17:16
The dynamic duo delire + pix have been hacking game engines to produce sound and visuals for some time now. Their projects typically go much further than simple Unreal or Quake hacks. Instead, they use the game engines to create application environments that are either self-running installations or interactive performance systems. The resulting works exploit the aesthetics and interactivity of computer games while presenting new models for realtime performance tools.
fijuu is a sound performance tool based on the Ogre3D open source graphics engine. The user controls sound synthesis by manipulating morphing 3D shapes using a Playstation-style controller. Different shapes correspond to different “instruments”. See the Fijuu video on YouTube and screenshots for examples.
q3apd uses Quake3 and various bots to control realtime sound synthesis in a PureData (PD) patch. Data like bot position, view angle, weapon etc. are sent to PD over the network interface. The PD patch then uses these to control the soundscape that is being continuously generated. The visual component consists of Quake3 with custom made maps and graphics. See a video of q3apd at Lovebytes to get an idea of the result.
11:55
Generator.x: The concert tour on Flickr
Our gig in Tromsø last night was a success, possibly the best night on the tour both in terms of audience response and quality of the sets. The audience soaked up sounds and images enthusiastically, and gave immediate positive response. Once again Tromsø audiences prove that they are open to new ideas.
The mood was clearly aided by the intimate setting, Kaos is a small club with low ceilings and we were happy that we managed to set up our two screens without too much trouble. Once up, they really transformed the space.
Our thanks go out to Kolbjørn and his crew at Kaos for support and love, and to Geir Jenssen for playing an eclectic mix between sets and softening up the audience for us. Thanks also to Ny Musikk for supporting the concert. This was a great experience, and we hope to come back to Tromsø in the future. They have several small festivals etc, so there is hope…
Today we play Union Scene in Drammen, tomorrow we go to Tou Scene in Stavanger. In Stavanger we will share the stage with the excellent FE-MAIL, Maja Ratke and Hild Sofie Tafjord. Emi Maeda has played with them before, and we’re looking at a possibility of some sort of jam.
Elsewhere tomorrow, Alexander Rishaug (producer and co-curator of the Generator.x tour) is producing a new version of his Random Cube event at Black Box in Oslo tomorrow, Saturday 29th. Playing are Phill Niblock, Thomas Ankersmit, Moha!, Kevin Blechdom and DJ Erik Skodvin. If you’re in Oslo, you know where to be.
15:19
Generator.x: The concert tour on Flickr
The Generator.x concert tour continues. We are now in Tromsø, north of the Arctic Circle and historically home to a significant scene for electronic music. Artists like Biosphere (Geir Jenssen) and Mental Overdrive (Per Martinsen) became an influential force on an international level, with much resulting talk of an “arctic sound”. The arctic tag has since been applied to many Norwegian electronic acts that feature dark, organic beats.
Biosphere in particular is regarded as one of the grandfathers of ambient techno, with albums like “Patashnik” and “Substrata” exploring a restrained and crystalline sound. We are therefore honored to be able to say that Geir Jenssen will be DJ’ing for the Generator.x event tonight. We hope we make it will make it worth it for him to do this rare DJ set. For more information on Biosphere, see his web site or the excellent Wikipedia: Biosphere article.
The concert itself will take place in a small club called Kaos, which variously functions as football pub, concert stage and general hangout. Kaos is an unpretentious venue, but can nevertheless boast of a serious pedigree hosting artists like Röyksopp, Timbuktu, Darren Laws, Tungtvann, etc.
Yesterday we played at Landmark in Bergen, with the support of BEK and Ny Musikk. The Bergen scene is a powerhouse of experimental music and sound art, and Landmark is the centre of much of this activity. Bergen is also home to one of the artists on the tour, Espen Sommer Eide aka Phonophani. Espen originally comes from Tromsø, so today’s concert will be a double home-coming event for him.
Check the Generator.x: The concert tour photo set on Flickr for snapshots of the tour.
23:18
This video shows Berlin-based Frank Bretschneider performing live on the Generator.x concert tour, with excerpts from Trondheim, Oslo and Fredrikstad. Bretschneider creates his own visuals using a highly reduced vocabulary of shapes and colors to create a precise visual representation of his music. More information about his work can be found in his profile.
