blink feedback

As expected, the international art press didn´t fly to Bergen to cover my exhibition. Neither did the national press or the local press (with one exception).

However, I did get a lot of positive comments from visitors of all ages (see more of the younger generation´s response here), as well as some feedback from Norwegian art blogs like kunstkritikk and ytter (both in Norwegian).

Create Digital Motion generously mentioned my work, as well as the blog Young Starving, which was just too flattering not to mention

“This is pretty darn beautiful. Projection mappings been done to death but so far most people have just copied each other and done trippy, morphing stuff on castles and libraries. HC Gilje takes a step back and puts two flat surfaces to work. We’re in love.”

For a relatively updated list of coverage, take a look here (in norwegian)

dimsun

The last half year I have been working quite a lot with lights and shadows, and this summer I decided to build my own lighting system, which I called dimsun. The first use of it was for my blink installation consisting of 24 leds placed in a circle.

It consists of dimmers based on the TLC5940 led controllers. Each of the dimmers can control 16 channels, up to 5w each, and are intended for power LEDS, very bright leds up to 5W. The dimmer is controlled by an arduino microcontroller, and up to 6 dimmers (96 channels) can be controlled from one arduino.

more images of the dimsun system.

The schematics will be made available soon.

The lamps are based on starshaped LED´s combined with a lens mounted on an aluminum profile.

blink blink

My exhibition at HKS contained two new installations, both named blink. The first blink has already been mentioned.

In the cellar of the gallery I set up an artificial sundial, 24 leds placed in a circle, moving the shadows of the people standing within the circle.

I used the dimsun lighting system which I made this summer, based on power LEDs and arduino controlled LED drivers (TLC5940).

VPT 4.1 available

Play Alter Native, originally uploaded by am4ndas.

An updated version of Video Projection Tool is now available.

Version 4.0 had a lot of under the hood changes, which unfortunately introduced some bugs. Hopefully most of them have been taken care of with this update.

There are also a few new features: different blend modes and a global moviesource drop zone.
Read the list of updates on the VPT page.

The image is taken from a project Amanda Steggell is doing for the theatre company Verk, where she is using the new blend mode feature for her beautiful emoticons video design.

blink

Last week my exhibition blink opened at HKS in Bergen, Norway. It consists of two new installations and documentation of the main projects I have done during my research fellowship.

In the basement I have a light-sound installation, with 24 bright LEDs placed in a circle in the ceiling, animating the shadow of the visitor.

In the main space I have a video projection-sound installation, where I project into/onto the gallery space.

Since my project the last three years has focused on improvising with spaces, transforming them using image, light and sound, I decided for this exhibition to go all the way and work with two empty spaces.

You can see an excerpt of the projection installation here:

more images of the installation.

I will come back with documentation of the light-shadow installation.

HKS asked the australian artist and writer Mitchell Whitelaw to write a text about my work.

VPT (Video projection tool) v4.0 released!

I am happy to announce the new version of VPT for osX and Windows xp/vista with lots of new features:

16 layers (previously 8 )
2 live sources (previously 1)
8 A-B mixers (previously 0)
greatly improved MIDI and OSC capabilities
enhanced interface
monitor preview for 2ndmonitor (single screen, matrox 2x or 3x),live camera.
lot´s of bug fixes and more efficient code.

And as always, it is free.

The sourcecode is also included, (GPL 3 license)

There is a new manual and new video tutorials covering the new features, everything available from the VPT page.

signs of life

It´s been awfully quiet from me the last few months, and that´s not because I have not been working, on the contrary.
I spent the summer testing out ideas for my research fellowship exhibition in october, which resulted in the creation of a new lighting system, “dimsun” (more about this in a later post), and a new version of VPT (videoprojectiontools) which will soon be available.

I have also spent some time on writing, I just came back from two weeks at NKD in Dale in Sunnfjord, a fantastic place to be for concentrated work.

A few things coming up:

Tomorrow I will be part of a BUU screening in Köln, where they will screen Shiva.

In the beginning of october I will be part of Experimental 3 in Osaka, where h.k.mark1 will be screened as part of a lowave program.

(both of these videos are on my Cityscapes dvd)

I would also like to recommend Michelle Teran´s project “The city is creative” which is part of flux/s in Eindhoven, september 10th-13th.

on top of the opera

An outdoor event on the roof of the opera house in Oslo, with two short concerts using video projection.
This was a projected iniated by electric violinist Victoria Johnson, which is currently a research fellow at the National State Academy of Music in Oslo.

The white marble opera house designed by Snøhetta has become one of the main tourist attractions in Oslo, with a nice view over the harbour and the city. It is almost like a iceberg that you can climb onto.

Standing on the roof, listening to the sounds of sirens and seeing something which could almost be a skyline (actually 90% of the tall buildings in Oslo are just behind the opera house), you could get the impression that Oslo is actually a big city!

In short, a quite spectacular setting.
The concert consisted of two compositions by Knut Vaage, Electra and multimorf, performed by Johnson and Thorolf Thuestad. Ellen Røed has made a beautiful volcano timelapse video for Electra, and I did a live impro video for multimorf.

