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.

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.

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.

Currently at Lydgalleriet in Bergen there is an exhibition by young british artist Felix Thorn.

Felix´s machines are music making sculptures, creating acoustic counterparts to electronic music. Check out the interview made in relation to his exhibition at Gasworks.

The installation of instruments reminded me of some very different projects, but the connection is the use of digital control systems to control mechanical instruments, so in principle they could be played with the same sequencer but producing very different results:

In 1998 I saw Matt Heckert´s Mechanical Sound Orchestra at the Ultima festival in Oslo. Heckert has background from Survival Research Laboratories and later moved to making music. In a statement about the Mechanical Sound Orchestra he writes about Machine sound: build machines that are playable, being remote controlled via a computer interface, and the performances consist only of sounds produced by the the machines in real time.

In contrast to Felix´s machines which takes up the corner of a room, Heckert´s gigantic instruments filled up a whole factory space. Here is a documentation I made from the performance in Oslo, called Flying at Sound.

David Byrne Play the Building is another type of machine orchestra, where the machines play the building:

“a sound installation in which the infrastructure, the physical plant of the building, is converted into a giant musical instrument. Devices are attached to the building structure — to the metal beams and pillars, the heating pipes, the water pipes — and are used to make these things produce sound. The activations are of three types: wind, vibration, striking. The devices do not produce sound themselves, but they cause the building elements to vibrate, resonate and oscillate so that the building itself becomes a very large musical instrument.”

The devices are controlled by an organ, which made me think of something Charlemagne Palestine said about the organ as instrument in a presentation a few years ago. The organ, with its many pipes, are built specifically for a particular space and stays there for hundreds of years. So playing the organ is a way of playing a building in itself. It also contrasts to the mobility of laptop instruments, an organ is attached to a building.

Finally, I would like to mention Maywa Denki´s Tsukuba series (eventhough they are not controlled digitally as far as I know).  Maywa Denki is a combination of a company that makes gadgets/toys and produces art: Maywa Denki is a art unit produced by Nobumichi Tosa. Each piece of of Maywa Denki´s work is called “a product” and a live performance or exhibition is held as “a product demonstration”.

The Tsukuba series: musical devices played by physical movement of motors and/or electromagnets at 100V: Machine music materially performed by electric powered musical instrument. Here is the “manual” for the tsukuba in typical maywa denki style:

I have made a new manual for the Videoprojectiontool, documenting the latest improvements including cornerpin keystoning and OSC support. There is also a slightly modified version of the application, v3.1c, with some bug fixes and increased OSC support.

All available here.

I have added rudimentary Open Sound Control (OSC) and MIDI functionality, and provided maxmsp templates for osc/midi for people to develop this further.

This makes it possible to sync several computers, and control the videoprojection tools from other applications that support OSC.

more info and downloads

Announcing the latest version of the videoprojection tools, now with 8 layers with cornerpin distortion, advanced masking ++. Also there are now 8 individual video sources, 1 live video source and 1 draw source.

As before it also has a quite extensive preset and sequencing system.

It is available for free for osx and windows xp/vista.

Download application and documentation

(photo:sloth by Lars Brunström)
The last two weeks has been dedicated to moving objects. First, Lawrence Malstaf gave a workshop, and this last week the swedish artist Lars Brunström was in Bergen, partly to teach at the academy, partly to help me with the prototype for an upcoming project.

Brunström gave a lecture about artists working with kinetic sculpture, showing examples from some well known and some lesser known artists.
I have collected some links to some of the artists he talked about, plus some other artists and projects related to kinetic art I have seen the last few years.

This list is by no means exhaustive (and it points in all directions), so if you think there are other artists who should be mentioned, leave a comment.