Video: Frank Bretschneider live on the Generator.x concert tour. (~ 5.5 MB)
13:00
Generator.x Tour: Frank Bretschneider live on the tour (more photos on Flickr)
A veteran of electronic music, Frank Bretschneider is currently based in Berlin but was born in 1956 in East Germany, growing up in what was then Karl-Marx-Stadt (now Chemnitz). He originally trained as a graphic designer and painter, but in 1984 started experimenting with electronic music through tape loops, a Korg synth and treated guitars. In 1986 he founded the now-defunct AG.GEIGE, an experimental group mixing popular music with avantgarde performance strategies, borrowing from Dada and the Surrealists.
In 1995 Bretschneider formed the Rastermusic label with former bandmate Olaf Bender, releasing experimental electronic music. Rastermusic merged in 1999 with Noton Archiv für ton und nichtton (run by artist and musician Carsten Nicolai), creating the now renowned Raster-Noton label. With artists like Bretschneider, Nicolai and Ryoji Ikeda, Raster-Noton is famous for releasing uncompromising musical abstractions. The label also focuses on the interaction between music and visual art, with its artists frequently producing audiovisual performances or art installations.
Bretschneider’s music is often described as minimalist, but when asked he prefers to describe it as simply economic. Whatever the term used, his music is highly structured, marked by pinpoint precision and micromanagement. His raw materials are sine waves and white noise, resulting in a sound which is clearly digital and synthetic, although not without warmth.
As strategies for composition Bretschneider emphasizes accidents and the intentional misuse of software. Claiming to be “lazy”, he experiments with connecting modular synthesis systems until he gets interesting sequences. These are then saved and processed further. The final track is then constructed using these elements as building blocks, with looping and filtering applied to introduce further unexpected results.
Bretschneider’s interest in visual representation of sound comes naturally from his background in visual work. Using spectral analysis and custom software, he takes visual cues from music software (dots, lines, bars etc.) and turns them into representations of musical structures. The visuals mirror Bretschneider’s sound perfectly, with hypnotic repetition and precise micro-events drawing audiences into a synthetic visual space. Again, he claims that his use of a limited visual vocabulary of shapes and colors is a matter of economics rather than a minimalist statement.
To watch one of Bretschneider’s audiovisual performances is to be placed inside the logic of the composition, seeing and hearing it simultaneously. While this highly structured environment somewhat restricts possibilities for improvisation, the result is immensely precise in its connection of sound and image. To overcome the improvisational challenge, Bretschneider is currently working on new software solutions for realtime visuals.
Frank Bretschneider is touring with the Generator.x concert tour for 7 performances all over Norway. The tour is produced by Rikskonsertene and co-curated by Alexander Rishaug and Marius Watz.
Related links:
- frankbretschneider.de
- Photos of Frank Bretschneider on the Generator.x tour
- Raster-Noton
- Bretschneider on the 12K label
- Interview with Surreal Sound
- "Micro-economics", article by Susanna Bolle for Boston’s Weekly Dig
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.
09:29
Soundtoys.net | Stanza:amorphoscapes | Hoyle/Baker: Soundtoys.net navigator
Soundtoys.net, the brain-child of UK artist Stanza and veteran survivor of online interactive art, has relaunched in new glory. Retooled by Karsten Schmidt (aka toxi) in a new “web2.006 framework” called @emitter, Soundtoys has made the jump overnight from old-school semi-static site to being all-dynamic, tagged and blogged.
Soundtoys contains a wealth of old and not-so-old works, including more than a few gems from the productive period of Shockwave experimentation in the mid-to-late 90s. To get a good idea of the scope of the project, have a look at the artists page. It reads almost like a who’s who of a cross-section of new media art and experimental design.
Adam Hoyle and Julian Baker have contributed a soundtoys.net content navigator, which allows interactive navigation of the project database using the tags. Users can combine individual tags to combine them as a search, get a short description of the piece and launch it directly from the navigator. Although some of the pieces may make your browser complain about Shockwave’s brutish ways (or even crash outright), persisent browsers can expect (re-)discovery of particular gems.
Many props to Stanza for starting this community and keeping it alive, and to Karsten for his good-looking but über-functional publishing platform.
Update: Karsten just blogged a detailed description of the magic behind the scenes of the new Soundtoys.net. Read it over on toxi.in.process.
Some highlights:
- Soundtoys by Boredom Research
- John Weir: Sound of traffic
- Elout de Kok: Version v.005
- Gameboyzz Orchestra Project
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?
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.
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