Barry Threw

Milieux Sonores: Sound and Imaginary Spaces

Posted at 2am on 08/27/10 In Events, Immersive Media, Interactive Art, Technology, installation

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Next week we begin the installation for Milieux Sonores, an exhibition of sound installations exploring space presented in conjunction with swissnex San Francisco, Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, and the Institute for Computer Music and Sound Technology (ICST) at the Zurich University of the Arts. It consists of five installations sonically recreating imaginary spaces. Come to the opening reception on Sept 11 to meet with the artists and give a first listen to this set of immersive sound works.

Details

Opening Reception at Gray Area Foundation for the Arts
11 Sep 2010 from 7:00pm to 12:00pm
Suggested donation: $5 to $20
Exhibition Hours: Tuesdays and Thursdays, 4pm-7pm through November 19, 2010.

Note: Marcus Maeder is live at swissnex San Francisco on September 9, 2010, to discuss the exhibition.

Location

Gray Area Foundation for the Arts
55 Taylor Street, San Francisco
(415) 843-1423
Map and visitor info

From the rooms we imagine when we hear our noisy neighbors across the wall to the echoes that bounce off mountain cliffs, sound and space combine to create mental landscapes that become important parts of our environment. As developments in media technology make these virtual spaces and soundscapes ever more present in our lives—think video games, GPS applications, and audio surround — they are increasingly the subject of cultural theory study. Rarely have these concepts been explored in media art exhibitions, however.

Milieux Sonores, which premiered in Zurich in 2009, was designed to create imaginary spaces that could be shown in actual places as exhibition architecture. Participants, who included artists, composers, and sound designers often working in teams, were issued the following challenge: Build an imaginary space. The resulting five installations make use of cutting-edge audio technology developed at ICST Zurich to propose very diverse solutions. At Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, they all become part of a dark, mine-like space defined by sharp black shapes jutting out from gallery walls. Listen for yourself through November 19th, 2010.

With support from Pro Helvetia, the Swiss Arts Council. Stay tuned for upcoming related events.

Presumed Wind Loads (Mutmassliche Windlasten): Yves Netzhammer and Bernd Schurer

Yves Netzhammer and Bernd Schurer created an installation that transcends synthetic virtual reality. It consists of a table set in a small room. The space inside four open drawers has gained independence and broken free, collected in four pillars that project up to the ceiling. The pillars emit sound, turning the four objects into acoustic inner space. Netzhammer and Schurer write, “Tables are social instruments used to verify our proportions and distances. Through the components of the installation, the imaginary space switches latently between the inside and outside, with drawers represented by pillars and the communicating elements cushioned with pillows. The vertical projections between the inner and outer surfaces delineate an acoustic inner space. This supports the imaginary architectural space through an audio-collage. The symbolic use of sounds and the question as to how one space relates to another within a system are part of the process of creating a new world, heterotopia, engaging in dialogue with the imaginary space and examining the experience of touching the various (spatial) objects.”

Flow Space: Daniel Bisig, Martin Neukom, and Jan Schacher (ICST)

Flow Space is an audiovisual space created by surround-sound, video projection, and interaction forming an immersive media experience. A touch-sensitive interface offers an intuitive, contemplative interaction with swarms of sounds. Various options are provided, each with its own performance, sound, and visual representation. Ambisonics surround technology is used for three-dimensional sound projection and spatialization. Flow Space is the fruit of three research projects at the Institute for Computer Music and Sound Technology within the music department of the Zurich University of the Arts: The Interactive Swarm Orchestra project, the Immersive Swarm Spaces, and the Musical Gesture project.

SoundSpots: Rob van Rijswijk and Jeroen Strijbos

At first glance, Rob van Rijswijk and Jeroen Strijbos’s SoundSpots resemble oversized Plexiglas lamps. Only when one stands directly below one of them do the “lamps” reveal their auditory secrets: the listener is submerged in a sound-bath of musical eruptions. SoundSpots consists of traditional and parabolic speakers focused on a single point to create a walk-through sound environment, i.e. a spatially distributed composition. As visitors move around the installation, they experience their own version of Rijswijk and Strijbos’s composition as the sound generated by normal loudspeakers mixes with the sound originating from the speaker above them.

