Abandoning any attempt at continuity or chronological order, here's another project from a while back that really should have been posted here months ago! Synchresis is a DVD I curated for the Australian Network for Art and Technology late last year; it's a survey of Australian audiovisual practice, with an emphasis on "fused" or "synaesthetic" AV - a niche where the Australian scene is very strong. The DVD features work by Jean Poole, Andrew Gadow, Robin Fox, Gordon Monro, Wade Marynowsky, Abject Leader, Pix + Delire, Ian Andrews and Botborg.
Below is the essay,"Monsters and Maps," that I wrote for the project. It introduces the works on the disc but also touches on some more abstract thoughts about synchresis, synaesthesia, cross-modal perception, the map, and audiovisual practice.
This DVD isn't available retail-wise, unfortunately; it was distributed with ANAT's Filter magazine to their members. However I have a bundle of copies that I'm happy to send out, especially if you're interested in writing a review - let me know. Otherwise, read on for the essay; you can also grab the whole Filter issue as a pdf (3.2Mb).
Sound and video are, on the face of it, the most unremarkable ingredients in the new media arts. Compared to smart textiles, bio-art, data visualisation or locative media, sound and moving image seem almost archaic. Yet as the work documented in this edition of Filter shows, these materials are anything but obsolete. This body of work reflects a dynamic practice, and one that has emerged in recent years as a real Australian strength. It's not video art, though it has been known to fly that label as a flag of convenience; if anything its ties are closer to sound and music. What distinguishes it is that it focuses on, to recycle another archaic word, the audiovisual. The relation between sound and image, and especially, in digital culture, the set of possible relations between sound and image, is central here. The soundtrack, largely neglected in video art, is amplified; the moving image, taken for granted as "content" in an era of desktop video, is obliterated into sheer texture, or synthesised from scratch. Most importantly, sound and image fuse into new, tightly articulated wholes; they are cross-wired, cut or moulded into blocks of something like raw sensation.
As the writings here show, this practice crosses, and links, diverse scenes and cultures; it draws on video and sound art, experimental music and improv, computer music and experimental film, live video and the VJ scene. It also reflects in part a rich historical tradition of abstract animation and "visual music", as well as a specifically Australian history of audiovisual practice; Stephen Jones' video work with Severed Heads looms large. But at the core of this collection is a focus on the point of audiovisual fusion - the moment of synchresis - and as I hope to explain below, that point of fusion, and the relation it describes, has a particular significance in digital media culture.
On the screen, pixels shift, a dark void moves, opening and closing. The speakers vibrate; pulses and lumps of tone and pitch, flecks of air and noise; a voice. The void belongs to a face; and the lumps, stops and pulses from the speaker meet in time with the openings and closings of the mouth. We sense a correlation, a tight coincidence between these disparate events, and we recognise, involuntarily, a common cause that seems to link them. A newsreader enunciates the headlines: her image and her voice, separated at the point of capture, technically distinct and independent in the video signal, re-embodied by different means, are finally reunited in our perception.
This is synchresis, in its everyday form: lip-sync, the perceptual trick at the representational core of screen culture. Film sound theorist Michel Chion, who coined the term, defined synchresis as "the spontaneous and irresistible weld produced between a particular auditory phenomenon and visual phenomenon when they occur at the same time" (see Chion, Audio/Vision) Lip sync is its most ubiquitous form, but as Chion shows there are many others. The cinematic punch, what Chion calls the "emblematic synch point," shows how synchresis can be fabricated, how a sound effect guarantees an event that "we haven't had time to see" - but also an event that, in fact, never occurred.
The audiovisual cliche of the punch also hints at the wider potential of this audiovisual fusion. As Chion observes, synchresis works even with "images and sounds that strictly speaking have nothing to do with each other, forming monstrous yet inevitable and irresistable agglomerations in our perception." With the perceptual impetus of synchronisation, anything will glue to anything, and in the process new, sometimes monstrous wholes are constructed. Scratch video, Milli Vanilli, and more recently the YouTube-powered renaissance in video ventriloquism have all demonstrated this at one level. Yet these cutups rely on synchresis reinforcing the cinematic representation of a body, a source, a redundant, all-too-obvious shared cause. The audiovisual practice presented here offers some powerful alternatives.
