Musings of a Digital Brain http://isjtar.org/cgi-bin/index.cgi isjtar.org Tue, 26 Jan 2010 16:39:41 +0200 Tue, 26 Jan 2010 16:39:41 +0200 http://23.fi/kukkaisvoima/ en One big post http://isjtar.org/cgi-bin/index.cgi/ab%3A2010-01-26%3Anews%2Cartsbirthday http://isjtar.org/cgi-bin/index.cgi/ab%3A2010-01-26%3Anews%2Cartsbirthday#comments Tue, 26 Jan 2010 16:39:41 +0200 Isjtar news artsbirthday http://isjtar.org/cgi-bin/index.cgi/ab%3A2010-01-26%3Anews%2Cartsbirthday/ 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

Many thanks to all the participants! ]]> http://isjtar.org/cgi-bin/index.cgi/ab%3A2010-01-26%3Anews%2Cartsbirthday/feed/ Symbiosis Computer Improvisation Live Recordings http://isjtar.org/cgi-bin/index.cgi/symbimprorec%3A2010-01-26%3Anews%2Csymbiosis%2Ccomputerimprovisation http://isjtar.org/cgi-bin/index.cgi/symbimprorec%3A2010-01-26%3Anews%2Csymbiosis%2Ccomputerimprovisation#comments Tue, 26 Jan 2010 18:32:36 +0200 Isjtar news symbiosis computerimprovisation http://isjtar.org/cgi-bin/index.cgi/symbimprorec%3A2010-01-26%3Anews%2Csymbiosis%2Ccomputerimprovisation/ It starts out a little jittery, but then develops to some depth.



Get the rest of the recordings here ]]> http://isjtar.org/cgi-bin/index.cgi/symbimprorec%3A2010-01-26%3Anews%2Csymbiosis%2Ccomputerimprovisation/feed/ TimeQuake http://isjtar.org/cgi-bin/index.cgi/timequake%3A2009-12-03%3Anews%2Ctimetravel http://isjtar.org/cgi-bin/index.cgi/timequake%3A2009-12-03%3Anews%2Ctimetravel#comments Thu, 03 Dec 2009 18:36:20 +0200 Isjtar news timetravel http://isjtar.org/cgi-bin/index.cgi/timequake%3A2009-12-03%3Anews%2Ctimetravel/ 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. ]]> http://isjtar.org/cgi-bin/index.cgi/timequake%3A2009-12-03%3Anews%2Ctimetravel/feed/ Symbiosis Computer Improvisation http://isjtar.org/cgi-bin/index.cgi/symbimpro%3A2009-11-29%3Anews%2Csymbiosis%2Ccomputerimprovisation http://isjtar.org/cgi-bin/index.cgi/symbimpro%3A2009-11-29%3Anews%2Csymbiosis%2Ccomputerimprovisation#comments Sun, 29 Nov 2009 18:18:57 +0200 Isjtar news symbiosis computerimprovisation http://isjtar.org/cgi-bin/index.cgi/symbimpro%3A2009-11-29%3Anews%2Csymbiosis%2Ccomputerimprovisation/ workshop.
Who would've though electronic musicians could play together, find structure, adapt and just make nice music?
Recordings online soon... ]]> http://isjtar.org/cgi-bin/index.cgi/symbimpro%3A2009-11-29%3Anews%2Csymbiosis%2Ccomputerimprovisation/feed/ The Last Theatre Show Ever http://isjtar.org/cgi-bin/index.cgi/lasttheatre%3A2009-09-30%3Anews%2Clasttheatreshowever%2Csocietyofalgorithm http://isjtar.org/cgi-bin/index.cgi/lasttheatre%3A2009-09-30%3Anews%2Clasttheatreshowever%2Csocietyofalgorithm#comments Wed, 30 Sep 2009 17:26:08 +0200 Isjtar news lasttheatreshowever societyofalgorithm http://isjtar.org/cgi-bin/index.cgi/lasttheatre%3A2009-09-30%3Anews%2Clasttheatreshowever%2Csocietyofalgorithm/ 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. ]]> http://isjtar.org/cgi-bin/index.cgi/lasttheatre%3A2009-09-30%3Anews%2Clasttheatreshowever%2Csocietyofalgorithm/feed/ Music for Sunflowers http://isjtar.org/cgi-bin/index.cgi/musicsunf%3A2009-08-21%3Anews%2Cconnecteddomes http://isjtar.org/cgi-bin/index.cgi/musicsunf%3A2009-08-21%3Anews%2Cconnecteddomes#comments Fri, 21 Aug 2009 13:49:35 +0200 Isjtar news connecteddomes http://isjtar.org/cgi-bin/index.cgi/musicsunf%3A2009-08-21%3Anews%2Cconnecteddomes/ Connected Domes sessions with visiting artists Audrey Samson and Stefanie Wuschitz.
audio ]]> http://isjtar.org/cgi-bin/index.cgi/musicsunf%3A2009-08-21%3Anews%2Cconnecteddomes/feed/ Letni Dilny Cistirna 2009 http://isjtar.org/cgi-bin/index.cgi/cistirna%3A2009-08-09%3Anews%2Ccistirna%2Csocietyofalgorithm http://isjtar.org/cgi-bin/index.cgi/cistirna%3A2009-08-09%3Anews%2Ccistirna%2Csocietyofalgorithm#comments Sun, 09 Aug 2009 14:00:14 +0200 Isjtar news cistirna societyofalgorithm http://isjtar.org/cgi-bin/index.cgi/cistirna%3A2009-08-09%3Anews%2Ccistirna%2Csocietyofalgorithm/ Or asciified unicode for Summer Workshops in the Sewage Museum!

