Archive for February, 2011

Thelivingeffect Panel

Tuesday, February 22nd, 2011

On Saturday 29 January, I attended a panel discussion held by the Ottawa Art Gallery in conjunction with the exhibition The Living Effect. The exhibition and the panel discussion were the result of the research, effort and connections of curator Caroline Seck Langill (although she wasn’t alone and the support of many others was mentioned).

A small caveat before I begin: This was only my second week in Ottawa. I had no idea I would be writing this for you and I did not turn up prepared. I admit wasn’t the most attentive listener at times. I sometimes let my mind wander a bit. I didn’t take notes. So the following account is inevitably patchy.

The premise of the panel discussion was humongous: art and science / technology. Such broad topical terrain seems to be a feature of discussions centered on more ‘fringe’ endeavors – new media art, as it is presently known, included. This is not to say the material presented was not engaging, it was just…wide ranging.

Three of the four advertised panelists spoke for 15-20 minutes about their practises, their perception of the intersection between art and science and technology, as well as the history and problems of new media art. Each presentation plotted a different tangent, with only occasional overlap.

Steve Daniels presented a wonderful little vignette by way of introduction to his former life as a scientist. We all ooohed appropriately as we zoomed in on colony of white pelicans.The colony is so populous their combined mass is visible on google earth, appearing to the untrained eye as a snow-capped point. Daniels spent numerous years studying these birds (was it 5?…7?…10 years? I can’t remember). But his burgeoning interest in the communication between individuals in the colony and his frustration with the limits of what science deems as knowledge, spurred him to flee the science scene in a hurry, with a vow never to return.

Now, time has passed and Daniels has revised his stance on the relationship of art and science. A diagram by Rich Gold, serves as a simple distillation of Daniels’ present perception of the interconnection of art, science, design and engineering. I wish I had taken a pen as I try to remember it for you:

Having come to reconcile both the artist and scientist within, Daniels has created his colony of light sensitive and communicative robots. A species somewhere between spider and a sea anemone, his creatures are rooted to the gallery wall. Their three spindly tendrils unfurl when you cast a shadow over them and they can communicate information about their encounters with their peers. Daniels encourages an anthropomorphic reading of his robots, as he explains how he programmed them to exhibit fear of visitors and their shadows. This loops around to Seck Langill’s quotation of Simon Penny in her curatorial text: “Why do we want our machines to appear alive?” For Daniels, he sees his project as an examination of communication, a sort of study in group behavior.

Steve Daniels, Sessile, 2008

Nell Tenhaaf provided us with historical insight through a discussion of a few works by of colleagues who have been experimenting with technology since the early 80’s. A group of names that would no doubt be familiar to those fluent in Candadian new media art. Only one name was familiar to me: David Rokeby, who’s iconic interactive sound installation Very Nervous System was on exhibition at the Carlton University Gallery at the same time.

Tenhaaf, provided us with nuggets of insight into her practice and the practices of her fellow compatriots who have enlisted the help of scientists and other miscellaneous geeks to create their work. She spoke of the slow evolution of a common language with her collaborator programmer Melanie Baljko and how useful it can be for artists to adopt and learn the jargon of scientists as a shortcut and bridge to this knowledge.

She also touched on a broader alignment of new media art: the way that a striving for novelty is a double edged sword; it propels exploration but also leads to pigeonholing by institutions. New media works are selected to help tick the box on media diversity and are never the subject of thorough or serious investigation by the history producing engines, galleries, critics, historians, museums…

Ryan Stec was the only panelist not an artist exhibiting in The Living Effect. He also pointed out to us that he was also the only non-academic/teacher on the panel. He approached the topic from his point of view as Artistic Director of artengine. His presentation was entitled ‘The problem of the prototype’ (or alliterated words to that effect) and he raised some of the issues around the intersection of the art world and those creatively exploring technology.

