche, the distinction between
the metaphorical and the literal is simply that
the latter no longer acknowledges the difference
that constitutes it, taking itself to be
what it represents. Such literalness is
a chief characteristic of the aesthetic discourse
of synaesthesia today.

As Kittler notes, the ready translatability
of digital media encourages this literalness.
The fact that all digital material shares a common
base—binary code—supports the illusion
that sound, image, word, and movement can be made
identical and interchangeable. What is forgotten
is that they can be made so only via the intermediary
of arbitrary mapping formuli decided in advance.
This disparity was evident in the sound-image
juxtapositions of numerous pieces in “What Sound
Does a Color Make?” When sound and image pulse
together in Granular-Synthesis’s video projection
LUX, 2003, for example, it is because they
have been programmed to do so, not because of
any real correspondence between these sounds and
images. The same is true of the correspondence
between vocal tones and luminosity in Jim Campbell’s
Self-Portrait of Paul DeMarinis, 2003,
which uses sound to draw a pixelated figure with
LEDs, and the relationship between the viewer’s
movements and the alteration of image and sound
in Atau Tanaka’s Bondage, 2004, which features
a mutating digital photograph projected onto a
shoji screen.

Presented almost tangentially
in “Visual Music,” an excerpt from Oskar Fischinger’s
film Ornament Sound, circa 1932, provides
a very different and much richer model for sound-image
translation. The German abstract filmmaker drew
bands of jagged and undulating patterns across
the optical soundtrack and extending into the
visual frame. These forms, read by the projector
as both sound and image, produce corresponding
bursts of multitextured and variously pitched
noise. Sound ceases to be a mere accompaniment
to image or suture for visual cuts, but instead
collaborates directly with image in the production
of a genuine audio-visual experience. Indeed,
Fischinger’s forms appear as stylized versions
of ordinary optical sound bands and thus draw
attention to the sound track both visually and
aurally.

While scarcely followed in the
past seven decades, Fischinger’s model has been
rejuvenated today in a number of works utilizing
audio-visual feedback loops without any intermediary,
from Austrian video artist Billy Roisz’s __AVVA,__
2004, to installations such as Carsten Nicolai’s
Telefunken, 2000, and Scott Arford’s Static
Room, 2003. Arford, for example, begins by
generating a palette of video static: granulated
washes, throbbing bands, and pixel fragments.
He then runs the video output through the audio
input, producing a matching gamut of noise: dense
blasts, dirty pulses, and disintegrated drones.
The translation is effected not by the conversion
of color and sound to a neutral digital substratum,
or by the idiosyncratic sensual associations of
the artist, but is, rather, effected simply by
the routing of the electronic signal and the medium
of display. Herein lies the true potential for
a sound-art discourse steeped in a multisensory
approach. Where indirect and arbitrary digital
translation too often attempts to elide the differences
between media and sensory modalities, this direct,
analog translation does the reverse, intensifying
sensory differences and the materiality of the
video medium.

Such procedures and results not
only revive Fischinger but recapitulate the work
of video pioneers Nam June Paik, Steina Vasulka,
and Gary Hill—selections by whom were included
in “What Sound Does a Color Make?” to the detriment
of the more recent work on view. For example,
Hill’s Full Circle (formerly Ring Modulation),
1978, brilliantly foregrounds both correspondences
and differences among sound, text, and image.
A video screen divided into three sections presents
several ways of rendering the sound of a voice
that repeatedly drones an “ahhh” sound held for
various durations and wavering in pitch and volume.
In the upper left portion of the screen, an oscilloscope
image represents the sound as a jittery, rotating
ring; below, a close-up image shows a pair of
hands bending a metal wire into a circle; above
right, the screen presents a distorted full-body
view of this wire-bending exercise. True to the
theme of circularity, one is never certain which
element controls which others. The voice seems
to be attempting to form a perfect circle in the
oscilloscope image that represents it, but it
could also be matching the hand movements that
seem to mimic its vocal fluctuations. The malleable
wire and quivering ring also reference the vibrating
vocal chords; and the title of the piece puns
on the verbal connection between the vocal-visual-manual
efforts to form circles and the technical process
of generating dissonance by multiplying electronic
signals (ring modulation).

