mikro performance

mikro performance, originally uploaded by hc gilje.

Mikro is a series of improvised performances using the immediate surroundings as raw material: A microscope captures everyday objects and surfaces like wallpaper, coins, clothing, furniture, newspapers and transforms it into an explosive universe of textures. Contact microphones and electromagnetic sniffers pick up unhearable sounds to create the live soundtrack.
Mikro is a collaboration between HC Gilje (video) and Justin Bennett (sound).
Performances so far:
Paradiso (Amsterdam), IMAL (Brussels), TAG (den Haag), DNK (Amsterdam), Bergen Kunsthall Landmark (Bergen), Laznia (Gdansk)

Backjumps - the Live Issue #3

Backjumps - the Live Issue #3 03, originally uploaded by hc gilje.

I was back in Berlin for a week in beginning of july, and got the chance to see the excellent exhibition BackJumps -the Live issue #3, which cover new and recent street art works in Germany and the rest of the world. It was partly a exhibition using the huge space at Kunstraum Bethanien, and partly documentation of work from urban spaces. I saw many interesting projects, but will mention two which relates directly to this project blog:
The first one is a animation shown on a monitor in a small room (see image). What´s interesting is that the animation was made on the walls in the same space and you see the trails of the animation on the walls. It is made by Bologna based Blu.
The other project was part of CubaBrasil, Los Berlin BeamBoys, which did huge video projections on buildings in Cuba, partly as a way of bypassing the censorship of certain political slogans and images.

Another useful link, reclaim your city .

I also picked up an interesting book at DAZ, Urban Pioneers: Temporary Use and Urban Development in Berlin. It just came out, but already some of the locations covered in the book have disappeared and been replaced by new buildings.

directional sound

May I Have Your attention, Please, originally uploaded by Mar.co.

I am doing a series of projects called soundpockets for urban interface oslo, which in different ways tries to create pockets of sound in public space. Some of the versions involve the fm sender- mp3 setup mentioned in the previous post, another one involves a directional speaker mounted on a pan/tilt unit, and this has been my second headache this summer, finding a controllable pan/tilt unit which is reasonably fast, which can handle a load of a few kilos and which is not ridiculously expensive.

Fortunately I have had good help from Soundscape studios. The first ideas was to use a existing movinghead light and refit it with the speaker, but it turned out that the motors wouldnt be able to handle the load. Pan tilt units are usually made for a specific purpose, either light or video, and the few ones which are available for general purpose use and which are controllable are very expensive.
The one we have ended up with is quite expensive, but is controlled using serial protocol, is made for outdoor use, and is powerful enough to handle video projectors (for later projects). It is also very fast, up to 300 degrees per second pan, and 60 degrees per second tilt. Hopefully it arrives next week.

The most ambitious plan is to control it using an arduino microcontroller, which will also control a serial-controllable mp3 player, the daisy, so I should be able to place sounds quite accurately in a space, and also create movements with sounds.
If time runs short I will use a macmini with max controlling the sound and pan-tilt unit over the serial port.

I have been testing two different models of directional speakers which uses ultrasound as the carrier signal, I will probably have to go for the smaller one, although I am a bit worried it will disappear in the ambient sound. It is also challenging to find the sounds which works best, and also how to deal with the sounds both coming directly from the narrow beam of the speaker but also the reflections on surfaces in the space.

The inspiration for this projects comes from when I studied in Trondheim in the 90ies, and I heard some stories about how a directional speaker had been used to cause a certain distress on a bridge over the local river: A person walking alone across the bridge suddenly hearing whispering voices. An out of tune clarinet projected into a marching band playing on the 17th of may (Norway´s national holiday).
If these stories are true or not, doesn´t really matter, it is the idea of having a private experience in a public space which intrigued me.

the matrix for the rest of us (well, almost)

Google Earth has implemented a new technology called street view, developed by Immersive Media

This could roughly be seen as a mix of very advanced quicktime VR and a film effect from The Matrix movies. Interesting to me as another example of the interrelation between space,time and motion.

From the Google Earth Blog:
“One of the many secrets behind their technology is a patented 11 lens camera system that simultaneously takes photos in 11 directions based on a dodecahedron geometry. They can capture 30 frames a second of high resolution photography. That’s right - we’re talking high resolution video in digital 360. You can stop, start, back up, single-frame, etc”

Morphovision

 

Ars2006 030 Toshio Iwai - Morphovision, originally uploaded by watz.

This project has been mentioned enough places already I guess, but it fits too well to my research theme for me to leave it out: Morphovision by Toshio Iwai, shown at Siggraph and Ars Electronica last year. It is almost disturbing how frequency and patterns of light combined with motion make a solid model house morph into very liquid shapes.
“Morphovision is a unique display system that interactively transforms and animates a 3D solid object before our eyes. In this system, a model house is rotated at high speed, and is illuminated with special lighting from a digital projector. This enables the model to be distorted into various shapes.” More info here.

Video from Ars Electronica:

I was reminded of Morphovision when reading about a low-tech project posted on the serendipity blog, the time fountain, molding time and form with strobelight.

Julien Maire

image from the Tesla website

I received an email from Tesla that Julien Maire is showing work there this week (exploding camera, may 22nd-may26th), wish I could go. I have had the chance to see his performances with mechanisms in slide-form, Dia-positive and demi-pas at Transmediale, which were great.
The work which really caught my attention though is a old performance he showed a documentation from at a presentation of his work, ordonner: a slow motion performance, described as “The gradual slowing down of the movement of the boxes during a house move”. See a short video from the performance here.

Cloud

The Aleph installation reminded me of the installation Cloud that David Rokeby recently completed.

“Cloud is a monumental kinetic installation hanging suspended in the Great Hall at the Ontario Science Centre. One hundred identical sculptural elements, arranged in ten by ten grid, are rotated at slightly differing speeds by computer-controlled motors. The elements slowly shift in and out of synchronization. When the motors are just out of sync, huge waves ripple across the space. When completely in sync, the work appears almost solid then suddenly almost invisible. When far out of sync, the sculptural elements float in apparent chaos. “

Synk at Dansstationen in Malmö

Synk, originally uploaded by hc gilje.

On Friday May 4th, I perform the piece Synk with Kreutzerkompani and Justin Bennett on sound. Synk was originally made in 2002 for the Ultima festival, but has been played quite a few times the last five years.

The idea of Synk was that no prerecorded video or audio would be used, only material sampled during the performance was allowed, to investigate live as raw material : to impose a structure on a live situation to allow for unpredictable results within that frame structure.

It creates a dialogue between the physical space on stage and the mediated space from the screen and speakers, and the relation between the memory and the present of a space.

More info on Kreutzerkompani and Justin Bennett

More images from Synk (click on the small images)

 

The lamentation of Orpheus

image from webstage

Amanda Steggell sent me info about this project from 1996, by choreographer Åsa Unander-Scharin: The lamentation of Orpheus.

A industrial robot dances to the music of Claudio Monteverdi, quite beautiful really.

You can see a small quicktime of it here, and read more about the project at Unander-Scharin´s website.

Michael Snow: La Région Centrale

Image taken from the Medienkunstnetz site, which has extensive information about the project and also a short videodocumentation.

Snow constructed a device for creating a quite complex camera movement, and placed it in a remote area in the mountains in Canada. The result was a 3 hour film of the camera scanning this landscape.

Another quite good article from Medienkunstnetz relating cinematography to the landscape.