Stec pointed out that museums and galleries are often ill-equipped to display and conserve technology based work that often involves the customisation of tools and interfaces. He also posed the question where do we belong, us who experiment with technology stretching the creative boundaries of machines, formulas and processes? Perhaps the art world is not the place for us?

Many of his questions, I would argue, are similar to those posed by artists who feel external to the art mainstream, but are therefore, defined in relation or opposition to the mainstream. Looking back to the recent history of video art would dredge up similar problems and questioning. This type of work has been done by theorist Lev Manovich in his book The Language of New Media. Here he traces some of these historical patterns that digital media repeat in order to separate these from its developments.

Stec went on to speak of some exciting work being done in the circles he revolves in, where experimentation with tools and process is valued over products. One example he offered was a piece of software designed by GRL (Graffiti Research Labs). Their software was designed to enable public to create drawings that would then be projected onto the sides of large, public buildings. Stec was disappointed that this ‘democratising’ of media and the means of expression did not prevoke diverse or challenging statements from the public. Instead, most people, wrote their name or drew large penises.

Tenhaaf and Daniels suggested that one of the reasons behind a lack of quality engagement could be a problem they have seen with many new media works where the users have a limited understanding of the interface and it’s programming. They coined this the problem of expert verses novice users. Those who create or design a system or tool have an intimate working knowledge of its structure. Users approaching the system fresh may lack even some basic assumptions required to interact, or they will fall into repetitive or habitual forms of interaction. Although, abstracted out I would say that this divide between proficient and novice speakers of visual languages stretches across the entire art world.

Questions from the floor, as always is with these things, were thematic offshoots. One audience member posed the question of what queer technology would look like. Seck Langill responded that this was still fluid terrain and that Faculty of Art at OCAD University had just established a laboratory for LBGTQ students and teachers to explore this. Seck Langill posed a question for another of the exhibiting artists Marie-Jeanne Musiol who was present in the audience, asking about her experience of working with scientists on her photographs. Musiol expressed a dismay at the lack of interest expressed by scientists in her visual representations of their data. There was a tangled little question, the gist of which I think was somewhere along the lines of ‘It made sense to turn to artists to understand technology in the era of 80’s computer graphics, because this was a visual language. But, what business do artists have poking there noses further into science? The general consensus was that the door was opened to art and artistic exploration in the more applied and hybrid sciences. But that line between pure art and pure sciences is still very clearly defined.

Well. I’m surprised I was able to dredge even this much out of my memory. What I took away from the whole discussion was a sense that the course new media art is heading is both familiar and new. There is thar ever present need to validate the arts as a legitimate and valuable enterprise when compared to the sciences. Can it resist designs to use as a tool for social engineering or activism, in an age where web 2.0 is dominating our social and political lives? How can artists resist the mainstream, the museum, the market and still get recognition and a paycheck, especially in the age of digital reproduction? How can artists make their work more relevant to a wider public, particularly when they are extending the vocabulary of new media? These are all questions artists throughout the ages have struggled with, now with a digital spin.

For those wanting a more un-biased and complete record of the event check out the OAG website for a video recording of the discussion, soon to be posted.

Jaenine Parkinson

Grosse machine

Thursday, February 17th, 2011

Avant tout, je trouve que les deux humains étés “bon sport“. En deuxième lieu, toutes choses considérées, ils se sont assez bien débrouillés. Lors d’un match de Jeopardy jeudi dernier ils ont affronté un ordinateur de la grosseur de 10 frigos, équivalant à 200 millions de pages d’informations (ayant absorbé dictionnaires, encyclopédies, livres, scénarios de films…) et, surtout, pouvant répondre sous forme d’une question. Pour moi il y avait pas grand chose de fascinant d’un ordi possédant tant d’information et pouvant correctement répondre à des questions. J’étais dans les patates. Voici donc l’essentiel du fruit de ma recherche de 22 secondes: C’est IBM qui sur 4 ans, et grâce à une équipe d’à travers le monde, cré “Watson”; un jour cette technologie pourrait servir aux médecins pour trier des tonnes d’informations pour des diagnostics; avant de répondre, Watson devait comprendre et analyser la question (par exemple déterminer des jeux de mots), filtrer toutes ses infos pour trouver la solution et décider si oui ou non la réponse choisie valait le risque.