From a quarter-century’s distance,
Hill’s piece presents an appropriate directive
to sound art today and underscores the deficiencies
of facile synaesthetic discourses. The best sound
works neither reject the visual nor succumb to
it, but instead amplify differences among media
and sensory modalities, drawing attention to sound
as a semiautonomous power. They are complex engagements
with the visual that intensify the moment of translation
and the movement of metaphor (in Nietzsche’s sense
of the term). For the silence of the visual can
cut two ways. It can stifle or, as John Cage taught
us, powerfully disclose sound. Exemplary instances
of this second sense are recent installations
by Stephen Vitiello, which feature suspended speaker
cones that tremble inaudibly. At once mouths and
ears, these mobilized membranes draw attention
to the kinetic energy of sound, the vibrations
that constitute its production and reception.

Or consider Christian Marclay’s
The Sound of Silence, 1988, a framed photograph
of Simon & Garfunkel’s 1965 single “The Sounds
of Silence”—displaying, in effect, the record
as a mute visual object. The piece is a joke,
but an epistemologically and ontologically profound
one, the humor of which consists in an evident
confusion of categories: Photograph, object, and
text are absurd because they cannot be what they
claim they are. Sound is thereby shown to be of
another order, one inadequately represented or
even foreclosed by the imaginary domain of the
visual and the symbolic domain of the written
word. Sound is real, Marclay’s work seems
to say, something too quickly forgotten by the
fantasy of a “union of the senses,” which remains
a visual fantasy. Genuine sound art today is fostered
not by this consensus but by a dis-sensus that
gives sound and hearing their due.

Christoph Cox is associate
professor of philosophy at Hampshire College and
coeditor of Audio Culture: Readings in Modern
Music (Continuum, 2004).

NOTES

1. See Martin Heidegger, “The
Turning,” in The Question Concerning Technology
and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New
York: Harper & Row, 1977), 48; Theodor Adorno,
Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert, trans.
Susan H. Gillespie (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2002), 213–317; Max Horkheimer, Dawn
and Decline: Notes 1926–1931 and 1950–1969,
trans. Michael Shaw (New York: Seabury Press,
1978), 162; and Pierre Schaeffer, “Acousmatics,”
in Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music,
ed. Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner (New York:
Continuum, 2004), 76–81.

2. Friedrich Kittler, Grammophon,
Film, Typewriter, trans. and with an introduction
by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Palo
Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 1–2.

3. Hearing History: A Reader,
ed. Mark M. Smith (Athens, GA: University of Georgia
Press, 2004), and Hearing Cultures: Essays
on Sound, Listening, and Modernity, ed. Veit
Erlmann (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2004).

4. See Richard Cytowic, Synesthesia:
A Union of the Senses, 2nd edition (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2002), 16. See also Steven Connor,
“Intersensoriality,” www.bbk.ac.uk/english/skc/intersensoriality/.

5. Christian Metz, “Aural Objects,”
in Film Sound: Theory and Practice, eds.
Elisabeth Weis and John Belton (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1985), 154–61.

6. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth
and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” in Philosophy
and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks
of the Early 1870s, ed. and trans. Daniel
Breazeale (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities
Press, 1979), 82.

Ground Breaking + Live Algorithms

Ground Breaking – Experience Past Landscapes in Grains and Pixels by Paul Adderley & Michael Young: In this installation, a computer explores and represents nearly 10,000 years of soil records, revealing them in different colours and perspectives.