Ian Andrews' Spectrum Slice (above) is constructed on a temporal grid - a field of tripwires that trigger Chion's monstrous agglomerations. The video track is chaotically intercut, but the edits are locked to the grid's pulse. The same pulse structures the audio track, as Andrews punches live radio samples into a loop. Tiny, random chunks of degraded video and radio noise weld into new units. But in this recombinant cutup, staggered loops and refrains also move against each other: synchretic welds are formed and reinforced only to be broken and shifted. We feel synchresis at work; and though it's constantly apparent that sound and image are disparate, the jolt of fusion keeps working. In Spectrum Slice Chion's monsters multiply, are cut into pieces, disintegrate and re-form; a preacher with a fragment of deep talk-radio voice; then a crowd with white noise static, then video static and a snatch of orchestral strings. Associative chains and correlations form between the fragments; between the cosmic, molecular jitter of audio and visual noise, and faces in a crowd; crowd/audience and preacher/presenter.
Similar chains and networks emerge in Abject Leader's Bloodless Landscape, again created by combinations of synchretic fusion and disjunction; and as in Spectrum Slice, the material signatures of the medium are everywhere. These works take apart the conventional anchor of synchresis - the represented body - but instead create an embodiment of their own media substrates. Sound and image operate in indexical relays that ground media forms in a material continuum: dirt, bubbles, scratches, static, celluloid, light; synchresis becomes haptic, or tactile.
Peter Newman's work intensifies this material quality while dissolving the last fragments of indexical content into incandescent plasma (. The cinematic constituent, the edited shot, is likewise obliterated into long textural dissolves; in a sort of inverse of Spectrum Slice, which trips up synchresis by multiplying the edit, Newman's audiovisual textures tighten their relationship through immersive duration. A flickering, rhythmic synch point binds Rosebud (above) together from the outset; but the synchretic monster here is a single entity; it intensifies as it gradually reveals (or destroys) itself, a tactile or palpable presence.
The monstrous body makes a representational comeback in Wade Marynowsky's work. Like Newman, Marynowsksy uses digital processes to manipulate sound and image into abstraction; but where Newman's video seems to have been worn smooth over years, Marynowsky's retains a hard, self-referential edge. In a post-glitch performance parody, The_Geek_From_Swampy_Creek - another monster - sways gently at his Powerbook, calling up disintegrating images of his wetland home. Unlike most of his peers, Marynowsky puts his own body up as the synchretic anchor, the common cause for sound and image. Jean Poole's floating monkey in Cappadocia Skies is another audiovisual self-construction; author as both witness and performer, using the sure-fire synchresis of music video to re-frame experience and, again, landscape. Cappadocia Skies is also an emblem for a nomadic laptop-video culture; where images and sound are gathered, networked, recombined, processed, filtered, and beamed back into the environment. A kind of distributed, recursive, synchresis machine.
In most cases, synchresis is constructed; sound and image composed and arranged to form these spontaneous welds. However in one important strain of Australian AV, synchresis becomes automatic, inherent; and the synch point, the synchretic moment, is extended and intensified to become all-encompassing. Robin Fox's audiovisual practice began as he connected his laptop audio rig to an old analog oscilloscope. The scope renders audio signal as dynamic image, a phosphorescent trace generated automatically, according to a technically defined translation. The result is an audiovisual instrument; Fox's audio software becomes a sound-and-image-synthesiser. In the resulting work the synchretic weld acquires new power; image and sound are tightly and immediately coupled. The sense that Newman conveys in Rosebud, of an autonomous, coherent AV entity, is extended. There's a sense of something like revelation, as sound-forms unfold: Fox's Immaculate Infection (above) continues to investigate an audiovisual space which is totally self consistent, yet continually surprising.
Andrew Gadow's work approaches the same relation from the other side; his practice is based on rendering synthesised video signals as audio. Using a Fairlight CVI - a pioneering (but now archaic) Australian instrument - Gadow generates visual patterns and forms with an automatic double in modulated buzz-saw sound. Again there is a direct and immediate fusion, an intense coherence behind the abrasive surface of the work. In Gadow's more recent work he has introduced an analog audio synthesiser, creating loops in which video is generated by the CVI, filtered by the audio synth, and returned to video (as in Techne / Auxons, above). Botborg complexify these loops, wiring a video mixer into an unstable, psychotropic feedback system where the elements become indistinguishable; we see-and-hear video-and-sound in varying mixtures and causal relations (below: Principle 4, from their DVD Principles of Photosonicneurokinaesthography).