Je vous ai manqué,
Crystal Doré

some notes from transmediale 11

Monday, February 14th, 2011

Earlier this month I attended parts of the transmediale 11 festival in Berlin, and I thought I would share some of the ideas and discussions I encountered during my festival meanderings, on subjects like freedom, power, knowledge, privacy and openness…all tied to the main theme of the festival itself: Response:ability. Here are some notes on some of what I saw and heard…

Mozilla’s Mark Surman, in his Marshall McLuhan lecture, focused on the idea of freedom as a framework for talking about the web. Mark has adapted Richard Stallman’s four freedoms (to run, study, redistribute and use software) to his own version of use, study, remix, share. He argued that this type of freedom, the freedom of open-endedness, of something never finished, is built into the fabric of the web itself, it is an inherent quality ‘baked in’. Or in other words, “the web sez ‘build me’”. Like Lego!

Lego bricks by bdesham on flickr
[Lego bricks by B Desham (bdesham on flickr)]

This open-endedness and the freedom to develop without asking permission is what fuels rapid innovation, benefiting grass roots organizations, global capital and anyone else who builds off of the tools and standards available for adaptation and reuse. We cannot take for granted these inherent freedoms, and Mark believes that we are now at an important point in time where decisions must be made about how all of this will continue to work and how freedom will continue to be built into the web. Using the example of the history of innovation and decision making in cinema, he pointed to one way in which Mozilla is trying to ensure continued web freedom: their Popcorn project which uses the native video handling of HTML5 to develop “hypervideo” tools to integrate video with content from just about any other web source. Mozilla also sponsored the first Open Web Award at transmediale this year, which went to the Evan Roth’s Graffiti Markup Language (GML) project.
Some links:
http://www.webmonkey.com/2010/08/mozillas-popcorn-project-adds-extra-flavor-to-web-video/
http://webmademovies.etherworks.ca/popcorndemo/
http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2011/02/07/first-transmediale-open-web-award/

Wikipedia Art
I had the opportunity to interview Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern, whose ‘Wikipedia Art’ project was nominated for the transmediale award. I have transcribing and editing to do and will post the complete interview online when it is ready. Their project interested me because it takes as its source ‘material’ Wikipedia itself, it’s culture and the power structures that drive it. Through an intervention which took the form of a Wikipedia article and the ensuing discussion and documentation surrounding it Nathaniel and Scott have brought into question the mechanisms of knowledge production, the pursuit of truth and objectivity and the perceived authority of Wikipedia. Their project seemed to push a lot of buttons, provoking some heated debate of whether to keep the page in Wikipedia or not and whether it was in fact an act of vandalism. While Scott and Nathaniel are both proclaimed fans of Wikipedia, they hope that their project revealed the need for greater media literacy in the use of this resource.
http://wikipediaart.org/
Recent NY Times article about Wikipedia gender gap

Google street view

Tackling the issues surrounding privacy online, Mushon Zer-Aviv presented a talk called “Getting Intimate with Invisible Audiences” in which he spoke about the privacy debate and the binary opposition it promotes between public and private poles of what should actually be a spectrum of more complex concepts, like confidentiality and intimacy. This binary opposition both dumbs down social interaction online and taints privacy with suspicion – if you have nothing to hide, why do you need to keep information private? He talked about Danah Boyd’s idea of the invisible audience as a characteristic of mediated publics and the way in which the resulting state of visibility can both assure the functioning of power in public spaces, and yet also become a means of publishing. In his conclusion, Mushon highlighted the importance of not only defining the protocols for interaction in these new mediated publics, but of defining the culture that will allow a broader spectrum of relationships to exist in them.
I highly recommend reading the details of his talk, which are available here: http://mushon.com/blog/2010/09/21/getting-intimate-with-invisible-audiences/

