Gregory Taylor

Some of the events we attend are annual gatherings of scholar/practitioners who gather to discuss and encounter the work of their peers. They’re often convivial and intense gatherings of concerts interspersed with papers (or vice versa). We love ‘em, look forward to ‘em, and know that there is almost no better way to combine keeping up to date with increasing the chance for the serendipitous meeting.

Then, there are those interesting word-of-mouth events. You know the type: You might have seen the mention of it at the edge of the little circle of light you work in, and then – after it’s over – you start hearing from friends or acquaintances that you missed something amazing, and that thing is suddenly no longer at the edge of your little circle of light. “Next time, I’ll be there, if I can….” you promise yourself.

While I love those annual scholarly gatherings, I’ve got a real place in my heart for the buzz that accompanies the word-of-mouth gathering, and I’ve been lucky enough to attend and participate in a few that have really changed my life (the legendary and much-missed Spark Festival, the Ableton Loop event and Sonic Acts) and a couple of those that I have yet to experience (Electric Spring in Huddersfield).

I’ve just checked one of those kinds of events off my list – MOXsonic.

This was the second Missouri Experimental Sonic Arts Festival held. The first one showed up on my radar when my friend and colleague Andrew Pask returned from the first one raving about what a great experience it was. After I’d heard from a couple of the other attendees, I marked it on the calendar.

It was everything it was described as being – a couple of days enlivened by an astounding variety of performances that were spectacularly curated and ordered/presented in such a way that I ended the first concert vowing not to look at the online program notes (yes - no trees destroyed in the name of the festival!) until after the performance so as not to spoil the surprise of what was coming next.

Instead of the more usual collection of photos of people standing around and talking, this on the road is going to stick close to the action – a kind of whirlwind tour of the festival from the third row seats - right after I post these two pictures of the post-nightlife show MOXsonic crowd enjoying some libation and conversation at Old Barney's. Now that I've established the usual cheery festival vibe, let's move on to the concerts and MOXsonic events!

Why was MOXsonic such a pleasurable experience? I guess that a good festival is a complex cocktail of imagination, ingredients, and execution, presented in proportion. Beyond the size and scale and the tremendous level of expertise and support on the part of the UCM Music Tech students handling the sound and stage wrangling, the amazing concert hall facility that helped everyone sound great, and the fantastic Front of House support for the nightlife shows, MOXsonic had something else special going for it: curation.

Careful curation by the triumvirate of Eric Honour, Elizabeth Stimpert, and Jeff Kaiser - based on a call for submissions that stayed strongly focused on the motto “Surprise me,” – assembled a program between their three very different styles and outlooks that not only eschewed a single style or practice, but also wound up providing a widely varied program for each and every concert.

The layout of every stage in each of the three daytime concerts set you up for what was to come – a bewildering collection of devices/laptops/instruments spread across the stage, with the usual pianos and horns alongside megaphones, tabletop scaffolding, and the like. The mystery for every concert was “Who’s next, where are they on stage, and what does that do?”

And what was on stage? I'll share a few photos with you and merely invite you to imagine what you'd be hearing, all under one roof (If you were performing and I missed you, I hope you can forgive me. I owe you a pint)....

The concerts were spaced so as to allow ample time for a walk into town for a bite, a little hang time, and just enough time to recover your sense of anticipation for the next round. As much as I understand the reason for maximizing the number of concerts at a conference, MOXsonic really hit the sweet spot for me.

The festival’s guests this year were Shiau-uen Ding and Miller Puckette, which meant that attendees had a chance to hear a live performance of Philippe Manoury’s Pluton - the very first piece realized using Max– a really rare opportunity. Miller wasn’t able to attend at the last minute, but Barry Moon stepped into the breach to deputize for Miller minding Miller’s Pd port of the piece for the performance. It was a fantastic performance of one of those pieces that simultaneously enervates and energizes you. It's a listen that requires your full attention over a span of time, but whose energy cannot help but lift you up. f you ever have a chance to go hear this beast live, just go.