Synaesthesia offers a promising analogy for these works, as well as an alternative model of audiovisual relations. In synaesthetic perception one modality is automatically and involuntarily translated into another. Synaesthetes may perceive letters, numbers or days of the week as inherently coloured, associate shapes with smells or tastes, or see coloured forms in response to music. The analog crossovers of Fox and Gadow seem to echo the neural cross-wiring thought to cause synaesthesia; in both cases there's an immediate and automatic connection between sound and image. Is this some kind of machine synaesthesia? If so, can we learn it, internalise it and reconfigure our own sensorium? In the fictotheory of Arkady Botborger crosslinked sound and image promise to open "new neural pathways" that expands perception by overwhelming or bypassing our "linguistic centres."
Artificial or induced synaesthesia is possible, but not in a few minutes of AV: it would mean living with, and adapting to, rewired or augmented perception in the long term. An alternative model for these fused audiovisuals is both more realistic and more abstract. Synchresis is perceptually founded on the process of cross-modal binding, where percepts in different modes are "bound" into recognition as a single entity. Binding feels good - some neuroscientists theorise that it activates our limbic pleasure circuits (see Ramachandran and Hirstein, "The Science of Art" [pdf]). Binding is marked subjectively by a flash of recognition, an "a-ha" moment or a sense of noesis, or revelation. Perhaps the affect of tightly fused audiovisual experiences is related to the perceptual process of binding?
What some suggest as an adaptive rationale for cross-modal binding - and the reason it feels good - is its functional role in interpreting our environment. As the newsreader shows us every night, we link sound and image into a functional, coherent model of the environment; we recognise the common cause of these correlated perceptions. Which begs the question, what is that common cause, in the tightly correlated audiovisuals of artists such as Fox and Gadow? Unlike constructed forms of synchresis, in these works a single structure really does cause both sound and image: the signal, the abstract pattern of voltage fluctuations, is what we see-and-hear. The artists literally feel out the domain of the signal; but also, over time, a form more abstract still. Moment by moment we sense the signal's dual manifestations in sound and image; over time, we come to sense the pattern of correspondences between sound and image. This is the map, the relation between the signal domains, which for Fox and Gadow at least is a static, technical artefact.
This map is a space of transformation; it describes how one domain connects with another. Though conceptually abstract, it is completely ubiquitous in contemporary media. Digital media are founded on transformation, for the digital is imperceptible in itself; "digital imaging," "digital video" and "digital sound" are in a sense oxymorons, for what we sense is not the digital, but a mapping of the digital into one or more domains of sensation. These maps are essentially arbitrary, open to change; we can take image data and re-map it into sound, or text; map text into image, or three-dimensional form. If the digital has no inherent manifestation, no necessary relation to our perception, then the question of the aesthetics, or affect, of digital media, is a question of the map. In this context Gadow and Fox do something remarkable, and entirely contemporary, in their cross-wirings of image and sound; they give us a sense, literally, of the map.
Maps may be ready-made, technical artefacts, as they are for Fox and Gadow; or like Chion's synchretic monsters they can be invented, arbitrary, anything-at-all. Gordon Monro's Triangular Vibrations unfolds from a computational model that generates both sound and image, and so invents a distinctive correspondence between sound and image. Here too, cross-modal perceptual cues direct us to the "common cause" here - that computational model. That model - another abstract but ubiquitous figure in digital media - becomes literally sensible; as the system slowly changes it reveals its own logics, its internal patterns of conistency, its boundaries and centers.
Pix and Delire's Fijuu2 navigates a similar space - a computational map between sound and image - but here its exploration is turned over to the user. With a pallette of audiovisual forms and filters, gestural controls and a sequencer, Fijuu2 demonstrates a proliferation of digital maps, some of the range of possible audiovisual "anythings" this space contains. More monsters, and again they go for the throat, so to speak; the gestural distortions in Fijuu2 make a visceral choreography out of the abstract malleability of the digital. Drawing on the technical resources of open source game culture, this work reconfigures the default narratives of hardware-accelerated 3d into far more promising circuits of action and sensation.