Four Adjoining Rooms (Vier Nebenräume): Felix Profos

Four Adjoining Rooms is a completely darkened room consisting of four imaginary adjoining acoustic spaces. The only discernible elements are a seat, headphones, a navigation trackball, and projected visual navigation. Composer Felix Profos writes, “Being alone in an empty room surrounded by adjoining spaces, from which muffled sounds can be heard is a fascinating situation in which listening (without being able to make out exactly what is going on in the adjoining spaces) comes into its element. The most nondescript sounds are charged with meaning and begin to shine, and the remotest events become related to one another. I have long yearned to have this condition within reach, perpetual and undisturbed. The project is an attempt to achieve this goal. However…the advantage of this project is that here, time does not slip irretrievably through our fingers: we are free to stop at any given point in time and listen for as long as we like…”

Perimeter Gray: Jason Kahn

Jason Kahn’s installation, Perimeter Gray, is the only work that is not directly placed in the exhibition rooms but instead sits on the facade of the Gray Area Foundation. Here, taut wires pick up electromagnetic and acoustic vibrations outdoors—specifically from the inner courtyard of the barrack grounds—and transform them into sounds. The modified signals from the acoustic environment around Gray Area are played back outdoors via various loudspeakers mounted in the same location. Thus, the sonic space of the street is enriched with its own transformed sounds. Jason Kahn writes, “The focus of my sound installations lies in our perception of space through sound. I see space as a sculpture shaped by sound. The emphasis is not so much on the sound that I bring into a space as on the space itself. My installations seek to heighten our perception of space. Today, we often try to shut out the world around us. We are faced with simply too many sounds and too many images, resulting in an information overload. In my work, my aim is to empower visitors to perceive a given space, sensitizing them not only to its sound, but also to the general perception of the place.”

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Resurrection of Recombinant Media Labs Nomadic Video Engine

Posted at 10pm on 08/14/10 In Immersive Media, Interactive Art, Technology, installation

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This is the first look at the new Recombinant Media Labs’ Cinechamber video engine. It is newly functional, using Derivative’s Touch Designer Pro, a remarkably fast and agile realtime video authoring platform. It is currently being rebuilt at UCSD. The new system will support 10 screens of realtime GL and video playback with up to 1080p resolution.

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New Walkthrough of GlobalLives YBCA Installation

Posted at 11am on 08/06/10 In installation

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A new walkthrough of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts installation for the World Premiere of the GlobalLives Project has been released. This was the longest running portion of the exhibit, paired with the 10 screen installation of all videos in the museum forum space.

Working with acclaimed filmmakers, artists and designers, Global Lives assembles the realities of everyday life from Lebanon, Serbia, China, India, Japan, Malawi, Indonesia, Brazil, Kazakhstan and San Francisco. In producing this paritcular installation, we collaborated with renowned designers and architects FOURM design+build, Sand Studios and Ade, as well as digital media artist, Rafael Alcala.

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This Thursday at 7:00PM the Californica Academy of Sciences I’ll be presenting the K-Bow with violist Marielle Jakobsons as part of LoveTech. We’ll be walking through the software and showing the capabilities of the bow.
$12 ($10 for CA Academy members), 21+
Website w/ full event details here:

An event about Artists and Scientists who work/think/imagine/engage at the intersections of the Arts and Science.

University of San Francisco
2130 Fulton Street
SF, CA 94117
McLaren building, Room #251

lluminated Forest Exhibition: July 9 – August 7
Opening Night Time: 6p-10p July 9th.
Location: The Lab, 2948 16th Street, San Francisco
RSVP Here
More Information

Featuring sound selections by Luc Meier with exhibition artists Jorge Bachmann, Agnes Szelag, Ben Bracken, Alan So, Suzanne Husky, Sam Easterson, Alyce Santoro, Reenie Charrière, Vaughn Bell, Elin Øyen Vister, Jessica Resmond

In Soundwave Festival’s most ambitious presentation ever, Green Sound mounts a special month-long exhibition and performance residency at The Lab. The Illuminated Forest is an imaginary world inside the gallery walls of San Francisco’s preeminent experimental art space that features a large immersive multi-media and interactive exhibit and performance installation from the collaborative minds of Agnes Szelag, Ben Bracken, Jorge Bachmann and Alan So, and environmental artist works by Vaughn Bell, Alyce Santoro, Sam Easterson, Reenie Charrière, Suzanne Husky, Elin Øyen Vister, and Jessica Resmond.

