Hudson-Powell: Luke / Jody / Sketches

Brothers Jody and Luke Hudson-Powell have been on my to-see list after their excellent Responsive Type project last year. Their Shoreditch studio is a modest space shared with friends, constituting a miniature creative community. Like many small design studios they are expert collaborators, teaming up where necessary.

Hudson-Powell’s portfolio is quite varied, featuring print work, graphic identities, motion graphics and interactive work. While at home in digital media, they also use drawing and found objects in their work, giving it a playful lo-tech feeling. They often use a system-based approach, following a British tradition of conceptual graphic design. Their cover for SHIFT is an excellent example. Here they used found objects to spell out the word SHIFT for a webcam, changing the image gradually over the scope of a month.

Hudson-Powell: Shift Cover / Responsive Type / Barbican

Luke and Jody are not hardcore coders themselves, although Jody did attend the MSc Virtual Environments course at Bartlett, learning VRML and C++. Following the Responsive Type project, they have recently continued their code-based exploration in a set of illustrations for the Barbican classical music programme. Working with V3ga and Michael Zancan (both of whom were involved in Responsive Type), they developed a tree-like system which grows in real-time based on audio input. The project was based on V3ga’s Vision Factory platform. The final output is a series of illustrations based on classical music, for use in the Barbican’s printed material, banners etc.

Hudson-Powell links

• Hudson-Powell (make sure to look at their portfolio PDF and showreel)
• SHIFT Interview
• Responsive Type

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)

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

"Hamster Sensing Unit"

Sequencer

Holidays are in effect, so like most of the blogsphere Generator.x is quieter than usual. To compensate, here is a non-denominational, animal-related bonus project:

Intelligent MIDI Sequencing with Hamster Control was created by Cornell University student Levy Lorenzo for his Master of Engineering (Electrical). It uses 6 hamsters as an input device to an “intelligent” MIDI sequencer, presumably mapping parameters to sensors triggered by the hamsters moving around in a cage-like box.

From Lorenzo’s abstract:

The resulting music sounds generic, but not very hamster-like. On first listen, it is reminiscent of Brian Eno’s experiements with the algorithmic composition tool Koan from SSEYO. For a more complete description of the process, Lorenzo has provided a full report in PDF on the project page.

Sound art is big in Norway. Now there is even a gallery dedicated exclusively to sound art, called Lydgalleriet. The gallery has no permanent physical space, but is unsurprisingly based in Bergen, which for now seems to be the center of the Norwegian sound art universe.

This Saturday 11 Dec Lydgalleriet will have a one-day exhibition / event at Landmark in Bergen, curated by Erlend Hammer and Steinar Sekkingstad. Artists include Bjørn Askefoss, Bjørnar Habbestad, Leif Inge, Jørgen Larsson, Nicholas Møllerhaug, Maia Urstad and Jana Winderen (producer for the Generator.x conf). Full announcement in Norwegian follows:
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Seth Hunter has posted a short tutorial on how to integrate Processing and Supercollider, using Open Sound Control to send messages back and forth. This means that even if you can’t afford a Lemur controller, you can at least build yourself a spiffy experimental interface in Processing. Seth’s tutorial uses oscP5, an OSC library by Andreas Schlegel.

Caveat: Supercollider is free, but is primarily for MacOS. There is a Windows port of Supercollider, but I’m not sure how stable this is. See also: SourceForge page for Supercollider.

This looks like it could be interesting: Interact2006 call for participants. They want composers/sound artists and visual artists for collaborations. Deadline 15 Dec:

Paintings by Randy Wray and Amy Yoes

The Cranbrook Art Museum (part of Cranbrook Academy of Art, famous for its influence on architecture and graphic design in the 90s) had an exhibition in 2003 called Post-digital painting. Curated by Joe Houston, the show presented positions in painting that reflect the influence of digital media on visual arts. From the web site:

It’s an approach I have noticed on occasion, with painters using Adobe Illustrator and other tools to plan paintings. I’m not completely convinced, but it’s an interesting perspective. The reviews from Detroit News and Metro Times are interesting for their mainstream painting perspectives on digital work.

As an aside, Kim Cascone used the term “post-digital” in his article "The aesthetics of Failure" to describe a movement in computer music that rails against the cleanness of digital audio, and strives to rediscover the material qualities and defects of the binary world. Interesting article.

Name: Organum

Greg Niemeyer, Ryan Shaw, and Dan Perkel’s interactive sound installation/game Organum Playtest 3.0, currently in Banff at the “Art Formerly Known as New Media” exhibition, offers an interesting example of the relationship between sound, movement, space and bodies. The exhibition, curated by Steve Dietz and Sarah Cook, will be at the Walter Philips Gallery until October 23, 2005. The Organum project has been a truly multi-media endeavor, beginning with a film, a book, and an exhibition of stills, and then moving on to the creation of a multiplayer game. On the Organum website, the project is described as “a playground for anticipated changes, adaptations and evolutions of the human body.”

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WolframTones

Sure, Stephen Wolfram may be one of the most, uh, erm, ‘controversial’ figures in math, but even with that said, no one should ignore Wolfram Research’s new project WolframTones. In short, ‘Tones uses Wolfram’s simple system principle to generate surprisingly complex pieces of music in the form of a cellphone ringtone. The programs and theory are simple but it would be hard to deny its elegance (and you’ll probably end up replacing that Chingy ringtone you currently have).