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.
Friday, February 22, 2008
Sound.Music.Design Symposium
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 08, 2007
A Conversation with Mark Fell
In the heyday of laptop, back in the late-90s, Sheffield duo snd - Mark Fell and Matt Steel - were getting lots of airplay at my house. I recently ran across Fell's other work through DC-Release, a recent collaboration with Ernest Edmonds. This AV performance work constructs a tight correspondence between minimal colour-field graphics and a palette of percussive synthetic sound. In this conversation Fell talks formalism, philosophy, religion, art school, interactivity and audiovisuals and namechecks Heidegger, Yasunao Tone and Aleister Crowley, among others. I'd like to thank him for being a candid and generous "subject" in this blog's first interview - hopefully the first of many.
MW: Your work is quite diverse - though you might be best known for your music as snd, you've also worked across interactive installation and audiovisual performance, and as a collaborator and curator. What are the common threads in your practice?
MF: The common threads... It’s difficult to answer as I am mainly aware of the inconsistencies. But that probably is what leads to the fundamental common thread which is the aesthetic focus. All my work is driven by that. It’s not an exploration of any issues or in any way conceptual. It’s a purely formal aesthetic exercise. That isn't to say that it exists in a vacuum and doesn't connect in lots of other kinds of ways with the rest of the world. But for me an aesthetic description is the probably the most meaningful. And actually it's a position that was quite difficult for me to adopt: in art school there was an overpowering emphasis on being somehow more socially engaged or critically connected. And it took me several years to realize how meaningless this was for me. This is something that spans my music, my audio visual work, my generative and interactive pieces and my curatorial practice.
Another thread is slightly harder to describe, and it’s related to the first. I have a kind of bipolar attitude towards how the audience respond to what I do. I'm far more comfortable with an audience reacting negatively to what I do, than reacting positively. Like if I’m DJing and people start to nod their heads or move about a bit, I really find it quite unpleasant. And with music making, there is a definite emphasis on trying to disappoint the audience. I remember once being interviewed on a radio station in Perth and the interviewer asked "what will people feel when they come to see your music?", and I answered "disappointed" (which the promoter, who was sat beside me was not too impressed with). But generally I’m after a complete lack of energy in both my performances or how the audience responds. A complete lack of anything you might want to get into.
In curatorial practice the stance results in some quite challenging shows, and ones that funders are often unhappy with. With my colleague Mat Steel, we are constantly under pressure to produce events that are more immediately enjoyable. But I find an alienating experience far more rewarding. There's a story I always tell people: when I was a child, maybe about 4 or 5, my mum took me to an art gallery in Sheffield. There was a show of paintings on there which were just pure colours that actually (looking back) were not even very nice colours. And I was completely drawn into it. It totally confused me. Although I don't deliberately aim to emulate that experience, I think it’s quite fundamental to how I get drawn into things.
This feeds fundamentally into my exploration of interactive art, both as a practicing artist and the critical research I conducted while working at the Creativity and Cognition studios in the UK. I think in lots of interactive art there is an emphasis on creating certain types of experience. A very good example is Bubbles by Woldgang Meunch. Here people instantly get what the work is about and can "play" with it quite quickly. The same is true of lots of other interactive works. People expect something fun, something playful. They see the point of these works as being able to fully understand the relationship between themselves and the work. Like trying to work out figurative details in an abstract expressionist painting... it’s pointless. I would never make a piece like that. My work aims for the complete absence of anything energetic or engaging. I find the whole idea of play or embodied understanding in the context of interactive art completely distasteful.
In the context of the work I do looking at sound and colour, both with Ernest Edmonds and my own solo work. The emphasis is on correlations that are purely aesthetic. There is no innate or mathematical relationship between sound and colour. Anything one does is purely invented. I like the idea that these works are presented as if there is some relationship, where in fact there is none or could be any.
MW: What is it about an alienating or confusing art experiences that you find rewarding? And is that response related to minimal or formalist aesthetics?
I don’t know. I think alienating and confusing are probably not the best ways to describe what I'm trying to describe. Most art is often like that anyway. But with the snd music it is like kind of blank, like someone stood with their back to you.... we are just preparing for a big tour, and as a focus for developing this we focus on leaving the audience feeling cold, not just a lack of interest in trying to engage anyone, but more like deliberately avoiding this... no dynamic changes in beats or nodding heads behind powerbooks, just large, awkward, immobile slabs of form. Imagine a Zen Buddhist with unresolved emotional issues. For me, thats how this particular "vibe" relates to minimal or formal aesthetics.