Alexander Calder (american)

inventor of the mobile (kinetic sculpture constructed to take advantage of the principle of equilibrium)
“There is more of the unpredictable about them than in any other human creation … A general destiny of movement is sketched for them, and then they are left to work it out for themselves.” — Sartre on Calder’s mobiles

calder links
wikipedia on calder
calder foundation

calder circus video filmed by Carlos Vilardebo in 1961
part 1
part 2

Jean Tinguely (Swiss)

self destruction machines, imperfect machines
wikipedia on Tinguely
installation at Jean Tingeuely museum Basel
paris, fountain and kinetic sculpture place Igor Stravinsky

P O Ultvedt (swedish)

video of an installation by Ultvedt

Rebecca Horn (german)

artist´s website
wikipedia on rebecca horn
video with an installation by Horn

Arthur Ganson (american)

artist´s website
TED presention with Arthur Ganson

Anna Strid (swedish)

zoetrope
artist´s website

Peter Flemming (canadian)

artist´s website
video of installation

Jean Pierre Gauthier (canadian)

main focus on making sound from the kinetic sculptures
artist´s website

lázlo moholy nagy

light space navigator

Bernie Lubell

interactive wood machines
artist´s website

Gregory Barsamian

zoetrope
artist´s website

chinese farmer and inventor Wu Yulu

article about Wu Yulu
video with Wu Yulu
video with Wu Yulu
Mechinal love: documentary

The film portrays people who in different ways enjoy a close relationship with a robot. We meet an old German woman who desperately seeks to keep her memories alive through talking with a baby seal robot called Paro. We also meet Professor Ishiguro who is developing androids, and who, in his current work on his own geminoid, wonders what it takes to be human.

The robot is no longer just a mechanical gadget that sits inside your coffee machine or performs monotonous, mechanical work, but made to provide meaningful presence.
The film´s website

and while we are in the robotics section, here is a link with some great images of contemporary robots.

Theo Jansen (dutch)

wikipedia on Jansen
TED presentation with Jansen

Kristoffer Myskja (norwegian)

artist´s website

atle selnes nielsen (norwegian)

artist´s website

Lawrence Malstaff (belgian)

website of his gallery with several video examples of his work

Lars Brunström
Last, but not least, check out Lars Brunström´s website with his own work, including the sloth at the top of this post.

Here is a video documentation of his snake

I have added a separate post about Len Lye.

Last week I was in Budapest for the first time, a fantastic city!

I was invited to take part of a Touch – Punkt event as part of the Temps d´Images festival. The Touch label came with Mike Harding and Jon Wozencroft which gave a short seminar, and with the artists BJNilsen(laptop)  and Hildur Ingveldardóttir Gudnadóttir (cello).

The concept of Punkt, which is a festival in Kristiansand run by Erik Honoré and Jan Bang is to sample a concert as it is being played, and using that sampled material as the basis of their own concert following straight after. They had invited Sidsel Endresen to join them on vocals, and Andras Halmos from Trafó had invited me to create the visual part of the concert.

I wanted to stick to the concept of using the first concert of BJNilsen and Gudnadóttir as the departure point for my video.

I created a very long image buffer, 12000×480 pixels. For recording, I could move sideways through the buffer and add images into the buffer, and eventually adding layers of overlapping images as the two concerts progressed. The image above is a small sample of what the buffer looked like at the end of the concert. For playback I had a very slow horisontal movement, so it would take several minutes to move through the buffer.

I wanted the recording head to move faster than the playback head so the images wouldn´t appear in a chronological order, and which also created some interesting layers of time.

Unfortunately I still don´t have any good images from the concert, the one at the top of the post is taken from my video camera with nightshot on, but you get an idea of the scale, it was a huge image behind the performers.

I was also supposed to do an hour presentation at Kitchen Budapest for maybe 10-15 people, but they convinced me to participate in a tech-pecha kucha event (so 20 slides, each showing for 20 seconds= 6min 40 sec) at the Merlin Theater with 300-400 people in the audience, so that was a strange but interesting experience. My impression was that people were sincerely interested in the content, my previous experiences with pecha kucha events has had a strong focus on entertaining, but superficial presentations.

By a weird coincidence one of the other presenters was Maté Gaspar from the theatre company Krétakör (website in hungarian) who I had been in touch with a year ago, so I got to visit their amazing workspace.

I also got a short tour of the Kitchen Budapest facilities, and finally met Adam Somlai-Fischer, who was supposed to be part of my seminar last fall.

snow lab, originally uploaded by hc gilje.

It is not so often that there is snow in Bergen, it usually rain by the time it hits the ground. But last week has been an exception, which finally gave me the opportunity to testing out my videoprojection tool on forms made in the snow. It was a pretty nice location, on the roof terrace of BEK overlooking the harbour of Bergen.
I hope to develop this snow projection project further as it is quite fascinating to explore black and white contrasts. I am especially happy with projecting black with a white background, check it out in the video below.
There are more images to see.