Synchresis is, as Chion says, ubiquitous, commonplace. It's one of the mainstays of Western media culture, and we take its familiar manifestations entirely for granted. A mouth, a sound, a body, a figure, a punch, a story. Our sensoria are well-wired for finding these correlations, identifying those coherences in the incoming flux of reality that tell us, something's out there. But we're starved, at the same time, of those perceptual moments that really matter, marked by an unfamiliar coherence, an unknown cause: what's that? McLuhan told us years ago that art is perceptual training for the future; in this case, it's directing us towards powerful abstractions that define the digital present. Synchresis is ubiquitous and commonplace, yet when we focus, as this work demands, on that kernel of media and perception, it opens out in ways that are anything but ordinary.
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Synchresis - Australian Audiovisuals
Friday, February 22, 2008
Sound.Music.Design Symposium
A belated start to a busy new year... if you're still out there, thanks for hanging around. Last weekend I was in muggy, grimy Sydney for a symposium at UTS. Music.Sound.Design was a sort of transdisciplinary talkfest, loosely organised around the planning of a new sound/music/whatever degree. There were film sound guys, music educators, interaction designers, sonifiers, theorists, experimental musicians; and while the question of what a modern, interdisciplinary sound degree looks like remained elusive, some good stuff came out along the way.
My picks from the symposium included Darrin Verhagen's presentation on audiovisual relations, in particular how the power of the synchretic weld can link incongruous materials together, fooling our cognitive "zombie agents" into thinking that normal causality is operating, when in fact we're being carefully manipulated. Also on the AV line, artist and theorist Ian Andrews gave a detailed historical overview of the whole visual music / fused audiovisual tradition, emphasising structuralist or materialist film and the trajectory from the Russian avant garde, seeking to prepare our senses for the new post-Revolutionary world, to the Modernist trope of "mediumicity". In discussion Andrews shared an interesting point about his own AV practice and how it relates to this tradition; he disavowed anything like "expression" in his work; instead he described it as the exploration of a concrete and constrained field of possibilities. So the stripped-down "mediumicity" of this practice is not reductive or reflexive so much as generative - the medium proliferates, rather than being reduced to some essence.
On another topic altogether, Julian Knowles gave a passionate keynote on the state of tertiary music education in Australia; timely especially from where I'm sitting, as the Canberra School of Music faces up to possible extinction. He was preaching to the choir here, with the crowd well stacked with experimental musos, laptoppers and the like; so his quotes from local "heritage arts" crackpots got the laughter they deserved. But Knowles also deftly showed how every single assumption made in the classical conservatorium approach - such as valuing interpretation over creation, and demanding a specific technical skillset rather than adaptability and innovation - is contradicted in the living culture of contemporary music practice. You could design a pretty interesting curriculum, he suggested, by simply inverting all those assumptions.
It was great to see Tom Ellard - now vehemently ex-Severed Heads, but a hero of my youth nonetheless. He too was seeking to get a grip on a contemporary music industry in flux, wondering whether participatory virtual environments could be a new form of "album"; and thinking, like Kandinsky, about music as a model for all kinds of art practice and education. As Ellard demonstrated, VJ tools make visual composition and semiotics literally playable - more on his site. The thirty seconds of live AV scratch video that illustrated this point had me grinning all day.
I also made it to the final performance night of this event, which featured Robin Fox, Peter Blamey, Darrin Verhagen and Yasunao Tone, all playing a lovely eight-channel surround rig. The whole night was impressive, but special mention goes to my friend Peter Blamey's set. (Image above is by mr.snow, from back in 2002). Blamey plays a sort of "no input" mixer rig - an old Tascam four track with its ins and outs all tangled up. In this set he barely touched the mixer; he didn't need to, this network was delicately poised, putting out shuddering, accelerating ramps of static, ephemeral stereo crackles, and these superb, delicate chirps from somewhere in the feedback. But unlike other feedback-driven audio I've heard, there was a total absence of drone; Blamey's mixer is wracked with spasms, waves piling up, overloading then quickly dispersed. Never exactly repeating, but completely, organically self-consistent; like Ian Andrews' work, no sense of "expression", but for me that only heightens the poetry. More on/from Blamey here and here.
