Christchurch will play host to a spectrum of digital artists, musicians, programmers, and designers this weekend for Tending Networks, the yearly symposium for the Aotearoa Digital Arts network. Highlights include a keynote and new work presented by Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, the Seoul-based masters of flash who first came to light with their cheeky, minimal work "Artist’s Statement No. 45,730,944: The Perfect Artistic Web Site" shown above.
Stella Brennan will be discussing her most recent work, "South Pacific", a poetic micro-narrative overlaid over satellite imagery which I've previously reviewed.
Eddie Clemens, now based in Christchurch on residency, will be talking about his Pinball Lanterns installation in the Auckland Central Library space. Douglas Bagnall will show us how to "take the tedious work of experimentation, abstraction and learning out of the process of making art" via his myriad machine creations, which range from A Film Making Robot to Te-Tuhi Videogame machine and Cloud Classifier. Finally, cyber-performance group Avatar Body Collision will most likely focus on UpStage, working between countries, and the nuances of the virtual theatre.
From ShowStudio comes word of "Trembled Blossoms", an animated short film for Prada. Directed by James Lima, the film depicts a "cyber woman's journey through a magical, illustrated forest", accumulating clothing from the fashion icon as she goes. And while "Blossoms" is an important shift from glossy photo spreads to moving image for fashion, what's more interesting are the cues taken from online worlds, videogames, and new media.
The film's protagonist, an androgynous avatar birthed into the world by a rose, is heavily influenced by manga and anime - featuring the long legs, large eyes, and faerie complexion favoured by Japanese artists. Beginning nude, but fully grown, the animation starts in the same way as notable online words like Second Life. The main item of clothing, a red and blue check sheath dress, isn't put on, it's transferred. Another avatar appears to bestow the clothing, virally spreading the distinctive check texture from herself to our heroine. A host of traits are picked up from online massive multiplayer environments like World of Warcraft: a pixie companion that circles the avatar, a camera that tracks movement, even glitter and glow effects that look downsampled and artificial.
Starting life as a series of stunning storyboards from James Jean, with beautiful finished watercolours from Jared Purrington, "Blossoms" mood boards are pieces of art by themselves. Elegant lines wrap around explosions of colour, pencil drawings of organic flower/high heel hybrids are delicately articulated. Unfortunately, the final work fails to keep it's cyber and organic influences in tension. Caught between pixel and paint, avatar and actor, "Blossoms" plunges into the Uncanny Valley.
Roboticist Masahiro Mori coined the term in the 70s to describe robots "with appearance and motion between a 'barely-human' and 'fully human'. We love the clumsy hulking metal of C-3PIO, but a more realistic woman cyborg with fake hair, skin and unblinking eyes repulses us. While "Blossoms" doesn't cause this degree of emotion, it fails to work because of it's straddling. Instead of an obviously artificial video-game walk cycle, or a motion captured female walk, the film uses a mediocre between - a badly animated slink that's more strange than sexy. Likewise, the avatars facial expressions are more than the real-time triggered response of a videogame, but they're also far less than human. The result is an experience that is beautiful but cold, stunning but not completely compelling.
Te Tuhi's foyer space reverberated with drones, clattering sticks, and plucked tones on Friday as it played host to a sound and dance performance for James McCarthy's Powersound+. A "sonic wall drawing", Powersound takes the form of a bridge of wires at various tensions, with pickups for amplification. Joining him was members from Auckland's experimental music community Vitamin S, including: Kristian Larsen, Zoe Drayton, Paul Buckton, and Andrew McMillan. The group successfully flowed through a number of phases, from Drew's initial harplike 'activation' of the instrument, through harsh guitar scraping, Dada-like play, and a rich harmonic tone on the verge of feedback to close.
Kristian throws sticks at James in some sort of fishing-baseball hybrid.
Zoe provides noise and soundscapes via a laptop.
James sets up a made instrument of wooden posts at various lengths.
As well as recycling code as a way to teach programming, Steph Thirion recently finished Cascade on Wheels, a data vis project attempting to translate abstract traffic stats into a more meaningful, compelling interactive. Beautifully realised in Processing, Cascade extrudes upwards, creating something akin to a spatial bar graph over Madrid - the higher the wall, the more traffic on that street. Responsive and navigable, the user is able to pan, zoom, and explore this new environment of data easily. The problem is, Cascade stops there, failing to make any statement about how, for instance, the 100,000 vehicles per day on El Prado street impacts residents, the environment, and the urban fabric.
