frey

From April until July 2007 I was resident with the Modulate collective in Birmingham, UK. They hosted me and looked after me and generally provided an excellent environment for me to develop my practise, to work out some things about what i was doing, and to begin to explore the European side of the world. This residency was in fact the thing that first brought me from New Zealand to the UK, and it has led directly to the connections I have made in Europe and elsewhere. So I was and still am greatly honoured to have been selected by them to undertake it.

In March earlier this year I went back to Birmingham to visit them again, and to work on a little video collobarative project involving using audio to control live video. While I was there we spent a couple of hours talking together about what the residency meant to all of us. They have just put up the video and audio from these conversations on their weblog over here.

Lovely.

Couple of things in the pipeline.. I’m currently living in Amsterdam, will be here for the next year, so we’ll see how things work out.

I’m currently working on 7 channel sound for a project called Tokyokyoto, by Rietveld Academy graduation year student Hrund Atladottir, who is friendly, talented, and awesome.

Next performances will be at the UM festival in Lisbon, 19-22 June 2008, solo as part of the N.I.P. collective, and with Chris Sugrue performing A Cable Plays.

at http://www.frey.co.nz/projects/sunrunsun/

enjoy.

I’m in Amsterdam, NL working at NIMK/Montevideo with Yolande Harris, who is currently Montevideo’s Artist In Residence. She has a project called Sun Run Sun which is about sonifying navigation data, in particular GPS data.

I have been called in to help write some Pure Data patches for this project. The patches need to run with PDa on a Gumstix computer.

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 :-)

between Now and Then I have been:

• to Barcelona, ES, to visit Chris, celebrate her birthday, and generally hang out and not write much code (even though we intended to write lots..)
• to Amsterdam, NL, to hang out with n.i.p, give a talk at STEIM (incl. video), meet Yolande Harris who is doing some super interesting things with sonifying navigation technologies old + new;
• to Eindhoven, NL, to perform at TAC on a freezing cold Wednesday to a crowd of about six people, then to give a talk at the following night in the Van Abbemuseum to a crowd of about four people;
• to London, UK for Christmas;
• to Berlin, DE for the 24th Chaos Communications Congress, which was amazing, then to go stay with Pix and talk code and veganism, and meet up with my friend the documentary filmmaker Simon Burgin from Wellington and try to convince him to stay in Europe rather than going back to Wellies;
• to Bremen, DE to stay with Kjen Wilkens, do some work on MailGarden and generally lay low for a bit..

So that’s me for now.. I’m looking at going and doing a bit of helping out on a project in Amsterdam next week, and then there might be a couple of projects in Lisbon, with in between a visit to Paris to stay with another friend.

Things are still coming along, slowly but surely.

Till next time,
much love + be well
Damian

Over the last two and a half weeks I have been at Visualizar, a project hosted by the ever-awesome Medialab Prado in Madrid, Spain, the same people behind the Interactivos workshops, one of which I participated in earlier this year.

I’ve been working on something called Mail Garden. Mail Garden visualises the contents of one mailbox (read in the mbox format for open goodness) on your computer as a forest of trees. Each tree in this forest represents an email, with the height of the trees reflecting the length of the mail. Moving your mouse over a tree shows some details about the email. The overall aim is to create a view of your mailbox that encourages a more reflective kind of consciousness.

Go to the Mail Garden project page for more…

I am in Linz, with limited internet. If you need to, you can reach me on +44 7854 493 796, although it costs me to receive and I don’t think I have much credit left.

I’m here for the Ars Electronica festival. I’m performing A Cable Plays with Chris Sugrue as part of Welcome to the Jungle of the Real, on the opening night Wednesday the 5th of September, at Grand Cafe zum Rothen Krebsen & Institut für erweiterte Kunst, Obere Donaulände 11, 4020 Linz.

Hooray!

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