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
From Scratch - A Conversation with Andrew Sorensen
Andrew Sorensen is an Australian musician and programmer, author of the Impromptu live coding environment as well as a live coding musician of note. I recently caught up with his latest work, documented as screencasts on his site. In A Study in Keith Sorensen builds a Keith Jarrett machine that juxtaposes two linked layers of performance - qwerty and (phantom) piano keyboard. Stained (below) is a striking twist on the "transparent" aesthetics of live coding, as Sorensen uses Impromptu to draw in, and manipulate, the code window, hooking the graphics into the musical algorithms. These works demonstrate (for me at least) how live coding can be honed to a fine point, as a performance form. They're improvised, but also controlled and restrained; they work well as music, but clearly the real performance here is also in the developing code structures. It's in the combination of those two structural levels - the emotional impact of tonal music and the abstract, formal domain of code - that these works are really strong. In this conversation Sorensen touches on the live coding scene, performance, craft and virtuosity, code as score, coding without computers and algorithm as thought
MW: I saw that you went to the LOSS livecode festival - how was that? What's that scene like?
AS: Actually LOSS was fantastic. I was a little concerned at first because the number of attendees was very low (20 ish) but this ended up being one of its real charms. It was a really on the ball crowd and so the general level of conversation during the 3 days was really excellent. It was great to see everyone perform, particularly SLUB, as it was Alex Mclean’s “Hacking Perl in Nightclubs” paper that initially caught my interest. I would have enjoyed seeing a few more from-scratch live coding performances. From memory there were only 3 of them - Fredrik Olofsson, Graham Coleman and myself. Most of the other performances used pre-programmed material - which I should emphasise is still perfectly valid but I was hoping to see more from-scratch work. I should also mention that Ross Bencina and Robert Atwood both performed from-scratch live patching works. (Ross in Audiomulch and Robert in Pd).
One of the great things about that scene though is the general competency, both artistic and technical. It’s hard to find people competent in both areas. I think one of the things that emphasises this for me is that most of these guys build their own environments. And these are good environments displaying strong technical competency. Yet almost none of these guys are working as professional programmers, choosing instead to concentrate on artistic and academic projects when they could all be out earning squillions as programmers. This focus on the creative and dynamic use of computation really shined through for me at LOSS. Of course the downside is that live coders are all broke... Of course there is a history of broke hackers but that's another story.
MW: I'm attracted to live coding for the same reason - a sense that these artists are something like virtuosi in their field. But then I'm very interested in what that means, to be a virtuoso live coder - and whether it means something different in a small, expert gathering such as LOSS, to what it might mean in a different context.
Good question. I think one thing worth thinking about though is that there are a lot of people in the world with some programming experience these days. Most of the time this is at a pretty basic level, some VB scripting in Excel for example but still the number is growing rapidly, especially with younger generations. I guess in short the number of people who have a basic conception of what's going on (even if they don't understand any of the specifics) is quite high and is growing rapidly. How many people at an Australian Chamber Orchestra concert have ever played the violin - still this doesn't stop them from being mightily impressed by Richard Tognetti. In this sense of course small expert gatherings are always going to be ... well ... small.
Another interesting aspect is the high level of domain knowledge required. Just as music domain experts may struggle with the code’s syntax, good programmers can become just as lost trying to understand the semantics of a musical live coding performance. A musically literate crowd can often pick up on things even though they have no programming experience. If I type for example (random ‘(I ii IV V vi)) a musical audience will automatically pick up on the chord association that a programmer may not. Of course this all comes back to the types of symbolism that you employ.
MW: You also mention that many of these artists (including yourself) have made their own coding environments: how important is that? It's an interesting contrast with other genres - imagine if the first task for every young new media artist or computer musician was to write their own authoring tool from scratch! On the other hand for many computer artists of an earlier generation, this was an everyday reality.
Yeah, this is a really interesting question, and as you say certainly a generation ago this was almost always the case. I should say that when I talk about environment I don't necessarily mean a whole environment like Impromptu. Most of the time the environments I'm talking about are built on top of something else (well of course everything is built on top of something else but you know what I mean). Many of the "environments" that were at LOSS were built in Supercollider for example. So I don't think I'm advocating building everything yourself. The most important thing is spending the time to know your environment well. For example, one Impromptu user has built his own bindings to CSound. Not something I would want to do in a million years but he loves it and he's really productive with it so there's an example of an environment built on an environment. And the end result is that his live coding looks very different from mine even though we both use Impromptu.
