01:29
Generator.x: The concert tour (Phonophani, Lia vs. Emi Maeda)
Generator.x: The concert tour – 19-29 April, 2006
Phonophani (NO) / Marius Watz (NO)
Emi Maeda (JP) / Lia (AT)
Frank Bretschneider (DE)
This week sees the beginning of the Generator.x concert tour, with 7 dates all over Norway – we’ll even go north of the Arctic Circle. The tour is produced by Rikskonsertene, and presents a selection of artists working with generative strategies in the intersection between sound and visual performance. Co-curators are Marius Watz and Alexander Rishaug, the latter also known for his music and his RandomSystem festival projects.
Norwegian Phonophani (aka Espen Sommer Eide) will play glitchy improvisations using Max/MSP, accompanied by generative visuals by Marius Watz. Helsinki-based harpist Emi Maeda will play harp combined with electronic sound manipulations, with Lia doing visuals. Finally we are pleased to be joined by Frank Bretschneider from Berlin, one of the founders of the renowned Raster-Noton label and a veteran of minimalist beats and sine wave abstractions. In what could be seen as a continuation of the Gesamtkunstwerk tradition, Bretschneider also produces visuals from his sound works.
Photos from the tour will be put online on Flickr.
Generator.x: Tour dates
- 19 April, Oslo: Presentation at NoTAM Forum
- 20 April, Trondheim: Blæst (w/ Monolithic)
- 21 April, Oslo: Blå
- 22 April, Fredrikstad: St.Croix huset
- 26 April, Bergen: Landmark
- 27 April, Tromsø: KAOS
- 28 April, Drammen: Union Scene
- 29 April, Stavanger: Tou Scene (w/ FE-MAIL)
Our thanks go to Rikskonsertene, Alexander Rishaug and local organizers like TEKS, BEK and Tou Scene for making this tour possible.
For information about the concert that took place during the Generator.x conference in Oslo, please visit the Generator.x Club page.
18:19
Jannis Kreft: Generative Audiovisual Systems (rappers Monarch & Thec)
Jannis Kreft (aka "Dein Lieblinsgestalter") has documented his diploma project for Joachim Sauter’s class at Universität der Künste in Berlin. Entitled "Generative Audiovisual Systems", the project is a performatice live show using VVVV to generate interactive sets for rappers Monarch & Thec.
Abstract visuals are normally seen illustrating electronic music, while hip hop typically features ubiquitous booty videos. Kreft breaks the norm, only referencing traditional hip hop aesthetics with an interactive Lowrider model (seen top left). Using IR camera tracking, projections onto the bodies of the performers can be isolated from the rest of the set.
See Kreft’s site for details, including step-by-step progress reports, and be sure to look for the hilarious bluescreen photos. The site also holds documentation of other audiovisual projects Kreft has been creating for media design studio Art+Com.
Respect to the German generative massive. Peace, I’m out.
13:09
This is an experiment to see if posting videos on the blog would be feasible (or even desirable). The video format of choice is Flash Video, since it’s light-weight, most users have the necessary plugins and the plugin doesn’t stop the browser for several seconds while initializing. We’re using the WP-FLV WordPress plugin by Roel Meurders to embed the FLVs. WP-FLV in turn uses Jeroen Wijering’s Flash Video Player.
Please give feedback on how this is working for you. It shouldn’t slow down the normal blog use, since it doesn’t load the video until you ask it to. Without further ado, here is the clip.
Video: Alva Noto (Carsten Nicolai) live at AV.06. (~ 6 MB)
13:25
Alva Noto: Concert (video)
Fenwick: What I know about stem cells
Back online after a few days spent at the AV.06 festival in lovely Newcastle, where the architecture is baroque industrial (except for Norman Foster’s very sci-fi Sage Gateshead) and the local females brave the sub-zero conditions in flimsy tops. This is only the second time the AV festival has been organized. The last (2003) version was a VJ- and film-oriented event. This year director Honor Harger and her team has created an ambitious event around the theme “Lifelike”.
Spanning three cities (Newcastle, Middlesbrough and Sunderland), it features commissioned performances and installations by artists like Ryoji Ikeda, Carsten Nicolai (aka Alva Noto, see live video) Michael Nyman, Critical Art Ensemble, Ken Rinaldo and many more. Concerts and VJ culture are still important to the programme, as is film (the Tyneside Cinema is one of the organizing partners). The festival includes not one but two premieres of new work by experimental filmmaker Richard Fenwick, including an excellent deadpan edutainment piece on stem cell research.
All in all, a very strong showing of varied events, successfully mixing film and VJ culture with classical music and media art. The festival is on for another week, if you’re in the neighbourhood be sure to drop by.