Thirion (and the rest of the team) seemed to realise this, and came up with a second vis based on the same data, Traffix Mixer. A sound toy, where "emotion was given prominence over direct readability", Mixer does provide a nice complement to the more strictly infographic Cascade. But unfortunately, the innovative, slick interface compromises the power of the work. " Ah, i forgot how pleasant it sounds... nice to hear it again.", is one comment on the video blog. The sound of a speeding car coming up behind you - as any pedestrian or cyclist can attest- is always unnerving and ominous. Mixers sound, while aggressive, is too abstracted from its subject matter, sounding more like a track from a laptop/glitch artist.
Traffic expands like a virus. The amount of vehicles will always expand to the amount of roadway available. Its effects are also viral and ever expanding. In a landmark study in 1981, Dr. Donald Appleyard demonstrated a direct correlation between the number of friends people have on a street, and the amount of cars travelling on a given street. Even more interestingly, when asked to define their "home area", residents on Appleyard's "Low Traffic" road circled the whole street: their house, the front yards, the footpaths, and even their friends houses. With growing traffic comes growing impact, and a growing retreat. Children on the street stop playing. Adults on the footpath stop conversations. Hanging out in front yards ceases, decks stop being used, and finally in extreme situations, the front room of the house is unused, permeated with traffic noise, horns, and pollution. Traffic Mixer and Cascade on Wheels, while stunningly executed, fail to convey the impact of their subject - either quantitatively or qualitatively.
(Editor's note: from guest contributor Melody Watson) Almost exactly four years after his last memorable performance in Auckland, Robert Henke (otherwise known as Monolake) graces our New Zealand shores once again.
Those of you who went to that 2003 gig will know that it was one to remember, one that people still talk about even now. This year’s performance promises to be no different.
Monolake has been an integral part of the minimal techno scene in Berlin since the early 1990’s and had releases on the groundbreaking label “Chain Reaction” before starting to release music on his on label “ Imbalance Computer Music”
Monolake describes his music thus: “I create music people can dance to, music people want to experience also with their bodies, massive rhythmical structures, temporary sonic architecture with carefully choosen textures, shimmering details, constantly breathing and pulsating objects in time. …Music in which is nothing is static and which wants to exist as a state rather then a story, music which is the result of an intense occupation with detail and which still leaves enough room for interpretation. Music which improves if played loud over giant speaker stacks. Those works are released under the project name Monolake and usually labelled techno, minimal, electro or dub.” He has performed as Monolake a number of times at various prestigious festivals such as Mutek in Montreal (www.mutek.ca) and Transmediale (www.transmediale.de).
Robert has also been involved with a very interesting collaboration with various producers over the world. This is called “Atlantic Waves” and it comprises Robert jamming in real-time with such people as Deadbeat (aka Scott Monteith) and Torsten Proefrock who is associated with the Basic Channel label. He has performed this in such places as the Tate modern and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. I was lucky enough to catch this when I was in Berlin, with Robert jamming with Deadbeat in New York. It sounded really great, and you could also see what was happening due to the interface being projected.
Yet another project (this Robert Henke is a busy boy!) revolves around the use of buddha machines. Here’s what online music magazine Gridface said about Layering Buddha: “Here the lovable FM3 Buddha Machine is his source. The result is a gorgeous ambient album of echoes and crescendos. At times the pieces are soothing (“Layer 001”), other times they are tense and immense (“Layer 002”). The incredible heft of these sounds is a result of Henke’s recording process. Henke used a state-of-the-art A/D converter to record information up to 48 kHz, allowing him to pitch the recordings down to reveal previously inaudible data.”
Robert describes his Layering Buddha performance as “music that needs attention and focus, that slowly builds up intricate and fragile structures, morphing timbres constructed of millions of microscopic sonic particles, cathedrals of filtered noises, dynamic and dramatic processes that grab the listener and throws them into a new state, or music that is almost invisible, floating around like air, music that grows when performed live using multiple channels of audio“. Layering Buddha was awarded an Honorary Mention in the Digital Music category at the 2007 Prix Ars Electronica competition.
