On the 1st and 2nd of December I am heading up to Sydney to check out the e-Performance and Plug-Ins Congerence at UNSW. The conference focusses on cross- and multi-disciplinary investigations of issues around media/technology-based performance.
Over the last year or so I have started to think of my own work in terms of performance more and more. This performance stretches from private improvisation while programming in real time, to ‘live-coding’ experiments and VJ performances made using Vidgets.
After a quick look at the program, the following papers/presentations in particular caught my eye:
On Saturday morning I went on a ’sound walk’ around the wetlands, docks, industrial areas and bridges of the inner west of Melbourne organised by Anthony Magen. The walk was one in a series of events by the Australian Forum for Acoustic Ecology, affiliated with the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology who are concerned with relationships between sound, nature and culture.
The World Forum for Acoustic Ecology (WFAE), founded in 1993, is an international association of affiliated organizations and individuals, who share a common concern with the state of the world’s soundscapes. Our members represent a multi-disciplinary spectrum of individuals engaged in the study of the social, cultural and ecological aspects of the sonic environment.
A group of about 15 or 20 of us started at Newell’s Paddock Wetlands, near Flemington racecourse and followed a series of paths and roads leading down the Maribyrnong River, past Melbourne Port, winding back along creeks and through residential areas before returning to the wetlands. See a Google satellite map of the area here. The idea of the sound walk is that there is no talking so the the sounds of the environment become your focus.
Over the course of the walk we traversed a wide range of sonic and visual environments, often juxtaposing nature with highly constructed industry. It was quite amazing how by simply framing the walk as a ’sound walk’ my attention was drawn to the subtleties of the audio environment as though it was a sound performance. I plan on returning to the area to make some recordings and take some photos soon.
On Saturday I presented at the School of Applied Communications Graduate Research Conference at RMIT. In the past MA and PhD students have been assessed by their supervisors every six months or so as either not satisfactory, satisfactory, good or excellent. This was the first time the school has run a GRC which allows students to present their projects publicly in front of a panel, answer questions and receive advice and critique from other students and staff. In the past I have been along to see GRCs run by the design and architecture schools who make a big production out of the event, flying in special panel guests and really forcing students to defend their work with tough questions.
I found the process of getting ready for the GRC and presenting to be very helpful, making me look back over what I’ve been reading and doing and what I need to write more about. I made a couple of mistakes in my presentation, the main one was that I didn’t keep track of how much time I had. I was concerned about not rushing through my points without explaining them properly, and at the same time not repeating myself too much, I think I still repeated myself a bit. I spent a bit of time at the start of the presentation explaining my background and my initial ideas for the project. This was good on one hand because it framed my work and the developments I have made. It also put me at ease, since it was very easy to talk about. On the other hand it took too long which meant I didn’t have enough time to go into my latest research and Vidgets in enough depth towards the end of the presentation. For a 20 min presentation I guess you only have time for the highlights.
The general mood of the conference was pleasant and helpful from my experience and the presentations I saw. Unlike the architecture style panels which can be very intense, challenging the presenters on any mistakes or unclear points, my panel gave me opportunities to clarify a couple of points I explained badly in the Q & A session which followed and actually highlighted some links between ideas that I hadn’t identified.
Today I played live visuals for Legs For Fish at Thornbury High school. Kent Macpherson from the band is a music teacher there and organised a performance / presentation for the kids from music, media and IT classes. We played three improvised AV sets and the kids seemed not to hate it 
As Paul from the band said, it makes you acutely aware of how self indulgent this sort of improvised performance is when are doing it in front of a room full of kids who aren’t necessarily there by choice. Some of the kids seemed to dig it and some asked some good questions. “Why do you do this?” “What does it mean? The pictures just looked like colours and shapes.”
I used the Quartz Vidget I prepared for the Liquid Architecture gig in July as it works fairly well and made it easy for me to show the kids what I was doing without the confusion of showing a huge messy Quartz Composer patch. After each set we took questions. I showed how I can grab any two video files or sequences of still images and mix them together, manipulating colour, brightness, contrast etc. as well as layering multiple copies over each other. After the second performance I showed very briefly how Quartz Composer works by dropping in a video file, connecting it to a Billboard and then running it through a couple of effects.
Looking back at the QC presentation I gave at Electrofringe after this one I realise I should have shown heaps more examples and started much more slowly in Newcastle. Assuming no prior knowledge meant I explained things much more clearly, and I introduced things in a much more logical order (having slept the night before also helped!).
I’ve been back in Melbourne for a week now and have started to catch up on some sleep so its time to reflect on the past couple of weeks’ gigs and event.
On the 27th and 28th of September I performed as part of Kiss my after effects, an experimental video art festival which is part of the larger Melbourne Fringe Festival 2005.
On the 27th, after much last minute tinkering, I provided visual accompaniment for Null Hypothesis (aka Elaine Carter) who played a set of crunchy industrial beats and glitchy tones. Parts of my old Quartz Composer patches refused to work on my new laptop (I think I had a second ‘Video Input’ node hidden somewhere in a macro-patch, connected to nothing which prevented my use of live video in) so I ended up using my old computer with an older patch and copied my newer images across. The set ended up going pretty well, visually based almost entirely on sequences of still images manipulated and fed back upon themselves. I really like the effect of adding in a layer of video feedback over the images so that the highlights bleed out and move across the screen. I’ll post some examples of how this looks soon.
