The Geometry of Flux | UWA Centenary

The Geometry of Flux | UWA Centenary

Yesterday I entered the University of Western Australia's Centenary 3D Open Art Challenge, a prize for 3D art created in the virtual world of Second Life. A few years ago I was one of the winners of the UWA's Imagine art prize under my previous Second Life name of Snubnose Genopeak. Since then, the UWA has worked tirelessly to promote the Arts in Second Life, and I was pleased to be able to support their centenary celebrations.

For my entry, I wanted to celebrate not the UWA's past, but their future, and the work they have done to support cutting edge developments in art. My submission is a kinetic sculpture called The Geometry of Flux, and was entered under my Second Life name, Cajska Carlsson. It is an exploration of the future of form and content, a geometry that constantly evolves into ever new forms. The sound component of the installation similarly generates evolving forms in a continuous evolution. It was composed using only feedback, though this is disguised by the ethereal nature of the sound.

The exhibition will be open throughout June and July 2012. You can visit it by following this link. You will need a Second Life account, which is free.

Here is the description that accompanies the piece.

Form and content are linked together through a dialectical process in shining unity.

Constant evolution...

development...

a movement towards, but never reaching...

never repeating...

Discard the old semiotic forms of meaning, that endlessly recycle the experience of the ages.

Create a new form of sensory-motor meaning.

Meaning through direct experience : of the senses : of movement : construct a new world.

Feedback Prototype Test

I've just completed the first prototype for my interactive audio-visual-haptic project, Feedback. The work uses the sense of touch to guide the audience through its interactions with the piece and each other, making the audience’s engagement literally ‘hands on’. The project extends my work in the manipulation of feedback with physical objects. Passing feedback through the surface of a beach ball, the audience can change the sound by manipulating the beach ball. The video was recorded on my phone at Red Wire Studios, Liverpool. The prototype was funded by a research grant from Frakture.

Here's a short video of the first test of the prototype.

Resonating vans, Neon Party in the Car Park

Here's some footage of last month's Noise Club gig in Dundee at Neon Party in the Car Park, which, as the name suggests, was actually in a multi-story car park in Dundee. Mike Loftus and myself were the performers.

During the gig I resonated a van that had been hired for us using feedback, manipulating the sound with the panels on the van and effects, while Mike, among other things, recorded sound live from the performance onto megaphones, which he then placed around the car park, looping the recorded sounds.

Interface Amnesty 3

Interface Amnesty is an event run by SoundNetwork. It shows off new interfaces that artists have been working to control sound/vision/bubbles/and much more. This was the third Interface Amnesty (Noise Club have been at all three), and was part of the Abandon Normal Devices festival. This time the event was held in Noiselab in Manchester.

It was a double-whammy for me, as I was there not only with Noise Club, but with the Inari Noodle project I had been working on.

For the Noise Club stall, we demonstrated a few of the new instruments we'd been working on. Mike Loftus, always the prolific builder, had modified a cello with brake pedals (see clip below), and was also demonstrating his new electronic instrument he'd built with home-made capacitors. I showed off some of the work I've been doing on controlling feedback with physical objects (more of this to come in future posts).



Inari Noodle is an audiovisual noodle bar project by Japanese artist, Inari Nishiki. My role in the project was quite extensive: writing computer-game-type music to use as the project's theme; creating a media player for the audiovisual clips, and getting them to play when a particular type of noodle was selected; and controlling the noodle dispenser using servos controlled by an Arduino. It was really interesting working on the Arduino - so many possibilities - and I think I'm going to use the knowledge I gained in the process to create a robotics project at some point in the future. More to come, then...

In the meantime, here's a short clip of the moment I got the Arduino controlling its first servo.

The Frakass Megaphone Choir

Every couple of months I put on a noise night in Liverpool called Frakass. For the August event, Phil Morton of Frakture and myself formed a megaphone choir. Anyone who turned up with a megaphone could get in free and would get to play in the choir. Just too funny!!!