Landscapes reflect the lives and histories of the people who live in them. Scientific analysis of the soil can be used to examine how people lived in the past and provide lessons for future management of landscapes in extreme or fragile environments. We invite you to become part of the shifting scenes of the Sahel in image and sound and reflect upon its presence and history…

Soils can store information recording the way people have affected the land over thousands of years. Microscopic fragments of different objects found in the soil can tell us about past landscapes. The colour, size and number of fragments offer further clues about the management of landscapes. The latest advances in visual and sonic technologies allow us to illuminate and make audible these ancient landscapes. Sounds of the Sahel, and sounds made afresh are recalled and shaped by the computer using scientific information taken from the soil itself. The Sahel in Africa is an area at the fringe of the Sahara desert. It is one of the world’s most marginal environments yet is home to over 50 million people. With a dry season lasting eight months of the year and unreliable rainfall, survival is hard for farming communities. Climate change is keenly felt in the Sahel. Understanding how people managed this landscape during past periods of climate change is essential in developing successful responses to future changes.

Live Algorithms [PDF] by Tim Blackwell and Michael Young, Depts Computing and Music, Goldsmiths College, London:

“The EPSRC-funded Live Algorithms for Music (LAM) research network is establishing an inter-disciplinary community of musicians, software engineers and cognitive scientists. Our aim is to investigate autonomous computers in music.

The use of computers in live music is not new; the fields of generative (algorithmic) composition and live electronics are of particular interest to LAM. A key discriminator between these is the degree of interaction with the performer. Interaction is intrinsic to live electronics: a performer may jam with commercial or custom software; a ‘laptop-as-instrument’ paradigm, in which the computer is controlled directly. Another approach links players of traditional instruments with computers: incoming sound or data is analysed by software and a resultant reaction (e.g. a new sound event) is determined by pre-arranged processes. Such ‘reflex-systems’ can accompany performance but might also utilise stochasticity to effect surprise; as determined by organizational decisions made by the composer /designer. We would term such a system ‘weakly interactive’ because there is only an illusion of integrated performer-machine interaction, feigned by the designer. Algorithmic composition generates music off-line, although can be used in real-time.

Algorithms from such fields as fractals, chaos theory, neural networks and evolutionary computing have been exploited by composers for their patterning properties.1 Such systems are not interactive, since all the parameters needed for sound generation are pre-determined. In contrast, strong interaction is exemplified in the human-only practice of ‘free’ improvisation. This music rejects top-down organisation (a priori agreements, explicit or tacit) in favour of open, developing patterns of behaviour.2 Social theories describe experiences with a sense of certainty, and with a unified artistic intent, as ‘becoming situated’. An ‘interactional semiotics’ has been proposed, stemming from Meade’s idea of emergence: an ensemble as single entity exhibiting self-organising behaviours (see 1. for references).

LAM is interested in computer systems that might interact strongly with musicians, in both a supportive and a creative capacity and the research agenda is a marrying of algorithmic music, live electronics and free improvisation. Properties of human performance – and therefore of a live algorithm (LA) – include strong interactivity, autonomy, innovation, idiosyncrasy and comprehensibility. Strong interactivity depends on instigation and surprise as well as response. Individual decision-making is immediate, necessary and basic: when to play or not, when to modify activity in any number of parameters (loudness, pitch, tone quality), when to imitate or ignore another participant, when to ‘agree’ the performance is concluding. When to make a decision. And why. Without the capacity to innovate, listeners would lose the belief that the LA was truly engaged with the performance instead of merely accompanying it. The iterative, generative, idiosyncratic world of algorithmic organisation must be accessed, but the mechanical and the predictable must be avoided. It is the ability to innovate that distinguishes automation from autonomy. It is not hard to generate music of great complexity. Harder, though, is to ensure that these contributions are comprehensible to fellow performers in real-time who might be hearing these ideas for the first time. (But an incomprehensible, opaque system can be contrasted with a transparent one where the association between input and output is too trivial.)