Disclosure: I participated in the festival with a new projection piece commissioned for the Sage Gateshead and with System C in the Animated Drawing programme organized by the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art. My thanks to Honor, Fiona, Dan, Mark, Adam, Beckie etc. for assistance and hospitality. I’ve uploaded a Flickr set from AV.06.
12:30
The concept of the artist software work camp is spreading. Piksel in Bergen has been a hit with the live visuals performers and developers, now the French city of Poitiers is host to Make Art 2006 later this month. The event is organized by the Goto 10 collective, who describe Make Art as a “festival dedicated to the integration of “free and open source” software in electronic art”.
This is an event for and by people who make stuff as well as talk about it, so expect a hands-on approach. The schedule includes a Pure Data workshop, an exhibition and a program of lectures and software presentations. Most of the tools presented tend towards applications in sound or community building.
Now what is needed is for someone to organize an open source work camp for the visual people, rallying the Processing, VVVV and Open Source Flash communities. Any takers?
13:35
Onoxo: Clean exp
Onoxo: Pipet filters
Onoxo is the project name of Zagreb-based VJ and motion designer Vedran Kolac. Working in VVVV, he creates forms that tend towards the architectural while retaining an organic quality. His work is proof positive of the potential of VVVV for creating generative live visuals. Be sure to take a look at the movie version of Clean Exp.
Kolac is also a part of the Strukt Visual Network, a collective operating out of Austria which puts out a magazine for graphic design and live visuals. Strukt has also become a gathering point for various projects, such as the Redestrukt Visual Crew and other spinoffs. In a VJ scene that has yet to find a coherent voice, Strukt stands out as a group that communicates both loudly and clearly.
09:26
Postvinyl was created by Mathias Fuchs with Michelle Jay as an experiment in future DJ tools. It is based on a first-person shooter engine, turned into a performative sound tool. The virtual environment features record players and special “sound guns” that the DJ performer can explored and interact with. The result is an interface for creating both sound and visuals, with the virtual enviroment being both a functional and aesthetic space. The images seen by the virtual DJ avatar is projected in the club as the visual part of the performance.
See more documentation of Fuchs’ work here. There are also more images of Postvinyl, including pictures from live performances.
Via an article by Mathias Fuchs for our good friends at Artificial.dk. Artificial.dk regularly publishes original articles and interviews with artists and theorist, sign up to their mailing list if you want to receive updates on generative art and electronic art.
10:54
I know glitchy sounds and visuals are appreciated round these parts, so I couldn’t miss out on posting about Karl Klomp and partner-in-crime Tom Verbruggen. These hyperactive boys indulge in video bending, max/msp hacking, hardware repurposing and general sweet mayhem.
A student at the Frank Mohr Institute in Groningen, Karl Klomp (aka MNK) documents his hardware hacks and visual glitch on www.karlklomp.nl. Make sure to see the videos of his live performances, he combines drawn animation with video bending noise. Tom Verbruggen (aka Toktek) is part of the Sonido Gris band / art collective, and also does performance art, installation etc. I certainly hope they drop by Berlin sometime.
Ultrasound 2005, 21-25 November
Media Centre, Huddersfield, England
The Ultrasound 2005 festival is just around the corner, filling Huddersfield with audiovisual performances, experimental music and media art. The list of artists include Golan Levin and Zachary Lieberman (who together and solo will perform in 3 different projects), Jan Robert Leegte, Pan Sonic, Sue Costabile, Owl Project and many more.
This year, Director Tom Holley has decided on an interesting twist. In cooperation with PixelACHE organizer Juha Huuskonen this year’s festival has a section called “Finnish Partition”, presenting a number of Finnish artists and performers. The legendary noisemakers Pan Sonic (pictured above, in front of the TV tower in their current home town, Berlin) will perform, as will Grey Zone. Exhibited projects include Kick Ass Kung-Fu, the classic Habbo Hotel and the Open Source "Modular Electronic Game Prototype" TileToy.
There will be a TileToy workshop during the festival, see the workshop page for information. It looks like a great lineup, sure wish I was Finnish in Huddersfield.
11:36
HC Gilje: CityScapes DVD
HC Gilje, who lectured about his instrumental work with live visual performance at the Generator.x conference, has just released a new DVD. The CityScapes DVD is published on the French Lowave label, and features 5 films in Gilje’s signature dreamy style.
Gilje’s release email says the following:
The videos have been made over a period of 6 years, starting in Hong Kong in 1998. This is why we chose to do the release event in this city on november 4th at Habitus, a small artist space overlooking the Hong Kong Harbour.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial- ShareAlike 2.5 License.
This license applies to blog entries only.