I can hear you saying (or thinking). "Well, what kind of festival would it be without papers or workshops or installations? Surely they included some of that, too...."

As it happens, they did, but - again - judiciously curated and scaled so as to avoid Chronic Conference Paper Fatigue. We were treated to two pairs of papers - a pair of talks interrogating personal artistic practice from Lars Bröndum and seah Heikes...

....followed by a pair of papers on software and hardware design from MDSP's daddy Hugh Lobel and Shawn Trail (a delicious piece of Raspberry Pi).

MOXsonic also included two workshop-like events, one of which was the reason I was in attendance. Following on the heels of the publication of Step By Step, I had the chance to present the book’s history as a narrative, and to provide a walkthrough of its contents and their ability to be recombined. I was happy that this meant I could attend the festival, and happier still at the amount of interest in the book.

Since I was otherwise engaged, I was unable to attend Stephanie Zalatel's dance Master Class. I heard it was amazing.

Sooner or later, the sun goes down and dinner's over and you wonder what to do next. As with other festivals, there was a nightlife component to every evening. Unlike other conferences, there wasn’t quite the distance in terms of style or personnel – the biggest difference was a combination of ensemble size and set length. I really liked the sense that the performances for the whole festival seemed more coherent and presented with less regard to time of day.

Of course, I was stoked to see the Choir Boys reunion (Jeff Kaiser and Andrew Pask). In addition to it being a rare opportunity, I was really curious to see Jeff’s Max patches that repurposed the Ableton Push 2 in action. Their take-no-prisoners gig was also full of surprises – from the odd dive into a refracted brass chorale and a finish that included (no, I am not kidding) a Cure sample.

Miller Puckette (along with his Higgs Whatever band partner Kerry Hagan) also made a telematic appearance during the final evening’s nightlife performance. Dressed in his finest Johnny Cash apparel and accompanied by Kerry and her facial recognition tiger mask, they brought the house down with their recombinant cakewalk through every version of “Ring of Fire” ever recorded, complete with cellphone tales of expired goldfish. To (mis)quote Shakespeare, “Oh brave new world, that has such pieces in ‘t!”

The nightlife curation closely mirrored the daily concerts - well chosen and paced, and well-varied. I even got a chance to sit in and provide the fog machine effects for signalsundertests - my friend Ricky Graham's magnificent expanded guitar project. It was a great way to end the festival for me.....

There are a few images missing here - I was so busy listening to and interacting with Ritwik Banerji's beautiful interactive installation Astromusicology and seah Heikes' installation work that I completely forgot to take any pictures of them! Ditto for the early morning coffee tasting hosted by the wonderful folks at the Kansas City Electronic Music Alliance that Andrew Pask mentioned last year - it was first thing in the morning....

So here's the bottom line: consider this another bit of buzz for a plucky little right-sized festival. Mark it on your calendar. If your work is accepted, go, and prepared to be surprised and delighted and challenged.

Oh yeah - you're also about an hour's drive from some of the finest barbeque in the world in Kansas City (and, if you're vegan, the Cafe Gratitude, which will knock your socks off). Win-win!

I'd like to thank Jeff Kaiser and Michael Bersin for providing some of these photos (and better ones than I was able to take from row three).

moxsonic-2019.gif

In addition to those annual gatherings of scholar/practitioners who get together to discuss and encounter the work of their peers, there are those interesting word-of-mouth events. You know the type: You might have seen the mention of it at the edge of the little circle of light you work in, and then – after it’s over – you start hearing from friends or acquaintances that you missed something amazing, and that thing is suddenly no longer at the edge of your little circle of light.

on-the-road-moxsonic-2019

On The Road: MOXsonic 2019

Darwin Grosse

Over the last few years, we’ve reviewed – and participated in – the Visiones Sonoras media festival, in Morelia, Michoacán, Mexico. It has provided an exciting opportunity to engage with an energized group of artists, and to experience a remarkable wealth of visual and sonic art.