It's an issue of fluency for me. Of course I'm a big advocate of craft so you'd expect me to say that!
MW: LOSS billed you as "one of the masters of from-scratch coding." I used to do a lot of sound work using only live-sampled material, which was a challenge - but live coding from scratch is something else. What's your interest in this approach?
Well, I guess there are a few things here. The first is that I think from scratch is more flexible. You aren't as emotionally constrained as you are if you're working from prewritten code. By this I mean that if you have the code in front of you you're just not as likely to explore. Of course lots of people will say that everything is an abstraction and that you never really start from scratch, which is of course true, but I think this misses the point. The blank page has a unique and mystical quality of endless possibilities.
Secondly I think it makes the ideas more obvious to the audience. Strange as it may seem I think that this is even more important for a non-literate audience. They seem to understand that code is being constructed for them in real-time. If you start with a page full of code they're less sure what's going on. For me the code is an important ingredient of the performance. As you have said before - how it is done matters.
Thirdly, it's more fun because (a) it feels more spontaneous and hopefully the audience realizes that they're hearing something created in the moment, and (b) it's more dangerous. One of the things I love about live coding is the adrenaline rush! You kind of forget that when you stop performing. I think audiences also understand and enjoy the risk of failure.
Fourth, I honestly think the music can be better if you aren't too constrained. It's good to be as adaptable as possible - although this is a constant challenge.
MW: The idea of being more or less "emotionally constrained" when coding is striking. We don't tend to think of coding as an emotional experience - can you elaborate?
I was really just suggesting that people will use pre-written code if it's there. They are less likely to forge a new path if one is sitting right in front of them. It is this kind of emotional constraint that I was getting at.
Having said that, of course coding can be an emotional experience - it all depends on what you are coding. I don't get emotionally engaged when writing out a shopping list but I can well imagine that novelists become emotionally engaged when writing. I'm sure people have no difficulty imagining that coding can be frustrating when things are going badly and exhilarating when a difficult problem is overcome. Of course producing something aesthetic just adds to the range of emotional responses that coding can elicit (often accompanied by frustration and exhilaration). And of course there’s the music. If that’s not giving you some kind of emotional response then you’re just not working hard enough!
MW: I found your screencasts quite affecting, which surprised me - especially when in A Study for Keith (above), for example, there's nothing but code for the first minute or so. The music is emotive in its harmonic language but it wouldn't have the same impact without the code. There's a contrast in fact between the explicit, formal language of the code and the lyricism of the music. It's a sort of pathos that works because clearly these two things are tightly linked - the formal machinery of the code is generating the music.
Yes, this is true, but I also think it's worth remembering that this is not a new phenomenon. Composers have been using symbol systems to describe musical processes for a long time now. Of course programming languages have given us far more symbolic power but this does not deny the fact that composers have been working abstractly for a long time. I very much think of the program code as a "score", albeit a dynamic one. Of course this is one of the things that makes live coding fascinating - the audience actually gets to see the formal machinery that has really always been there.
Where live coding differs from the "score" metaphor is that it is also a performance practice. So there are two elements at work in the program code. Firstly the symbolic manipulation described above but secondly performative control. So in the context of an 18th century classical paradigm it is not enough to describe just the harmonic, rhythmic and melodic information, it is also necessary to describe the performance information (i.e. timbral/ gestural information over time). I think there is a very interesting mix of event based and signal based work in live coding which I think sets it apart as a platform for improvisation.
MW: The TOPLAP Manifesto is very interesting here. Its first line is "Give us access to the performer's mind, to the whole human instrument." Along similar lines it states that "Algorithms are thoughts." Do you agree?
This is a tough question. Is mathematics a creation of pure human thought, or does it have some platonic existence? Algorithms raise similar questions. But maybe this isn't the important question. Algorithms, whatever their true nature, can communicate a useful subset of thoughts - they are a shared vocabulary that we can use to communicate ideas. In this sense live coders communicate their ideas rather than share their thoughts.
MW: Though this is a distinct kind of idea; it's an idea for a procedure, an idea for action - and we perceive both the formal notation of the idea, and its action. And what's more we perceive the relation between those things - this is the program / process semantics idea that you pointed me to earlier.
Yes, exactly.