Catch Robert Henke perform his Layering Buddha piece in a six channel surround sound environment on the 26th of February at 10/12 Customs St. He will be joined by Rosy Parlane (who releases on Touch), Nigel Wright (who releases on CMR ) and Rose. The performance starts at 8pm and costs $20 ($15 for AF members)
You can also catch Robert performing as Monolake at Coherent the Saturday before (the 23rd). He will be joined by local DJ’s Miles Kuen, Melody and Darin King as well as Wilberforce who will be playing a live dubstep set. This event will start at 10pm and will cost $20 on the door.
We Make Money Not Art today briefly mentioned two projects from infographics specialist Michael Mandiberg I've taken a closer look at, Oil Standard and Real Costs, both plugins for Mozillas Firefox web browser. Oil Standard converts US currency amounts into their worth in barrels of crude, a simple premise with it's strength lying in the connectedness of the internet. Running online and using RSS feeds, prices are converted in real-time, rising and falling with the world markets. They're also personalised - the concept becomes much more concrete when it appears over an iPod you're buying online or your own credit card transactions.
Real Costs operates in the same way, albeit on a list of very limited travel websites such as AA.com, JetBlue, and Orbitz. Translating jet miles to kg of CO2 directly on the page, that trip from LA to NYC loses some of it's glamour. The plugin does go further than literal guilt tripping however, providing a range of alternatives like public transport, carbon offsets, and carpools.
But is it all a little too earnestly green? Perhaps. Mandiberg hopes the user might shift "from passive consumer to engaged citizen." With the lack of public transport in the US and the large distances between cities, RL might just have the opposite affect - causing apathy and a sense of helplessness in users. After all, who's wants to spend a few days and nights in a Greyhound bus to make the trek across country? Oil Standard seems simpler, more sinister, and - with the addition of live news feeds from Rigzone.com - much more real. Viewed as an art project, the latter is successful precisely because it doesn't prescribe. Instead it causes a vague but definite malaise in the user, and leaves them to work out any concrete actions or lifestyle changes.
Auriea Harvey & Michael Samyn have just sent word about the latest update to their free-roaming online multiplayer project, The Endless Forest. Packaged as a screensaver, the work comes to life when your computer starts to sleep, recasting you as a stag in a dreamy, meditative forest setting, complete with ruins, ponds, and seasonal changes.
Without boundaries, goals, or levels, the interactive shifts the focus away from objectives and onto the stunning environment, which the team have obviously focused on. Light filters through pines, close objects obscure the player momentarily in a cinematic nod, and your avatar leaps across streams and into lavender glades.
In a strong move based on their interactive narrative backgrounds, the team have disabled any form of text or language communication. Avatars are 'named' with a randomly generated symbol. Communication with other stags takes the form of emotive actions - a bow, a cower, a prance. Language barriers are gone. So is specific communication ("walk to this location","how are you?"). But what Harvey and Samyn realised is that simple interactives require simple communication. Stags play "follow the leader", action their meaning through, or post general notices on a forum ("If I see you and don't respond, I'm sorry, my computer is playing up...").
With such a open-ended base, the team have released updates for special times and seasons. "Endless Halloween" turned stags into a midnight black for a certain time, and enabled costumes like blood red antlers or a Mexican inspired "deer of the dead" motif. The latest event/update combination involves the gods visiting the forest next Tuesday, February 5th at 5pm for a Mardi Gras flower spree.
Of course, EF isn't without it's problems. When I logged on at 10am NZT, there was exactly one avatar in the forest. Me. Exploring the lush environment is interesting for a while, but where EF ultimately wins or loses is it's user base - midnight gatherings of stags, magic spells cast by others, and new emotive gestures added regularly are for naught without others online. A few glitches crop up. It's easy to ruin the Csikszentmihalyi-like flow of galloping through the forest by hitting a tree, or break the realism by using a walk animation when your avatar should be running. But these hardly detract from an interactive which succeeds in pushing the boundaries of what a 'game' is, what 'communication' means, and how time and users can evolve a game world.
This month's Online artist at Window is a selection of work from Stimulus Response, "the sprawling web-based diary of Wellington artist, writer, and game theorist Pippin Barr. From comic strips to delicate pencil drawings, interactive video works and maps, Barr chronicles the bizarre, banal, and boring in the everyday."
I've also completed a range of 'additional data' for Xin Cheng's recent show: a massive repository of texts, theses, links, and streaming audio research that provided the basis for the work shown at Window. From green roofs to gannet calls, the psychology of blogging and motorcycles in galleries, there's an array of interesting articles.