This year, the 16th edition of Visiones Sonoras will be held virtually, from September 23rd through the 25th, providing unprecedented access to the performances and presentations from the festival. We thought it would be a great idea to give a heads-up on this upcoming event, and give you a chance to attend – when it might otherwise be difficult or impossible!

VS16 is loaded with compelling performances, featuring:

Composer/performer Annabelle Playe, presenting “InLAND | come back in broad day”, a performance situated in an immersive 3D world.

The CHDH collective performing “Morphist”, using a unique set of audiovisual instruments for realtime performance.

Popular media performer Maotik presenting his space-bending 3D audio-visual worlds.

Other performance will be occurring throughout the festival. One that we are especially excited about is having two Cycling ’74 folks – Ashley Bellouin and Ben Bracken – performing with their unique blend of acoustic instrument design and audio processing. 

Ashley and Ben are well-known in the Max world, and it’ll be fun to have them share their beautiful sonic creations more widely.

In addition, there are collaborations with the University of Concordia and UARTES of Ecuador. These include a variety of presentations (in Spanish and in English) on electronic music history, creative plug-in techniques and algorithmic music tools.

On the VS16 website, composer and curator Tonalli Nakamura points out that this year’s presentations embrace a mixture of design, programming and technology – a perspective that will feel like home to most Max users. Block off some time in September (virtually) visit Visiones Sonoras, and experience a different kind of festival!

Visiones Sonoras 16: https://visionessonoras.org/

017_Logos.jpg

A preview of an upcoming virtual festival that provides an exciting opportunity to engage with a vital and energized audience, and to experience a remarkable wealth of visual and sonic art.

visiones-sonoras-16-preview

Visiones Sonoras 16 Preview

Marsha Vdovin

Composer Randall Packer collaborated with Opera Singer Charles Lane, Designer Greg Kuhn and Director Melissa Weaver to create a theater piece entitled A Season in Hell, premiering at the Zero1 Festival in San Jose on September 17-19, 2010.

A Season in Hell is a ground-breaking multimedia performance work that integrates a complex electronic musical score and vocal performance with multiple forms of digital media, video projection, surround-sound, objects, and storytelling to fuse live performance, installation, and sculpture into an otherworldly theatrical experience. We spoke to Randall Packer and Max/MSP/Jitter programmer Craig Roche about the performance and the Max patch that runs the entire show.

Please tell us a little about your theater piece, A Season in Hell, and what inspired it.

Randall Packer:  I moved to Washington, ten years ago, I created a project called The U.S. Department of Art and Technology, which was a conceptual art project that I turned this into a performance project. I was Director of the department, and I gave speeches, and did performances, and installations, that centered around the whole notion of an artist-driven government agency. It was kind of a utopian prototype of what the government might be like if it were actually run by artists.

I called on one my oldest friends and long-time collaborator Charles Lane, a tenor, who sings with the LA Opera. We met when we were at Cal Arts, many, many years ago, when I was studying music there.

So Charles and I began to work on this music-theater piece, or video opera, A Season in Hell, based on the poem by Arthur Rimbaud, which we were both totally enthralled with when we were students and Cal Arts, 30 years ago. We had talked about doing a piece based on this poem about the disintegration of humanity, and how the artist copes with that. So we decided it was time to do A Season in Hell.

We began to travel around the country. Charles came to Washington first, and we thought about how we could do this. We created a character called Orph, based on the legend of Orpheus. Charles as Orph would lead me through the underworld of America.

We created this kind of surreal idea that the nation had actually died, with the second inauguration of Bush. I built a grave, a sculptural installation with six monitors buried in soil, and I loaded all the video footage, news footage that had been happening up until that point in 2005.Then the idea was that Charles and I would descend into the grave, into the underworld of America. So we went all around the country filming. We started in Washington, and we went to New Orleans right after Katrina to do a site-specific performance there, and filmed that. We went to the Bible Belt and filmed all kinds of religious iconography.

