Five intensive days with the Maxwell City Workshop at Atelier Nord is over, you can get some impressions here, as well as in Sophia´s blog, and a slideshow of images from my flickr site. There will most likely be a 20 minute radio program based on the recorded sounds later.
We mainly used two types of EM sniffers in the workshop, one antennae based, from this kit, and a coil based one, made by Martin Howse.
I have already jumped into another workshop, exploring video for stage, together with the director-, choreography- and scenography students at the National Academy of the Arts in Oslo.
I look at it as a collaboration: I propose several tools I have constructed,we work with them and I modify them according to the feedback from the workshop. This will be made publicly available later.
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.
My latest collaboration with Yannis Kyriakides is a piece based on old telegraph code books. I use scanned pages combined with microscope texture from these books and project onto the orchestra from two sides, using the musicians as screens in combination with a wide screen behind, trying to create a dynamic space using text fragments and letters as projected light.
It is a coproduction between ZKM in Karlsruhe and Musikfabrik in Cologne, and is performed may 17th in Cologne and on the 18th at ZKM.
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. “
In january 2007 I got the first opportunity to work two intense weeks in a project space, enabling me to test out some new elements in the nodio system.
I set up 9 nodes (macminis+monitors) in a local network, and expanded my nodio composer tool to work with the 9 channel setup. A continuous discussion I have with myself is where to put the control: on the individual nodes or on a master computer talking to the nodes. Usually I end up with a combination, that one of the nodes does slightly more work than the others. I managed in this work period to sync the nodes with an audiosignal, making it easier to put more control on each node.
The results of this period resulted in a more refined way of moving elements between the sources:
I also played with using the soundtrack on videoclips (instead of generating sound from the video which is usually the case), and moving clips between the different nodes:
In general I was able to improve the sequencer aspects of the system a lot, making it possible for more complex patterns and rhythms:
nodio composer is a composer/sequencer for realtime multichannel video and audio, developed in maxmsp and jitter.
The nodio composer system consists of 4 modules:
The client is installed on each node, and does realtime processing of image and sound.
The motor talks to the clients and coordinates them, and it sets an saves the state of the whole system, and plays back sequences.
The composer is the gui for the motor, so it allows the user to set and save the state of the system and to program and play sequences. the motor sends feedback to the composer about the current state of the system and the sequencer.
The simulator is a fully working simulation of the system. It contains the three clients, and shows the three screens and pans the sound according to which client generate the sound. It is a slight modification of the node clients, but is made to be easy to replace with updates of the clients. As with the node
clients, simulator communicates with the motor.
The system is intended to be operated in 4 different modes:
composer, standalone, performer and composer_offline.
composer:
each node has a client application, one of the nodes contains the motor, the
composer is on another computer.
standalone installation:
each node has a client application, one of the nodes contains the motor.
performer: each node has a client application. The motor and the composer is on another computer.
performer: each node has a client application. The motor and the composer is on another computer.
composer offline:
When the network or individual nodes are not available, it is possible to run the composer and motor together with a simulator on the same computer.
Here is a video with documentation from one composition and a brief description of how it works:
Drifter is a 12 channel audiovisual installation: 12 nodes, each with a computer,flatscreen and speakers, are placed in a circle. The nodes are connected over a wireless network, but each node only relate to its neighbour: It knows when a image is coming and knows where to pass it on to. Images travel clockwise across the network. The images leave traces. The image and traces are processed in realtime individually on each node and a sound is generated from the video, based on a given frequency. There are 4 base frequencies for the sound distributed among the different nodes, creating chords.
Each node has the same set of rules for how to behave, but they make individual choices (using the dice analogy, all the nodes follow the same rules for what happens if they get a 1 or a 6, but they throw their own dice, which will get different results on the different nodes).
There are also a few states or moods which change on a global level: the change happens on all the nodes simultaneously, switching between nervous, relaxed or more intense behaviour.
The overall result is an everchanging surrounding audiovisual landscape.
The first version of drifter was developed for my solo show at Trøndelag Senter for Samtidskunst in march 2006, and then in april at Rom for kunst+arkitektur.
A documention video from TSSK:
A video explaining the principles of the installation:
A doublesided videoprojection on six vertical strips of half transparent material at different depths in a blackbox space. One projection creates downward movement and the other a movement from side to side, thus creating a video weave on the projection surface where the projections overlap. The audio is generated by the changes in the video, one a dry chirping sound which pans with the horizontal movement of the video, the other is created by the downward movements of the other video, creating a very loud, deep sound resonating in the space. Moving around in the space is like walking inside a videomixer, perception of image and sound changes dramatically as you move inside the installation.
The installation was comissioned for the opening of the 2006 season of Black Box Teater in Oslo, and was developed during my residency at Tesla, Berlin in autumn 2005.
