Sonification of Performative Space

Sensuous Geographies is a responsive sound and video environment. It is a space of ritual, a liminal space intended to draw attention both to the intricate inter-weaving pathways of sensation in the body, and to the equally intricate pathways of subtle group behaviour.

The installation comprises a collection of polyphonic electroacoustic sound worlds which are created as the actions of visitors to the installation generate and influence both individual musical layers and the overall texture of the sound environment. Shadowy virtual counterparts of the visitors are projected onto banners, intermittently brought to presence by the motion of those engaging with in the installation. The members of the public who become active participants in this responsive environment immediately become an integral part of the installation itself, as they don richly coloured costumes before entering the active space in order that they can be identified as distinct individuals by the motion tracking which drives the interactive system. The visitors’ engagement with and immersion in the sound environment results in a continually evolving world of sound, image, light and colour which visitors can alternately observe from without and experience from within.
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Muted Response Reaps Reward

Perversely Interactive System, by Lynn Hughes and Simon Laroche, puts the spectator into relation with a virtual other whose image (s)he controls through a biofeedback device.

The system is made of a large scale video projection and a wireless “biofeedback handset that monitors galvanic skin resistance (variation in sweat gland activity that measures the level of stress).

The video projection begins with the image of a woman with her back turned. As the participant learns to reduce his or her stress/sweat level, the woman on the screen gradually turns around, and advances towards the participant.

So in this piece, excitation or effort hinders, rather than promotes, successful interaction. If the participant?s tension level rises (often due to the excitement of success) then the woman stops.

Till December 12 at the FILE festival in Sao Paulo. Originally blogged by Regine on near near future.

Intertwined Networks

The Waag Society for Old and New Media has in 2004 commissioned Canadian artists Jeff Mann and Michelle Teran to produce and present the second iteration of the LiveForm:Telekinetics Project. LF:TK involves the creation of a series of site-specific installation/performance works connecting hybrid physical/virtual spaces using streaming media and networked kinetic objects. The commission is part of the Connected! project of Waag Society, a two-year programme of performances, lectures, workshops, installations, and emergent events exploring collaborative networked media and live art.

The LiveForm:Telekinetics project is envisioned as a laboratory that examines the intertwining of social networks and social spaces with their technological counterparts. As a work of art, it challenges and expands the notion of performance, the relationship of the artist and audience, production and exhibition, and ideas of locale and presence. The project creates hybrid installation/performative works, augmented with electronic devices and network systems, to create shared spaces and live social situations. Two-way streaming media such as video, sound, and graphics, are used to connect together physical sites via the Internet. Everyday physical objects within the environments become kinetic communications interfaces, animated with embedded sensors and actuators. In LiveForm:Telekinetics, mediating technologies are human-scale, built into architecture, furniture, decorations, utensils, toys, and the bric-a-brac that we surround ourselves with. Read more.

Soundmesh: Design and OSX version: Mara Helmuth; RTmix Collaboration: Brad Garton; Linux version: Ivica Ico Bukvic. Soundmesh plays uncompressed audio data to remote host ips. It handles 44.1KHz au/sun/next or aiff files. It is a RTcmix-3.1.0 based application. You do not need to install cmix as all binaries are included. Because high bandwidth is required, you must be at an Internet2 site to participate.

SoundWIRE: This project is fundamentally concerned with two areas of research: streaming professional-quality audio to remote destinations using next-generation Internet, and developing practical, intuitive methods for assessment of network reliability. Currently, digital audio streaming across the internet is compromised by restricted bandwidth and buffering of audio data to safeguard against network irregularities. The results are signal compression and potentially long delay times.

Global Visual Music Project: Goals are to: a) develop software for the creation, mediation, and dissemination of real-time multimedia content, including high resolution two and three dimensional graphics, digital audio and video; b) develop a networking capability for this software, so that multimedia data could be shared between users in many locations; c) organize a high profile event to unveil these resources by staging a networked multiple site public performance with accomplished artists in established artistic and technological venues; d) create a web site to disseminate information about our research; e) freely distribute the software we create; and f) develop and publish a communication protocol for networked distribution of high quality real-time multi-media data.

The Challenge of Haptics

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article on the technology behind haptics, derived from the Greek word meaning “to touch”…A group of science museums in the US is showing off one form of the technology. The system, dubbed the Internet Arm Wrestling Challenge, uses aluminum arms and hands connected by a series of rods and gears to computer servers linked to the Internet.