Angela Main, an interactive installation artist, will discuss her new work for Auckland Museum, "Metazoa", on Wed, February 20th, at 7pm. According to the release, the work explores the evolutionary tree of life, and Main will "position this in relation to her experience of electronic art museums in Europe and recent contemporary art events." For Metazoa, she collaborated with HITlabNZ, the promising but problematic augmented reality (AR) technology we've blogged on in the past (Pushing and Pulling the Interface). This specific installation looks interesting however, and I'll be there on the night to give a full review for Window:Scene. Entry is $10, or $5 for members.
These sounds have a history. Recorded on "the corner of Spring and Flinders Sts on a rainy afternoon, the corner of Spencer and Flinders Sts on a baking hot morning, a train ride from Parliament to Melbourne Central, a stroll through the food stalls at the Queen Vic markets on a Saturday morning, and a visit to the CERES Environmental Park in Brunswick," expat New Zealand duo Montano built their latest album from the ground up from found sounds, or field recordings. But you won't find it in record shops. They've put the whole album on Amie Street.
We've blogged in the past about new ways of marketing, distributing and selling work which is already digital, (Artists give it away with new distribution models). Amie Street goes a couple steps further than a simple "give what you want", or "get it for free" model, taking some tips from the school playground. If you're the first to discover a hot new band and download their tracks, it's free. But once that popularity hits the masses, the price of each song starts rising for every download it gets, capping at 98 cents. Plus - like the playground - if you're the cool kid who recommended the band to everyone from the get go, you're account is credited when they all catchup and start racking up the download count. And artists are taking notice; rappers like Busta Rhymes just put out a mixtape on Amie, Aussie dance kids Justice released their latest single, and Lou Reed dropped a couple one-off tracks that aren't on any albums.
"Recognize this code?", the designer next to me flipped open a website he was working on and scrolled through a dozen lines of Flash coding. The minimal commenting, the structure a true coder would launch into a rant about. Yeah it was mine. But the site I hadn't seen before. "I've used your code for two more sites since you gave it to me". For this graphic designer, reusing a generic function to scroll through images was easy. Keep the structure the same, alter the type and colourings, and export. It just worked.
Strangely, in this information age, well commented, reusable code is a tangible asset - saving hundreds of real hours. Sites like DZone Snippets have 10,000 users tagging and submitting snippets. Prototype, for Flash developers, has been running for 7+ years now.
More interestingly, a recent workshop on the Processing language in Barcelona showed another trait of good code. Participants had 6 hours to do a "mod" (modification) of the classic arcade game, Breakout. The catch? No one had ever coded before.
Steph Thirion, who conducted the workshop had the "objective of showing the participants that it is not required to understand code to experiment and play with it." The result? A selection of totally compelling, experimental 'sketches' - as they're called in Processing - which abstract the videogame, reinterpreting it in dozens of ways. Glitchy line drawings fill the screen, green blocks flicker on and off like some pixelated Barnett Newman work, cute Tokyo inspired blocks bounce back and forth playfully. With no restraints to make something functional, and no previous experience with code, the results are inspired.
From pixels to paper, the worldwide FreeCycle network adds a twist to the notion of recycling, providing a network for people to post objects to give away, or things they'd like to have, all for free - it's "all about reuse and keeping good stuff out of landfills." The Auckland network currently has 1782 members, with around 10 posts per day, ranging from desk lamps to paint, electric tooth brushes, and Dungeons/Dragons sourcebooks. For those working with technology hardware or music, items like older computers, laptop hard drives, stereo parts, and printers surface regularly.
The British Council in collaboration with a couple universities is continuing it's Cityscapers studio series this year, open to a variety of practitioners in the arts, architecture, urban planning, design and engineering. Previously held in Rotterdam, Beijing, and Milan, this years studio runs from March to April in Edinburgh. Seeking to provide education and relationships to "build the cities of the future", this particular studio focuses on the relationship between Edinburgh and Glasgow, via projects and practice which are either "macro or micro" in scale. The organisation provides full scholarships for the studio, including travel, daily expenses, and accommodation. New Zealanders can download the application, and read more on how to apply here.
