Maxwell city day 2-3 8, originally uploaded by hc gilje.

As I promised a year ago in the post about the Maxwell city workshop, I edited together a track using material from all the participants of the workshop into a 20 minutes soundtrack, which was originally made for a radio broadcast for the ctrl_alt_del sound art festival in 2007.
So, finally available, the maxwell city soundtrack.

Due to server migration problems at my service provider BEK, hcgilje.com and www.nervousvision.com sites might be down, as well as any links to files on that server, for instance the videoprojectiontool (alternative link here) . Hopefully this will be sorted out soon.

In the meantime, you could read about the seminar I am organising in september, with Brandon Labelle, Kirsten Dehlholm,Mark Hansen ++.

Last week I was invited to the Medialab Prado in Madrid to give both a short workshop and a presentation as part of the light,space perception sessions. The energy at the medialab was amazing, a lot of projects being worked on in parallell, and it was great to see a medialab focused on producing works, not making festivals or big exhibitions. Check out their interactivos program, a intensive two week period for developing a selected group of works, a collaboration between the artists, the workshop teachers and other collaborators who want to contribute.

I got a chance to continue working on my videoprojection tool, which is a multi-videoplane software for masking video projections and position layers on specific objects and surfaces. You can find all the information,documentation and software (osx and win xp+vista) here.

relief projection lab at bit teatergarasjen by hc gilje april 2008, originally uploaded by hc gilje.

This easter I got the opportunity to work in a large theaterspace (BIT Teatergarasjen) to continue my work on relief projection (or masked projection).
I made 9 plywood boxes to use as my projection objects, and worked with two projectors, having a total of 16 projection surfaces.
One of the aims for this session was to also work with sound (each object would double as a speaker), and to create a depth in the placement of the objects.
I implemented my nodio system into the projection patch, which made it possible for me to create sequences of movement.
There are plenty of images from the session here.

nodio five-aside 2008, originally uploaded by hc gilje.

the last few months have been packed with lab work and a few public appearances.
I made a 5-channel nodio installation as part of a group show at Visningsrommet USF in Bergen, trying to develop further the idea of composing a circular audiovisual composition.
A few more images can be found here.

HKmark1 was part of a program curated by Per Platou, shown at the FESTIVAL INTERNATIONAL DE FILM ET VIDEO DE CREATION in Beirut, Lebanon. The day after the screening the rest of the festival was cancelled due to the violence in Beirut.

The queen is the supreme power of the realm, the piece commissioned by ZKM and Musikfabrik in 2007, was performed at this years Moers festival in Germany, on may 9th. The Moers festival looks like any summer rock festival, with a camping ground, people in a good mood (for various reasons), a wide selection of temporary tatoos, hair extensions, falafels etc. What is different is that it is a jazz/impro festival (for instance John Zorn was playing later the same evening), and the main venue is a huge circus tent. It was also a first for this festival to present a contemporary music ensemble like Musikfabrik.

This was the second project I made for urban interface oslo fall 2007.

I collected a library of field recordings I have made over the years. I set up an internet radio station for the project (using Nicecast), and played with different configurations mixing music and the field recordings, but ended up just using my own recordings.
I thought it could be interesting to stream internet radio, a global media, to very specific local areas. I found three locations in Oslo which would serve as the local radio stations. They were somehow connected to a clear visible cue in that location: A huge oak tree, a small sculpture, and a small pound in the roundabout. The range of the local stations would more or less correspond to these visual cues: If you saw them you would be able to pick up the signal from the radio stations. In numbers this would mean a range of 30-100 meters.
My original plan was to use the fm-senders for mp3 players which are mostly meant to be used to listen to the mp3 player through the car radio. This was partly because I was experimenting with solar energy as energy source, and because they were cheap. The range and quality of the signal wasnt good enough though, so I ended up getting the more powerful aareff fm transmitters .
The senders were placed with friendly hosts, letting me use their internet connection to pick up the internet radio stream.

The result was three very local radio stations sending out a continous soundtrack from other locations, so somehow these recorded locations came in dialogue with the physical locations of the radio stations.
The listening involved active participation from the public as you would need to tune in on your own radio to pick up the broadcast.

Soundpockets is a series of projects of intimate sound interventions in public spaces. By using fm radiowaves, soundbeams and miniature speakers to create local pockets of sound, the different projects have different scope and focus: creating private listening rooms, changing soundtracks of a location, displacement of time/or space and a bit of general disruption of everyday life.

I made Soundpocket 1 as part of the exhibition urban interface oslo fall 2007.
From urban interface oslo blog:
“Hauntings? Dimension Doors? Time tunnels?
A boy heard what appeared to be the sound of a sheep coming from the wall of Strykejernet Art School.
A bartender at Blå was concerned when he heard running water like that from a leaking water pipe. The sound disappeared before he was able to locate it.
A seagull can be heard, but is nowhere to be seen.
Soundpocket artist HC Gilje is causing slight disturbances in the urban interfaces.”

Using a directional soundbeam to project a localized sound into a public space, this sound being only heard by the people within the sound beam which can be as narrow as 50 cm in diameter. It is similar to a lightbeam, only being sound instead. When it hits a surface it is reflected.
Soundpocket 1 was installed in a narrow passageway in Oslo, connecting two parts of the city. The soundbeam was mounted on a pan/tilt head making it possible to place the sounds very precisely in the passageway.