Charles is African-American, and we went to an African-American cemetery where slaves are buried.Then we did the last filming in Death Valley, which was the idea that we had descended to the very bottom of America. We filmed the ending of the work there.

By that point, it was 2007, and we had finished all the filming, and I began to work on editing all this material. I had thousands of hours of material recorded off of television, cable news footage, as well as all the footage that we had done in these different locations. I had even gone to Crawford, Texas, and just filmed all the things that were happening in the country during that 2005-2007 period.

Then, in 2009, we got the commission from Zero One to do the theater production. I don't know if you're familiar with Zero One, but it's a media-arts festival based in San Jose. Then I pulled together a team. I found a director, Melissa Weaver. I called on another old collaborator of mine, Nick Gregory Kuhn, to do the sound design, and set design.

The four of us began working on a script that brought all of this material and performances and the history of The U.S. Department of Art and Technology together into one full-length, evening theater piece, A Season in Hell. So we've been working on that for the past year and a half.

Is it true that the entire show is run from Max/MSP?

Randall Packer:  A former student of mine at American University in Washington, Craig Roche started working on a software system that's being written in Max, that runs the whole show. It brings together five video projectors, the main projection screen, plus all sorts of other projectors that are hung from the pipes and point in different directions on scrims, as we create this very complex and ‘labyrinthian’ underworld of video imagery. Then that's synchronized with a musical score that's running in Logic. So Max is basically all tied in with Logic, to perfectly synchronize five video feeds, surround sound, and the musical score.

Can you describe the patch and its functions? 

Craig Roche:  The patch consists of four main components: the interface, the resource manager, the playback system, and the main render loop. The resource manager is implemented in JavaScript, and in Max as two js objects connected to a few other objects. The resource manager is responsible for loading all of the video files used throughout the performance, and providing an interface for accessing those videos.

It’s implemented as an array of jit.qt.movie objects and a few JavaScript classes that structure the behavior of those objects. Because there are several projectors used in the show and they are all in different resolutions and orientations -- some projectors are turned sideways -- there are some video files that contain the same content but have been oriented or stylized differently. The resource manager associates these different files with the same clip name, and when the clip is triggered it will choose the appropriate video file based upon the destination.

The playback system consists of a cue sheet and a SMPTE timecode transport. When the transport is playing, it triggers cues on the cue sheet and sends midi time code to a separate computer running Logic Pro to maintain sync between the audio and video. The columns in the cue sheet correspond to the five video projectors, and when a cue is triggered the names and symbols in the columns are sent to the resource manager. The resource manager then starts playback of the corresponding jit.qt.movie objects. It also determines which video files are no longer in use and automatically stops those objects. Whenever the jit.qt.movie objects are triggered, the names of the Jitter matrices are sent to objects in the main render loop, where they are mixed and sent out to the projectors.

About 95% of these operations are hidden from the interface objects, which are connected remotely.

What was your biggest challenge in this project?

Craig Roche:  The biggest challenge was finding an elegant way to organize the flow of information throughout the patch. The patch includes many abstractions that need to communicate with a large number of objects.  For this reason, many objects are connected to receive objects so that they can be accessed from anywhere in the patch. All of the interface elements are connected to the rest of the patch through send and forward objects. This is done for organization. Another example is a jsobject connected directly to a forward object that initializes the patch by sending messages to over 20 locations.

Craig Roche:  This is a difficult question to answer because I can think of at least a hundred objects that the patch depends on, including, of course, many Jitter objects that are the basis for the system. I suppose the most useful objects have been: receive, forward, and bpatcher. When used correctly they facilitate the proper organization of the other objects. Without bpatcher it would have been very difficult to design a simple and effective interface.

What was the reasoning behind the use of Excel Spreadsheets?

