frey

hey, sorry about the late notice but I’m performing at a placard (headphone) concert tonight at 2300 CET (11am Saturday morning, New Zealand time) in Poitiers, France as part of the Make Art festival.

you should be able to listen to to it here:
http://makeart.goto10.org/2008/?page=streaming&lang=en

I’ve added a bunch of documentation about my Wind project, which was developed during a New Interfaces for Performance residency at O Espaço do Tempo. You can read it here.

I’ve been thinking a lot about slow life. Having moved from England, where the pace of life is hectic, to Amsterdam, where the pace of life is slower but still fairly fast, I am presently on a residency in a place in Portugal called O Espaço do Tempo (The Space of Time). Here time moves much, much slower.

I’ve taken a job as an interactive installation programmer, four days a week. I’m wanting to keep the extra day for my own projects. At the same time I don’t want to fill every second of my life up. I want to leave time for contemplation in the middle of everything.

I stumbled upon this today: Is Google Making Us Stupid? (via OneGoodMove). I’m finding this idea of contemplation to be extremely important in the artworks that I’m making and planning. Over the last few days I’ve planned and executed a project that takes a video image of a moving scene and turns it into sound. I made it with moving grass in mind, but it should work with any kind of movement. In any case the point of it is to provide a space for contemplation of visual stimuli by augmenting them with sound. In other words, it takes what you are seeing and sonifies it, in a way that makes you more aware of the movement and thus better able to slip into a state of contemplation, where time seems to stop.

In November last year I gave an artist talk at Dorkbot Valencia. It looks like Diego has put some photos online from the talk: wicked :-)

I got an interesting email out of the blue from Dmitri Soubochev. He is involved with two projects – the first is called Duo Inventum and it uses a theremin and a laptop to control audio and visuals. Nice. Also on his website is documentation of the Moscow Laptop Orchestra, which do kind of freeform improvised performances with a big group of laptops.

Also I’m especially impressed by the Concert for mr. Cheglakov and his shadow – combining video of Mr Cheglakov performing with the person himself on stage. It plays around with ideas of time and here-and-now-ness – very nice work!

because the old one was a little broken:

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!

My Wiring board blew up again – this time I think it was the actual CPU I fried, rather than the FTDI USB-Serial chip, which was the culprit last time. In any case I’ve had to hack together a replacement system using Arduino boards instead. 5x RGB controllable modules makes for 15 output pins, which was easily doable on the Wiring board, but is just outside of the range of the Arduino’s 12 pins.

What’s more, the power and data distribution thing I built to handle all of the wiring for this thing is connected to the controller board (orginally Wiring) by 2x 8-core ribbon cables (you can see them in the picture below, each snaking off the distribution board on the left to go to the two separate Arduino boards in the middle/right). So think about it for a second: 15 doesn’t divide into 8 very nicely, nor does 3 divide into 8 very nicely.

So one of the lighting boards is shared across two ribbon cables, which was fine when it was all on the one I/O board, but now that I’ve got two of them it’s meant a doubling up of data transmission for the third light module. To save bandwidth in the original design (making serial communication speedier) I transmit light control information in packets of 3 bytes (red, green, blue). Because the third light module is split over two Arduino boards (red and green pins on board 0, blue pin on board 1) I have to transmit the third light module’s data to both board 0 (as module 2) and to board 1 (as module 0).

Look, it makes sense to me, OK? :-)

But I’ve got it to work again, for the first time since I left New Zealand! Hooray.

I went up to Sheffield on Friday to check out Lovebytes. It went a bit like this:

8 am Caught a train from Birmingham to Sheffield.

10 am Arrived in Sheffield. Sought out the Millenium Gallery to see Rose Butler’s 3-screen video installation Tent. The work is based on Muslim ideas of pottery design, apparently, which seemed to my mind to play out as a kind of mirroring and inverted mirroring effect. Sometimes the central screen had a mirror line down the middle, and the video stretched over the left one and a half screens was repeated on the right. Sometimes the left screen and the right screen showed the same thing but the middle was mirrored, sometimes the three screens showed video staggered in time; and variations on the above. In all shots though a tent appears, adorned with brightly-coloured paintings, posters, and bits of colour.. the idea seems to be that the tent formed some kind of base of operations for the filming process, connecting the bits of otherwise fairly random landscape photography together.

Read the rest of this entry »

64 square feet of audio cassette tape madness.

[edit, to clear up some confusion] no, I didn’t make this, but isn’t it cool?