By bouncing the sound off surfaces, it seems as if the sound is coming from a window, door, elevator, a poster on the wall or just a more general presence. This made the piece into something which added another layer of sound to the existing soundscape, blending (sometimes disappearing) into the location.
Most of the sounds would appear to belong to the site, although dislocated (like the sound of the chandelier in the wind), the sounds of birds, telephones, babies crying, dogs barking, water running etc.

It was interesting to see how the piece was received. It was obvious for me that it wouldnt work very well as a typical art piece, it has a much more interventionist nature. I wanted it to be slight distortions to the regular soundscape of the passageway, and was pleased to see that the people who used this passageway regularly were noticing these disturbances. This could be described using the first of Barthes´ three listening modes: hearing involves “evaluation of the spatio-temporal situation“ and thus, it is linked to a “notion of territory“. It places the listener on alert when new sounds which dont´t “fit in” are heard.
By adding an extra layer of sound if also made people focus on the sounds which were already there.

The inspiration from this 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 hear whispering voices. An out of tune clarinet is projected into a marching band playing on the 17th of may (Norway´s national holiday).
If these stories are true or not, doesnt really matter, it is the idea of having a private experience in a public space which intrigued me.

Soundpockets is a series of projects of intimate sound interventions in public spaces. By using fm radiowaves, soundbeams and miniature speakers to create local pockets of sound, the different projects have different scope and focus: creating private listening rooms, changing soundtracks of a location, displacement of time/or space and a bit of general disruption of everyday life.

“In the suggestive medieval spaces of the Magazzini del Sale (In Palazzo Publico, Siena),
some of the most interesting international video artists and film
makers measure themselves with the idea of wandering, a very ancient theme shared by
a variety of traditions and literature, the paradigm par excellence of the human
condition.

The exhibited works were created during the last decade; they are real “journeys”, or
wanderings of the mind, dealing with the search for an identity, dislocation and
estrangement. These random or planned meanderings set up a relentless “private”
dialogue with the natural landscapes and the architectural or urban spaces.
The artists deal with the subject of wandering according to different inflections; some
relate it to a “loss” and to a dynamic quest (Shirin Neshat, Martijn Veldhoen); some
associate it to the concept of “still dislocation” (Hans Op de Beeck, Kimsooja); some to a
wandering of the mind or memory (Matthias Müller, Jonas Dahlberg) that can also be
accompanied by physical wandering (Seouhgho Cho, Pipilotti Rist, Jonathan
Glazer/UNKLE); some artists thrust the wanderer into the metropolitan contradictory
environment (Jordi Colomer, HC Gilje). The exhibition also hosts the last work of
Michelangelo Antonioni, a concise and intense video showing the artist in a wandering,
poetic and sensuous dialogue with Michelangelo’s Moses.

In the bilingual (Italian/English) exhibition catalogue, published by Silvana Editoriale, the
theme of wandering is further investigated in essays by the curators and artists’
contributions, as well as in an extensive anthology of poems. In a meandering path from
Schiller to Verlaine, from Borges to Luzi, this selection of verses narrates the wanderer’s
poetic modulations from the romantic Wanderer to the 19th century flâneur, until the
contemporary drift.

EXHIBITED WORKS: Michelangelo Antonioni, Lo sguardo di Michelangelo, 2004 - Seoungho Cho, Orange
Factory, 2002 - Jordi Colomer, Anarchitekton: Barcelona - Bucarest - Brasilia - Osaka, 2002-04 - Jonas
Dahlberg, Untitled (Horizontal Sliding), 1999 e Untitled (Vertical Sliding), 2000 – HC Gilje, h.k.mark1,
1998 - Jonathan Glazer / UNKLE, Rabbit in Your Headlights, 1998 – Kimsooja, A Needle Woman - Mexico
City, Cairo, Lagos, London, 2000-01 - Matthias Müller, Album, 2004 - Shirin Neshat, Soliloquy, 1999 -
Hans Op de Beeck, Determination (4), 1998 - Pipilotti Rist, Aujourd’hui, 1999 - Martijn Veldhoen,
Momentum, 2003. “

Marius Watz recently held a two week workshop as part of Club Transmediale this year: Generator 2.0 X Beyond the Screen.

“Digital fabrication (also known as “fabbing”) represents the next step in the digital revolution. After years of virtualization, with machines and atoms being replaced by bits and software, we are coming full circle. Digital technologies like rapid prototyping, laser cutting and CNC milling now produce atoms from bits, eliminating many of the limitations of industrial production processes. Once prohibitively expensive, such technologies are becoming increasingly accessible, pointing to a future where mass customization and manufacturing-on-demand may be real alternatives to mass production.”

The invited artists had some prior experience with fabbing, and from looking at the images from the workshop I wish I could have seen the resulting exhibition at [DAM] Berlin.

..and as usual a more in-depth article at WMMA.

Related:

When I visited f0am in Brussels in october they were busy constructing a reprap, a DIY rapid prototyping printer, and their ultimate goal is to use it to make food.

I made a quick trip to Berlin last week to catch the exhibition at Martin Gropius Bau before it closed, it´s too bad they couldn´t keep it open until Transmediale opens end of january. The exhibition is curated by Richard Castelli and includes several large scale installations by Ulf Langheinrich (former Granular Synthesis) and Jeffrey Shaw (Place and EVE) as well as some very beautiful small-scale work by dumbtype founder Shiro Takatani, to mention just a few of the works.
I found it interesting, especially after having just read Mark Hansen´s “New Philosophy for New Media” which uses Shaw´s work extensively to support his theory.
Regine at We make money not art has written two posts from the exhibition which I recommend:
http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2007/12/i-finally-got-t.php
http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2007/12/from-spark-to-p.php