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. ]]> http://isjtar.org/cgi-bin/index.cgi/cistirna%3A2009-08-09%3Anews%2Ccistirna%2Csocietyofalgorithm/feed/ Shifting Metropolis http://isjtar.org/cgi-bin/index.cgi/shiftmet%3A2009-05-29%3Anews%2Cshiftingmetropolis http://isjtar.org/cgi-bin/index.cgi/shiftmet%3A2009-05-29%3Anews%2Cshiftingmetropolis#comments Fri, 29 May 2009 13:29:07 +0200 Isjtar news shiftingmetropolis http://isjtar.org/cgi-bin/index.cgi/shiftmet%3A2009-05-29%3Anews%2Cshiftingmetropolis/ 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.

This project was presented at Coop-Bratislava ]]> http://isjtar.org/cgi-bin/index.cgi/shiftmet%3A2009-05-29%3Anews%2Cshiftingmetropolis/feed/ Site-specific installation in Prague http://isjtar.org/cgi-bin/index.cgi/multiplace%3A2009-04-20%3Anews%2Cmultiplace%2Csewageechoes http://isjtar.org/cgi-bin/index.cgi/multiplace%3A2009-04-20%3Anews%2Cmultiplace%2Csewageechoes#comments Mon, 20 Apr 2009 11:10:21 +0200 Isjtar news multiplace sewageechoes http://isjtar.org/cgi-bin/index.cgi/multiplace%3A2009-04-20%3Anews%2Cmultiplace%2Csewageechoes/ 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. ]]> http://isjtar.org/cgi-bin/index.cgi/multiplace%3A2009-04-20%3Anews%2Cmultiplace%2Csewageechoes/feed/ Catatonic State Society Screenshots http://isjtar.org/cgi-bin/index.cgi/css_shots%3A2009-02-23%3Acatatonicstatesociety http://isjtar.org/cgi-bin/index.cgi/css_shots%3A2009-02-23%3Acatatonicstatesociety#comments Mon, 23 Feb 2009 11:16:46 +0200 Isjtar catatonicstatesociety http://isjtar.org/cgi-bin/index.cgi/css_shots%3A2009-02-23%3Acatatonicstatesociety/ An iframe capable browser is required to view this web site. ]]> http://isjtar.org/cgi-bin/index.cgi/css_shots%3A2009-02-23%3Acatatonicstatesociety/feed/