Such considerations show the research goal is prescient, but there are reasons to believe that it is imminent too. The authors’ own Swarm Music/Granulator systems implement a model of interactivity derived from the organisation of social insects.3 These systems embody our idea of a proxy environment which holds meaningless sonic events. The system (human or machine) explores the environment, discovering and manipulating found sonic objects. Long term organisation can develop, just as it does in termite nest construction. Within this framework, we envisage a modular system comprising of analysis (P) and synthesis (Q) functions which interface and interpret the sonic environment and relay parameters to a hidden patterning algorithm (F) (analogous to listening, playing and musical thinking enjoyed by a human performer). This picture integrates interaction with algorithmic composition and exploits recent developments in real time music analysis/synthesis.

The network has some 70 members, including representatives from France, Portugal, USA and Australia. Activities include an open meeting and two network workshops each year. Each event features invited speakers, contributions from LAM project teams and performances. The next meeting will be December 19-20 2005, with an international conference in December 2006. LAM warmly encourages AISB readers to participate: please see www.livealgorithms.org.”

1. E. Miranda. Composing Music With Computers. Focal Press, 2001
2. T.M.Blackwell and M.Young. Self-Organised Music. Organised Sound 9(2): 123–136, 2004.
3. T.M.Blackwell T.M. and M.Young. Swarm Granulator. Applications of Evolutionary Computing EuroWorkshops 2004, Proceedings, LNCS 3005, Springer-Verlag (2004) 399-408

Originally from Networked Music Review by jo
reBlogged by michael on Nov 15, 2007, 9:07AM

Tenori-on musical instrument demo

The newly released Tenori-on, developed by Toshio Iwai for Yamaha, has been mentioned on several blogs. But I particularly liked this short demo from engineer Yu Nishibori. Tenori-on is a 16-channel, 16-layer music sequencer, with a modernized 8-bit-ish sound. I particularly liked the visual feedback that the interface provides — deleting, moving and setting tones, [...]

Universal Avatars Bestride Worlds

“A virtual character, or avatar, for all the virtual worlds in which people play is the goal of a joint project between IBM and Linden Lab. – The computer giant and the creator of Second Life are working on universal avatars that can travel between worlds.

The project aims to open up virtual worlds by introducing open tools that work with any online environment. The companies hope to boost interest in virtual worlds as well as make them easier to navigate. At the moment every virtual world requires a player or user to go through the process of creating an avatar that will act as their proxy in that online environment. Typically, an avatar created for one world, be it a game or a system like Second Life, cannot move between these different virtual spaces. The project started by IBM and Linden Lab aims to create a universal character creation system so people only have to create a digital double once.” Continue reading Universal Avatars Bestride Worlds, BBC News.

Originally from Networked_Performance by jo
reBlogged by michael on Oct 12, 2007, 3:53PM

Interview with Milk and Tales

The British collective Milk and Tales is made of three young women who design interactive environments for cultural venues. I don’t know how they do it but each of their new projects manages to enchant everyone: kids and their grand parents, Londoners and tourists, people for whom interactive environments is a new expression and old grumpy blasés like me who keep on complaining that interaction is getting tired and tiring.

Who is Milk and Tales? How did you get to work on interactive environments?

We are Arlete Castelo, Melissa Mongiat and Kelsey Snook.
We met on the MA Creative Practice for Narrative Environments (CPNE) course at Central Saint Martins, in London, and started working on projects together, in parallel to the course activities.

– We also have a set of rotating collaborators for different projects. We have been working with Dan Harris, Charles Ward, Matthew Olden and Rakhi Rajani on some projects, we are currently working with Chris O’Shea on a new project.

We started to work on interactive installations together as an offshoot from the course where we were fine-tuning our skills in creating narrative environments. A narrative environment is an experience or a place designed to communicate a story, is hopefully engaging and a place for dialogue. Interactive environments are inevitably linked to narrative environments. We’ve got a mix of skills and are very happy designing both.