MW: For me this feeling seems linked to the formal, machine-like autonomy of the work's structure - the structure establishes itself and plays itself out without reference to the audience - in your analogy it has its back turned. It's not hostile or aggressive, it's just oblivious, pursuing its own logic.
Yeah, I like that.
MW: Your own work seems to have become more minimal recently, focusing on very basic audiovisual elements - which I will come back to. But other works seem more personal reflections on place - works like "Coming of Age in South Yorkshire", and your reconstruction of the Human League's album "Reproduction". Manifold, your installation with Joe Gilmore, also responds to place though in more abstract terms. Can you elaborate on this side of your work?
The Reproduction project... In terms of sound I think it’s as formal as anything else I’ve done. There is perhaps one track where the listener could here some reference to the source. The project was like a re-organisation and atomisation of what the Human League had done. All the musical changes were at a micro level. The lyrics on the sleeve had been sorted into alphabetical order. The images of reproduction on the cover were of plant cells dividing rather than babies (as on the original). So it was very much like some kind of organisation according to different rules or processes.
Coming of Age in South Yorkshire was a shot of sunset and sunrise over Sheffield from the same camera angle. And these were projected together at opposite ends of the gallery. So essentially it’s a movement of blue light from one side to purple light on the other.
So both of the above were quite formal exercises. But obviously there is some personal relationship to the city and the sound. I grew up in Sheffield and spend most of my teenage years listening to electronic music. Sheffield then was very different. Lots of derelict factories and empty spaces. No cafe bars and everyone (it seemed) was into electronic music. The city was a big adventure, so it’s also quite sentimental too I think. But I think this is probably more evident in Coming of Age in South Yorkshire.
Both pieces refer also to anthropology and musicology. Like "Secular Musics of the Dogon Tribe" or whatever.... I used to love those old anthropological recordings that always seemed to crop up in charity shops. And Coming of Age in South Yorkshire refers to the book Coming Of Age In Samoa. But what’s important here is the emphasis on some kind of "scientific" process of understanding of something alien.
The Manifold piece... We went to do a site visit and found this amazing old railway arch. Inside it was just complete dust and things laying around. In the centre was a large concrete slab. It occurred to us to leave the space untouched and just to project onto the slab. It looked amazing. It’s good to transform spaces just with the use of light and sound. Especially pure colour and tone. The work has two sites: site a uses image analysis of patterns in a car park and this connects to behaviours in the visual and sonic output. Although it’s related to place, the finer point is about the relationship between systems. One - a car park, the other - some flocking algorithm. It was about the transference of data and the use of this for purely aesthetic reasons. I guess in many ways the piece looked great but failed in terms of foregrounding things like the beauty of traffic movement in a car park. But I like the idea of overlaying of systems.
The common theme between Manifold, Reproduction and Coming of Age is one of the relationship between divergent systems and processes rather than a relationship to any given location. Again like the relationship between sound and image, purely arbitrary, fictitious and aesthetic.
MW: In your recent audiovisual works - such as 64 Pixels and 240 Sine Waves (below) - you set up these arbitrary relationships between sound and light, linking synth parameters to the color and brightness of an array of LED lights. How do you choose these mappings between sound and light, and what role does sensation - or even pleasure - play? What has drawn you to these tightly constructed relationships?
In Manifold with Joe Gilmore we developed a system whereby over the duration of the work every parameter from the environment was mapped every parameter of the output. So over a month it cycled through every possible combination of mappings, using these simple systems to weave quite a complex structural object.
But the recent works I’ve been doing - with pure synthesis and colour in the form of light - link the two in the closest possible way, but in a way that is completely arbitrary. There is no mapping. It’s just like putting two objects next to each other - say a football and a block of cheddar cheese, then a tennis ball and some ricotta, just collections of two classes of object. When we talk about correspondences in sound and image, its just the same as correspondences between spherical objects used in sporting activities and slightly decayed dairy products. The relationship is absolutely tight, but doesn't follow any mathematical or natural law. Given that this relationship is an aesthetic one, sensation and pleasure are considerations.