MW: I notice that Nick Collins has been exploring live coding without a computer - emphasising the idea that the "work" in live coding is an algorithm or procedure that can be implemented in different ways. What do you think of this move?
Does computation require a computer? Of course the answer to this is no it doesn’t. Is live coding about computation? I think the answer here is yes, although this is a bit weak given that we still don’t have any strong idea about exactly what computation is. So in short Nick's work is perfectly valid. However, my slightly longer response would be that I’m not sure of the point in doing live coding without the symbolic power of the computer/ programming language. I think my problem with non-formal live coding - live coding with humans for example - is that the process semantics become incredibly vague. Now of course this ambiguousness is something that some people love, but in terms of a new paradigm I’m not sure what is really different here from the conceptual art movement of the 60s? In contrast, I think the program and process semantics of formal live coding are something new. Maybe this all just comes back to my craft focus again and a bias for the art object. In my work I enjoy crafting the result in the task domain.
Something that does interest me though is working with acoustic performers. I've been thinking for some time about doing a live coding performance where Impromptu output standard musical notation to four LCD displays for a string quartet to perform from. The displays would update one bar at a time giving the musicians a small amount of look ahead. I’m also very interested in working with acoustic musicians in collaborative improvisational settings.
MW: In Stained you begin drawing graphics into the code window; I really enjoy the moment where we see you prepare the code for the graphics, only to have those forms overlay the code itself. This is a direct illustration of your point about code as both performance and notation - it literally flattens those two layers into the same visual space. Where is this visual side of your work heading?
AS : Well, I should start by saying that all my history is bound up in musical, not visual work - so I'm a complete visual novice. I think the easiest answer to your question is to say that I'm exploring the space at the moment. Just enjoying playing.
Thursday, November 29, 2007
Murray McKeich - Generative Gothic
While I'm in Melbourne I've been trying to catch up with some of the artists who have made this town a new media hotspot over the past decade or so. I recently met up with Murray McKeich, an artist who came to prominence in the 90s here through the amazing (and sadly departed) Australian magazine 21C. He's refined a signature style, imaging urban detritus on a flatbed scanner, then grafting those elements together into surreal-gothic hybrids. In the hyped-up, Wired-style 90s, McKeich's images in 21C were startling; artefacts from a far more unsettling future.
In recent years, as I mentioned a while back on Generator.x, McKeich has discovered generative art. His approach, and the resulting work, are interesting in part because they are so different to a lot of what goes under that banner at the moment. At the core of his practice is a kind of heresy I find really appealing: McKeich doesn't code. He cheerfully admits to being "hopeless" at programming, and has no inclination to start. I had to fight the urge to talk him around, the way I do with students sometimes, leading them gently into the joys of Processing. But I had a feeling it would be futile, and besides, the processes McKeich has devised are coding, of a sort, and they are working beautifully.
Having accumulated a massive library of scanned-in source material, and discovering Photoshop's actions, McKeich began to experiment with automated processes; macros that would randomly pull source files into large multi-layer compositions. Hierarchies and groups of layers and sources provided a mix of control and randomness. He ran batch processes that would output many thousands of stills, then hand-picked the best to form very large image sets, with works like A Thousand Pictures of Footscray and DVN (detail above). The artists's motivation here, he insists, is pragmatic, not conceptual; he's interested in the specifics of an image, the moment of its impact, not in process for its own sake. For him generative techniques are essentially a matter of externalising aspects of his own process; computational studio assistants.
McKeich's next step was his discovery of AfterEffects, which he describes as "a superior imaging tool" to Photoshop - even for stills. With a more procedural approach, nested compositions, and powerful automation, AfterEffects remains his generative platform of choice. As a kind of bonus, it produces video. McKeich's procedural motion graphics use his signature palette of materials, but feel lighter, more ephemeral. In Maddern Square (above) we seem to skirt the edge of some dense conglomerate of street flotsam which is forever dissolving into itself.
Most recently McKeich has begun a new line of work - in one sense another brilliant heresy in the super-abstract context of generative art. He's been making faces, or rather, zombies. pzombie is from "philosophical zombie," a term for a hypothetical non-conscious human in a cognitive science thought-experiment. Like digital Golems, McKeich's pzombies (above - hi res) are cooked up from junk and grime, articulated by recursive coils of AfterEffects scripting. Smoke and mirrors, in a sense, but they have that visual impact McKeich is after; he shows them in large groups, which adds to the uncanny effect. The apparently infinite variety of these faces makes them both more intriguing and more unsettling than the usual science fiction clone-armies. While the artist might deny it, there's a conceptual hook here too; who are these portraits of, after all? Aren't these zombies the faces of those studio assistants, who work tirelessly through the night, those macros within macros. This time, they've been rendering themselves.