The Haters
The Haters

At the sister festival, club transmediale (CTM) I went to see a performance called “Loud Luggage / Booming Baggage” by GX Jupitter-Larsen (The Haters). This performance is documented on his website as follows: “On Feb 2, GX Jupitter-Larsen squeezed an amplified toy shovel against an amplified suitcase. (#358).” I was with a friend, at the back of a small crowded room. My friend, who is taller than me, was trying to take a photo and I asked him if he could see anything. A woman nearby replied “You don’t need to see, it is a sound performance.” I thought this comment was interesting given the CTM festival theme of #LIVE!? and the many different and illusive things that ‘live’ can mean in electronic music and sound performances. In the stage performances of the Haters, the emphasis is more on the action taking place rather than on the creation of sound for it’s own sake, so in not being able to see anything I felt I was missing something integral. Hopefully I will have a future opportunity to both see and hear a Haters performance.
http://jupitter-larsen.com/

Transmediale – Days 5 + 6

Monday, February 7th, 2011

Self-Projector

One of the pieces that I had missed earlier on in the festival that I was really glad I finally got around to seeing was a self-reflexive projector – sitting on a tripod and surrounded by mirrors, it reprojected a grid of its own dimensions back onto its own body. Unfortunately, I forgot the artists name, thinking that I could look it up online, but have not been able to find it anywhere on the TM site… and I barely found it in the venue; I needed to have someone expressly show it to me, as it was off in some side room.

Immediated Autodocumentary

I managed to sneak into the roughcut screening of the Future Of Art by KS12/emergence collective, who produce what they call ‘immediated autodocumentaries’ at festivals and other events. This one focused on new ways of working, the digital avant-garde, and the crowd-sourcing of the content itself, all harvested, shot, and edited during the course of the festival. They raised some really fascinating questions (and crowd-sourced the answers), and I think are really leading the way in collaborative filmmaking.

Facebook Resistance

A huge theme all Festival.. Seppukkoo.com, a ritual virtual suicide, shut down. Face to Facebook, served a cease and desist letter from Herr Zuckerberg’s lawyers during the Festival. 4chan and their decentralized meme madness. Wikipedia Art (ok, not facebook, but same idea) almost getting shut down for a virtual project that had become real. FFFFFAT Labs and their Facebook Resistance workshop (hot tip: dislike button and multiple partners coming soon!). I guess that’s why he was person of the year… but it was a bit much.

CineChamber

I was a little disappointed in this. For those of you who don’t know, the CineChamber was a permanent immersive a/v theatre in San Francisco for the last few years, made by RML, and Club Transmediale was the first time in what promises to be a lengthy tour of the infrastructure. From the looks of it, they need to iron out some kinks. There were way too many shows (and expensive at that), which from what I heard, really affected the tech schedule, and negatively impacted a lot of live acts rehearsal time, and subsequent performance. The edge blending on the projectors could have used a few more tries as well. But the performances themselves were good. Jeffers Egan and Mimicof was really nice, even with the technical difficulties. But the prerecorded After Effects videos being played as part of the really expensive live programme ….???…. not so into that.

CTM needs a squat

Because I’m sick of going to see really important DJ’s and live acts and not being able to even move because the mega-clubs are full of 19-year old British tourists and drunk, chachi Russians (?! did I just write that?!). There’s enough space in this city to find a special, secret location, so that people who are here for the festival can actually pay attention, or even dance if they wanted to.

Awards Fiasco

One more thing… I’m not Evan Roth. I’ve been saying this since 2008, at Nuit Blanche. Now immabout ready to gets me a shirt madeup, because I had to go onstage during the awards ceremony and accept the Graffiti Markup Language award, read his speech, and hold an iPad with his picture on it in front of my face during the press photos. I wish it was an Android tablet… sorry Evan… blame Mozilla. But you should definitely check out thimbl and Booki, the other two projects nominated for that award… great stuff.