The main installation is manufactured by projections, sensors, MAX/MSP, sound, sculptural shapes and light/shadow where visitors become its inhabitants and part of its ecosystem: their presence activates both visual and auditory sensations, and leaves an imprint on the environment long after they are gone. It demonstrates our own connection to the environment and how we are all interconnected. Our presence in the environment affects this space and is forever changed (for better and for worse) with our temporal presence. This experiential exhibit actively reminds people what we do has impact: on our own lives, on others, and the world around us, both in the present and the future. It is a human reminder of the life existing outside our urban borders, its importance, and the power it can play in our lives while raising questions about a natural world lost.

The Forest will host experiential performances by some of the most compelling local, national and international artists and musicians. Inspired sound purveyors from across the sonic spectrum will explore themes of reinvention and recycling, real and imagined natural environments and creatures, endangered species, water, environmental awareness and responsibility, plantlife/animal life, and other artist imaginations.

In various eddies around the forest, artists re-imagine a place with Suzanne Husky’s textile trees and soft rocks, Sam Easterson’s animal-borne imaging, Vaughn Bell’s moving and wall mountains, Alyce Santoro’s Sonic Fabric, Jessica Resmond’s birds nests, Reenie Charrière’s Washed Up waterfall and Elin Øyen Vister’s Soundscape Røst installation on the birds of Røst archipelago in northern Norway.

Join us in celebrating the opening of The Illuminated Forest featuring sound selections by Luc Meier.

We have passed the era of Peak MHz. The race in CPU development is now for smaller, cheaper, and less power-hungry processors. As the price of powerful CPUs approaches that of basic components (there are fast CPUs now that cost less than some LEDs, for example), how information processing is used fundamentally changes. When information processing is this cheap, it becomes a material with which to design the world, like plastic, iron, and wood.

This vision is the opposite of cloud computing and it argues that most information processing in the future will not be in some distant data center, but immediately present in our environment, distributed throughout the world, embedded in things we don’t think of as computers.

* * What it means to treat information as a material.
* * The properties of information as a design material.
* * The design possibilities created by information as a material.
* * How information as a material enables The Internet of Things, object oriented hardware, smart materials, ubiquitous computing, and intelligent environments.

Mike Kuniavsky has been active in the intersection of design and technology for more than twenty years. In 1994 he designed one of the first e-commerce websites. Since then, he has worked on hundreds of interactive experiences: search engines, museum guides, digital pianos, kitchens of the future, wine racks, amusement parks, and more websites than he can remember. He co-founded Adaptive Path, an influential Web design company, and Wired Digital’s user experience lab, one of the first user research initiatives dedicated to a single company’s online products. In 2006, he co-founded a new company, ThingM, which designs and manufactures ubiquitous computing products.

His previous book, “Observing the User Experience,” has been popular all over the world and is used as a textbook at many universities. He lives in San Francisco. He blogs at orangecone.com.”

After homebrew enabling a gameboy or similar retro computer it’s possible to run whatever software you like on it, including contemporary software that has been written specifically for composing and performing music! starPause will provide a birds eye view of the culture around this trick as well as demonstrating how he builds a track from the ground up using a playstation portable.

Jordan the k9d writes code for cash, rides keirin bikes on city streets, and produces lofi electro music as starPause. He’s also active in the demoscene with the Northern Dragons, practices dayan qigong, and publishes the DINOAIDS pocket zine.

T.bias is compiling a book of photographs that he has taken of plants & flowers at night. Armed only with his point & shoot Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS3 he has discovered an interesting way to biologically modify his process to capture stunning night time photographs. He intends to release his book of these photos, “Night Garden”, in tandem with the Dorkbot talk.