We decided to do the concert in front of one of the walls of the stage tower, which is about 30×15m. We managed to cover one half of the wall, using a 15000 ansilumen projector.

We have performed multimorf twice before, in very different contexts: First with a big brassband at a concert venue in Bergen, then a stripped down version for electric violin,electronics and live video at the Concert Hall in Oslo. My video has changed from venue to venue, trying to adopt to the setting. The only connection between the three performances is a series of microscope images from brass instruments, which I made for the original version.
For the outdoor concert on the opera roof I wanted to have a more direct relation to the surface we projected onto, a beautiful aluminum wall with a relief pattern made by the artists Løvaas & Wagle.
The 30×15m wall consists of panels of the relief patterns and I decided to use my videoprojection tools software to mask rows and columns of these panels.

Working outside with a short timeframe means a lot of practical issues needs to be solved, and this left very little time for my slightly ambitious masking project.
It gets dark quite late in Norway in the spring, so the concert was to start at ten in the evening. Only at around nine was I able to see enough of the projection to actually start masking the image, so everything needed to be done in less than an hour. On top of this it was freezing, so I was literally shaking while I was trying to do very precise masking.

In the end, it turned out quite nice, and triggered some ideas for a project I am planning to do next year.

All photos from multimorf and of me is taken by Ellen Røed, thanks!

more images from the event.

The space between my ears

Perceptual meltdown after Granular Synthesis retrospective at the STRP festival in Eindhoven, in the old Philips facilities in the Strijp area.

The festival´s focus this year was a retrospective on maximalists austrian media art group Granular Synthesis. It was a unique opportunity to see a lot of the group´s work as well as newer work by the two members Ulf Langheinrich and Kurt Hentschläger. If you have ever seen any of their work before you would guess that this would be an overkill event, and you are right. The works are intense audiovisual bombardements, they physically attack your senses and that does something with your body and mind.
The Granular Synthesis performance installations POL and modell 5 are large scale multiple projections with a corresponding large sound system, which worked well in their monumental way in the factory space.
The solo works are not that large-scale, but more intense. Ulf Langheinrich showed Hemisphere (which I mentioned earlier from the exhibition “from spark to pixel”) and Drifter. Kurt Hentschläger showed Cluster and Zee, which could be seen as offsprings from his ARS electronica performance Feed in 2007. Zee is basically a room filled with smoke, with stroboscopic images projected into the smoke. You loose all reference to the physical space and experience psychedelic visions.

All their works relate to perception, and it was an interesting coincidence that I was reading The Space between our Ears while I was at the festival.

It was a bit strange to experience Granular Synthesis at STRP, since the audience is mainly a quite young techno crowd, and the difference between a trippy techno party and an installation like Zee is pretty vague.

Apart from the retro media artists there wasn´t so much of interest at the festival, the exhibition was a mix of two trends in the media art scene: The commodification of media art on the one side: beautiful objects in perfect collector size, and the technology fascination on the other side.

The Strijp area contains more than the festival. It is the site of the former Philips research lab Natlab, in the art world probably best known for the creation of le poéme electronique, a collaboration between LeCorbusier, Varese and Xenakis for the World Expo in Brussels in 1958 (I will probably write a bit more about this in a separate post).

The old Natlab is now dead, but last fall Baltan laboratories emerged in another part of the Strijp complex, a media lab with a fantastic space and with interesting artists like Telcosystems and Geert Muul involved. I will give a presentation there in the end of may as part of their monthly public Natlab sessions.

Composing motion

I have known New Zealand artist Len Lye´s films for a long time, but was unaware of his kinetic sculptures until recently. I found the Universe sculpture from 1976 especially interesting. The Len Lye foundation did a remake of it in 1998, completely silent except for the sound made by the steel.

City of Sound did a nice post on Lye some years ago, and I will requote their Lye quote: “One of my art teachers put me onto trying to find my own art theory. After many morning walks an idea hit me that seemed like a complete revelation. It was to compose motion, just as musicians compose sound. [The idea] was to lead me far, far away from wanting to excel in traditional art.”

You can find several of Lye´s films by doing a search on youtube (although the quality isn´t very good), Free Radicals and Swinging the Lambeth Walk are two good examples of his work. What makes them really stand out today is the combination of the experimental nature of the visual side with the soundtracks of african drums and happy jazz.

There are two documentaries made on Lye, Doodlin´: Impressions of Len Lye, and A Flip and Two Twisters.

Addendum: There is also a third documentary about Lye (thanks Pip Chodorov)

Here is a an excerpt from the first one where you can see the Universe sculpture in action:

Roger Horrocks has written a biography on Lye, but it seems to be available only as a collector´s item at the moment. Horrocks has written a new book, Len Lye – ART THAT MOVES – which will be published by Auckland University Press in November 2009.

Here is a website which gives a good overview of the work of Lye.

Re-voir has a collection of Lye´s films on VHS (thanks again to Pip Chodorov).

And check out my quite extensive post on kinetic art.