Craig Roche: The spreadsheets, which are edited in Excel, are actually saved as tab-delimited text files and are parsed by JavaScript with the Max js object. An external application is used for two main reasons. First, it allows the show to be modified without running the patch. This means the computer that is used does not need to have Max installed, and it also allows someone who is unfamiliar with the patch interface to make modifications. Second, if the show cannot be edited within the patch itself, there is no chance of a user accidentally modifying the show. There are a number of interns that have been running the patch during rehearsal, and if anything ever goes wrong it is easy to reset the patch. None of the data is ever permanently changed.

Would you care to share any advice or tips for others trying to accomplish this?

Craig Roche: When working on a project of this scale, make extensive use of encapsulation. It is my personal philosophy that when the main patch is opened, all that should be visible at the highest level are abstractions and interface objects. Take the time to sketch out your ideas and determine the flow of information between the highest-level abstractions of the patch before implementing all of the gritty details. This could save you a lot of time.

Would you approach anything differently now that you have experience with the patch? 

Craig Roche:  I went through several rewrites of the patch early on because I didn’t take the time to carefully sketch out my ideas. With what I know now, I would examine the big picture first and design the smaller components later. This is something that anyone must learn to do if they are to complete a very large project.

A Season in Hell plays September 17-19 At the San Jose Stage as part of the 2010 01SJ Biennial. Tickets available online.

Interview by Marsha Vdovin and Ron MacLeod for Cycling '74.

an-interview-with-randall-packer

An Interview with Randall Packer

Andrew Pask

Last week I made the trip to Morelia in Mexico. Morelia is an amazing old town, the city center looks like it was transplanted from 17th century Europe - which, of course, it pretty much was.

I went there with my colleague Rob Ramirez as a guest of CMMAS for the occasion of their 10th birthday and the 12th Visiones Sonoras Festival. We have been working with CMMAS professor, Max expert and all around good guy Francisco Colasanto on the Spanish translation of Max now for a year or so and this was the first time we got to meet in person.

CMMAS is a busy bunch - a Latin American center for research, experimentation and the development of new sound projects (Residencies, anyone?), as well as a clearing house for information. Just in case you've been living in a cave somewhere, there's a rich history of electroacoustic music in Latin America (for more on this, visit Ricardo dal Farra's website on the subject), and CMMAS has released a couple of really interesting recordings, too - the Autoctofonías series of CDs of computer music that foregrounds local musical traditions and materials (Volume 1, Volume 2, and Volume 3 are available through CD Baby), along with a cool series produced along with Ricardo dal Farra that spotlights the history of electroacoustic music in Latin America (Volume 1, Volume 2, and Volume 3 are also on CD Baby). Check 'em out.

For Visiones Sonoras, Rob and I each gave a talk on Max.

Here I am showing how you can make one of Icaro Ferre’s awesome CV gen patchers play in a Link session. You can find Icaro’s code in the Package Manager - look for “Gen CV Tools” by Spektro.

Rob’s talk was a great introduction to Jitter techniques and resources.

Incidentally, you can find all of Rob’s Jitter resources from his talk here.

The big thing at the festival was modular synthesis. I was blown away by the amount of extremely high quality DIY work being done and the amazing sound art being produced. Here's a shot from one of the sets - Javier Lara in performance.

This was our first time participating in Visiones Sonoras and I’m quite sure it won’t be our last. We had a blast hanging out and meeting people in the excellent facilities at the Campus UNAM in Morelia. Definitely a great stop on the festival circuit.

feliz-cumpleanos-cmmas

¡Feliz cumpleaños, CMMAS!

Rnul interactive

For the Spinrag festival in Kortrijk Rnul created a video installation for children. In the beautiful theater in Kortrijk, children could virtually fly through an imaginative environment. By discover and using specific gestures which controlled their virtual image the children could create their own virtual world.