T.bias is a jack of many trades; Music, video, web production, graphic design, interaction design, geekery and hackery. He spend some of his time trying to capture photographs that he finds pleasing with the limited photography gear he has.

* * 13′ high sculpture depicting the mythological Trojan Horse.
* *A public project where everyone is invited to make hundreds of real and imaginary paper viruses sculptures.
* *A means to smuggle the viruses into the museum and release them in a public ceremony.
* *Constructed almost entirely of sustainable and recyclable materials.

Scott Kildall is cross-disciplinary artist working with video, installation, prints, sculpture and performance. He gathers material from the public realm as the crux of his artwork in the form of interventions into various concepts of space.

He has a Bachelor of Arts in Political Philosophy from Brown University and a Master of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago through the Art & Technology Studies Department. He exhibits his work internationally in galleries and museums. He has received fellowships and awards from organizations including the Kala Art Institute, The Banff Centre for the Arts and Turbulence.org and the Eyebeam Art + Technology Center

Victoria Scott strives to understand the transformation of matter and energy as it flows from one state into another. Working with electronic media, sculpture and social relations, she creates site-specific installations, digital prints, objects and audio works.

Her recent projects include constructing 3D paper representations of objects that exist both in simulated environments and real life. She is also developing a series of batteries that are charged by human emotional energy.

Scott completed her MFA in 2005 at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago within the Art and Technology Department. She has exhibited in Sweden, Mexico City, Toronto, Berlin, Boston and Chicago and received several Canada Council arts grants.

Sasha Harris-Cronin is a San Francisco based multimedia artist who creates interactive exhibits for museums. freelances designer, programmer, artist, technologist, integrator, manager, and all-around outside-the-box thinker.

“The path of the righteous string musician is betset on all sides by the inequities of MIDI and the tyranny of keyboards.”

Let’s face it, MIDI is about the smallest possible straw you can suck a compelling music performance through. For guitar players, it has been nearly impossible. That’s why after more than three years of development, I and the rest of the team at Keith McMillen Instruments are proud to announce the release of the StringPort, the worlds first computer platform for guitar (and coming for other string instruments – violin, viola, cello and bass).

It can do so much that it is hard to describe in just a few words what it is, but the best explanation is that the StringPort is a computer platform for string instruments. It allows you to control software in a personal computer using your instrument as the interface.

The StringPort is used in conjunction with an instrument with a polyphonic pickup (a pickup that outputs a mono audio channel for each string of the instrument, such as are available from Roland, GraphTech, Zeta and RMC) to enable the player to use multichannel effects processing and synthesis control. Prior to the StringPort, the only way for a string player to accomplish this was via a dedicated hardware box.

While some of these products work well, they have several disadvantages. Foremost, they are very rarely updated so the feature set that initially comes with the product may well be what is available for the duration of its lifespan. By contrast, the StringPort’s features are implemented in software on a personal computer. This not only means updates are as easy as downloading a new version of the applications, but also that as processor speeds increase the StringPort will gain a natural advantage over its competitors. While a dedicated hardware device is never going to get any faster, and never going to be able to support more features than its locked hardware can provide, our software can take advantage of every increase in personal computing power whether is be clock speed or additional cores.

At its base the StringPort is simply an audio interface, albeit an optimized one. You can use the hardware without our software and record every string of your guitar separately right out of the box. This makes it possible to put different effects on each string of the instrument in any DAW software such as Logic or ProTools. However, our software also includes an analysis system that looks at the incoming audio from each string to provide a full set of spectral metadata. While other devices simply output MIDI (a single pitch and “velocity” and sometimes pitch bend), the information provided by the StringPort analysis is much richer. It contains continuous pitch and loudness, pitch bend, centroid, parity, noisiness, and inharmonicity for each string. These spectral parameters are gained from complex FFT analysis to describe the continuous vibrations of the string, not a single event. All of this control data can be output to other software programs on your computer or over the network, meaning anyone can write a software program to use this analysis data. This really does make the StringPort a platform for controlling a computer rather just a completely isolated effects and MIDI output system.