I was a little surprised that the House of Natural Fibers won the main award – they brew bacteria then make music with it, and then drink it ! – mainly because I didn’t see any theoretical framework about their work coming from them, but it seemed that everyone supplied it for them. Not to demean the project at all, I think it’s great, but it just came as a surprise. And the ginger bacteria tasted great. Not sure if that qualifies as Veganer, as they say over here, but some things we just have to try…

Again, I don’t know that anyone had any idea about the work nominated for the Flusser Theory award – why can’t they make this stuff readable on an internet terminal, or a reading room at the festival? – but I’m sure Jordan Crandall’s was very dense and forward-thinking. I mean, it must have been, he won right? EDIT: my bad. he read it live on Wednesday.

Ok ok ok… I promise to add weblinks and some pictures in the next day or two… time to sleep, and eat some real food.

Transmediale – Days 3 + 4

Saturday, February 5th, 2011

The daytime schedule has really ramped up at the festival, thanks in part to Open Design City’s insistence on putting the open back into the open zone, filling up all the empty space and slots by turning the festival into a large barcamp. To the festival’s credit, they have seemed to embrace this.

Their’s been a lot of guerilla performances happening over the last few days – musicians and visualists plugging themselves in to empty speakers and beamers, and just having at it, which is really nice to see.  I wish I knew if every Transmediale was like this, as it seems very ‘Berlin’… the aforementioned Open Design City has set up a tent which they rent out for 10-minute sprints, and also have a person walking around in a giant photo-booth construction, which has a lot of people really confused as to whether it is humanic or robotic, not to mention where to find information about it in the program.

Perhaps my favourite project is the kom:post collective who have a wanted & for sale office setup directly across from the official information booth, except that they look a lot more imposing and eye-catching than the real thing, so they are getting a lot of questions by first-time visitors, to which they are happy to oblige. They are also serving as a nexus point for audio tours, where you can do a guided tour, offer to lead a guided tour, record your own audio tour, or rent anyone else’s tour. I listened to two in succession – the first attempting to give a Flusserian reading of the work, the next simply saying “shit, shit, boring, awesome, pretty but banal, shit….”.

Last night (Friday) held my two most anticipated performances (at least considering I’d already missed People Like Us), by Daito Manabe and Kode + SpaceApe. Unfortunately, in order to see Daito, whose work I’ve been following with lust and bemusement for what seems like decades, I had to sit through a long film screening by Herman Kolgen. Part of the Live:Response night, this was a 45-minute, over After-Effected, beautiful-but-vapid piece that featured a naked – except for one shoe – Japanese man repeatedly falling into a pool, eating pomegranates, wearing a squid hat, and vomiting large ginger roots, all underwater, all in slow motion. Beautifully shot, composited, and scored, but that’s about it.

But seeing Daito – joined onstage with Ei Wada, aforementioned in my last post, made up for it all, with his myoelectric sensor performance. If you don’t know this piece, I assure you, it’s something only the Japanese could do (which I mean with the most sincere amount of respect and awe), where they attach electrical wires to their face, and as they run a Max/MSP patch, different sounds also send out triggers to the wires, so that certain muscles of the face are triggered in perfect sync with the music. It was really interesting to see Daito do it to himself alongside Ei, who obviously wasn’t so used to it, and had a hard time relaxing, which made the crowd empathize with him very much.

Unfortunately, the festival in its infinite wisdom decided to put Kode 9 on at the exact same time halfway across town, which they decided to mention only in the opening remarks of this piece (they had not published any times beforehand), so while everyone was assuming that they could safely get over to the HyperDub master’s night at any time of the night (considering it was at Berghain, one of the legendary all-night clubs in Berlin), we all missed him because he played at 9pm. I have yet to find a single person that actually saw him, as I think that move took everyone by surprise, and most of Berlin habitually doesn’t show up at Berghain until after 3… but regardless, when we finally got there, the night was still going strong, with dark, moody dubstep of the highest order on the club’s formidable bass bins. Extra special was the fact that I got to wander up a set of stairs and see Vincent Lemieux, of Mutek fame.

