Musings of a Digital Brain

While I do sound mostly, I also fiddle about with video and 3d. This piece of noodling in particular made me think back to when I was in a plane above the Gobi desert. Because you have no point of reference, your eyes can't seem to quite catch the scale of things. Some shape can be a small dried-up river or a huge tectonic rift.

Well, this generative piece made me think of that, but that's probably just me.


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I'm really looking forward to the next Symbiosis, this sunday, 29th of June. The guys and girls of Gamila are coming over for a performance and a film.
Read more |here| and mirrored on the the okno-site |here|.

Symbiosis is getting back into gear, with a workshop by GOTO10's Jan-Kees van Kampen who is later joined by Arjen Keesmaat for the performance.
Read more here and of course check the okno-site for updates.

Workshop: 29-30-31 May 10 - 17
Performance: 31 May 20h
@ OKNO HQ

Last week, foam, nadine and okno invited a bunch of friends to get together for a series of discussions, workshops, experiments and presentations in St Erme, in rural France.

It was very inspiring event, with people of many different fields and nationalities, all connected by the media ecologies theme.
The OKNO studio was very active, we built a quite extraordinary windmill annex spaceship, we got deeper into sensored mesh-networks and unfortunately my virus-project (more on this later) bumped into some obstacles.

But, no matter where we go, our table always ends up looking like this : )



People made some great pictures, get them on flickr here.
xmedk.be
okno

During the first Symbiosis, Shelbatra and i took some pictures with an old polaroid camera and had some fun burning them for some nice discolorations.

[ recording removed, it hurt my feelings : ( ]

Jeroen Uyttendaele and Isjtar continue their symbiotic merger of sonic material and strategies.
Discarding dichotomies as rhythm and texture, form and function, digital and analogue, they seek to build arches of sonic tension.

A wonderfully pompous description of our next performance, friday february 29th at OKNO.

Friday, february 15th, I'm joining societyofalgorithm and friends for an online 3 times quattre mains guitar mutilation session.
We'll be grabbing live guitar playing and mangling it in realtime, to send it over to Bratislava, Praha, Tokyo and back.
qt.okno.be:8000/brussels.sdp
qt.okno.be:8000/praha.sdp
qt.okno.be:8000/bratislava.sdp
qt.okno.be:8000/tokyo.sdp


Strange hour due to the sun being slower than our connections...

SOA's anti-design, unorganized website

Using a mouse pointer as a musical interface can be a bit limiting, so i decided to build some controllers on my own. It's dead easy with the arduino boards and interfaces nicely with my beloved max-msp.
It's much more fun too.
Here are some pics of the building process:



You can also listen to the recording of the symbiosis performance with Jeroen Uyttendaele below:
symbiosis#1

Thanks for listening!

Staying here in New Orleans, you get bombarded by christmas tunes all week long.
Biggest shock of all is that some of them are actually very good, in New Orleans style.

So, I decided to make a small christmas piece of sounds I found here.
Here it is: there is no escape

Now don't expect me to go all egg nog, I'm still more fond of the solstice than baby Jesus, though they do have some nice voodoo impressions here of that.

Special thanks to the great musician by the Mississipi shore whose performance I ruthlessly snatched and mangled.

I finally got rid of the old outdated site and put this one up. It should be easier to keep up to date now, and a lot better looking too.
I hope you like it, I aim to add more features and content soon.
There are still some minor problems for PC users -mostly aesthetical, I'll iron them out in the next few days.

Thanks for visiting!

Isjtar