Of course, we also provide standard guitar and studio effects. Take, for instance, our PolyFuzz application. It contains an entire effects rack including compressor, EQ, pitch shift, filter, delay modulation, amp simulation, delay and reverb. All of these effects are available for every string independently. Not only are they available for every string, but they can all be modulated with the realtime spectral analysis data. Do you want your filter frequency set by the note you are playing? Or your reverb level to go up depending upon the fret you are playing? We have build a modulation matrix capable of controlling every knob you can touch with a mouse cursor with the realtime spectral data.

We also provide two very satisfying synthesis applications. The first is a three operator “classic” synthesizer. It contains a two operator FM section, a subtractive section, and an LFO. This synthesizer is driven directly from the continuous spectral data, so it is very responsive to a variety of subtle playing techniques. It is easy to perform sounds with this application that it previously seemed impossible for a guitar to create, let alone control in realtime.

This just scratches the surface of what can be done with the StringPort system. The software package comes with twenty-four separate modules including notation, MIDI output, additional synthesizer control, phase driven synthesis, sound file playback and manipulation, and physical modeling. We’ve really put a lot of tools at the guitarist’s disposal with this product, and are excited to hear what gets created with it.

Find out more information on www.StringPort.com. What features would you like to see in a polyphonic audio processor? Let us know.

From May 27th – 29th I attended the Libre Graphics Meeting 2010 in Brussels. The conference turned out to be a really inspiring and creative group of people really pushing the envelope of what is possible, not only with open source software, but with visual arts as a whole. Building upon the previous LGM years focusing primarily of developers of the big list of open source graphics programs (such as GIMP, Inkscape, Scribus and Blender) this year added a large number of presentations by users and artists. There were even media art focused presentations such as this one on metaphor and images by Mirko Schafer.

The conference was held at a very comfortable arts venue called Pianofabriek. Complete with bar, the sessions were broken up into a main presentation space plus several breakout rooms for birds-of-a-feather meetings and workshops. Every day of the meeting was filled with interesting content and real use cases and user feedback for the software packages being developed. The theme of this conference “reclaim your tools” was reinforced from nearly every angle from conception to final product. This is what really brought the message home for me, people actually using these tools and showing the great results they can achieve with complete open software and content packages. This is a stark contrast from most other arts, music, and engineering conferences I’ve attended where the papers are abstract, the tools extremely academic, and the products proprietary. None of these things applied at LGM, and the feeling of mutual creativity between all the participants was as big an argument as any in support of open source tools, free content, and shared knowledge.

Some of the most interesting things at the meeting were the sessions on desktop publishing. People self publishing and developing sophisticated tools made it clear that contrary to some opinions about the directions of literary technology, new tools will only strengthen the printmaking community, not wipe it out with dedicated e-readers. The sheer ingenuity of projects solving publishing issues with freely accessible tools showed a steady movement that will with time inevitably destroy even the highest volume censored app store in the world. Excellent presentations were given on open font design by Christopher Adams (the publisher of Joi Ito’s book Freesouls) and on self publishing by Ana Carvalho at Plana Press on transitioning from closed source software to created independent comic books. Also Tom Lechner’s talk on his program Laidout shows off its many impressive features, including laying out print on an arbitrary polygon.

Jon Phillips of Open Clip Art showed off the new website created with a very interesting new database based CMS framework called Aiki.

Another very interesting thread was that of open source fashion. Susan Spencer‘s presentation for her project Sew Brilliant that aims to make scalable free sewing patterns available, and also create open source software for fashion design. The fashion industry currently has no open source solutions and is thus enslaved to expensive proprietary solutions for their entire production pipeline.

We stayed at the Pantone Hotel in Brussels, which is obviously leveraging the Pantone brand (basically big squares of color) into a panoply of overpriced products (like $15 coffee mugs). This made the presentation by Ginger Coons introducing the Open Colour Standard, a new effort to standardize a color definition model not owned by a corporation, particularly noticeable.

To see a more of the talks at LGM head over to River Valley TV, who recorded all of the presentations.