Window is on the hunt for our next Online Curator. Working closely with our two On Site curators, you'll be planning a yearly programme, working with a range of local and international artists, producing shows, maintaining the website, and assisting with publicity. Window's dual programme structure is unique and long-running, being at the forefront of online art for the last 6+ years. We'd like to see the new curator continue this and go further - commissioning work from high profile artists working in the genre, pushing for wider exposure, and integrating with the Onsite programme in innovative ways. You'll have a good awareness of this media space, an ability to collaborate with others, and a range of intermediate digital skills needed to provide support to artists and run a website. The position is on a volunteer basis, requires approximately 5 to 15 hours per week, and is based in Auckland. Interested? Send an application to luke.munn@gmail.com, with some basic information about yourself, experience in the area, your skillset, and your vision for the project.
Billy Apple staged a sound performance at the Auckland Art Gallery yesterday afternoon, filling the usually tranquil Albert Park area with roars and smoke from the "The Billy Apple Historic Racing Collection" - a series of classic British grand prix bikes like the 1962 Norton Manx 500cc, once raced by innovative cycle designer John Britten. Reconfiguring the traditional gallery circuit of Kitchener and Lorne streets as a conceptual track, Apple had notable riders deliver their 20 minute sonic barrage in the 'pit'. Apple has a long engagement with sound in previous works, such as Severe Tropical Storm at Window, in which an extended 'soundtrack' was composed from data sourced from a fateful voyage on a freight liner. The usual generic throttle sounds were replaced with a range of throaty roars, pops, and piercing buzzes - demonstrating different attributes of each bike, and reinforcing the artist's statement that "the difference between the AJS and Norton is like the difference between a trumpet and a trombone."
Hye Rim Lee recently sent word about new work in the Art Basel Miami Beach show - the US counterpart to the parent show in Switzerland. "My 3 new work Crystal City, a digital print series 1, (c-type print, 72 inch x 72 inch), Candyland, a series of digital print (70 cm x 70 cm, c-type print) will be at Art Miami Basel, Kukje Gallery stand." Lee showed earlier in the year here in Auckland at Stark White gallery, before heading off to a residency in New York.
While United Visual Artists produce ambitious, mammoth installations for artists like the Chemical Brothers (shown above), you can respond to music and sound with some simple Flash code.
With the advent of version 9 of the software, Adobe has introduced a spectrograph tool, capable of reading and responding to the various EQ changes in a song. This enables rich feedback - scripts for example could show deep purple for base heavy techno, and a light pink line for a high-pitched opera sonata. Programmers have responded with an array of experiments, sound toys, and visualisers like the ones from this competition on The Flash Blog.
The only problem is that live sound, either from a microphone or the input on a computer, doesn't have this ability. Programmers are restricted to responding to basic volume changes, which although simple, can still be compelling. From a dozen lines of code....
// construct mic object import flash.events.ActivityEvent; import flash.events.StatusEvent; import flash.media.Microphone; var mic:Microphone = Microphone.getMicrophone();
Opening on Friday at Window Online and On Site, thought we'd give you a sneak preview of "Interpulsator", a screensaver-based work by Annie Bradley. Coming to life when the system becomes idle, the piece embraces some of the conventions of the medium, while ignoring others - installing itself as traditional software but then 'failing' to save, allowing parts of the screen to burn in because the pixels are never refreshed. Annie provides additional tangents on her show page, ranging from the first digital watch to time-keeping stars (Pulsars) and hardware diagrams of LEDs. Available for PC or Macintosh systems.
An absorbing sound emanated from Cross St Studios in Auckland on Friday night, heard by the lucky bunch who attended the CD release of Compact Listen, from the label CLaudia.
The launch included a night of performances from three of the groups included on the CD compilation, which surveys some of New Zealand's recent audio explorers.
Praise be to Tim Coster and Nigel Wright who were first up. They lulled their audience with a perfect parabola of noise, a nice complement to sipping shared beers and sitting on a cushion.
Nigel Wright and Tim Coster. (Apologies to the artists for poor sound in the recording)
Rosy Parlane also produced some wonderfully complicated sounds from his laptop, his music is like wine that gets discussed in terms of its full bodies and citrusy tangs. Yum.
Sweetcakes--an ensemble of three wooden percussive instruments, a drum kit and a laptop--came together to produce a sound that had an air of a 1960s after dinner improv session, plus laptop, although sadly without the visible or audible enjoyment associated, providing an eclectic cap to the night.