MW: The long durations, simple elements, multiple speakers, and matter-of-fact titles of these works, all remind me of American minimalism - La Monte Young and Phill Niblock for example. Is there a connection there?
I don't know their works very well. I’ve met Niblock a couple of times. I think he has some works on Touch in the UK who publish my work. I know one or two pieces. In fact, one piece by Niblock that I have never heard has influenced me. He took a group of flute players (flutists?) and played sine waves to each one over headphones and got them to tune to this. I never heard this work but when I heard about it somewhere I thought it was a great idea. I should check out La Monte Young. I often work with Yasunao Tone who is a Fluxus sound artist, but very different in terms of sound. His work and approach have influenced (and confused) me massively.
Within the genre to which my work is aligned there’s lots of tonal music. And actually I always hated this as to me it always alluded to some kind of Western New Age version of music for meditation. I remember in interviews at the time criticizing music like this for its pseudo "zen-like vibe". Someone like Yasunao for example, whose music is complex and chaotic shards of digital synthesis, is a far more interesting sonification of Eastern religious thought.
As a teenager, as I was getting into synthesis I also read the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and the ideas about vibration interested me. These recent works draw upon this. Not by trying to emulate gong-like harmonics or whatever, but with pure digital tones, each tone having a different speaker. Each speaker produces one tone, and these are distributed around the space.
This approach is very different to multi speaker works in say electro-acoustic music where sounds are moved around. In my works sounds are utterly static - one sound from one speaker. This creates an unusual and complex synthetic sound field that changes as the listener moves around the space.
I’m doing a new piece for DVD in this colour and sound series. It started out after I read some book by Aleister Crowley (also as a teenager) where he suggests exercises for focusing your conciousness, such as imagining a blue oval. So the DVD is like this; very simple forms using colour and sound that remain totally immobile.
The working title for this is "Jihad" which people are warning me about using. But what appeals to me about this isn’t that I’m being ironic or political. In essence Jihad is about personal growth, social responsibility, etc etc. And as it is defined in the Koran it’s actually a very well thought out model of how positive change is carried out, and it encompasses several levels of activity – it’s a formal system of change. It annoys me that in the West we are happy to take ideas from Buddhism and turn them into ways of selling aromatherapy candles, yet the notion of Jihad, which is equivalent in its intention, is framed as something evil.
But, to bring this conversation back round to where it started. My dislike of tonal musics from the genre I’m working in, and its pseudo-spiritual connection, is something I'm quite critical of. Here I want to present something that is like a harder version of this. Some very pure vibrating forms. Without the aromatherapy candles.
MW: On that thread, I've been reading some theory lately that proposes the idea of presence - in an experiential, materialist, just-being-there kind of way - as central to aesthetic experience. These ideas seem to fit with a lot of the (minimal, abstract, formal) media art that interests me - including yours. Would you agree?
This is really interesting. I arrived at a massive interest in Heidegger only recently - perhaps five or six years ago. And although it took some time to get to grips with his thought, there was an instant attraction for me. Mainly because his approach to being seemed like the best way to sum up what’s wrong with lots of assumptions and attitudes I had encountered during my education... assumptions and attitudes that I believe find their ultimate expression in Western myths about art and technology. So I relate very quickly to the description of presence and meaning.
Along with meaning we encounter notions of skill, interpretation, intention, control, the idea, the purpose; a set of interlocking concepts are derived from and that promote a particular (metaphysical) relationship between ourselves and our environment.
As a student studying video I was keen to make more abstract non-narrative pieces. This was difficult at the college in my local town. So in my spare time I made pieces using various kinds of chroma keying, colour over lay systems and video feedback. All realised on analogue technology. When my tutor saw these he warned me that it was important I should start with an "idea" because otherwise my work would simply be "driven by the technology". (As a structuralist might suggest that the system of language drives its uses... My view shortly after was more Wittgenstein-like - that the uses of language extend the system.)
I instantly reacted against this position - perhaps for the first time - I had never encountered it as a problem before it had been posed as such. Indeed in my everyday life I often saw people making things up as they went along. The best example is my father who, when making a conservatory at our home started with the first brick and made it up as he went along (resulting is some quite challenging architecture…).