I’ve just arrived at HKW, and lost my spot in Daito’s workshop because I was 5 minutes late, so I think I’m going to go listen to some body politics roundtable and try to fall asleep 😉

~ J

Transmediale – Days 1 + 2

Thursday, February 3rd, 2011

OK, get ready for the daily rushes!

Apologies in advance, still no pictures 🙂 … im writing this from my phone … maybe i’ll  save the pictures until the post-festival-post.

Some quick notes:

Much of the talk the last few days has been the general agreement on the underwhelming aspect of the opening remarks, as a lot of people where none too happy to be made to sit through what they thought was the wrong aesthetic choice (and much too long at that).

The 1992 Wilhelm Flusser (sp) hypertext piece (with involvement from Canadian Baruch Gottlieb, and installed on an Apple II) really makes me happy. Reynold Reynolds Secret Trilogy, a set of video installations, is visually the most appealing work I’ve seen yet, with some really beautiful images, discrete soundtrack, and beatufil sense of movement and pacing. Im happy for the Wikipedia Art piece from Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern, which seems to be a real work now, having been exhibited, and has come out of the virtual in the real.

The HackAWay zone is a little perplexing, split between mic’ed fluids and breathalyzers feeding sound synthesis, and desks where you can forge money and design fashion lines for somali pirates. But it has a certain charm. Im excited to see Ei Wada’s performance Braun Tube Jazz Band, which I anticipate will be a little like the Tsvesteroy (sp?) piece at Electric Fields a few years back.

The Open Signs exhibit in the Marshall McLuhan lounge at the Canadian Embassy last night was a little odd. Featuring work by Mouna Andraos & Melissa Mongiat, Ben Bogart, Brett Gaylor, MetaNet, Alexandre Castonguay, the memelab (in collaboration with Nathan Jonson, Trevor Larson, and Ottawa’s own Ross Birdwise), and Brandon Ballengee, a lot of the pieces sat in a weird spot vis-a-vis each other, but kudos to curator Heather Kelley for being able to bring the concept of ‘the open’ out of its closet, and present a lot of variations on that theme. The vernissage was, as I said, a little odd, replete with speeches, security concerns, 200 people rushing in after the talk by Mozilla director Mark Surman, then leaving once they had devoured all the caviar, no Canadian Artists receiving an artist fee (despite Canada Council funding), and free wine (confirmed: from Ontario. unconfirmed: vintage a’la Dan Akroyd), and then me being kicked out – as the last man standing – a full 45 minutes before it was scheduled to close. Yes, thats right, I shut down the Mcluhan bar.

Afterwards, the Canadian contingent of Melissa, Mouna, Alexandre, Mirae, and I went to Festaal Kreuzberg to listen to a night of music from Australian label Room40 and Jan Jelinek’s new imprint Faitiche , and it was packed. Unfortunately we missed Jan himself, but I was delighted to be able to see Tujiko Noriko, a Japanese avant-vocalist who produces subtle beats, cut-ups, and chopped melodies, while managing to be so cute and Japanese, saying ‘danke schon’ and nodding after each song, then pausing to readjust her hair berets. Her backing band, John Chantler and Lawrence English both played solo sets beforehand, and I’m not sure which one was which, but the first one – playing live electronics out of a suticase – was a little underwhelming, while the second – twisting knobs and controlling software, had a really menacing, throbbing element tho his sound that had me happily lost. Unfortunately, the sound system was a little weak the whole night, and the rock-show spotlights and fog machine detracted more than anything…

I’m just arriving at the House Of World Cultures now, and it’s really busy, with workshops and book launches and breakout presentations happening all over the space… will let you know more about this tomorrow!