The software of the project is entirely made in Max; the video recording, recording of gesture movement, the open GL part with physics and OSC communication between different patches and Max apps .

spinrag-festival-kortrijk-belgium

Spinrag festival Kortrijk Belgium

One of the great things about hanging around the Cycling '74 campfire is the great group of artists and musicians that are found there. One of these, Andrew Benson, produces visual artwork that ranges from stamp-sized GIFs through massive festival/concert graphics. Find out more about Andrew's work and artistic perspective in this mini-interview.

Let's start off by introducing people to your artwork. What are some of your highlight pieces?

Right now I seem to have 3 different trajectories of work, all sort of inter-related.

The main thread is heavily feedback driven experimental digital video/animation work like these:

And the past few years I've been working a lot with 3D animation like this new one I just released through Undervolt & Co:

http://undervolt.co/SINGLES/Mud-Andrew-Benson

And oddly one of the most popular projects I've done is Wolf+Unicorn:

And then there is live video performances and installations that are hard to document well, but it's an important part of what I do.

You've been involved in collaborations with some big name performers. What are some of the particular challenges with that kind of work?

I've been very lucky to work with some wonderful artists all around. The biggest challenge there is that it's not just you in a studio coming up with a crazy idea and going for it. In addition to the headlining artist, you need to work with a big group of people who are all motivated by things not failing and being as predictable as possible. As someone fascinated by the unexpected in my own software, it took some adjustment to see things from that perspective.

The biggest challenge there is that it's not just you in a studio coming up with a crazy idea and going for it.

The other part of it, as Video Director, you often need to be on the phone with equipment vendors and venue people and your job is to demand the best possible situation while not making any enemies. That relationship is really important because in festival shows (for example) you are getting to the venue early in the morning and all you have is soundcheck to make sure the rig is going to display your output properly.

Among Max users, you are probably best known for your "Jitter Recipes" articles that describe interesting visual effects. What was your motivation for doing the recipes, and will we be seeing any more in the future?

When I was learning Jitter in art school, I found that the core stuff I really wanted to do was only hinted at in the tutorials. When I started working for Cycling '74, it was around the time that Jitter 1.5 was coming along with a lot of new sound manipulation and OpenGL features that were really exciting. As a side project, I started putting together these little demos of the new features while also trying to provide some guidance for people who were learning Jitter. These started as a Friday afternoon forum post, but it became clear quickly that we should collect them together and add some text documentation. Since a lot of us at Cycling '74 also happen to be serious home chefs, the cookbook format seemed like an obvious hit.

As a side project, I started putting together these little demos of the new features while also trying to provide some guidance for people who were learning Jitter.

I've begun work on a Jitter Recipes package that will be updated as I further develop the content. Right now, I'm focused on modernizing and consolidating the essential existing recipes, but I'm also excited to get to a point where I can start adding in some new ones.

While most of your writing has been about visuals, I've also noticed a few articles about sound/audio. What is your interest in audio work, and how do you integrate it with your visual work?

I actually started using Max because I wanted to do audio work with it. I spent most of teenage years playing drums in garage bands. The cool thing about being the drummer is everyone leaves their gear at your house, so after hours I'd go out and start plugging things in and experimenting with all the sound gear. So when I was in art school I really got into sound art and performance (I was a Painting major), and took a Max class with Laetitia Sonami. I consider sound, synthesis and music to be a really core part of my identity as an artist, although nowadays that tends to be more just part of the studio process and not necessarily a big focus of my output. I love collaborating with musicians because it keeps me connected to that part of things.

[You can also hear more about Andrew Benson’s work - and his background - in his interview in this Art + Music + Technology podcast.]


artist-focus-andrew-benson

Artist Focus: Andrew Benson

Cycling '74

Lilli Wessling Hart

If you happen to be around New York this Summer and are looking for something to do, we'd like to suggest a trip out to Governors Island for the New York Electronic Art Festival presented by Harvestworks.