Visitors looking for a test of strength sit in front of a touch-screen monitor and ask the computer to look for a potential opponent at another museum. If one is available, his or her picture appears on the screen via streaming Internet video, the two wrestlers grip the metal hands and the computer starts the contest.” [via]

We reported on an earlier form of arm wrestling in our post about the two Canadian artists?Doug Back and Norman White?who in 1986 used motorized force-transmitting systems interconnected by a telephone data link and did some telephonic arm wrestling of their own. “You could almost feel the pulse of the other person,” White said, “… it was uncannily human-like–the sensation of sinews and muscle–not at all like feeling a machine.”

Motion, Mapping, and Music

Todd Winkler is a composer and multimedia artist on the faculty at Brown University, where he is Director of MacColl Studio for Electronic Music and Chair of the Music Department. His work explores ways in which human actions can affect sound and images produced by computers in dance productions, interactive video installations, and concert pieces for computers and instruments. He is the author of Composing Interactive Music, a book and CD-ROM about the theory and technology of interactive music and performance, published by MIT Press. Winkler has also authored numerous papers.

His recent work uses motion sensing devices to allow dancers creative input into computer music and digital video systems. These dance productions include: Dark Around the Edges, with Walter Ferrero, presented at Carriage House Theater, Providence, Rhode Island; Songs for the Body Electric, with Gerry Girouard, presented in Minneapolis at Intermedia Arts, and at the International Dance and Technology Conference in Tempe, Arizona; Hitch’s Bitches, with Cindy Cummings, at the Project Theatre in Dublin, Ireland and the Yale University Multimedia Festival; and Falling Up, with Cindy Cummings, a commission from the Dublin Fringe Festival.

“The age of distributed media has facilitated political awareness and activism to a mass audience. From clicking to feed the hungry at www.thehungersite.com, to experiencing in real time first hand accounts of the bombing of Belgrade on the (original) Syndicate mailing list, to more recently the Salam Pax blogs from Bagdad, world issues seem very close to home. We’ve clicked to email politicians and institutions about local arts funding issues and global art sackings, and there were many eager mouse-clicking soldiers in RTMark’s Toy Wars campaign, who jointly plummeted the stock price of a corporation that tried to destroy an online art group.

Today we take it for granted that mainstream media has a vested interest, and artists and writers use their skills to create another point of view. These artworks come under the banner of tactical media—‘do it yourself’ media, where mass distribution networks are used to critique and respond to social issues. They never present a monolithic perspective, but rather are individuals or loose collations defined by their activity that intervene, often subverting or reformatting, the images, texts and icons of mainstream culture.”–Melinda Rackham, empyre, Thursday, 3 Jun 2004.

Karakuri: Shadows Working on the World

Presented by Even Eidsten Westvang at VSMM

“Abstract: Within the context of artistic practice as a methodological resource I have built an augmented reality system that allows unencumbered interaction with a structured physics system. The resulting installation artwork is cast as an experimental design laboratory. The ‘laboratory’ is set wihtin a clearly delineated sub domain of interaction where a rich set of embodied knowledge can inform performativity on the part of users. This allows its further application to a setting of unscripted performance where an anticipatory design process seeks to structure interaction. This paper outlines the components of such an anticipatory design process, theories it can be informed by and within which domains of embodied knowledge it can function. Details of the interdisciplinary and developmental piece Karakuri are presented and analysed. Directions for future research are suggested.” [PDF] [Quicktime video]

Locative Incarnations

Progress Report 2–The Mobile Audience: Art and New Located Technologies of the Screen by Martin Rieser.

Summary: A critical study examining emergent uses of mobile, wearable and wire free technologies, which move the audience for screen-based work out of the gallery and cinema into public spaces and geographies, with a particular focus on forms of experimental art works using narrative in its new spatialised “locative” incarnations. This continues arguments on reception rehearsed in Rieser, M., Zapp, A. New Screen Media: Cinema/Art/Narrative (BFI, London, 2002), but examines and contextualises more recent and developing work founded on mobile technologies.

This is a book involving primary field research, the principal aims being to develop visual languages and critical discourses around new art and narrative forms using mobile technologies, in particular through examining audience response. Read more.

Conducting Synaesthetic Intruments

laptop_orchestra is an interactive synaesthetic instrument designed for performances of audio visual compositions in real time. Fifteen laptops are arranged in rows similar to the formation of an orchestra. Algorithms activate sounds and abstract visual shapes based on the color spectrum; each laptop has its own sound and instructions for the construction of a shape.

Interacting from the orchestra conductor podium by lightly touching metal stems, it is possible to activate or deactivate each laptop, permitting the generation of an endless number of different compositions. Compared to the software of elementary audio and visual compositions, this installation puts the interaction in a defined and public space dimension, drawing a reactive environment in the contour of its physical dimension. Software made with Processing. Download pde file and sound sample.
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