~ J

Agent Scott at Transmediale

Wednesday, February 2nd, 2011

Dear all y’all,

Jesse Scott here. As some of you know, I’ve recently relocated to Berlin, and I’m fortunate enough to have two pieces in Transmediale this year, so it was with pleasure when Ryan asked if I can give some news and reviews from the front lines (*ahem*) of the genre formerly known as New Media…

So i’ll be dropping something most every night/morning for the next week. Apologies for no pictures or hyperlinks on this post… promise I’ll be more organized for tomorrow!

Day 0

So I’m sitting here at the HKW, just having gotten an earful from the German bureaucrats… (more on that later). The space, with rather odd – not-quite-open architecture, is starting to take shape. Lots of screens. Fair bit of sound bleed (though that may just be final level setting, and hustle…) The last few days haven’t been so stressful, but it’s a little hard to keep track of the general feel of the coming festival… seems like i’m just reliving the hours i spent pouring over the website in my head…

Trending and Lending

Due to the theme, I’m not quite surprised to see so many social projects, particularly ones that seem to question the roles and use of technology itself, but it does seem odd, in a way that I cant quite put my finger on, to see so many lo-tech and offline projects at Transmediale. But this year seems like corporeal bodies, net-(not-quite)-activism, and anything to do with money/exchange/economies is fair game. We’ve already accepted a commission laser stencil for fake artist money, traded documentation, and participated in a diy kitchen/beer collective, and we haven’t even opened the doors. I was talking to one participating artist who commented that Transmediale has always had a sense of evolution to it, while, for example, Ars Electronica seems to be stuck on showcasing robotics year after year…

No Laser, No Cry

One of the projects I am involved in this year is SVG2BVG, by Graffiti Research Lab Germany. This consists of a drawing surface for graffiti tags, a Processing-based capture application, and export to GCode, so that the tag can be laser-cut as a stencil, which happen to be perfectly sized for the advertising screens in the Berlin U-bahn…

The complication that we ran into today is the certification of the laser (it is a 1-watt blue led, taken from a DLP projector) is invalid in the eyes of German bureaucrats because it has been repurposed from it’s original situation and housing. So, at the moment at least, until we work with the festival to figure something else out, we have what seems to be one of the most popular, interactive projects put high and dry…

But we’ve managed to quickly source a button machine from our friends at Open Design City, and have printed dozens of pro-and-anti laser icons, so we seem to have started a groundswell of 1-inch protest…

Transit Strike

Our friend Alexandre Castonguay is currently suffering massive transit problems with his installation at Open Signs (which i’ll say more about tomorrow), so we hope that he’ll be able to get something working for that. Apparently there was miscommunication between the shipper and the embassy.. but I don’t’ know details, besides that the box had ended up in Weisbaden this morning. He says next time he’s exhibiting from a USB key.

Home Base

Alexandre was also telling me about the Dorkbot Berlin event at cBase last night, where there was a pre-show-and-tell of a lot of the more geeky projects last night, which I was invited to speak at but had to decline… but we started talking about the recently-announced Pure Data Convention in Weimar/Berlin, which I am also helping to organize. I also coined the hashtage for that – #PDC11. Original, I know. Just thought I’d mention that quick, as you only have 4 weeks to get project funding from Canada Council! (maybe the entire PdMtl/2008 team – including Artengine – should apply for a larger delegation-based fund…. ???)

Ok, the doors are opening… bis morgen.

~ J

Percussion Afternoon

Tuesday, February 1st, 2011

It was an intimate setting for Jesse Stewart’s solo percussion performance at CUAG last Saturday afternoon.  A hushed crowd gathered in the gallery space where David Rokeby’s interactive sound installation Very Nervous System is currently set up and Stewart, a local percussionist, curator, visual artist, and professor at Carleton University, entranced us with his improvised beats for the better part of an hour.

