frey

Longer, better documentation footage for Sounds like Light, Lights like Sound:

Watch the video in ogg theora format, 320×240 or look at the icky closed source YouTube flash version below:

The YouTube version is a little broken at the end. I don’t know why, but since I seem to have broken my ffmpeg encoder’s mp3 support it will be a week or two before it’s fixed. Fixed!

I’ve added a couple of new projects, documenting my work with Lumen Digital Studio in New Zealand (who incidentally are looking to hire a programmer, so if you’d like to work on these sorts of projects get in touch with them; Lumen is an awesome place to work)

• Mult-User Multi-Hand Tracking System
• Future Farming roadshow

this city is fucked up. i don’t get it. i don’t get it at all.

it’s bloody enormous but it’s tiny.

it’s full of people who are making creating playing living but nothing’s ever on.

it’s vibrant and dead. punk and pop.

something.

is Lidl.

Piles of junk everywhere; not a neatly stacked aisle in sight; bizarre European versions of ordinary things; absurdly cheap gourmet food including pesto, ricotta, and every kind of juice you could imagine; no logic to the stock organisation.

This is the supermarket where you have to pay to hire a trolley. I love it.

• Type records
  UK experimental music label
  (tags: label electronic music)

I spent the last weekend out at artist Geoff Broadway’s home out in the countryside. The house itself is a converted 19th century folly in the form of a four-storey tower set on the edge of Weston Park. (photographs to follow).

There was the most gloriously sunny day, followed by a bonfire; there were a bunch of interesting folks to chat to, and there was a light-up frisbee for night time frisbee action. Some very good times. On Sunday Geoff took me for a big walk around the park grounds, showed me around his studio, where he’s working on a dynamic sculpture commission for a stairwell in the Science Department of Holly Lodge High School College of Science. The sculpture involves stainless steel tubes twisted into a double helix, with handmade resin spheres containing programmable LED lights and speakers through which will play some kind of soundscape. We also had some nice free-ranging chats about this and that in the art world, in the real world, politics and people and the world and things, including how to justify the work that we do, and how to justify getting paid for it.

It’s good to talk to other artists, I find it helps me to figure out things about what I’m doing. One of the biggest things I’m going through at the moment is what to do next. My residency is now officially over, which means I’ve moved out of the flat I was being provided with, and am now staying in Joseph Pott’s living room. I’m in preparation to go for a bit of cycling around the Lakes District, and perhaps Scotland as well, although certainly not if it stays as cold as it is.

I’m also going off to the Ars Electronica festival in September, followed by a gig or two in Portugal being organised by André Gonçalves. After that, who knows? There’s a design firm here in Birmingham that seem interested in having me do some interactive work with them, or perhaps I might end up working in the Ars Electronica Futurelab, or I might just end up cycling around Europe with my tent and seeing what happens. I’ve got a bunch of festivals and residencies to apply to, all lined up in my computer’s calender with due dates and everything (I’m so organised.. haha). Or I might apply for entry under the HSMP programme and just be a fulltime artist here in the UK.

Things will sort themselves out. They always do.

• Engravings by Piranesi
  engravings of urban images by the 18th century Italian artist Giovanni Piranesi – the situationists quite liked him, esp. his image Carceri
  (tags: piranesi architecture)

• ELECTRICA – a journey into sound
  interactive online sound work – needs a PPC – try this down at Green ST
  (tags: audio interactive web)
• raster-noton | archiv für ton und nichtton
  submit some music to them
  (tags: label minimal)
• crash sound made from pots and things
  sampled for track in progress – remember to credit
  (tags: sample crash)

Hello copious quantities of loyal readers,

I have been having some email issues of late, especially with messagse from Gmail, but my server admin has hopefully just fixed it. Would everyone please email damian[at]frey.co.nz to say hello and, if it you get an error message in reply, please forward the error message to damian.stewart[at]gmail.com.

Thanks!