Hidden Love Song

Your installations seem to manage to get the broad public immediately engaged and entertained. At the same time, your works are very elegantly designed. Is one of you responsible for the “look” of an installation and someone else works more intensely on the sound technicalities or on the experience side of it? How do you work?

Arlete and Melissa have a background in communication / graphic design and Kelsey has one in in product and installation design. In concept phases, our skills blend to work on the experience of the user/visitor/passer-by – that is our focus and what attracted us to the MA CPNE. For design detailing and production though, we may be working separately on different parts depending on our expertise and we usually seek extra help for technological development, but this is always done in a collaborative spirit, so that in the end, we all have a say and all make sure we are working towards a cohesive whole.

How much do you manage to control the way people interact with your work? Which kind of unexpected behaviour have you witnessed with your installations? Any bad or good surprise? What have you learnt from the way people interact with your works?

We like unexpected behaviours, we see our role as providing a medium for people to be creative. However, for the interaction to work, we feel there needs to be a careful study of the context. We carefully plan the first spark, and then let it go from there.

Hidden Love Song

When we study the context, we’re looking at factors such as the environment, the user, and the existing types of behavior in the environment. This enables us to set the foundation for a successful interactive piece, however, we enjoy when people find new ways to use our work and take ownership over what we do. For example, in Gamelan Playtime, we took time to study how people moved in the space and understood that everyone was in a hurry with no time to stop. We made it a priority for people to only have to stroke the wall while passing by for the interaction to work. However, when the installation was up, we realised people were stopping to pull and twist the buffers and were spending a lot of time discovering the different instruments and creating their own piece. They were seeking much more engagement than what we had anticipated. For the following installation of the same ‘Keeping in Touch’ series, Hidden Love Song, we provided a much more flexible and empowering medium, the scratch-off layer. People could scratch the wall to reveal hidden words or sounds, but they could also scratch in their own messages or simply draw. The piece was particularly nice because it wasn’t precious, the whole wall was fair game for manipulation.

Gamelan Playtime

Gamelan Playtime was created for the Royal Festival Hall in London. What was the brief for that project? How easy or difficult is it to get such a prestigious and probably a bit conservative institution to accept your unusual ideas.

First we have to mention that we have been working with the Learning and Participation team at the Royal Festival Hall, who is one of our very innovative and most forward thinking clients. Their way of doing and thinking has been an inspiration for our work, and was really a true collaboration. We met Shân Maclennan, head of L&P through the MA CPNE network and she asked us to come up with an interesting experience using the RFH hoardings while the building was closed for refurbishment. The initial thought was that we could start with communicating Gamelan workshops held with primary school children in Lambeth. They wanted to bring back the life that usually inhabited the area when the building was open. Typical marketing posters campaign didn’t seem to do that.

Gamelan Playtime

We came up with a broader program that we called ‘Keeping In Touch’ which would aim to communicate ongoing activities to the general public via an interactive system on the RFH hoardings for the entire duration of the refurbishment period. This system was made up of a tactile surface, sensors and a sound system which would enable a series of hoarding to go up every 2-3 months. This would keep a momentum with the audience until the re-opening of the hall, and maximise the use of the interactive system. Even though Shân could not commit to the program at the start, we ended up having 3 cycles on the hoardings, up until they took the hoardings down. Then followed PLAY.orchestra on the Riverside Terrace. Now the RFH is open, and we are still working with them on various interactive systems.

Where does the idea of PLAY.orchestra come from?

The brief came from the Royal Festival Hall (RFH) in collaboration with the Philharmonia Orchestra (PO). The PO wanted to communicate their Sound Exchange website, which enables the general public to download sounds from the orchestra and upload their own.

This installation was to take place on the Riverside Terrace which was not very busy, though a lot of people would pass by. Some people were using the seating in the area to take breaks. We needed to make it a destination point, for all audiences.