At the same time at college under the same tutor I was doing communications studies. A particular diagram by Shannon and Weaver had technology labeled as a "noise source". Although at the time I was unable to fully explain my objection to this, it is now obvious that this view of technology is similar to a Cartesian account of the body. A somehow imperfect or flawed container of an otherwise pure soul, or meaning. And this connects to beliefs about the inadequacy of language or technology. Opposite to that Richard Rorty suggests: the human self is created by the use of a vocabulary rather than being adequately or inadequately expressed in a vocabulary. And this is my view of technology and its function in art. It’s not about the encoding or transmission of a previously "disembodied" meaning. Although for me technology in action is a kind of thinking or understanding which makes some kind of meaning. Like a Wittgensteinian view of language, I don't think it has an inherent meaning of its own. This is how I think about the notions of technology and absence of intended meaning in my practice.
MW: Finally, what are your thoughts on the wider scene that surrounds your work? You do a lot of curatorial work with festivals, which seem to be flourishing, especially in the UK. What's going on in the electronic music / new media art worlds that interests or irritates you?
The whole laptop thing is over. Back in 96-7 it was interesting to see the likes of Farmers Manual stooping over their Powerbooks nodding with the beat. But now it’s common place - even the fattest and baldest academics are at it. The genre is not an oppositional one any more. Its main protagonists no longer define themselves in opposition to more traditional electro-acoustic practices. Hecker and Haswell for example exploring multi-speaker systems with a release on Warner Classics, Autechre also inviting Bernard Parmegiani to play at the ATP festival they curated. That’s a point of interest - a new relationship between two practices.
Irritations... in festivals it’s the presentation of works that still feature people stooped over laptops nodding in time to a beat. I guess I find it annoying too when curators just want to give quick and easy experiences to the audience. Like before, works that explore "play" etc., the whole "play" vibe was interesting 10 years ago. Now it’s just boring I think.
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.
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
ACMC07 - Warren Burt and Sebastian Tomczak
This year's Australasian Computer Music Conference is here in Canberra, hosted by Alistair Riddell at the CNMA. Though ironically I could only get there for the first day, here are a couple of choice morsels.
The opening keynote by Warren Burt took on the conference theme - "trans" - and delivered a dense core sample of transdisciplinarity in music, from the ancient Greeks to the West Coast musical avant-garde of the 70s, through to the present. Many of Burt's projects look fresh all over again - he's been doing audiovisual synthesis, sonification of complex systems, and bio-collaboration since back in the day. He also made some great points about the role of the avant-garde in transforming cultural systems, rather than just "playing new music in the same old venue" (a mistake he attributed to Richard Wagner and the Sex Pistols, among others). During the 70s and 80s Burt was involved with the Clifton Hill Community Music Centre, an experiment in new social contexts for music, affordable technology and anarchic DIY.
Meanwhile back in the present, Alex Thorogood presented some nifty hardware hacks splicing an Arduino board with the innards of a cheap MP3 player, for his Chatter and Listening sound sculpture project. Hardware of the day though was Sebastian Tomczak's amazing Toriton Plus, a homebrew controller based on lasers, photocells and water. I'll spare you a lengthy description, except to say that it's much more beautiful in live performance - here's the video.
Friday, October 13, 2006
Live Coding: Program / Process Semantics
Andrew Sorensen, live coder and author of Impromptu, sent me some interesting comments about the previous post on data, code and performance. In particular he pointed me to a concept that seems very useful in unpacking live coding practice. Computer / cognitive scientist and philosopher Brian Cantwell Smith outlines the concepts of program and process semantics. Program semantics refers to the relation between the program code (what Cantwell Smith calls "passive text") and the resulting process or behaviour - what the code does when it's compiled or interpreted and run. Process semantics refers to the relation between that process or behvaiour, and the "task domain" or "subject matter" of the software - the context in which it is applied. There's a two-stage chain of meaning: 1. the meaning of the code with respect to the computational process; and 2. the meaning of the process with respect to the context it operates in.
For Sorensen "the addition of program semantics to live performance is the primary reason to program in real time." Live coding transforms the two-stage chain that Cantwell Smith describes, because it introduces the program semantics into the task domain. In the modified version of Cantwell Smith's diagram above it's marked B. This is important: it's not just the displaying of the program code, but the playing out of the relationship between code and process / behaviour. In a live coding performance where we see code and hear sound, we are presented with the task of understanding the relation between the two - inferring or mapping the generative relation between code and sonic output. The specific relation may have a semantics of its own in the "task domain" of performance - it's not simply what you do, but also how you do it. There's also the semantics of the code itself, in relation to the task domain (A): this seems less interesting to me, but related to the code-focused theory around software art - see for example Inke Arns' paper (Runme 2004).