Monday, August 20, 2007
Wade Marynowsky: Interpretive Dance
Wade Marynowsky's Interpretive Dance has just been released on the artist's Demux DVD label. I'm currently gathering material for a DVD compilation of Australian audiovisual work - more about that later - so Wade sent me this disc, along with another new release, Peter Newman's Paperhouse (review coming soon). Interpretive Dance documents Marynowsky's installation and performance work since 2004 - almost all live audiovisuals, made using Max/MSP and hybrid sound/image processing. Long story short, it's great - essential viewing for anyone connected with the Australian experimental/improv scene (you might be in it) or anyone sick of new media performance that takes itself too seriously. 
On the cover of this disc is a familiar image: artist-at-laptop, gazing at the screen, immobile; behind, the "visuals" are projected large. The image instantly identifies a whole genre of AV where the body, conventionally at the core the performance, has been immobilised by the computer. The projected image, hovering over and behind the artist, forms an abstract, animated surrogate. Movement and gesture have been rationalised and externalised, the body's been reconstituted at PAL resolution. Taken with the disc's title, the cover image is a reflexive half-joke; because rather than replicate the new orthodoxy of man-machine AV, Marynowsky playfully shreds it. He puts the body - whatever that is - at the centre of post-laptop AV performance.
In the Autonomous Mutations installation he focuses on the performing bodies of the Australian experimental improv scene. The video, shot in studio conditions, extracts the performers from their native cultural environment - the utopian/bohemian niche of artist-run-space, cheap beer, all your friends in one room. Instead they have been archived, framed, some - the laptoppers and twiddlers - look vulnerable; some (like Marynowsky) use dress-up-box burlesque as a form of counterattack. Out of context, the body is forced to bear more of the weight of conviction. What do you think you're doing, at that laptop? What is that noise you're making? The performances hold their own, even as Marynowsky subjects them to an algorithmic cutup process, folding them into an automated improv-of-improvs apparently controlled by a runaway pianola. Embodied performance is guaranteed by our expectation of an audiovisual link; hearing and seeing, both at once, is fundamental. Here Marynowsky breaks that link, staggering sound and image edits to continually construct, recombine and deconstruct the performing body, and in the process casually generate moments of intense audiovisual counterpoint and (in)coherence.
The_Geek_from_Swampy_Creek further embodies Marynowsky's laptop pisstake. Sporting goggle glasses, nerd tie and megacephalic exo-brain, the Geek sways calmly at his Powerbook, generating an audiovisual meditation on the Creek from whence he came. Again Marynowsky puts his own body on the line with a persona that uses parody as a kind of side-door through which landscape, identity and narrative quietly enter. Like all the best parodies it works because it's true: the Geek is our embodied guarantee, he really is weaving organic image/sound textures together, on the fly. The shattered, glitchy processes feed the parody and the narrative, as the Geek's manipulations seem to take him ever further from home, abstracting his swamp into a haze of pixels.
Uranium Country and Apocalypse Later also deal with lost and abstracted landscapes, overprocessing image and sound into dense, evocative textures. In the audio track of Uranium Country cicadas and birdsong merge imperceptibly with the buzz-saw hum of digital timestretching. Apocalypse Later closes the disc in devastating style, drawing on images of Tasmania's Styx Valley, Kakadu, Old Sydney Town and Australia's Wonderland to develop a nightmare collage of trash culture, disintegrating landscapes and implied violence. Just when the abstract textures begin to lull you into a comfortable stupor, the body returns: a lash across the back, a flash of light and a wet snap; it's the crystalline moment of the disc, a visceral sync point that's also a parodic nucleus of history and fake history, national kitsch and real violence. It also jumps the representational gap that the whole disc explores - between the live, performing body and its image. Using processes that operate across audio and video, Marnowsky occasionally extracts abstract audiovisual gestures - gut blows or head-jarring abrasions - that pull your own body into the circuit, too.