The Philharmonia initially thought of having their website on the hoardings for people to take part in the sound exchange. We thought it was all a bit too abstract for people to come by and want to ‘exchange sounds’ through a website interface on a hoarding. So we thought through what a sound exchange meant to begin with: it was about taking part in the Orchestra, learning about the sounds and sending your own for a composition to take place. We noticed on the website there was a page of the orchestra scheme with all the instruments laid out in their particular spot and the sound they each make. So there, we decided to recreate the orchestra scheme on a stage with only seats. Each seat was labeled with its instrument. When people would sit, they would activate the sound of the instrument. All together, they would hear an entire piece, either classical or specially commissioned pieces. Once comfortably sitting and engaged, people could further take part in the orchestra by sending their own sounds via their mobile phones. A composition was made with all the sounds received and took place on the PLAY.orchestra installation in the last two weeks of its showing.

It turned out to be a huge success that the Royal Festival Hall directors could witness from their office windows not very far away. We also have had quite a lot of demand for it from around the world. We are now in discussion with the RFH and the Philharmonia to make a touring version.

In general, how much do you have to battle to get your vision of a work accepted? Do you get carte blanche?

It is very rare to get carte blanche, we feel the biggest trick is to be resourceful! Our process is pretty rational and directly responds to a client’s need, so it’s does not feel like a battle to have our ideas accepted. The biggest challenge is always to fully understand the context, the client’s desires and apprehensions, and then of course to make the idea work within budget…

Which kind of advice would you give to young designers who would like to work on similar projects? What are the pitfalls? What worked well for you?

We feel we’ve been pretty lucky with our opportunities, but our advice to new designers in the field— to see the opportunity to do something great in every brief, to think ahead and make the opportunity exciting even when the brief might not be. Gamelan Playtime’s initial brief was just a hoarding design that could have seemed somewhat boring, and made with a very small budget. But where there’s a will… Our first design had a great response and so the idea was allowed to grow. We also were careful to plan a basic interactive system that could be changed in a series of different installations, and luckily we were able to produce a series!

Is there any spot in London where you´d love to install a work?

Many spots… of course the Tate would be nice. An installation for the Olympics as part of a celebration, that would be great. The New York City Subway has a great art installation and tile art programme, which has really changed the experience of using their transport system. We would love a chance to do something similar for Transport for London. Tube journeys are just torturous, the NYC subway isn’t a whole lot better, but when you are navigating the subway maze or arrive at stations where there is some kind of installation, you feel at least that your journey hasn’t been all that bad. It’s an opportune ‘dead’ time and space where people have the time to engage, if you can pique their interest.

Thanks Arlete, Melissa,and Kelsey!

All images courtesy of Milk and Tales.

Originally from we make money not art by Regine
reBlogged by michael on Oct 13, 2007, 3:53AM

Kacy Maddux: New Drawings

Kansas City artist Kacy Maddux, whose headless sketches in the University of Chicago Renaissance Society’s “All My Pretty Corpses” exhibition caught a lot of attention in 2005, is to be featured again in the Windy City.

This time her fine illustrations are to be featured in a solo exhibition at the Gescheidle gallery in downtown Chicago. These free-hand drawings appear to riff on the theme of anatomy and symmetry while remaining fairly abstract. It’s an interesting installment in this 27 year-old artist’s career, presenting “empirical information metaphorically, and intuitive misunderstandings literally.” The result is equal parts new age and science class, to stunning effect.

New Drawings
Opening Reception: 12 October 2007, 6-9pm
Conversation with the artist: 13 October 2007, 1-2pm
12 October -10 November 2007
Gescheidle
1039 W. Lake Street, 2nd floor
Chicago, IL. 60607 map
tel. +1 312.226.3500

Originally from Cool Hunting by Jacob Resneck
reBlogged by michael on Oct 11, 2007, 5:18PM