Thursday, September 21, 2006
Data, Code & Performance
A few more thoughts and questions following on from the previous post, and responses to it. If data art isn't necessarily concerned with the (apparent) meaning of its datasets, or their empirical basis, then what is it concerned with? Perhaps one answer has something to do with performance. Whatever else it does, this work performs a process that is meaningful in itself. Whatever else it says, it also says, "watch what I do with this data." It displays a data literacy, an ability to acquire, munge, filter, process, map and render. Since it's primarily operating as art, rather than functional visualisation / sonification, it also demonstrates a process of translating or mediating between those domains. This isn't a criticism (necessarily), just trying to think through a few basics, and taking on those points from toxi and infosthetics re. the tension between art and visualisation here. If data art is partly self-referential performance, then what kind of cultural values exist / are constructed around that? Manovich refers to "data-subjectivity" - are data artists exploring / peforming this "super-modern" state of being?
I'm sure there's a connection here somewhere with literal acts of data-performance. I saw some live coding performances at the Medi(t)ations conference in Adelaide (blogged earlier). Brisbane duo aa-cell(Andrew Sorensen and Andrew Brown) played a great set - two laptops, both running Sorensen's own Impromptu environment, with screens projected to show the accumulating code. Here too there was a kind of mediation between computational and cultural domains - a performance of (largely obscure) code structures that generated a sonic structure dense with musical references. It was partly the pulse of a synth kick drum (hand coded, of course) but I came away thinking of Kraftwerk - laptop live coding as the new "man machine."
Live coding has a transparency that a lot of data art lacks - the code structure is gradually constructed, giving an (expert) observer some chance of following the formal, generative structure. Most data art conceals its mapping and munging, offering only an artefact and a promise that yes, this is "the data." Live coding's transparency is itself pretty opaque, though. At least one audience member at the Adelaide performance had no idea that the displayed text bore any relation to the sound. Live coding looks like great fun for the performers (like most improv), but what about the audience? Is data-subjectivity a prerequisite?
Wednesday, July 19, 2006
Medi(t)ations - Schiemer's Mandala 4
Last week I was in Adelaide for Medi(t)ations, the conference of the Australasian Computer Music Association. There was quite a bit of good old "computer music" (as well as electroacoustic, acousmatic, musique concrete etc), also threads of electronica, laptop, improv, sound art, and intermedia / audiovisual work. The tension between these approaches was clear at times, and like previous conferences in this series it was (for me) the dominant dynamic.
One of the most impressive performances of the conference brought these approaches together - or maybe showed up the distinction as false. Greg Schiemer's Mandala 4 is a piece for four performers and four mobile phones; spread around a large hall, the performers trigger quiet, microtonal chords from their phones, then slip them into little pouches on the end of long strings... and swing them gently overhead, their chords doppler-shifting as the phones orbit each performer.
It was a striking piece of music/theater, especially preceded (in the performance I saw) by a long pause while Schiemer and the performers prepared, huddled over their phones in the center of the room. The piece is a beautiful appropriation of the mobile phone, but also ties (ha ha) a very "now" technology to a long avant-garde tradition. Mobile sound sources were part of the expanded field of 60s minimal and process music; see for example Terry Riley's music/sculpture/video collaborationMusic with Balls and Steve Reich's Pendulum Music. Schiemer's approach aligns him with David Tudor, the composer and instrument builder who treated electronics as musical score.
Schiemer's mobile phone project, the Pocket Gamelan, draws on his "Tupperware Gamelan" instruments of the 70s and 80s. The Tupperware Gamelan, a set of small custom-made electronic instruments, housed in plastic kitchenware, was designed for non-expert players and used in dance and performance. The Pocket Gamelan is partly an effort to migrate this fragile analog electronics into software, and uses Java-enabled phones as the hardware platform. The technical lynch pin here is software from Schiemer's group that ports Pd patches to phone-friendly Java. There's more on the technical side of the project in a paper from this year's New Interfaces for Musical Expression conference.