We are happy to be one of the festival sponsors and to support the talented Max users who will be displaying work there. Below you'll find descriptions of some of the works there utilizing Max.  We hope you'll also check out the Electronic Music SUNDAYS at St. Paul's Chapel, and the Festival Closing Concert at Roulette. 

For more information on all the events at the festival, please visit the New York Electronic Art Festival website, and enjoy your Summer!

John Morton & Jacqueline Shatz: Water Wall

WaterWall is a sonic sculpture of tuned metal bowls, plates, and sluices that are amplified and distributed to an array of speakers in the walkway. The acoustic sound, the kinetic movement of the water on the sculpture and the sonic events create a musical, spacial, sculptural, and theatrical link to the urban experience of water. The installation is part of THE NEW YORK ELECTRONIC ART FESTIVAL Wave(form)s - an Exhibition of Electronic Art on Governors Island.

A composer and instrument builder, John Morton has presented his music throughout the United States. His 2009 NYC outdoor installation “Central Park Sound Tunnel” received significant critical acclaim. John Morton and Jacqueline Shatz have collaborated on many music box-based sculptures and installations. Visual artist Jacqueline Shatz is a sculptor who often works with collage. Her work is included in numerous collections, and she has curated and organized many exhibitions.

An interactive video installation that uses video and sound to bring to life stop-motion photographs from a 1950’s competitive swimming manual. Using Max/MSP and Jitter, the installation reanimates these beautiful but outdated images, creating an immersive environment where the viewer influences but does not control events.

Blue Swimmer is the latest piece from Louisa Armbrust that uses games and sports to examine ideas about play and creativity.  Armbrust uses games and sports as a helpful matrix for thinking about the creativity involved in trying to follow a rule. The installation is located in THE NEW YORK ELECTRONIC ART FESTIVAL Building 10b, part of Wave(form)s - an Exhibition of Electronic Art on Governors Island.

The original images upon which Blue Swimmer is based were created with the photographic technologies of their time to attempt to convey, as comprehensively as possible, the rules for performing a butterfly stroke or a competition dive. These images exquisitely demonstrate the distance between lived experience and the carefully orchestrated representation of experience, aligning them poetically with the task of exploring the gap between the rule and its resulting action.

Credits: Gene Kogan, Engineer with additional help from Kyle Kaplan.
Supported by the Jerome Foundation through the Harvestworks Artist In Residence
Program.

Revisiting a vintage computer data storage format using reel to reel audiotape, Data Decay is an installation that uses data as the primary sound palette and room acoustics as a modifying agent. Images are converted to sound and played back in a tape loop. The looping audio is decoded and the encrypted visual content is displayed. The size and volume of the audience changes the acoustics in the room, and thus alters the visualization of the image. The installation is located in the NEW YORK ELECTRONIC ART FESTIVAL Building 10b, part of Wave(form)s - an Exhibition of Electronic Art on Governors Island.

This project was commissioned by Harvestworks with funds from the New York State Council on the Arts. Additional support was provided by The Experimental Television Center’s Finishing Funds program which is supported by the Electronic Media and Film Program at the New York State Council on the Arts.

Festival Closing Concert at Roulette October 9, 2011 8:30PM

Angie Eng: Liminal is a series of live video music cinepoems based upon the concept of liminality, coined by ethnologist, Arnold Van Gennep (1909). The multimedia performance combines new inventive tools such as the VideoBass, French avant garde experimental cinema tricks and customized music/video software. This collaboration of music and video crosses genres: experimental jazz, neo-abstract expressionism, puppetry and live experimental cinema. Support for this project was also provided by: Experimental Television Finishing Funds, mediaThe foundation inc. and The MacDowell Colony for the Arts.

CreditsAngie Eng: Director/video/VideoBass
Nancy Meli Walker: live camera
Satoshi Takeshi: percussion/electronics
Shoko Nagai: piano
Audrey Chen: cello/electronics
Michael Egger: MAX programmer


Visit Governors Island for the New York Electronic Art Festival.

Search Results