I'm having some technical problems, so can't make any new posts, so I will just be editing this one.
Algorithmic Performance is Hard
Though I'm sure many people think I'm pretty self-confident about my work, in general I talk very little about how I feel about it. I have a strong dislike of disproportionate concept-talk and hot air spewing (well for an artist at least).
Nevertheless, seeing as this is my site, I imagine visitors can be both curious and confused about what I try to do exactly.
When I first followed a workshop at OKNO, in 2006 I believe, I got completely obsessed by generative algorithms and the process-driven beauty they evoke.
This is somewhat difficult to explain in text, but most easily explained it's trying not to paint a tree by looking at it, but to understand how it grows, express this dynamic in a set of formalisms and trying to recreate that.
The point is not necessarily to recreate nature's processes, but to find processes that are inherently elegant and beautifull like all the ones that surround us. A typical example is a flock of birds, you can watch them for hours, yet the rules by which the move and self-organize are deceivingly simple.
I got interested in visual forms, interactivity and the entire field of what is commony called new media.At the same time I was fed up with recorded electronic music and strongly believe that performance is where music lives, at least for me.
Computer music performance is widely accepted as an underdeveloped practice, even though there is an established academic tradition.
The complex nature of making synthetic sound, organizing it in music and expressing it in realtime demand a great deal of the aspiring musician.
Typically the experimental electronic musician has to be a programmer, an instrument builder, a composer and an instrumentalist at the same time. If like me you have no formal education, you're in for an intense study.
So the dream, the vision I try to make happen is to capture algorithmic beauty in generative processes, to expressively manipulate them in a musical performance and get a glimpse of the algorithmic beauty.
I often get frustrated, get the impression that I'll never get there, but I've come to accept that it's a long term goal, just need to work long and hard. In the meanwhile there are snapshots of where I am in this silly quest, some nice, most not, that's experimentalism for you.
Swarms
It's been a while since I posted, haven't been performing publicly lately.
At OKNO we've been putting a lot of time in TimeInventorsKabinet, an EU-funded two year program. As part of that, the bee's are back after the tragic loss of an entire colony.
We have a couple of beehives, one of which we want to equip with camera's, sensors etc to monitor their behaviour.
They're truely magnificent creatures and we hope to find some interesting patterns in the data that we can use for generative audiovisual work. Honey bees have a fascinating dynamic, a typical example of a complex system and it would be fantastic to capture this in a generative piece.
It's challenging to work with living creatures - even more so than buggy technology, they don't follow your timing and while they aren't of an agressive nature, they can be pretty unhappy when you shake down their city.
We've learned quite a bit from last year, both technologically and with regards to beekeeping. We made a nice planning which sensors to put in the hive, when to assemble the pieces.
However they caught us in speed and started swarming - the exodus of a new colony - so we had to put them in the hive we were so carefully preparing.
Finally we decided to build a new hive for next year and just a small prototype to learn some more this year.
Art's Birthday
Truly great edition of Art's Birthday this year at OKNO with varied performances covering a vast range of sounds and images.
I did a no rehearsal quick and dirty impro with Ofer which was very acceptable.
Video courtesy of Annemie Maes.
More info
Just found some time to edit the recordings of the improvisation concert. Here's a nice small piece performed with Ofer and Yolanda Uriz.
It starts out a little jittery, but then develops to some depth.
A long time since updates! As it happens I had pretty big changes in my production methods, the switch to linux and an all open source environment took a huge chunk out of my time. In a nutshell I had to throw all my sounds and tools out of the window and start from scratch, frightening but refreshing.
Kind of scary when a comic describes your life in detail: xkcd.
I learned an awful lot though, best of all SuperCollider!. I hope to put lots more stuff online, here and on the okno-site.
In the meanwhile, inspired by Vonnegut's timequake, I'm going to revisit what I did since april, see what came up.
Just had an intense weekend with Ofer Smilansky and the participants of the workshop.
Who would've though electronic musicians could play together, find structure, adapt and just make nice music?
Recordings online soon...
or how to dismantle theatre by making an electro-digital instrument out of it.
Givan and Natalia invited me for this wonderfully arrogant, self-defeating and gratuitous attack on theatre.
Many audiovisual artists have a love-hate relationship with theatre. It seems so promising a setting, but the methods, workflow and social structure are so antithetical to what we are used to and believe in that it almost always goes wrong.
So I guess this week was primarily a therapeutic session for frustrated media-artists.
In the end we had a nice noise-performance, but I don't think we got rid of our traumas just yet.
Generative piece picking up sensor data from sunflowers in the okno garden OpenGreen.
Part of the Connected Domes sessions with visiting artists Audrey Samson and Stefanie Wuschitz.
audio
Struck by what I still suspect to be a supermutant of the Pigs from Mexico Assault Virus, I gave up on my workshop.
But battling the haze of fever we had a nice set with my friends Givan and Michal in a Society Of Algorithm cave dwelling.
The other workshops were great, the people from yoyo ever so sweet and the place is magical.
I concocted a new edition of Shifting Metropolis in Brussels with Shelbatra Jashari.
Shifting Metropolis aims to make a descriptive map, a multimedia interpretation of a city by its inhabitants.
We moved away from the aesthetically pleasing but finally hermetic 3d world we made before and experimented with various technologies.
With Balthzar de Tonnac we got into QR tags and figured out how we could link this to the okno web environment.
We encoded urls in the tags, made stickers out of them and started posting them around the city. We put them in precise places, where if you read the tag (with a fancy cell phone) you link to the attached media.
This approach lets us add media in a fairly low-tech way to the city and allows for some nice possibilities, e.g. non-linear story telling by putting tags on fixed and mobile objects such as public busses etc.
Of course the high tech phone aspect was still a big put off, as few people have those here in Belgium, but that seems to change rapidly.
To group it all together, we put the tags on geograpically the same spot on a huge satellite photo in okno, so the public could also scan there and see the media projected.
You can get the urls and most of the content here: shiftbrussels.
The project was nice, but is for now refridgerated untill we find better ways still.
I just spent a great few days in Prague, working in the tunnels of the Eco-technical museum.
Marcio and I built a nice site-specific installation. A large tunnel, water, a valve, some leds, hydrophones, synthetic sound and a hell of a lot of effort turned it into something quite beautiful.
Givan and Michal's piece in the corridor next to us made for a nice complement.
My iPod got swallowed by a one of the holes, but we could see it was still working at 6 meters depth, ah well.
Tomorrow back to Brussels to get in gear for Shifting Metropolis, but for now I'll keep to relaxing in the Czech breeze.
Btw I spend a lot of time working on the okno site, we're still putting the new system in place and I'll migrate to something similar. So updates will be slow here, but http://okno.be should grow up to be a great site.