On the 28th I played two sets with Doktorb Robotnik (Adrian Lucas) and Soul Mirage (Simon Gorman), also as part of KMAE / Melbourne Fringe Festival. For the first set I played audio and video simultaneously with Adrian on feedback electronics and Simon on keyboards. I used pretty much the same video set up as the night before and found the task of playing both audio and video a bit overwhelming. I would either get lost concentrating on the audio and realise that I hadn’t changed the video for 5 minutes, or fade myself out of the mix and focus only on the video. It was an interesting exercise but far too stressful to allow for good improvisation. I don’t think I want to try it again any time soon. For the second set I focussed on audio only (playing with ableton live) and felt an enormous sense of relief and freedom in contrast. I was able to listen to what Adrian and Simon were playing much more easily and improvise without having to ‘think’.
After the gig Adrian and I started the long drive up to Newcastle for Electrofringe…
Template_Cinema is a collection of “low-tech movies made from existing data appropriated in realtime from the world wide web” by London artists Thomson & Craighead.
The works feature live camera feeds from various locations around the world accompanied by haunting mp3 scores, again appropriated from elsewhere online. Whilst beginning with film leader and ending with credits, these ‘templates’ are filled different every time they are viewed. Some are fixed views, others controlled by unknown ‘directors’.
The Template Cinema project began in 2002 with a networked installation: Short Films about Flying which featured live views of an airfield, snippets of audio from online radio stations and text from message boards.
In my own work I am interested in combining this is the sort of work (network/database cinema) with the real time malleability of sound art and VJ performance.
Also worth a look are these net.arty Web specific artworks and gallery works by Thomson & Craighead.
This week I spent a day improvising and recording audio with Doktorb Robotnik (Adrian Lucas) and was reminded of one of the key aims driving my research. I am developing software devices which allow the user to manipulate audio, video and other data in real time. By creating these works I am attempting to give the user the same feeling of control that I experience when performing live audio, of creating order out of chaos and letting it fall apart again.
Adrian and I have been making improvised sound art / noise / music together, for about 9 years. During this time we have developed various methods for collaborative performance and our production methods have evolved considerably.
Initially we would assemble, manipulate and sequence sound objects on computer in to create finished ‘tracks’, often to accompany short video works. While our process was improvisational in many ways, the combination of unlimited levels of ‘undo’ afforded by the computer software and the goal of producing a piece of a set duration meant that hours of work went into seconds of sound.
A significant shift occurred when we agreed to perform live at a music festival at uni: Rusfest 98 :-). With no idea of exactly what we were doing, we assembled a very basic setup consisting of two multi-effect guitar pedals and two basic synthesisers. Each of the pedals was set to a 2 second delay which let us play various sounds on the synths and have them repeat endlessly. Rather than spending hours obsessing over a few seconds of meticulously cut up audio, we were improvising in real time - in front of an audience. It was exhilarating. We had no interest in melody and our pedals were keeping time, we were free to play with sound. We had constructed a kind of machine for the generation and manipulation of sound in real time and given ourselves a set of variables with which to control it. While our individual noise making machines have diverged technologically since then to consist of a series of interconnected guitar effects pedals which feed back on themselves and a computer running live audio sequencing / processing software, the processes at work in our first performance are still employed.
We build ‘machines’ with fixed number of variables and manipulate them to generate audio in real time. This is exactly what I am doing with images and data in both my Quicktime and Quartz Composer Vidgets.
Technorati Tags: vidget
I’ve been having a good play with Quartz Composer over the last couple of weeks. It is very exciting and a bit scary at this late stage of my MA research: “Does it make what I’ve been doing for the past two years redundant?”; “Should I drop the whole interactive QuickTime thing and start from scratch in this new environment?”; “Should I ignore it for now and continue with QT because it is cross platform and more accessible?”.
In many ways it lets me do what I have been doing, experimenting with, and wanting to do (real time interactive online video) much more quickly and with exciting new visual results. In some ways it makes basic QT redundant but it is quite a different beast.
QuickTime excels on the network. Child movies can be sourced from anywhere, XML and QTlists while a pain to set up sometimes are very powerful and I’ve only really scratched the surface of their potential when combined with server side scripting such as php. Quartz Composer is much more at home on the desktop. It can import still image files from a URL but not movies. It can read RSS very easily, but is designed for human readable text and requires custom scripting to deal with generic XML files and attributes. I have had some success getting QC to load movies from the network via a local QuickTime link file pointing to a URL, but the targeting it is local, relative to the QC composition. It seems this link is lost if the composition is exported to a .mov file.
Here is a quick example (requires Mac OS 10.4). Apologies for the cheesy kaleidoscope imagery once downloaded and unzipped, the .qtz file should play in Quartz Composer, importing link.mov which points to a video file on my server. The zip file is about 4k.
The cool thing is, in many ways this (Quartz Composer), builds upon what I have been doing in QuickTime and is mostly playable by both the QT player and plugin. While the linking to movie files online is problematic at this point, surprisingly live video and audio inputs are supported even in the QuickTime browser plugin! Here is an example which takes a live feed from a FireWire camera, layers it over itself on 3 differently coloured layers (red green and blue) and scales in real time based upon audio input from the computer’s built in microphone. Link to livergb.mov. This has been tested in Safari with a Sony HandyCam and my PowerBook’s built in microphone. Here’s the source .qtz file. While live video input into a movie playing in a browser is pretty exciting, unfortunately more simple things like keyboard and mouse input are missing.
Stay tuned for more examples as I play more…
If all goes well this will be my first post in this new blog…
OK, since my last post (eep, just before christmas) I’ve:
- started a new job (DVD authoring)
- quit an old job (no more retail!)
- moved house (twice in two weeks)
- started working way too many hours at the new job
Over the last couple of months I’ve found heaps of good information and links (which I’ll start to post now) and the whole online video / videoblogging / podcasting / playlisting thing has developed extremely rapidly and is growing in popularity faster than ever.
Time to start catching up.