The performance was incredibly varied and Stewart’s use of unconventional materials and instruments had me fascinated throughout.  The set up was fairly minimal: one snare drum in the centre, one cymbal, and then a picnic-like selection of tools and props including various types of drumsticks, brushes and mallets, a handkerchief, a small aluminium bowl, and – best of all – a couple of little panda bear drummer toys, the old tin kind that you wind up in the back and let go.

The panda drummers opened the show, starting off on the drumhead clapping and jerking forward awkwardly, eventually making their way out towards the audience and into the purview of the camera set up for Rokeby’s installation, which caused a surge of low rumbles from the speakers.  This interaction with Rokeby’s VNS was unlike anything I’ve seen before.  Any trespass on VNS’s territory, whether it was a wave of Stewart’s arm or the wooden clicks of two drumsticks together, resulted in an audible response from the installation.

VNS was on one hand treated as an instrument, forming a part of the chorus of percussive elements composed by Stewart, but it also seemed to have an autonomous character – to function as a musician on its own.  This was not so much a solo performance as it was a duet between Jesse Stewart and the computerized personification of David Rokeby.

In the spirit of true experimentation and improvisation, even Stewart could not anticipate the exact reactions that the intuitive installation would have.  At one point in the performance, Stewart was playing the waterphone (which we will get to later) and was trying to coax a specific reaction out of VNS, namely, the sound of water trickling.  The first two attempts were successful, Stewart mimicked filling his cupped palms with water and VNS reacted to these movements with soft swishing sounds.  On the third attempt, he cupped his palm and recreated his movements in the exact same space as he had just moments ago, but silence followed.  Again he tried – silence.  He paused, tried once more, and an unruly growl emerged from the speakers.  Stewart looked quizzically at the audience for a quick instant, which provoked a burst of laughter, and then the performance continued.  Such are the difficulties of manipulating an ‘instrument’ which is both invisible and intangible, and exists in a space of unclear boundaries.

Outside of the collaboration with VNS, the performance was buoyant and exciting, showcasing Stewart’s sage-like knowledge of percussion and his innovative techniques using alternative instruments and musical tools.  The handkerchief was placed over the drumhead to create dynamic fluctuation, and lent a softness and roundness to the sound, while the aluminium bowl held a small hard object, which was swirled around in order to create a metallic buzzing that resonated down my spine.  I found the whole experience surprisingly physical as I could feel each quick snap on the drumhead and all of the tinny accents on the rim pulsing up through the soles of my feet.

Maybe I was getting a little too lost in the performance, but I started thinking about musical rhythms and their biological counterparts (heartbeats, breathing patterns, etc…) and how inherent the enjoyment of percussion is to being human.  The wonderful thing about Jesse Stewart’s performance was that it led me to unpack what I was hearing and look at music from a different perspective, but without all of the trappings of a New Age-y bongo drum circle.  Stewart’s presentation was professional, nuanced, and refreshingly modern.  Freed from the restrictions of conventional music (lyrics, melody, a single sustained tempo), the performance was a welcome detox from the mainstream hyperactive synth-pop sugar high that I embarrassingly indulge in now and then.

The highlight, however, was the not panda toy cameo, nor the Rokeby collaboration, but the mysterious and ethereal-sounding waterphone (pictured above right).  The instrument was invented by Richard Waters, and combines a base/chamber that holds water and stainless steel rods that can be played with the fingers, a bow, or mallet.  You can read up on it on Waters’ website and a quick You Tube search yields tons of videos of skilled (and a few unskilled) waterphonists in action.  Stewart’s mastery of the strange instrument was thrilling to watch.  The water in its chamber could be heard sloshing gently around, and the bow vibrating against the steel released dark moans, bottomless echoes, and vibrato hums that were otherworldly.  The sounds produced were horror film-worthy; both alluring and unsettling, and seemed almost too robust and multidimensional to be coming from such a modest instrument.  So the next time I have $1500 kicking around and several years to master an instrument, I think it’s going to be the waterphone – I’m completely intrigued!

In summation: a super interesting and unique performance by Jesse Stewart and a successful Saturday afternoon!

Nancy Webb